Category Archives: Platforms

Remote Desktop and ghost printers

For those who use RDP to reach Windows servers…

Event Viewer on the servers sometimes generates System Errors due to RDP sessions configured to try and connect printers… which don't exist on the servers.

Pretty silly, but it seems to often be the default for RDP, and it clogs up the Event Viewer with unnecessary errors, which slows you down when you go searching for actual errors.

It appears you can prevent this by configuring Remote Desktop to not try and use local printers in the session – eg under Remote Desktop, Options, Local Resources, switch off Printers.

You may need to configure this separately for each host you connect to… but those of us who have to look through Event Viewer for errors will save time, and thank you for it, if you do!

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TV tuner for Mac Pro?

I’ve been delighted with the secondhand Mac Pro I got last year. It’s five years old, but probably the best Windows PC I’ve ever owned… we sometimes use OSX, and sometimes use Boot Camp to run Windows, and I did end up getting Parallels as well, which is able to boot the Boot Camp partition — this I think is nothing short of miraculous.

Anyway, our other Windows PC is due for replacement. I was thinking I’d wait and see what the next crop of Mac Minis were like, but it looks like I’ve again got the opportunity to pick up a used Mac Pro via the same workplace clearing more of them out. Same age, but (if my calculations are right) double the speed of the current Mac Mini. Given our usage patterns, this is a cheap easy upgrade… particularly if we put an SSD in it.

I’m now pondering: what’s the best TV tuner for it? That’s the main thing I miss about the HP desktop we had that died. (I did try and rip the tuner card out of that to try in the Mac under Windows. It didn’t work.)

So… Mac Pro TV tuners…

I’d prefer dual tuner. I’d want it to work with both OSX and Windows. In fact I’d go so far as to say that this second box will be mostly using Windows, and I’d want this to work with Windows Media Centre.

For a USB dual tuner, the Elgato EyeTV Diversity looks pretty good.

Asking around on Twitter, there was some good feedback:

(Why does Twitter’s embed tweet with “Include parent Tweet” not seem to work?)

It’d be used with a proper connection to a roof antenna, so not concerned about the mini antenna.

But I think I’d actually prefer an internal card, since I really don’t need it to be portable… and installed internally might be more out of the way/better for longevity.

Any good options?

PS. This ancient page talks about some options. Not sure how relevant it is anymore though.

Chrome crashing in OSX – fixed by re-installing

I’m no OS X expert, so I was a bit befuddled to find Google Chrome began crashing on startup a few days ago. Was it some evil Apple plot to lock Google out of the Mac?

Chrome crashing on start up in OSX

All the grisly details from the automated report are below… it's not the most readable of reports.

The fix: What I did was to download Chrome again and re-install. That seems to have fixed it for now.

Continue reading

Sony Vegas 10: Out of memory when rendering

We were having issues rendering a reasonably complex but fairly short video using Sony Vegas 10 (32-bit) on a 64-bit machine (Win7 x64) with plenty of RAM and disk space free. After a few seconds each time, the rendering would stop dead with an Out Of Memory error.

I looked around on Google, where various discussion forums came to different conclusions about a fix (including changing the rendering thread and RAM options within Vegas) — and a 4-minute YouTube video claiming also to fix it — honestly, who has the time to watch something like that? — just give me the solution in words I can quickly scan and replicate.

I eventually found this:

I finally found the solution to Vegas giving me memory errors using CFF Explorer… This is what I did.

1) Using “CFF Explorer” I open the original “VegasMovieStudioPE100.exe” file.

2) Now go to “NT Header/File Header” and click “File Header”. There you will find a button labeled “click here”. Click it. And select the checkbox “App can handle> 2GB address space”

3) Now press the “ok”'s and when back on the main menu, click on the disk button and save the modified “.exe” file, overwrite the orginal one. (Note in Vista and 7 you must be running CFF Explorer in Administrator Mode).

Suddenly all my low memory errors were history and have been able to render all my movies with no issues.

Happily, this worked for us too. Hopefully repeating the fix here will help others find it more quickly. Thank you, “Lowlypawn” for posting your solution rather than just posting your problems like many do.

At some stage we'll upgrade to a newer (64-bit) video editing package. But it's nice to know this one can be cranked up to keep going for a bit longer.

It makes me wonder why (a) Sony hasn't issued their own information about this, and (b) something as incredibly useful as CFF Explorer isn't built into Windows.

Click through to read the full post, which includes feedback from Sony from when he contacted them about it.

Microsoft security bulletins using software “not licensed for commercial use”

I can’t help noticing that in the last couple of weeks, Microsoft’s security bulletin emails have been sent as PGP signed messages using a copy of PGP Desktop that is “not licensed for commercial use”.

...
This newsletter was sent by:
Microsoft Corporation
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, Washington, USA
98052


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP Desktop 10.2.0 (Build 1950) - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com
Charset: utf-8

wsFVAwUBURwisxWqSyu+jsPhAQjyGQ//fj/k7Fb2zIr2gcINPs66n3SAEdNp41eO
mvTuT/knbPdZNhECQaFcQulaTgOgUDMCIVPT+NWTWBBuoqaXUuMhPKMaro6Bv0Be
...

I suppose a small struggling startup company like Microsoft can be excused for not paying to update keep their commercial licence up to date.

Mac boot menu recommendations?

Hey there Mac geeks: a question.

I’ve got BootCamp running on my Mac Pro, and can get the menu for OSX vs Windows… but only if I remember to hold down the Alt key while booting.

Mac boot menu

What’s the best way to get this to appear (with a timeout, preferably) automatically?

It doesn’t look like BootCamp will do it.

Two alternative boot menus appear to be

rEFIt

and rEFInd

Any recommendations, or other suggestions?

(To clarify: I want to keep OSX as the default, but I want the computer to prompt — without having to hold down the Alt key at a specific time — to visibly allow the user to override it. Like Windows does with its boot menu when you have multiple operating systems installed.)

Update: Via Twitter, one vote for rEDInd, and a bunch of unhelpful comments asking me why I’d want to boot a Mac into Windows :-/

Chasing a BSOD

I’m trying to nail down a repeated Blue Screen Of Death on one of my PCs. It’s only happened in the past week or so, on my 3ish year old HP a6760a desktop, in both Win7 32-bit (which I’m phasing-out) and 64-bit (which I’m moving to).

The crashes seem to happen in a couple of places, but this one is typical (output of the dump file via NirSoft Blue Screen View, with a little re-arranging of its HTML output):

Dump File 122912-22417-01.dmp
Crash Time 29/12/2012 9:15:14 AM
Bug Check String NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM
Bug Check Code 0x00000024
Parameter 1 00000000`001904fb
Parameter 2 fffff880`0a707068
Parameter 3 fffff880`0a7068c0
Parameter 4 fffff880`012ea820
Caused By Driver Ntfs.sys
Caused By Address Ntfs.sys+b7820
File Description  
Product Name  
Company  
File Version  
Processor x64
Crash Address ntoskrnl.exe+7efc0
Stack Address 1  
Stack Address 2  
Stack Address 3  
Computer Name  
Full Path C:\Windows\Minidump\122912-22417-01.dmp
Processors Count 2
Major Version 15
Minor Version 7601
Dump File Size 291,720

I’ve tried ensuring all patches were in place; that didn’t help.

Then I tried rolling back using System Restore to before it was happening. That didn’t help either.

Now I’ve tried installing the latest BIOS patch, which HP does say can help with some Win7 BSODs (though not specifically what I’m getting).

So far so good, will see what happens from here.

Update 1/1/2013: Still getting crashes. Interestingly, most (possibly all) seem to occur when Chrome is running, and particularly on pages with Flash. I have removed Flash, but it seems Chrome has built-in Flash support. So… I’ve temporarily removed Chrome to see if it stops happening. (It was up to date: Version 23.0.1271.97 m).

Update 1/1/2013 10pm: Not sure that helped. I did do a full malware check using MSE, which found: OpenCandy adware — it reckoned it was in D:\Users\Daniel\Downloads\avc-free.exe — which I think is a free “Any Video Converter” product I was mucking about with recently (I don’t think it’s the one I settled on). It’s not clear to me that OpenCandy would be causing these crashes, especially as I don’t think it was even active. Have removed it anyway.

Update 2/1/2013 8pm: Well, this is entertaining. Still getting crashes, and now it’s not booting at all. In fact it’s not even getting to the BIOS startup screen. Obviously some serious hardware problem.

Update 2/1/2013 9:15pm: After trying many suggestions from the HP support web site, such as unplugging all devices and even disconnecting hard drives and removing RAM, no luck. The power goes on, the CPU and video fans spin, but no display at all, not even the customary single beep.

I’ve posted to the HP forum hoping someone there has some ideas.

Windows 8/Server 2012 new interface – is this progress?

Jakob Nielsen nails my concerns with Windows 8, specifically that the paradigm doesn't work on PCs:

On a regular PC, Windows 8 is Mr. Hyde: a monster that terrorizes poor office workers and strangles their productivity.

… (PCs) used to be Microsoft's core audience, and it has now thrown the old customer base under the bus by designing an operating system that removes a powerful PC's benefits in order to work better on smaller devices.

An example I'm finding trying to use Windows 2012 Server, which uses the same interface: the start menu isn't visible on the taskbar. You have to press the Windows key to get it. But this causes huge problems over Remote Desktop, which is how many servers are accessed. You have to specifically reconfigure Remote Desktop to do it, which then causes issues on your own desktop.

Windows Server 2012 - no Start button Windows Server 2012 - if you're lucky it will appear

The Start Menu does seem to appear if you mouse over the bottom left of RDP window, but I haven't yet worked out precisely what you need to do. Hover? Click? Swipe? It just seems to pop up semi-randomly. If there's a better way of doing it, it's certainly not obvious.

In my book, this is not a useability improvement.

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Converting .ts (DVB) to other formats (in Windows)

I’m always on the lookout for a better method of converting DVB (.ts) video streams to more useable formats.

This seems to do a decent job: Free Video Converter

— just beware of the installation questions; if you accept the defaults, it’ll install an unwanted toolbar, a doubtful driver optimiser, and an unneeded (in my case) plug-in for Firefox and Chrome.

Anybody got other suggestions, including for OSX?

To use Windows "shutdown" or "psshutdown" remotely, turn off UAC

I was wrestling with trying to get shutdown or psshutdown to remotely shut down a Windows machine.

These instructions (for shutdown) seemed so straightforward: ensure the relevant service is running, that it has access through the Windows firewall, and that the calling username is aligned with one on the remote box that has permissions to shutdown.

psshutdown avoids the latter point by letting you specify the username/password.

But everything I tried returned Access Denied.

The answer, it turns out, is to switch off UAC for that user on the remote box. Then it works:

psshutdown \\tintin -u daniel

PsShutdown v2.52 - Shutdown, logoff and power manage local and remote systems
Copyright (C) 1999-2006 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

Password:
TINTIN is scheduled to power off in 00:00:20.

Of course, UAC is there for a good reason. In this case I’m not too troubled because the box involved is one I’m going to decommission in the near future, but one would hope there’s a way of making this work with UAC still enabled.

Trouble moving iTunes from PC to Mac

I tried the other day to move my iTunes library from the PC to the Mac. I figured we might as well move everyone in the house’s iTunes libraries onto OSX and then avoid having to maintain multiple copies of the iTunes software on Windows.

From reading about it, it shouldn’t be too hard.

In theory you just ensure all the files are in the iTunes folder (by ensuring iTunes is set to organise it, and running a Consolidate files operation) then copy the folder across to the new computer’s iTunes folder and open iTunes there… plus authorise/de-authorise computers as appropriate.

Problem was once I’d moved the files across, iTunes on the Mac couldn’t find some of them:

iTunes library error

465-odd songs. It seemed to be primarily songs within compilations. They were all there on the hard disk, just not where OSX iTunes thought they should be. (Checking back on the PC, Windows iTunes was still happy.)

It would give me the option to find individual tracks, and then claim it could try and use that info to find others, but never seemed to be able to automatically find more of them by itself.

Where it was whole albums gone missing, I ended up removing them then adding them again.

Still about 90 lost which I may have to do individually… though I’m wondering if I should just remove everything from iTunes, then drag all the iTunes folders back into it to reload them from scratch… assuming it’s okay with folders and subfolders being added.

According to email clients and anti-virus, an EXE disguised as a PDF is not suspicious?!

So seriously, why can't email clients like Outlook, as well as virus scanners, flag EXE files disguised as other things?

For instance, at work we got one the other day that was a fake Microsoft notification.

Subject: Important Changes to Microsoft Services Agreement

It basically asks you to open the attached file to see the details. The attached file is Microsoft-Services-Agreement.zip – inside that is “Microsoft Services Agreement.pdf.exe”

I scanned it with the virus scanner (with up-to-date definitions). It doesn't flag it as suspicious.

Not suspicious?! It's a frigging EXE disguised as a PDF. Windows users who have the default “Hide known extensions” on* will see it as a PDF. How is that not suspicious?

*That's a stupid default, too.

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