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My BlackBerry had been acting up and I was afraid that it was going to delete my contacts before I could get them moved over to my new phone.  All I had to do is go to http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/ and then verify my cell phone number and Google account.  After that you will receive a text message with a hyperlink in it.  Next, click on the hyperlink and verify your Google account and then all of your contacts’ phone numbers, birthdays, and anniversaries will be synched automatically with your Google account.  After I activated my new DroidX all I had to do was enter in my Google account information and then all of my contacts’ information was on my new phone.  This means, I got a new phone and didn’t even have to go to the Verizon store!

I had a customer IT Admin call in saying that they had been trying to login to a Windows 7 laptop that had not been in use for a while and the employee was no longer there.  They kept getting a message when trying to logon that said “the trust relationship between this workstation and primary domain failed”.   When trying to login as the local Administrator account, it said that the account was disabled.

By default, Windows 7 disables the local Administrator account.  The laptop was encrypted, so resetting any passwords by means of a third party password recovery disk could cause the data to be irretrievable.  The IT person had removed the PC from active directory without unjoining the domain, so I could not troubleshoot resetting the computer account.  [more]

After some research, I found that you can boot the system with the network cable unplugged and login with cached network credentials.  The admin was able to login, plug in the network cable, then unjoin and rejoin the domain.  After a reboot, the PC could login to the domain normally.

I have a ThinkPad T410s.  I was running without power the other day & was almost out of batter, so under Power Manager, I moved my power setting all the way to “High energy savings.”  This allowed my battery to last longer. However, when I went back to my desk to doc my system I could not get both of my monitors to work (only one would come up).  I checked power, tried changing cables, rebooting, etc. with no luck.  Finally, I remember I had changed my power settings… [more]

What I found out was that with the T410s there are two graphics cards, the integrated Intel GMA & a NVIDIA NVS 3100M.  Under your energy setting plans, there is an option for “Switchable Graphics.”  You can set it to either “High Performance” or “Energy Saving” for both Batter and AC.  The only plan that had “Energy Saving” selected for AC was the “High energy savings” plan I had selected.  Once I changed it to “High Performance” it switched to the better graphic card and began to allow for dual monitors…

I was doing a physical to virtual conversion on a Windows 2003 Small Business Server. After the conversion, I shutdown the old physical server and booted the virtual server. I started the VMware tools installation and it got an error warning that it could not locate the path to My Documents to write temp files. Since no network interfaces (NICs) were available it did not load the SYSVOL and therefore could not find domain shares. I also could not change the My Documents redirection because it would not allow me to load the Domain Group Policy. The flexible NICs I initial tried to use did not work since VMware Tools could not install and the system did not have a driver available. The system did have a driver available for Intel E1000 NICs, I changed the NIC type to E1000 and rebooted. Windows installed the driver allowing the SYSVOL to load and allow me to install VMware Tools.

The traditional program switch to “fix” a hard disk drive may not fix everything. I have used chkdsk /f to fix disks for years, but it turns out that there is also a chkdsk /r . The /r switch does everything a /f  does and additionally checks for bad sectors on the disk.

When changing some settings in Internet Explorer recently, I stumbled across the “Use SSL 3.0” and “Use TLS 1.2” settings under the Advanced tab of Internet Options.  For a long time, I have been running without SSL 2.0, TLS 1.0, and TLS 1.1 enabled, but I wondered if SSL 3.0 is even necessary anymore (TLS superseded SSL 3.0 in 1999).  So I unchecked the “Use SSL 3.0” check box.  I did the same in my Firefox settings.  I ran that way for at least a couple of weeks without any noticeable issues.  Then last week I was onsite at a bank and tried to use the Cisco AnyConnect SSL VPN.  It did not connect, so I tried it that night from the hotel.  It still did not connect.  The Cisco IPSEC VPN client worked perfectly.  After a couple of days of the AnyConnect client not working, I was about to send an email to one of our network engineers asking if anything had changed when I remembered the “Use SSL 3.0” setting.  After re-enabling SSL 3.0 in both IE and Firefox, the AnyConnect client worked.  Aside from the SSL 3.0 setting breaking AnyConnect, the more general GOTCHA is that the AnyConnect client uses at least some of the web browser settings when establishing its connection, so I now know to include them when troubleshooting the VPN.

A couple months ago I bought a new HP desktop at home and it was working great except I kept noticed letters were missing after I typed sentences, passwords, etc. It seemed to happen at random and out of a couple sentences there was usually one letter that would be skipped. I thought it was me at first and maybe I just wasn’t used to the new keyboard, but after I started paying attention and made sure I was striking all the keys I realized it wasn’t me. I reinstalled the keyboard drivers and unplugged the keyboard and plugged it into a different USB port. The problem persisted. I was to the point where I was going to buy a new keyboard when I realized it was only happening in Internet Explorer. I found that disabling the Windows Live add-ons fixed the problem (i.e. Microsoft Live Search Toolbar, Windows Live Sign-in Helper, and Microsoft Live Search Toolbar Helper). I didn’t install those add-ons myself, so they must have came preloaded from HP. To manage your IE add-ons go to Tools -> Internet Options -> Programs and click the Manage add-ons button.

I ran into a very interesting 32/64-bit problem the other day that looks to me like Microsoft has goofed. The issue involved installing the x64 version of WSUS on Windows 2008. In Windows 2008, WSUS is now a feature and can be installed without a download.  During setup of one of our new customers, WSUS was installed on an x64 Windows 2008 server that was currently hosting some .NET web services in IIS. After the install of WSUS, the web services would return a 500 error for every request. The error page noted a problem with DynamicCompressionLibrary. After much digging, the problem was caused by installing the x64 version of WSUS alongside x86 web applications in IIS. [more]

When WSUS is installed, it installs a dynamic compression library called suscomp.dll globally in IIS. This compression library is used to compress updates before they are streamed down to clients via BITS. However, due the inherited nature of .NET configuration (web apps inherit global settings in IIS), these .NET web services were looking for the x86 version of the suscomp.dll (search path is by default at c:\windows\SYSWOW64\) which WSUS DOES NOT install. It installs the x64 version (default path at c:\windows\system32\). Without a matching suscomp.dll compression library, the inheritance chain is broken, and you will get 500 internal server errors. This could all be avoided if Microsoft would just include the x86 version of suscomp.dll in the install of x64 WSUS. The fix is to find an x86 version of suscomp.dll (from another install of WSUS) and copy it to c:\windows \SYSWOW64\ and do and iisreset. Thanks Microsoft!

During the recent move of a customer’s servers to our network, we had to change the IP address to match our addressing scheme. This ended up breaking many of the applications on the server (including OWA) that we needed to go fix. I opened up IIS and changed the connection address from their previous address to the current address of the network. After running iisreset, OWA still did not work. I couldn’t get the websites to even start up. It was as if the server still wasn’t listening on the correct address.

Well, sure enough, that was the case. The command “httpcfg query iplisten” will show you the IP addresses that the server is listening for. In my case, I saw something similar to the following:

 IP : 127.0.0.1
-------------------------------------
 IP : 192.168.1.10
-------------------------------------

Where 192.168.1.10 is the wrong address. For the sake of this example, our “correct” address will be defined as 10.1.1.10. [more]

Now, there are two ways you can resolve this, the first is running “httpcfg delete 192.168.1.10” followed by “httpcfg set 10.192.0.10” which should resolve the problem. In addition, I found a knowledge base article (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;890015) that explained how to reconfigure the IP addresses from the registry. After running through the instructions, followed by another iisreset, I got the following from my “httpcfg query iplisten” command:

 IP : 127.0.0.1
-------------------------------------
 IP : 10.1.1.10
-------------------------------------

Problem solved.