October 2003 - Posts
In an unfortunate series of events today, my MSN Messenger list was accidentally cleared. I was able to reconstruct some of it, but not all of it. If you were on my list/want to IM me, please add/im
brian@greenview.ws so I can add/readd you to the list on my end. Thanks!
If you're an MSDN subscriber, and you haven't already called Customer Service for your copy of the PDC DVD, stop & do it. The CS rep informed me that my copy with arrive between November 5th and 6th. It's supposed to have all sorts of cool PDC stuff like Longhorn on it.
MSDN USA CS Number is: 800.639.5800. When told to choose one of the five menu options, press 5, enter your subscriber ID number, press #, and finally press 2.
I've posted a want ad on SourceForge.net for someone to help connect the v1 GUI with the v2 code, and debug. ASP.Net, VB.Net, and basic SQL skills are necessary. The graphics are done, having a copy of SQL Enterprise Manager is extremely useful, but not required. If you're interested in helping some, either send me an email desmondb@payton.cps.k12.il.us, or respond to the ad on Sourceforge.net (http://sourceforge.net/people/viewjob.php?group_id=63363&job_id=16483).
Any & all help is greatly appreciated!
Five telephone calls, seven customer service reps, and two months later, I have finally gotten the DNS servers for wpcp.org changed. My advice: Don't use Network Solutions/Verisin. They're expensive, corrupt, and have horrible service. GoDaddy has treated me great for a great price - $8 a year.
I've been tasked with picking out four books from MS Press. What do you all recommend? I'm mainly looking at High - Mid Level .Net, High Level Win Server stuff, General/Adv SQL Server, & General/Adv Exchange Server.
Thanks!
I remembered reading that MS had a free widget for mounting ISO images as CD Drives somewhere. MVP Steve Cochran led me to it: http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/b/6/7b6abd84-7841-4978-96f5-bd58df02efa2/winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel_21.exe
The usual bit about how PSS doesn't support it applies. It only works on XP/2003 too.
FrankPR got an external DVD burner. We got a whole bunch of these at school, and having an external CD Burner, and an external DVD burner got really annoying really quick when I had 5.25” bays free in my tower. So, here's a dongle reduction tip:
Those External drive sleds that usually tack $50 onto the price - they have a little board in the back with an IDE widget that converts the IDE cable into USB. The actual drive is the exact same thing as you would buy for internal. So, if you've got an external drive and you use it with a machine which has a free 5.25” bay, you can just slide the thing in, and lose the sled.
Here's the process in it's entirety: Take all the bolts and excess plastic off the sled - the Backpack ones we have come with some really annoying plastic. My backpack ones have these locking plastic clips inside. If you're planning to maybe put the drive back int he sled, you'll have to be careful not to break the things - they're irreparable. I just busted them off on the ones I took apart at school, but I never planned to use the sled again.
Once you've got the drive out of the sled, get a pair of forceps or needle nose pliers, and put the master/slave jumper in the proper place. Here's my general approach to where to put it:
If I already have a CD drive of some denomination, and I'm planning to use the combination for writing, I put one drive on each IDE channel to prevent buffer overflows. So, make the new drive a slave to the HDD and put the other drive on channel 2 as a master, or vice versa. If you change the current CD drive to a slave, and make the new one a master, your drive letters may swap.
That's the long and short of it - Windows will recognize the drive without ay drivers (2000/XP/2003 at least), and you can use it like a normal drive. No mucking with extra drivers and such. You can pull this stunt with a SCSI drive (if you have one - haven't seen an external job in a while), it's a somewhat different procedure though.
One thing I hear rather often is that “I can't install X because it won't run on 2003”. If you're talking about most simple sorts of devices (i.e. mice, scanners, keyboards, gaming peripherals, etc), chances are you're just being fooled by the installer.
Driver installation works something like this - There's one or more inf files which describes devices and their driver files. Windows understands this inf file, and copies the drivers whereever they belong. The setup program just does this for you.
So, when you get told that the drivers are incompatible, here's the trick: If it's a self extracting sort of thing, just right click it, and extract it manually, WinRar and Winzip both do this. Inside, you'll find all sorts of stuff, a folder with a name like Win2kXP is likely to be in there. Inside are drivers for 2000/XP, and will more than likely work with 2003.
Step 2 here is to plug whatever dongle or device you want to use in. When Windows tells you its found new hardware, tell it you'll find your driver yourself (so don't search for you), once you get to the screen where you can pick all teh different sorts of devices Windows supports, click Have Disk, and browse to your inf file. If necessary, you will have to choose which device you want to install. Click next, finish, and you should be good to go.
Sometimes the inf files will be hidden on the CD somewhere - just search it for *.inf, or poke around in folders like “drivers” or “support”.
G. Andrew Duthie reminds me to note that somtimes there is in fact a reason that you shouldn't try to use drivers for 2000/XP on 2003, or 2000 drivers on XP, etc. Pulling the above stunt with something like a SCSI controller is a very, very bad idea. Conversely, pulling the above stunt with something small like a mouse or keyboard is probably not going to break anything (don't ever try and install mouse adn keyboard drivers on the same reboot, if the mouse and keyboard conk out, you're S.O.L.). So, use judgement if you try to do what I do, or you may very well be practicing your Windows installation technique.
If it's an MSI, you'll need to crack it open with something like Installshield (or the SDK maybe) and find the platform requirement condition(s). Just delete the condition all together, or fudge the numbers a bit (Windows 2003 is v5.2.3790, that's major 5, minor 2, build 3790). Service packs are metered in increments of 128, starting at 0 for the initial RTM release.
Roy Osherove wonders how to get his non-wireless MS keyboard working. Microsoft recently released a new version of IntelliType (their keyboard software), which works with Windows 2003. Goto http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/downloads/default.aspx, and pick your product. Windows 2003 isn't listed under the OS dropdown, but it works fine.
There is also a new version of IntelliPoint (the MS Mouse software).
So, everyone that installed 2003 on their desktop, and then tried to install their bluetooth mouse or keyboard from Microsoft found that Intellipoint 4.9 didn't install on 2003.
Well, for the past few hours, I've been working on a solution to this. So far this has entailed a fair amount of work:
- I've procured a hotfix for XP, extracted it, and changed the infs to run on 2003
- Consequentially, 2003 now has a Wireless Control Panel and recognizes the Bluetooth radio
- In order to get the setup package for Intellipoint 4.9 (included with the Bluetooth stuff), I've had to make several edits in Installshield to the MSI which does the install process
- The Mouse control panel now has a Connect button for BlueTooth
At present, I'm working on getting the mouse and radio to talk and get recognized by Windows. I think I need to do a couple of steps in a different order, so, I'm going to yank all the drivers and Intellipoint, and try again.
Stay tuned - I think I'll have this cracked fairly soon.
UPDATE: I'm still chugging along on making the radio and the mouse communicate - can't seem to get them to see each other. I'm still working on it, though.
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