I've noticed an increasing use of Micro USB connectors in things such as bluetooth headsets, external hard drives, Kindle and BlackBerry devices, etc.
Since so many devices use the Mini USB connector, I have more than enough of the Mini USB cables. I looked and found some nice little Micro to Mini adapters that just plug onto the end of the Mini cable. If you can keep from losing such a small item, it saves room and cables.
We had a new printer that needed to be installed on a PC at a customer site. The new printer was USB and after setting it up, all of my test jobs that I sent to the printer failed. I tested out many different drivers and even tried using a different USB printer at one point. None of these things worked. I then finally decided to remove PGP endpoint protection and the printer started working immediately. This didn’t make much sense because my account was not supposed to be blocking anything through PGP. I checked the PGP settings and found that the “everybody” group (a distribution group setup at the bank which did not include my account) was given access to these “other devices” that this USB printer fell under the category of. The group that was meant to be there was the “everyone” group to which includes CoNetrix accounts. This wasn't an easy problem to solve due to the lack of a useful error message. If you use PGP endpoint protection be aware that you will not get an error message if it's blocking your printer and that USB printers fall under "other devices".
I have been working on a proof of concept install of VMware View v4 at a customer location. One of the challenges that we ran up against was trying to get the USB redirection to work with HP USB printers. Technically, all that is necessary is to have the printer plugged in USB and have a driver loaded on the virtual machine that you are connecting to using the VMware View client. However, in practice what we found...
HP printers are usually installed using a DOT4 USB port driver. DOT4 port types have been around a while and basically provide a bi-direction information flow between multiple devices on a single physical channel. Its most commonly seen for devices that support multiple functionality like scanning and printing, but can be used for any USB connected printer. There is an option to NOT use the DOT4 port types and in our situation it was essential because….well, the VMware View USB redirection just simply didn’t work with the DOT4 ports. The problem is that once the printer was installed it was IMPOSSIBLE to change the port type from DOT4 to USB…the printer would stop working. After about 2 days of struggling with this and not being able to remove the DOT4 port type, I finally found that the port type could be altered after the printer was installed. Heres how: [more]
It is yet to be tested if this USB printer support method works with multifunction printers, but the change worked on every LaserJet USB printer that we set up. Obviously, if you have a choice, just set up all the printers as network printers and avoid the problem altogether.
I was experiencing long delays when attempting to delete files from my laptop or external USB drives. For example, deleting a 1.5 GB file would start a continually rotating flood bar of deleting. It would run for 30 minutes or more before I would give up and click the cancel bar in the dialog window.
The canceling would also present a never ending flood bar lasting 15 minutes or more. After doing some research regarding an early Vista problem with file moves and deletions I looked at several configurations but could not find the problem.
Finally realized during the installation of PGP desktop I had enabled a secure delete (shred) feature. When I disabled the shred feature, my never ending delete processes went away.