Windows 10 Update nightmare

Well another Windows update nightmare, on Monday I spent a total of 5 hours trying to figure out how to make my drive boot again - everything was fine but following Windows updates my PC had decided there was no operating system to boot. Now I have a Windows 7 and a Windows 10 boot option, Windows 7 doesn't work but it's there but I have managed to get the default to Windows 10 and 30 seconds in it will boot. Ever since my PC has not wanted to shutdown like it used to, it always says "getting windows ready" as it threatening to screw me over with another update and then shuts down. Today I logged in but the desktop hung - everything that was Windows worked as normal, Windows didnt want to play ball at all, no chance to restart the windows explorer process because windows was hung. I did manage to convince it to shutdown but it restarted the window state I had just left, then it logged me off and then rebooted again, a ghost in the machine, and every since I have no toolbar short cuts - I had toolbars configured but for the life of me I cannot find them again, it's taken me an hour to find where it stored them because inspite of the content just being links a windows search doesn't find them. Come on Microsoft this is just painful. Why a blog post and not reported to Microsoft? Have you tried reporting anything to Microsoft?

Lightroom, draining the light from my soul

A new update of Lightroom from Adobe. hurrah, lots of new features, there's the Reference View and performance enhancements according to one site.

Adobe's "What's New" shows Reference View.

Great get downloading.

Can I find the Reference View? Certainly have not found any performance improvements within Lightroom yet.

Lots of websites heralding the arrival of "Reference View" ... it hasn't arrived on my copy...finally an Adobe page that announces it's not on your version only on the pay monthly version, pure coincidence that I found that particular page.

So once again Adobe are releasing features in a product priced for heavy users / professionals but forgetting your basic home user which is a real shame.

Features in Lightroom that I know about that I would like to see come to my desktop so far :

• Dehaze
• Reference View

What a shame Adobe cannot be up front and honest about the quality of support provided for, what I assume, as a community of users it wants to forget exist.

Windows 7 Libraries

I've been driven to distraction over the last few days - Media Centre (64 bit Win 7) has lost its music and no amount of rebuilding libraries has helped.

Finally had to ask for help and cracked the problem by artificially adding then removing items from the library. Along the way I discovered that the performance of music in WMC is massively improved by stopping Windows Media Player from accessing the internet for album covers & info (set it manually and be done with it).

I also found that the default WMP on Win 7 64 bit is the 32 bit version (so you can change the short cut to point at the 64 bit folder rather than 32 bit, no problems there).

Also documented in the posts I made on The Green Button (title above is the link) are some checks to ensure folders are set correctly in the registry - they probably aren't if you've made drive / path changes.

SQL Server Installation Problem

Another day and another install of SQL Server Developer Edition (2005 in this case). Installation complete & there's no way to connect to reporting services or analysis services. Strange, no icons, nothing in the object explorer connection.

Turns out SQL Server Express edition is installed and it is a higher version that I've just tried to install so I am missing the options.

The resolution was to install using SKUUPGRADE = 1 as a startup parameter and then when that install completed I had to refer to an earlier post because management studio was still missing.

Got there in the end.

Sql Server Reporting Services 2005 Issue

Again SSRS 2005 has stopped working.

This time it follows install of Sql Server 2008 developer edition on my machine so I've been trying to figure out how to get both working on the same box - it is possible according to the documentation but there is no mention of how.

Unfortunately I am getting the following message when attempting to connection to Reporting Services via SQL Management Studio "unable to connect to the remote server. No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it."

Now that's not very nice is it, I ask nicely & it does nothing.

Anyway after a few weeks of digging I've finally found my problem is not related to the Dev 2008 install - it is in fact our network wide security settings, they have been changed!

So the solution was to go into IIS Admin console, goto the properties of my default web site (which hosts my SSRS pages) and goto the Home Directory tab and then change the Execute Permissions to Script and Executables.

Job done.

Acer Laptop Fan

I have an Acer Aspire 5920G laptop. By today's standards it is archaic, an early 2Ghz dual core processor, 4 Gb of 667mhz ram. However, the machine is brilliant - the screen is pretty good for the cost, it looks good, has good sound (for a laptop), works well (having now hosted Vista, Windows 7 Ultimate @ 3 bit & Windows 7 Pro in 64 bit, boy was Vista junk).

I've upgraded the hard disk to a faster larger model which makes a small amount of difference to performance but nothing worth worrying about.

The big downer is the fan. The Acer cooling system cools both the graphics card (Radeon Mobility 3470 - again, pretty high spec for a laptop when it was new) and the processor. Unfortunately it does this by running fast and loud and when temperatures go up it runs loud enough to be heard not only in the next room but downstairs too - frankly sitting at the desktop in from of the laptop it was deafening.

I've tried a couple of laptop coolers - I had an Akasa Orion laptop cooler but its fans were worse than the laptops, I had a block of wood - that worked pretty well but recently I've purchased a Cooler Master Ultra X3. Such a simple design - a nice looking bit of drilled aluminum (thin enough that if you don't rest your hands on the laptop when typing it does wobble annoyingly) with rubber bits to stop sliding. Added to that it has a USB powered (with pass thru port) fan system - 3 fans with a volume / speed control so you can choose how much air blowing is required. This works well because the fans can be adjusted so they are quieter than the laptops but they provide enough cooling to stop the laptop kicking into take off mode when the going gets tough. What's more the fans are mounted on the drilled holes on the aluminium sheet meaning they can be positioned to blow air directly at those areas of the laptop that heat up (along with some decent holes drilled in the case to let air in) this is a great solution.

Still, the laptop does heat up a bit though - from day one the processor has reported 51c on both cores as a normal temperature (that's using Speedfan which seems to report a little higher than most other products for some reason), whilst at boot the graphics card sits at 61c.

Delving inside has revealed those silly stick on thermal pads between the graphics processors and the heat sink. Waste of time, off they come and in goes some decent thermal paste (MX2, I've lost my Arctic Silver somewhere). No change in temperature there on boot, however, what I can immediately see is that heat transfer has improved because the temp does not rise much at all - I can also see that it is the GPU temp that is causing the fan to go into take off mode.

Still not happy though - the thermal pads were physically thicker than the paste and inspection shows that the gap between GPU chips and the heatsink is only just being bridged by the paste (caused by stand offs on the heat sink) - this also shows what a poor job the thermal pads are doing as one of the subsidiary chips had no contact at all.

Shims required but oh boy, they would be around £5 each for a 1cm x 1cm piece of copper from ebay. However, a 10cm x 10cm piece of copper (.9mm) was £3.99 via an ebay shop, a bit of elbow grease required and a new hacksaw blade. End result is I've now removed all of the thermal pads (GPU had 3, 2 chips next to the processor had 1 each and the south bridge had one - the CPU didn't) and replaced with custom sized copper shims and MX2 paste (I cheated and only cut one for the chips next to the CPU).

Was a good opportunity too to clean off the solidified cheap rubbish from the CPU and carefully dust everything.

The end result is that now the GPU temperature is 42c (around 39 on boot) and I haven't yet seen it approach the previous 61 degrees starting point), processor temperature continues to be around the same but falls more quickly whilst the fan simply does not kick into take off mode at all - all in all a good result. Interestingly the overall internal temperature has dropped - the hard drive not runs 2 degrees less than it did and the case over the cooling fan and hard disk bay noticeably doesn't get hot as it used to.

Any more to do? There isn't supposed to be a shim on the CPU (just paste when I rummaged) but if I ever take it apart again I'll be trying to wedge one in there (hoping I'll discover a cheap source of something less that .9mm by then) because I'm pretty sure the CPU should have a better connection - I think with nothing to start with wedging .9mm of shim in there would be a bit drastic but I think there is scope for improving the CPU temperature.

HP printers

I've had a number of Hewlett Packard printers, when I purchased the most recent an HP Photosmart D5460 it was the best print quality available for under £200.

Why is it that they have some enormous, complex, unreliable drivers.

It's connected by USB - when connected to the PC it works 95% of the time whilst on the laptop it works 10% of the time and I usually give up. Both operating systems are Windows 7 both work fine - it's only the printer that plays up.

I've now discovered a fix that seems to have worked successfully to date - so, when I turn the printer on the PC brings up the message "USB Device Not Recognized" and it rebooting doesn't change the situation.

What I've found is that deleting "USB Composite Devices" from Device manager solves the problem.

Simple.

Windows 7 Jump Lists

I've been having problems in that my jump lists seem to work perfectly except on Excel 2007 that I use all the time - it's jumplist contains one item that never changes & unfortunately is not something I use often.

It turns out that the jump list files can get corrupted, so the easy answer is to bin the whole lot and start again - so just delete the files in %AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations.


Alternatively, a more methodical but less reliable approach is to just delete the large files found in there -they appear to be files that have become corrupted.

SQL Server Install Error

I've had the following error a couple of times when installing SQL Server :


sql server failed to obtain system account information for the aspnet account... 


The solution is in a dos prompt to goto c:\windows\framework\v2.0.xxxx (you'll have to check what xxxx is on your machine) and then type


aspnet_regiis -i


Has worked everytime so far.

Backup Software

I think anyone who cares about their data is always thinking about backups. I know, they are boring, they are time consuming but when it all goes pete tong they are what you need.

I honestly don't think there is ever a perfect backup and even commercial organisations get it wrong and have slip ups.

What do I do, well I have been using Paragon Drive Backup (various versions but actually the free version works really well) to make a complete image of my machine - I now do this for all machines to make sure an overall backup is in place for easier restoration. Will I use it in times of trouble, given Windows benefits from a complete rebuild every now and then I just don't know but I have used it to switch between installs while building my HTPC (ie backup, add a feature, test, rollback if required with no nasty registry hangover).

Unfortunately, making an image takes quite a while and the incremental version doesn't seem very, well, incremental.

So, day to day file backups? I use Robocopy - a free download from Microsoft or built in on Windows 7 - backup what you want where you want when you want, a genuinely useful utility if configured correctly.

But that is still a bit manual - yes I could schedule it but there is no practical way of making it work in the background., but it does the general job.

Recently I received a cover disk with Genie Timeline Free on it - what a great program, it just works and is now installed on two of my machines. It's free so I cannot help but recommend this if you have a spare drive to hand - it's is not perfect but it does work. Problems? Firstly it is a per user install which means each user accounts needs to configure their own backups which is strange & the files duplicate as the backup cannot automatically keep only a single copy where folders overlap. Secondly, although it works neatly in the background, file copying still impacts desktop use (so a fast drive is really needed) and lastly it uses volume shadow copy but each time appears to make a full backup of the file rather than just keeping changes. But it does work.

The downsides were bugging me so I've looked for other software & hit upon Avanquest Autosave Essentials - this is nicer looking, easier to configure and appears to work faster. Also the license price is for 3 machines. Does it work? Well on a test folder of < 30 files it was brilliant. On a backup of my user folder of approx 40Gb? No, junk, it crashed out after a couple of minutes, took less time to remove from the hard disk than it took to tidy up the half copy of files it had made.

So Genie Timeline it is for the time being.

MCE Standby Tool on Windows 7

Be warned!

 

I’ve had problems of late with Windows Media Center on Windows 7 where on resume from sleep I get a a black screen for around a minute – I’m not the only one but I don’t have a clue what has changed to cause this to start happening.

 

So, I’ve finally been forced to give MCE Standby Tool a test. I say forced because I have tried to minimise the software installed on my media center machine to reduce the conflicts, reinstall hassle etc.

 

I have tried MCE Standby Tool in the past on a Vista configuration and I can confirm it did nothing useful for me at all so was not expecting much this time to be honest, although plenty of people swear by it.

 

Since I last tried it there do appear to be a lot more options which are pretty clear although some remain unclear. For instance the pop up that asks which devices should be allowed to wake the machine up gave a list of “HID Device xxxx” and “HID Device xxx1” straight out of Windows’ internal systems, well I don’t know which HID device is which but there were at least four on the list and as there are only 3 things plugged in that makes it interesting.

 

Still, reboot as required and we’re away, or not.

 

Previously, I got a black screen on resume which was clearly Media Center having some sort of display issue, now on reboot I get a black screen – this one is strangely much blacker except for the “Start” menu. No mouse response at all but luckily the three fingered salute worked to show that MST Blanker had crashed which caused MCE Standby tool to crash.

 

So that made the system much worse, uninstall works nicely though but check carefully that your settings are back where they should be!

Share This

Share this provides a good route for sharing via services such as facebook & twitter (perish the thought).

Setup is relatively complex most of time with Blogger, instructions are given on screen & involve editting the HTML on the design page, however, occassionally an "add this button" button appears - I cannot quite spot the logic of when it appears but unfortunately since attempting to do the job on my home laptop the button hasn't appeared again, so manual editting is the way to go.

Also, it is a little unfortunate that whatever you do, facebook & twitter are always the options initially displayed. I've attempted to create links to other services but the naming is not obvious (the code says "facebook" in the facebook part so I tried copying and using "blogger" but that was clearly too obvious).

Of all the things

I do rather like the new templates but what has been driving me to distraction is that my background image gets automatically resized, incorrectly, in Google Chrome. It doesn't happen in IE8 and notably does not happen to the images provided with the templates.

I've had no response from the help forums but have now cracked it - for which purpose I am uploading the picture I want to use here :

Why? Well it turns out that I can take the web link for the above, remove the scaling (the /sxxx) and use that with no problems found yet, whilst the same technique using Picasa fails - therefore, the problem is Picasa interacting with Chrome.

Bizarre.

Incidentally, this picture is a macro shot, taken hand held on a point & press camera in the back garden.

Blogger design

In last night's post I said that the second image link should be changed - you can safely change the first which removes a link (aka free advert) for someone else's site.

Blogger Template Designer

Google have continued to enhance the blogger tool with a WYSIWYG template designer with some nice new templates. A word of warning though - remember to save your old template first because the old templates seem to have vanished completely so there is no going back if you do not save first.

Still, having learnt that lesson it is time to press boldly on into the unknown.

Luckily one can change the background image in the new templates to your own - all you need to do is make sure you have an appropriate resolution image to hand & accessible online (eg in Picasa) and change the image link in the template.

As easy as that, well pretty much :

1) Create an appropriate image. The one I had from stock on the designer was 1800x1200 so I altered one of my own images to 1920x1200 as a nice catch all - it will work fine with lower resolutions too. Note, my initial image was around 200k which was a bit slow to load.

2) Upload to somewhere online - Picasa is good, just make sure it is a full size image, I set the album to unlisted and that seems to still work. Then goto the picture and click on "link to this photo", copy the "embedded link" string into notepad and search for the string commencing

img src="http://

followed by a URL looking something like this : "https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWUJbgjmjAwfaUzF2q5GWGK3haj-CrbQNLJlPeusL0hXP39YpG7M2NReM3_ujFCPAIxud6sQo-EPHYy7FxdGPlSMH1d9T_DSyyragB1_4qwJd9NgNdpm5XJ7wEor7BPzFmeQ1R8IF9a7r8/s144/20100626FlowerForSite.jpg"

Now copy the link in the speech marks and paste that into a browser, remove the /s144 or similar string you may have and hit return - one working link.

3) Now goto the Design page in Blogger and goto HTML (don't forget about backups). In the HTML, just near the beginning of the variable definitions you will find the following string, starting :

Now replace the url in the brackets of the 2nd URL (the first points to the original template image (why, who knows) and the second points to the current template image) with the URL you created above.

4) Click on Preview

Job done.

Now you've got your eyes open and you have checked your new page thoroughly haven't you.

Ah, you noticed the new "attribution" section at the bottom - it even appears on the Blogger design page but you can only add to it and not actually change it.

Well, to give credit to the person who produced the template is fair but you have just replaced the image with yours so why credit someone else?

Luckily for you immediately after the image URL you just pasted there will be an accreditation in what looks to me like a comment (it starts with

/*

and ends with

*/

Just change the text and the URL and all is fair.

Finally, wireless goes wired

It has been a while coming...

Wireless connections work fine for simple applications like the odd bit of browsing but I have been finding that with any volume of use they fall over. Admittedly the expensive Cisco kit at work never fails but cheap USB wireless is unreliable.

I have tried a number of brands and have settled over the years on Netgear, no frills, decent value, but no help on the wireless front.

My last attempt has been a WPN111 which uses the standard netgear config software (so in conjunction with Vista or Windows 7 you are doomed to pain).

Actually, the device works well when it works, unfortunately it cannot cope well with sleep so frequently has to be unplugged to force a reset (and to cool down). I have tried every setting possible on Windows 7 to no avail.

I understand that PCI based wireless is better but as no one seems to say much good in the reviews of current products that seems a waste.

Luckily, we have just relocated my satellite cable so took the opportunity to run a lan cble.

Ah, networking problems solved.

Camera RAW & HDR

My camera, a Panasonic TZ5 cannot produce RAW format images & that seems to be a loss given all the nice features such as the ability to change exposure (EV) in the raw editors (in my instance Photoshop CS3 Camera Raw). Imagine my surprise to discover that using "Open As" instead of "Open" one can then select "Camera Raw" as the file type & select a JPG or TIF files and get the raw editor on screen.

So, I've been tinkering & have taken a macro shot of a daisy taken as the sun went down yesterday :

and produced firstly this from just the raw tool :
,
unfortunately it seems to lose a lot of brightness during the lossy save / upload process and then using the Raw tools to change the exposure I created 3 files of -4,0 & +4 EV and ran it through Photomatix
:.

I know they're not great pictures but this discovery means a much greater scope for control of a picture and HDR is now possible, I'm even more encouraged having found an article comparing HDR pictures produced using RAW pictures vs images produced using files generated using the camera raw editor.

There's some work to be done - I need to start with a great picture first....

HP ink refills

I have just had my second try at refilling Hewlett Packard inkjet cartridges. This is something I have tried before with varying degrees of success and more often failure or at the very least success with messy fingers.

Refilling cartridges does appear to make financial sense, I have an HP Photosmart D5460 which produces awesome colour photo output, at present a set of cartridges is around £80 and that is more than 50% of the purchase cost whilst a complete set of inks with the refill tools (the modern ones are good) cost around £23 and I think will do around 4 refills (the box says 5 but with it's hardly an exact science).

Clearly there are downsides to refills (besides messy fingers), chief of which is uncertain print quality and uncertain robustness of the inks - if you are printing photos to display / keep for a long time then sticking to HP manufactured cartridges is essential.

But what if you just want the odd snap to show people and are not concern about longevity? Or you are printing web pages / text for convenience of your work / hobbies (so we print web pages to have a hard copy to refer to when working off screen quite frequently)? Who cares how long the colours stay bright.

I have purchased a set of inks from Inktec. I don't recall any magic claims about longevity of the colours but they are supposed to be consistent colour blah blah and they come from a business specialising in refills - there are plenty of cheaper sources out there, particularly ebay. These come with tools which actually work, the instructions are good but take a couple of goes to figure out.

My experience? Well I have found my HP D5460 cartridges have a little ink window on the bottom that fills with ink, once I realised I monitored how full that was (hold the cartridges the right way up as the ink simply sinks down into the window) and that is the indicator.

The big trick with this HP5460 is the software. HP have been very clever to make sure you keep buying their cartridges, the printer bleats if non originals are used - firstly, refilling the existing cartridge is a disaster as the printer keeps saying the the cartridge needs replacing. So the trick is to have 2 sets of cartridges so refilling the "old" set means the printer just tells you that you've inserted a previously used cartridge and asks you to press ok. Job done.

These refills are great. Just remember to refill over a sink.

Iomega Iconnect

I've spotted a scattering of previews and a single review of the Iomega Iconnect which is now available. What a great idea, a USB device that hosts other usb devices and is accessible via the normal TCP/IP network capabilities (wired or wireless) of your PC.

This looks really handy to me - I can plug in my 1TB backup drive, a USB memory stick and a printer. At £60 it is an almost unique item at a sensible cost.

It is actually available for purchase now (in fact iomega emailled me to tell me so) and the Iomega site has demo of the web interface that you will get in production.

Unfortunately, it has the typical design flaw applied to usb devices designed by someone who hasn't got a clue, firstly, not enough USB ports, so very quickly you would need two of these, good for making money, not so good for sockets and secondly, usb on the front and back so it doesn't matter how the device is positioned messy wires still protrude - for pete's sake designers, spend a little time thinking about who will actually use these things & how, casual USB use will still be via the desktop.

Discouraged, actually no, the device looks so great, it even has remote internet access, admittedly via a pay for service but you'd have to fiddle with port forwarding on your router anyway (well except for those of you who forgot security) so why not just skip the web service and let yourself directly in?

So why haven't I purchased on yet? Well I have an HP D5460 printer with the usual 2 way usb capabilities - it is used on 2 PCs & I've got the usb cable taped to a desk leg for convenience of swapping over so having the printer on the network would be great but I do like the 2 way comms.

More and more devices support modern usb features, does the Iomega Connect? Who knows, the manual does not say but what it does say is "connect a supported printer". Is there a list of supported printers? No.

I've raised a support call with Iomega - they have responded which is good - they even responded same day (now 7 days ago) with "we'll check to see if a supported printer list exists". Why say connect a supported printer if you don't know what is supported.

There, that's off my chest now.

GPEDIT.MSC & backing up on shutdown.

A handy tip for making backups - I have discovered another useful feature in gpedit.msc on Windows 7,  I presume it probably exists in XP & Vista as well but I cannot confirm having converted wholesale to Windows 7 lately.

If you run gpedit.msc and navigate to Computer Configuration >> Windows Settings >> Scripts you will find a start and shutdown option. Right click on either in the right hand pane and select properties & you will find a list of scripts to run at startup / shutdown.

I've created a short robocopy script to backup the user directories to a different destination on shutdown which gives me a little more security for my important files. Using robocopy makes the process pretty quick as I'm only copying over changes.

Here's a sample of the robocopy script :

robocopy "c:\Users" "d:\UserBackup" /log:"d:\UserBackup.txt" /np /xj /lev:10 /S /XF ntuser*.* *.tmp desktop.ini thumbs.db picasa.ini /xd "c:\Users\each user\AppData"  /ZB /R:1 /W:5 /purge

You will note that I exclude the AppData folder for each user - if my machine dies and I have to rebuild I'm only interested in user generated documents not any config details but essentially the exclude directory (/xd) and exclude file (/xf) section can be preety much as long as you like - and mine is in the live version.