Adventures in home working

I am a bit backup focused at the moment – I wonder why – so here are some useful things to backup:

Your windows deskbar shortcuts

C:\Documents and Settings\[your username]\Application Data\Windows Desktop Search\WindowsDesktopShortcuts.ini

Your ActiveWords

C:\Program Files\ActiveWords\USERS\[your username]

Windows media player really bugs me.  I want to be able to start it up with one click and have it play my favorite concentration music play list.  But it insists on making this a 3 or 4 click activity which is really distracting when I am working as I am always switching between different WMP activities.  Videos, podcasts, music and concentration music.

No problem, now that PowerShell has arrived it’s a simple job to automate WMP.

$WMP = new-object -com WMPLAYER.OCX
$Media = $WMP.mediacollection
$Playlist = $media.getbyname($strplaylist)
$a = $Playlist.item(0)
$WMP.openplayer($a.sourceurl)

Just replace $strplaylist with the name of your playlist.  This blog post has all the details.

Now in my case I wanted to be able to type

work [F8]

or

[CTRL][CTRL] work [RETURN]

and through the magic of ActiveWords this would run the script.  But to make this work you need to configure PowerShell to execute scripts (default security is VERY tight) and the details on how to do this are here.

When I installed Windows Desktop Search 3 I re-discovered the deskbar and the really quick and easy way it provides to create shortcuts to folders, documents, applications and web sites.

I really disliked the default hotkey though and still do and I also got annoyed by its limitations, the last straw though was that I tried it in Vista and – it’s gone!

So I have switched to ActiveWords which provides everything that deskbar shortcuts did and much more and it has a great hot key [CTRL] [CTRL] as well is in place active words (just type anywhere and hit F8 or [SPACE][SPACE].

It’s great!

In XP and W2003 I liked being able to search any explorer by simply clicking [SEARCH] or by pressing F3.  The search was very fast, especially when just searching on filename.  Along comes Windows Desktop Search 3 for Windows 2003 Server, which is working great BUT the folder search bar is rubbish, really slow and clunky.

To get the old search functionality back – but without breaking all the other great features of WDS just make the following registry key change:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\DS

Then double-click on ‘ShowStartSearchBand’ and set the value to ‘0′

Search within Explorer is much improved in Vista, but sometimes I just wished for a fast type down search by filename that I loved in X1.

When I reinstalled FeedDemon following my rebuild I found that there was not context menu to subscribe to a feed.  I previously used “send to default feed reader” which must have been added by NewsGator or one of the other products I have been testing.  Still easily fixed:

This web site

http://glenn.typepad.com/news/2004/01/adding_feeddemo.html

provides details on how to achieve it manually and this one

installer program

has a script that will do it for you.  Works great for me.

After reading about my rebuild nightmare you are probably thinking that I would be migrating fast to web 2.0 sites.  Wrong!  I really like some of the web 2.0 sites and work extensively in the browser – but I like to use the best tool for the job and right now I think that’s:

1. 2003 server
2. Driving 3 screens
3. Running most applications local but with background synchronization of data onto servers where it makes sense

I just love the customizability, the great integrated experience and the fact that from one desktop I can run local apps, smart apps, web apps, terminal served apps, virtual machines etc. 

I also love the fact that I can leave my desktop running and grab my Tablet and have everything synched but have a completely different environment optimized for a very different type of activity and different form factor.

So for me web 2.0 is a complement to the desktop, not a replacement.  My desktop has been rock solid for 2 years and largely because of my own messing around has probably cost me 3 hours of downtime to fix.  Not a bad trade off for the productivity benefits and fun I have had over those 2 years.

I switch to a new machine and Vista in a few weeks, I am pretty worried that I won’t get the rock stability I am used to but here’s hoping!

On Monday I started to notice that IE and Maxthon were not working correctly following the installation of IE7 on Windows 2003 server (my desktop).  IE would just stop opening new web pages completely, Firefox was fine but Maxthon is too integrated into my working practices so I decided IE7 must go and did a de-install.  Unfortunately the resulting machine running IE6 was badly broken, IE6 would not browse to any web pages, just download them.

I poked around for 30 minutes but failed to fix it, not to worry I thought a quick repair would fix it, but to no avail and this tipped me over the edge and I decided to do a rebuild. 

This machine – my current desktop – is about to become my server when my new desktop arrives in January so a rebuild was due anyway as this build has lasted me a couple of rock solid years.

Just at the end of the build (after lots of installing and lots of patching) I di a final restart and horror of horrors I get some error about services.exe won’t start because some dll is missing.  Using the repair console I copy over the dll, no joy, then I do a full repair – no better so I had to do the whole rebuild again!!!  I am not sure but I think it was VMware or the latest ATI drivers that did it.

Anyway the second time was much better and I took more care with the install sequence, my machine was running great.  I had been working on my laptop during these rebuilds so not much time had been wasted. 

At the end I thought I will do a quick image backup using Ghost 2003,  I decided to avoid the Virtual Partition utility that’s included as I thought there may be compatibility issues but made the mistake of invoking the image from the windows UI which without asking installs the virtual partition and reboots to that. 

Anyway the virtual partition doesn’t seem to be compatible with 2003 server!  It boots first and it’s impossible to get out of it.  After deleting this partition, changing boot.ini and marking my 2003 server partition active (thanks to BartPE) I was up and running again.

WHY NOT USE A BOOT FLOPPY!!! to run Ghost you may well ask, my floppy drive has been broken for 3 years and I have never had to fix it.  A new USB floppy drive is on the way from eBay!

The moral of this story, pay some attention to system backups.  I have great data backups in place and have coped seamlessly with a disk and 2 motherboard failures without a hitch but I always said to myself it’s as easy to rebuild -  NOT AFTER 2 YEARS OF FINE TUNING ITS NOT!!!

So I now do a weekly ASR backup as well as daily data backups (my software library is part of my data backup).

I have been running Vista RTM on my TC1100 since Sunday and it has been working very well,  I had one issue with the Smart Fetch process stopping, but this would have been transparent to me if Vista hadn’t brought it to my attention.

A lot of drivers are downloaded via Windows Update including:

1. Wireless network driver (So down try and do the install over a wireless network)
2. Wacom driver (so don’t get worried when your touch screen doesn’t work)
3. NVIDIA display driver

However there have been a few annoyances that are driver related:

1. No Qmenu
2. No hardware buttons
3. Sound is not muted when you insert headphones or headset, i.e. it keeps playing out of the speakers as well as the headset
4. No SD card support (no fix for this that I can find)

you need to download the following drivers:

1. Sound http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/Compaqtabletpc/us/download/22542.html
   http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/Compaqtabletpc/us/download/22582.html
2. hardware buttons
   http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/Compaqtabletpc/us/download/19713.html
3. Q menu
   http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/Compaqtabletpc/us/download/22141.html

Extract them all, normally to c:\swsetup, and then right click on each setup program, pick properties and pick Windows XP SP2 from the compatibility tab.  I think one of the sound drivers will fail, but don’t worry it seems to get far enough to fix the problem (actually I suspect only one of the sound drivers is needed, but I didn’t have time to experiment).

I also found I had to do the following tweaks:

1. Some of the buttons didn’t work until I did the following, 
   1. Control panel
   2. Tablet PC settings
   3. Buttons tab
   4. Select each button in turn
   5. Click change
   6. Click OK  (this seems to assign the action, even though it appears correct already)
2. In my case my screen would rotate from portrait to landscape but not from landscape to portrait, I fixed this as follows:
   1. Control panel
   2. Tablet PC settings
   3. Display tab
   4. Sequence – change
   5. I just swapped the sequence round and saved it and it then worked fine

The final issue that I had was that Foxit Reader (an alternative PDF reader which is much faster and reliable than Adobes version) wouldn’t open in the browser.  Which I fixed as follows:

Using your favourite registry editor Navigate to

My Computer
|___HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
…….|___MIME
……………|___DATABASE
…………………..|___Content Type (thx for the headsup)
………………………..|___application/pdf <- click this key once

and then look in the right pane if there is an entry with the name
‘CLSID’ and its data set to {14E8BBD8-1D1C-4D56-A4DA-D20B75EB814E}
might as well make sure there is also an entry ‘Extension’ with .pdf as data

Hacking around trying to fix this problem I also got very frustrated by the fact that the file types dialog in Vista is over simplified but I managed to find the wonderful Creative Element Power Tools which adds back an even better file type associations editor but also some other amazing utilities.

I have been running Vista Ultimate RTM on my aging Thinkpad T40 and its running reasonably well, although it’s my third machine (After my Desktop and Tablet) so I am not a demanding user.  I had to do a bare metal install though as I didn’t have enough disk space for an upgrade.

The main issue I had was lack of power management which was caused by the lack of a driver for the ATI embedded graphics chip set.  The correct driver was delivered automatically by Windows update for Vista RC1 but was nowhere to be seen in RTM. 

To fix this:

1. Go here http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-41918 and download and unpack the driver
2. Go to control panel and pick “update device drivers”
3. Open up display adapters in the list and pick your card, right click and select properties
4. Pick the driver tab, select update drivers and then select browse by computer for driver software
5. Browse to c:\drivers
6. make sure you check the subfolders check box

This should install the XP driver, which seems to work for me, although I don’t play games, but importantly you can now suspend your Thinkpad!

Last night I tried to upgrade from Office 2007 tech refresh, to Office 2007 RTM and received the following error:

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):

The 2007 Microsoft Office system does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of the 2007 Microsoft Office system products and associated technologies.

Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.

The online read-me that can be found here, helpfully informed me that:

The Office 2003 Web Components feature installed with Office 2007 Beta2 causes the Office 2007 product to block its installation. Users should use Add Remove Programs in the Windows Control Panel to Remove the Office 2003 Web Components, and then install the final Office 2007 product.

I searched through Add Remove Programs and could find no sign of the Office 2003 Web Components, so I installed Office 2007 and then downloaded, installed and un-installed the web components with no luck.

At this point I started searching around and found this article that explains that the error actually refers to the following much more comprehensive list of software:

This issue occurs if either of the following conditions is true:

• A beta release version of a 2007 Office program is still installed on the computer.
• A component from the beta release version of the 2007 Office suite or program is still installed on the computer.

You must remove all beta release versions of the 2007 Office suite or program from the computer before you install the original release version of a 2007 Office suite or program.
Additionally, this issue occurs if any of the following items are installed on the computer:

• 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS (Beta)
• 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF (Beta)
• 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as XPS (Beta)
• Microsoft Expression Web Designer Beta 1
• Microsoft Expression Web Designer CTP1
• Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats (Beta 2 Technical Refresh)

Interestingly this list doesn’t mention the Office 2003 web components.

Anyway Office 2007 RTM still failed to install, giving the same error. 

Finally I came across the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility, which I ran and discovered that Installer files were still on my machine for several of the uninstalled Office 2007 components even though there was no evidence of them in Add Remove Programs. 

After deleting them using this utility Office 2007 seems to have installed.