Posted on September 2nd, 2005%
This morning, I turned on my laptop and heard an unpleasant grinding sound. I knew it wasn’t good; I’ve heard this sound before.
It was a hard drive failure.
The hard drive wouldn’t boot up at all. Fortunately, I do routine backups (to a server and to a 1GB USB flash drive), so I wasn’t overly concerned. I ran out to the local BestBuy, picked up a new 100GB notebook hard drive, and installed it in the laptop.
In my CD collection, I pulled out my trusty bootable Windows XP Professional CD, and proceeded to start the install…
Boot from CD… check
Create new partition… check
Quick format… check
Command install mode file copy… check
Reboot to GUI install mode… check
Type name and company… check…
Enter Windows XP Professional product key… PRODUCT ID INVALID.
Wait a minute… This is the Windows XP Professional product key on the laptop itself, that stupid Microsoft sticker usually placed in the most inconvenient spot for reading! I double-checked to make sure there were no typos.
PRODUCT . . .
→ Read More: One step closer to saying "Goodbye" to Microsoft
Posted on August 23rd, 2005%
When playing computer games (something I don’t have nearly as much time to do as I’d like), you want to maximize the performance of your computer for the task at hand. To do so, shut down all those unnecessary services to free up memory and some processor cycles.Dump the following code into a batch file to shut down many services which you don’t need for most games (even network games). The batch file was written for a standard Windows XP Professional build, and includes a section for disabling Norton AntiVirus. Add your own net stop commands to the list to get rid of what you don’t need. Then, run the batch file (I call it stop.bat) to shut down these services. net stop “automatic updates”
net stop “system event notification”net stop “com+ event system”net stop “error reporting service”net stop iisadminnet stop “kodak camera connection software”net stop “licctrl service”net stop “network connections”net stop “network location awareness (nla)”net stop “norton antivirus firewall . . .
→ Read More: Stopping unnecessary services when gaming
Posted on September 27th, 2004%
A company I do work for upgraded their desktops from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows XP a few weeks back. Recently, one of the workers at this firm came to me with a problem. He used to use the “Find Files” feature in Windows NT 4.0 to search for files based on file content. In Windows XP, he does the same with the “Search for a word or phrase in the file” feature… but he doesn’t find files under XP that he used to find under NT.
A quick little Google search (using the keywords "windows xp" search "word or phrase in the file" "not found") landed right on a Microsoft Knowledge Base article, 309173: Using the "A word or phrase in the file" search criterion may not work. Apparently, Windows XP “improved” the file content search feature by not actually searching for the content in all the files and file types you specify. As a . . .
→ Read More: Selective searching in Windows XP: When search all doesn’t search all
Posted on September 7th, 2004%
I use my laptop (a highly-recommended Toshiba Portege M100) for most of my development work. Typically, I develop on my laptop (a sandbox environment), then push data to another server (either a staging or production server). One of the problems I run into is my ever-changing physical location. When I’m at home, certain Web sites need internal IP addresses; at other places, they need external IP addresses.
The solution to this problem is by toggling the use of your HOSTS file. I enterd all the static entries into my HOSTS file, and created a small batch file to “toggle” the HOSTS file on and off. (When the HOSTS file exists, it is used, so renaming it to something other than HOSTS – with no file extension – turns it “off”.)
The batch file for toggling the HOSTS file is:
if exist c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts goto :hosts_off :hosts_on ren c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.toggle hosts . . .
→ Read More: Toggling your HOSTS file
Posted on September 4th, 2004%
While configuring a new server running Microsoft Windows Server 2003, I decided to start using trusted SQL connections from ASP.Net Web sites (instead of specific SQL user accounts). One of the differences between Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 is the ASP.Net process account; the former uses ASPNET, the latter NETWORK SERVICE.
One thing you’ll notice is that when creating a new login for SQL Server is that you can’t select the NETWORK SERVICE account. (Oddly, you can select the ASPNET account, but I don’t know what it is used for in Windows 2003/IIS 6.0, since it’s been replaced with NETWORK SERVICE.) After plenty of searching I found a newsgroup posting from Microsoft that solved the problem.
In brief: Either specify the username as NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE in SQL Enterprise Manager’s New Login window, or run the following query:
exec sp_grantlogin [NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE]
Yet another example of Microsoft hiding the obvious.
. . .
→ Read More: Configuring Trusted SQL Connections in ASP.Net and Windows 2003
