To reset your BlackBerry, three simple keys are all you need to know.
Left alt, Right shift and Right del.  Pressing those three keys, at the same time, will cause your BlackBerry to reset.
(the BlackBerry 9700 pictured has the three keys circled).

Resetting your BlackBerry weekly is a good practice to get into.

“Why?”, you ask?

A reset causes the BlackBerry to restart the operating system, and it frees up memory up as well.

It’s the very first thing I get my customers to do when they tell me their BlackBerry is behaving strangely.

In Windows 2000 you could create a shortcut to an Active Directory resource, and turn it into an Windows Explorer view.  One of my (now long gone) predecessors worked out it would make life easier for end users.

“Oh, you just want to see the security groups you have delegation rights too?  No problems.  I’ll create you a shortcut.”

The AD Folder shortcut would look like this on a Windows 2000 system:

The user reported that since a Windows XP upgrade, the icon looked like this:

(and the shortcut no longer worked.)

You can tell the Windows 2000 shortcut looks like a Folder shortcut.  The Windows XP shortcut, just looks broken.

(more…)

If you followed my posts on un-deleting files, you now know that when you delete a file, you can often recover it.  A reader asked in email

“So can you delete files forever, by formatting?”

No, and let me show you why.  I’ll “Quick format” & “also “Format” a USB stick, and demonstrate that you can still recover files.  Then I’ll show you what I do to wipe a disk clean.

“Quick” & Full Formatting
Quick formatting, or even Full formatting,

it makes no difference, you can still recover files.

(more…)

Don’t you just hate it when, after you’ve spent quite a few hours on doing something, some smarty pipes up a suggestion which meant you’ve just lost those hours.

So it was with a 150+ page PDF to Microsoft Word conversion.  Finished it, and to be honest, it was fairly crappy as the Word document has complex tables like this:

which is hard to capture when you go from PDF –> Word.  And after 80 pages, my care factor was starting to get low.

The smarty suggested PDF to Word.  PDF to Word is a website where you upload your PDF, and your converted Word document is mailed back to you.  My 156 page document was converted in minutes.

Grrrrrrrrrr

Ok, the downsides, or faults if you like, in the converted document?

• the header and footers were not converted.
• heading styles were not created.

But for FREE, it is a great utility.

If it’s free, how do they make money?  They sell PDF software, such as Nitro PDF Professional, which is about a 1/5 the price of Adobe Acrobat Professional.

Had this error while trying to update a Windows 2000 SP4 test box.  As it’s a test box, it has the bare minimum installed.

Microsoft’s solution?

• clean the Internet Explorer cache
• Delete some files in the WindowsUpdate directory
• Delete some DLL’s.

None of those worked.

The actual solution which worked for me? Install Internet Explorer 6.

Other things I could have tried?  Autopatcher, which I wrote about here. Except that Autopatcher no longer supports Windows 2000. 
Or apply the patches one by one, after running an MBSA scan? Maybe.

IE6?  Well I did say it was a test box.

Printer toner, depending on who you ask, is cancerogenic.

Or not.

The Material Safety Data Sheets I’ve seen, say not.  But I still wouldn’t breath toner in.

Now some of the printers I’ve worked on over the years, have conspired to leak toner over me. 

There was the StorageTek mainframe printer, with the toner hopper.  You’d open the 5 litre toner container and pour the toner into the hopper.  Great clouds of toner would float up and cover the FNG* tasked to refill the toner.  And because of this, it was only ever the FNG who had to refill the toner on this printer.

The DataProducts LZR960.   You know, you could ship most laser printers and not be to worried that they survive the journey.  The LZR960?  Like a nervous puppy, it would leak toner when the shipping box “This Way Up” sign was not rigorously followed.  Resulting in me being covered in toner, and one expensive service bill later.

Things have gotten better over time, and since I had not had toner leaked on me for a few years, I thought

how much toner was left in the Lanier|Ricoh Photocopier toner cartridge when it said it was “out of toner”?*

An impressively small amount as it turns out.  I’m very impressed that Lanier|Ricoh are not ripping me off on toner.

Other things.

• In theory, the cartridge is designed to be disassembled.
  Theory is good, but I used a Dremel tool.
• Cartridge seemed very well engineered.
• Benefit of hindsight, I would have cut the other end of the cartridge off.  This would have allowed me to have a nice pile like The Angry Technician did.
• You should wash toner off with COLD soapy water.
  Warm or hot water will cause the toner to bind to you.

* Friendly New Guy
* idea first seen over at The Angry Technician.

I was sent a word document with "hidden data" in it.

"Hidden data" in Microsoft Word documents can be one of several bits of information, such as hidden data, change tracking, or even comments on the document.

Comments.

Such as this example:

This problem isn’t just limited to Microsoft Word, oh no.  It shows up in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint too.

The solution for:
Microsoft Office XP/2003?  Download the Microsoft Remove Hidden Data add-in, and use it.
Microsoft Office 2007?  You already have it.  The option can be found under the Office Pearl –> Prepare –> Inspect Document menu item.

This post brought to you by the outside company who shared a comment-enabled document with me.

I needed to read the last line of a log file.  PowerShell made it very, very, easy.

All you need to do is Get-Content the file, and then pipe it to Select-Object with the –last parameter set to 1.

Here is the code snippet which does that:

$failure_reason = (Get-Content $file_txt | Select-Object -last 1)

And here is a (simple) version of the PowerShell script I wrote to read though a list of computers, and dump the last line to the screen:

$windows2000_PCs = (Get-Content c:\temp\pc-list.txt)
foreach ($computer in $windows2000_PCs)
        {
            $file_txt = "\\"+ $computer + "\c$\log\install.txt"
            $install_result = (Get-Content $file_txt | Select-Object -last 1)
            Write-Host $computer has install result of: $install_result
        }
Write-Host Done!

Which outputs:

BROOMFONDLE has install result of: Program installed successfully on 21 DEC 2010 – 1000hrs
MAGICTHIGHS1 has install result of: Program failed to install – Error code 1603 on 11 DEC 2010 - 1321hrs
Done!

Things to note:

• c:\temp\pc-list.txt contains the list of computer names you wish to scan.
• the script is not idiot-proofed error-trapped.
  ie. in a production version of this you would check that the computer being scanned is online, the install.txt file exists, and so on.

Confessions can be good.  Here are mine around backup mistakes I’ve made.

1. Copy “new” backup disk over the “old” backup disk.
   The “new” disk was blank!
   I (almost) “lost” 5 years of irreplaceable photos.  Fortunately I found an “old old” backup.
   What it cost me: 100+ photos / 4 hours.
2. Production server: Disk to Disk backup.
   Setup a nightly backup of SOELAB1 server, so it copies all the changes to SOELAB1BUP.
   Some time later, try and recover a file from SOELAB1BUP.  It’s not there.
   Ask co-worker:
   ”Oh, we were running out of backup space so we don’t backup ISO files anymore.”
   What it cost me: Operating system install disk needed for fault investigation.
3. CTOS FAQ website.
   GeoCities was shutting down on 26th October 2009.  I thought it was the 31st October.
   What it cost me: complete website and Google Pagerank of 1 for CTOS.  3 files gone forever & 15 hours recovery time (had a 10 year backup).
4. Forget to backup the backup file.
   Make a backup of the Wisefaq web server.
   Download it, and store the backup locally.
   Yes, I forgot to download the backup.  I did several WordPress upgrades before I realised.
   What it cost me: nothing (phew!).  Potential lost, everything.

If you can learn something from my mistakes, more power to you.

Use Driver Magician.

Why?  Well sometimes you’ll get a laptop from a manufacturer, and to remove all the crapware, you’ll want to reformat the laptop.

Reformatting is normally the best option.  Quickest way to get rid of the crapware I know.
Or, if you work in a Corporate IT shop, you are probably going to want to install your own customised Windows operating system install.*

BUT.  Sometimes manufacturers don’t place their laptop drivers on their website, which makes it hard to install your own copy of Windows successfully.  What with not being able to find all those required device drivers.

Driver Magician will backup all those device drivers for you.  And if you’re not a skinflint who uses the Driver Magician Lite version, it’ll even restore them for you.  From the screenshot, you can see I’m a skinflint…

And the driver backup went very well.

On a test Dell e4200 series laptop, I backed up the Intel Ethernet and Wireless Network drivers.  It backed all the required DLLs/INFs/CAB files it needed to.  Then I reformatted the laptop, and installed Windows XP.  Loaded the backed up drivers, and they worked perfectly.

I’m very happy.

Why the Dell e4200?

A standard Windows XP build does not have the required (e4200) Intel Network drivers included.  Meaning you have to install them yourself.  So it made a good test machine.

Thanks to…

Terry McDonald (School Network Manager).  This is where I first saw mention of Driver Magician.

* if you are a large enough Corporate IT shop, you’ll get into discussions with laptop hardware vendors like:

Wisefaq, your customised image fails to load at our laptop manufacturing plant.  It’s your device driver choice.  We use different drivers in our laptop Windows install, and they work …

Driver Magician will allow me to extract those very same drivers, and use them in my customised Windows build.