monline

I installed the Boot Camp v3.1 drivers from a Mac OS X 10.6.3 DVD on a Mac Mini running Windows 7, but after the setup was finished, Device Manager still showed two devices as erroneous: "Performance Counters" and an USB device (which turned out to be the Apple Remote, aka. "Apple IR Receiver"). Repeating the install process did not fix the problem. The solution was to manually install the drivers. Ie. extract the contents of Drivers\Apple\AppleRemoteInstaller.exe (for the Apple Remote) and Drivers\Apple\AppleNullDriver.exe (for the Performance Counters) and update both devices with the respective drivers. This way the driver installations succeeded.

The idea is at the very end of the blog post, in an "UPDATE" section. The BSOD (blue screen of death) occurs during shutdown if the virtual machine is set to use the 'i686' architecture. Changing it to 'x86_64' fixes the problem.

I successfully used NTPWEdit v0.3 launched from an XP-based Ultimate Boot Disk for Windows to unlock and change the password of the administrator user on a Windows 7 (Ultimate, 32 bit) PC. It's a GUI tool and is based on code from Offline NT Password & Registry Editor.

The 4.x and 5.x versions of the Nortel VPN Client are based on InstallShield. They put an uninstaller app in the C:\Program Files\InstallShield Installation Information\{GUID} directory (where {GUID} stands for the app ID - a series of hexadecimal numbers separated by hyphens). The uninstall routine can be invoked simply by executing Setup.exe with the "Uninstall" parameter in that directory.

I've been in this situation a couple of times before, but I've never been able to fix it ... not until today. Let's assume that somehow your network setup in Windows gets screwed up. Ie. you've no network connection, the network adapter in Device Manager has a small yellow exclamation mark meaning it has some obscure problem that prevents it from normal functioning. And of course re-installing the adapter won't help because you get an obscure "error occurred during the installation of the device" error message (maybe you even get a "The system cannot find the file specified." message along too) ... or even better, you cannot uninstall the adapter at all because you get a "Failed to uninstall the device. The device may be required to boot up the computer." error message. All seems to be lost.

The description of the route command on the MS website is a lot more helpful, than the output of route /?. I've used the route command a lot, but never before realized that there's an interface list at the start of a route print command's output. It's good to know how to create a route for a specific interface. I had some trouble with a Nortel VPN Client (it overwrote my default gateway) and I couldn't figure out why my custom routes won't work (I still don't know). But an interface specific rule helped.

To summerize the steps:

1. Let the installer create the system partition.
2. Remove all other partitions (except for the 100MB system partition) if there're any.
3. Extend the 100MB system partition to a size of your choice (eg. if you want to use this as the primary Windows partition, then resize it to at least 10-20GB).
4. Optionally (if you still've any free space left) create as many partitions as you like (I used to have a 20GB partition for the system and the remaining space in one big partition for the user data ... however for users who store everything in their user profile folder, you might want to have only one big partition for both the system and user data).
5. Proceed with the installation on the first (system) partition.

"IMAPSize is a freeware Windows application that allows you to quickly and efficiently manage your IMAP mail accounts. It is not another mail client. The main purpose of IMAPSize is to locate space consuming folders and allow you to manage them, hence putting your storage quota under control. To accomplish this task IMAPSize offers a variety of useful (and some unique) operations."

"This article discusses the essential network ports, protocols and services that are used by Microsoft client and server operating systems, server-based programs and their subcomponents in the Microsoft Windows server system."

A very nice collection of all the Windows network services and their protocol+port usages.

I already posted about HashTab, a utility available for both Windows and Mac OS X. It integrates well with the OS and allows you to generate MD5 (or other) checksums easily. There're a couple of alternatives in case of Windows though.