Category Archives: How To

How to do things

Fixing a sticky Lockwood Deadlock.

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There hasn’t been many blog posts of late, as I’ve moved into a new apartment in South Melbourne, and the processing of moving has taken up a bit of time.

One of the first problems in the new apartment was with the lock.  I’d put the key in the lock, turn the key to deadlock the lock, then take the key out.

Except the key wouldn’t come out.

Ah, it’ll need some graphite to fix the sticky lock.  Off to the local locksmith to buy some.  The local locksmith is called Local Locksmiths.

Naahhhhh, you don’t need graphite, your actual problem is that the screws holding the key barrel are loose.

Lockwood Lock

By jove he was right.  Tightened the screws up, and the problem was fixed.

How to open a WD Elements USB2 External Drive

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You carefully lever the bottom of the case, out of the case.  Here are a couple of photos which demonstrate this:

WD Elements USB2 - Open WD Elements USB2 - Open - 2

After I got the case open, I was impressed by the amount of shock absorption that Western Digital provided.  The blue mounts in the second picture are the shock mounts.

If you are looking for a replacement, you can still buy drive these drives Western Digital WDBAA0010HBK drives on Amazon.

Office 2010 SP2 install issues.

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I’m getting ready to deploy Office 2010 Service Pack 2 out to my customers desktop fleet.  I’m going to journal the list of problems I find along the way.

Issue 1- Open File – Security Warning

Open File - Security Warning

I’m surprised that I’ve not stumbled across this issue before.  It’s caused by the “Zone Identifer” feature.  In short, if you download a file from the internet, you’ll probably see this warning.  I’m running the SP2 install from a VBscript file, which is why I’m seeing it.

There are a couple of ways around this:

  1. Copy the file to a FAT formatted drive.
    This causes the Zone Identifier flag to be stripped off.
  2. Change the SEE_MASK_NOZONECHECKS environment variable
    As documented in Microsoft KB889815
    It works.
  3. Don’t use VBscript “Use a command script”
    Also from KB889815.  Not an option for me unfortunately
  4. Use the Microsoft Sysinternals Streams utility to remove the Zone Identifier flag.
    Bit of a brutal approach, particularly if you have other information stored in the alternative data streams.
  5. Use the ZoneStripper utility.

Next (potential) issue: "Error 1718. File was rejected by digital signature policy"

Finding device drivers with the PCIDatabase

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Imagine you have a “No name brand” Ethernet card, without a driver disk or CD.

You plug it into your computer, and Device Manager can’t find the drivers for it.  If you get the Vendor ID and the Device ID from the Hardware ID Property Field in Device Manager:
Device Manager

And then you take those ID’s; and do a search with the Device ID on PCIDatabase.com
PCIDatabase_Search

After you press Search, you get results like these:
PCIDatabase_results

You can see multiple devices were returned for Device ID 1681.  But if we check the Vendor ID, we can see we have a Broadcom 57xx Gigabit Integrated Controller.  So we can now go to the Broadcom site and grab the correct Ethernet driver.

VS2010 & .Net 2 Framework Selection

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.Net 2 is not the default framework option …  No, you get .Net 4.  To change it, you select Project / <your project name> Properties / Compile / Advanced Compile Options, and select the Target Framework you want.
WinXP SP3 WS2010-2012-03-07-12-50-14

I prefer to use the .Net 2 Framework as it’s the lowest common denominator on the systems I write code for.  And yes, I documented this, as I can’t remember where the option is, and Google Search wasn’t my friend at the time.

Files to delete when imaging a system.

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Such as when you use the GHOST disk imaging product.  This is a revision of a post I wrote back in November 2009, and it’s about time to update it.

So here is the revised list I files I delete when I GHOST/image a system:

Directories to clean up:
%TEMP%
%PROGRAM FILES%\CA\eTrust\Debug

%PROGRAM FILES%\CA\SharedComponents\PPPPRealtime\Logs
%PROGRAM FILES%\CA\SharedComponents\PPPPRealtime\Logs
%PROGRAM FILES%\CA\SharedComponents\ScanEngine\Logs

%WINDIR%\CSC
%WINDIR%\PREFETCH
%WINDIR%\SYSTEM32\CCM\LOGS
%WINDIR%\SYSTEM32\DLLCACHE

Files to delete
386Spart.par
Amizvsus.pmf
Dos data.sf
Ghost.dta
Hiberfil.sys
Hibrn8.dat
Hybern8
Navsysl.dat
Navsysr.dat
Pagefile.sys
Pm_hiber.bin
Save2dsk.bin
Saveto.dsk
Spart.par
Swapper.dat
Toshiber.dat
Virtpart.dat
Win386.swp
%WINDIR%\dpinst.log
%WINDIR%\INF\SYSSETUP.PNF
%WINDIR%\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\*.EVT

Other
System Restore Points.
The best, and safest way I have found to clear the System Restore cache is to
a) Turn it off, click ok on the “System Restore is going to delete it’s restore points” and then
b) Turn it back on.

If your replace your iPhone device, you can say goodbye to Google Sync.

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My iPhone had a dying battery, so the iPhone was replaced under warranty.

Then I restored the iPhone setting from backup, and all seemed to work ok.

Except for email, wasn’t getting any.

I checked the email settings, and the iPhone verified they were correct, and I could connect to the Google Mail servers:
Google Sync Broken

After much Googling, I worked out what was going wrong.

  • The “Exchange” email account setting uses Google Sync.
  • Google Sync was discontinued as a “free” feature on 30th January 2013.
    ”Starting January 30, 2013, consumers won’t be able to set up new devices using Google Sync.”
  • “new devices”, includes my replacement iPhone.

There are alternatives; what I did was on my iPhone was:

  • Created new Gmail accounts to replace the Exchange account on my iPhone.
          Gmail account setting
  • Setup CardDAV.

It works.  But I wasn’t happy with having to do it Google.