My previous answer was that you couldn’t and you needed to get a XP Professional license and then reinstall.

However searching for something totally un-related, I found a procedure that did exactly what I needed. This does not mean you instantly have things such as remote desktop etc, for that you need to do further hacking. For more information on that see this article.

However to do the basic conversion, simply follow the procedure below. I have done this on 4 or 5 XP Home installs, and it has worked flawlessly:

1. Click Start.
2. Click Run.
3. Type “regedit” and click OK.
4. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/ControlSet00X/Control/ProductOptions
(where ControlSet00X is the one with the highest number).
3. Delete the ProductSuite registry key.
4. Create a new DWORD value and named it as “Brand”.
5. Set the “Brand” value data as 0.
6. Reboot the system.
7. On boot up after the BIOS screen, press F8 to display Windows XP Startup Menu.
8. Choose Last Known Good Configuration and hit Enter.

You can then right click on My Computer and select Properties and it should display as XP Professional.

I used to install VNC (Especially UltraVNC) almost everywhere I go, but hated the fact that I had to open up ports in the firewall all the time. Plus I found that VNC was sometimes slow and cumbersome to use.

I then started using Teamviewer however the earlier versions of this didn’t allow a permanent connection. In other words, the customer had to click on a button to allow the connection each time, which made late night support impossible. They have since fixed this and have a permanent solution.

Which brings me to Remote Desktop and LogMeIn. I usually setup at least both of these connection methods. However out of the both of them, I find that LogMeIn is by far superior.

Remote Desktop is a Microsoft technology that is similar to Citrix etc. It basically allows a fast connection from any Windows or OSX computer to another computer which is either running Windows Server with Terminal Services or even a basic Windows XP Professional PC on up.

The main reason I don’t use it as much as LogMeIn is that it never gives you true console level access. Instead you simply connection to the host PC as a “session”. It also means that if a customer has 20 machines connected to their network, I have to enable RDP on each and remember all the details.

LogMeIn on the other hand makes it easy to install the client software, and to have a bird’s eye view of all the machines attached to your user account. So you can effectively jump from PC to PC easily without knowing IP addresses, port numbers or anything. This makes it easy to do it when you are not on your regular PC or on the road for instance.

LogMeIn works through most browsers via a plugin, so again can be used anywhere you have access to a PC and the Internet.

The free version gives you an unlimited account however the paid accounts offer things such as Chat and File Transfers between your PC and the remote.

Technorati Tags:
OSX, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Remote Access

At first I thought I could do a basic non destructive repair of Windows XP to restore all the missing or corrupted files. However, on booting up from the Windows XP CD, it would not find an installed copy of XP unfortunately.

I then thought we may have no choice but to re-install into a separate folder so we could keep all the data accessible, however it happily copied all the files during the text based setup, however after rebooting to enter the GUI part of the install it would then display the HAL.DLL error again.

It was at this stage that I remembered a trick for restoring the Boot files which may have saved us from having to reformat and reinstall the whole system again.

Thankfully it worked!

To fix this problem I basically performed the following steps:

1. Boot up from Windows XP CD.

2. Once you get to the Welcome to Windows XP Setup, press ‘R’ to go to the Recovery console.

3. It will then ask you for a Windows installation to work on and finally the Administrator password for the install.

4. You will then be presented with a command prompt.

5. Perform the following commands one at a time:

Attrib -H -R -S C:\Boot.ini
Del C:\Boot.ini
BootCfg /Rebuild
Fixboot

6. Reboot.

I found that the last command of ‘Fixboot’ did the trick without having to do delete the boot.ini file and rebuilding the boot configuration.

Technorati Tags:
Windows XP, Boot.ini

They reported that every time they opened Word or Excel (however not Outlook weirdly!?), it would present them with an End User License Agreement that they would have to approve. It would them function normally until the next time it was opened and it would do the same thing.

Now I had seen this problem once before also appear on Windows Vista, however couldn’t for the life of me remember how to fix it.

Some quick google’ing pointed me to a Microsoft knowledge base article that detailed the problem exacted complete with resolution and workarounds.

I first tried the resolution but for some reason the instructions didn’t gel. I then resorted to the workaround which involved changing some security settings on a registry key:

* For the 2007 Microsoft Office suites:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0
* For Microsoft Office 2003:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0
* For Microsoft Office 2002:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0
* For Microsoft Office 2000:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0

You have to basically change the permissions for the Users group to enable Full Control.

Once done, you launch each application and accept the End User license agreement, and then you’ll never see it again.

Funny thing is the Microsoft article mentions both Windows XP and Windows 2000 in the workaround section, however I have installed hundreds of installations of both of these and Microsoft Office versions and have never seen this behavior. I have only seen it on Windows Vista.

Technorati Tags:
Windows Vista, Windows XP, Microsoft Office

As they had old cabling installed in the wall that terminated back to just a krone frame lying on the floor, I thought we could use the wireless network for their Internet traffic and the wired network for their printer traffic.

I connected all machines up to a small 8 port switch, and set static IP addresses on each in a different subnet to the wireless network. The wireless network was 192.168.0.x and the wired was 192.168.1.x.

I then set a static IP address on the printer and could happily ping from the desktops to the printer.

However, every desktop seemed fine except for when the machines wanted to access the Internet (i.e the wireless connection). They just timed out on pings and in Internet Explorer. Some could access the internet fine, others for only 5 minutes and then timed out. One even had no access at all unless I pulled out the wired ethernet connection!. I had been setting up the following configuration on all the wired connections on each desktop:

IP: 192.168.1.x
Subnet: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.1.1

For some reason or another, it appears that if you setup a gateway address on the second NIC, Windows XP can get confused by the looks of it. This is kind of understandable as how would Windows know which connection the DNS server and Internet connection is connected to??.

Simple solution, I just removed the gateway address. This seemed to allow Windows XP to send the everyday traffic over the wireless connection, but whenever they wanted to print, it would happily send out the traffic over the gateway-less wired connection.

Now if you were connecting to another router on the second network connection, you couldn’t do this however, but because I was only networking the machines using a simple switch I could.

Technorati Tags:
Windows XP, Networking, Wireless, Ethernet

However, I recently downloaded the Windows 7 RC and decided to run it on my Macbook Pro using VMware Fusion. The setup was a snap and even though I only dedicate around 768mb to the virtual session, Windows 7 runs *very* fast within it. Now mind you, I only really use Windows for Outlook 2007 as I cannot stand Entourage 2008. Ask me why I don’t like it, and I can never answer that question. There is just something comfortable and familiar about Outlook. I have used Outlook since v3.x that shipped with Exchange 5.5 many many years ago.

Anyway, I was surprised how well Windows 7 ran in such a small memory space. Try doing that with Windows Vista!. I have seen 2gb machines running Windows Vista absolutely crawling. So it was surprising to me that an O/S that is effectively Vista done right, would run so well. Microsoft must have done some serious tuning under the hood.

It actually ran better than the Windows XP virtual session I used to run before trying out Windows 7. I can actually say this is the one O/S that would sway me back to a Windows laptop. Unfortunately here in Australia we get shafted a bit in terms of Apple pricing. Even after doing the currency conversion, there seems to be another $500+ tacked onto the price of Apple laptops.

This makes it hard when it comes to buying a new laptop. I can either buy one of the quite nice looking Dell Studio laptops for $1300, or pay $2699 for a Macbook Pro. It is hard to pay double for something just to get OSX on it.

It’s a shame OSX doesn’t run on more hackintosh hardware, otherwise it would be an easy solution. I guess now that Apple dropped their prices on the Macbook Pro range, it does make that pill a little easier to swallow.

Technorati Tags:
Apple, Windows Vista, VMware Fusion, Windows 7

1. Dropped Calls

The biggest complaint I have is the dropped calls. I am not sure if it is the iPhone or the Optus network here in Australia.

One thing I have noticed is that even though I have full reception according to the display, people cannot sometimes ring me as it will send calls straight to voicemail. However if I turn on airplane mode and then turn off airplane mode, it will re-register with the mobile network and everything will be back to normal.

2. Data Speeds

This is more a complaint against the Optus 3G network, but it is soooooo freaking slow!. I am not sure if iPhone users on other networks have the same slowness issues but other people I know that are also on the Optus network say the same things about the speed.

3. Battery Life

Battery life is lame. The weird thing is I am positive it used to be better before I upgraded to 2.2.1. I am not a big player of games etc, I purely use it for calls and receiving push email from an exchange server.

4. Springboard

The phone becomes a chore to use and find applications once you have quite a few pages of applications installed. This should be fixed up once the 3.0 firmware comes out with it’s spotlight search.

5. MMS

Again fixed with the 3.0 firmware release. About time!

6. Lack of Memory

I have a 30gb iPod which pretty much contains my entire iTunes library of music/video and podcasts. The problem I have is I constantly have to chop and change what I can put on my 16gb iPhone. I would love a bigger capacity one.

I wouldn’t mind them releasing a new iPhone with say 25% extra battery capacity, and a 32gb model!. A speedier CPU would be nice to, to bring it up to the speed of the 2G iPhone Touch.

Technorati Tags:
Apple, Apple iPod, iPhone, Optus

If you have a fast internet connection however the site you are VPN’ing into has a slow connection, whenever you want to access the internet or download files etc, Windows unfortunately by default sends all traffic over the slower VPN connection instead of intelligently figuring out which is the correct way to do things.

Thankfully it is an easy thing to fix.

Once you have created your VPN connection:

1. You simply open the VPN connection window and then click Properties.

2. Select the Networking tab, and then highlight the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and click Properties.

3. Click the Advanced button.

4. Uncheck the Use default gateway on remote network option and click OK three times to get back to the main connection window.

Technorati Tags:
Windows XP, VPN

This server was running Windows 2008 Server, and was replacing an aging Dell Windows 2000 Server. The old server was basically responsible for everything like DNS, DHCP, WINS, AD, File Serving, Print Serving and VPN termination via Routing and Remote Access.

Needless to say it was a very busy box.

So when time came to upgrade it, the customer went all out on hardware and power etc.

I ran up the new IBM box with the Windows 2008 server software and installed it. It was at this point that I installed McAfee Antivirus v8.7. Everything went fine during the install and the server happily sat for about a week while we waited for the migration window to arrive.

We first started to migrate basic things like making this new box an AD participant. I then migrated over the DHCP, DNS and WINS details and switched off the services on the old box. So far so good.

It sat again for around a week before the next part of the migration was to take place. Remaining was file and printer migration as well as VPN and some basic Terminal Services, and then finally demoting the old server and reverting it to basically a member server in the domain.

The rest of the migration went fine, and the old box was demoted and relegated to other duties.

About 2-3 weeks went by and I got a frantic call from the customer saying the they could not access the server and no new DHCP addresses were being issued.

When I arrived onsite, I tried to bounce the DHCP service, however once it tried to start it, an error message reported that there was not enough server memory space. Now I have seen this error before however I am still baffled by what it actually means.

Anyway, I restarted the server and everything came up fine?. Chalking it up to some bizarre isolated incident, I didn’t give it much thought and got the hell out of there.

Then 2-3 weeks later again I got another call to say the server was unavailable. Again we rebooted and it was resolved once again. Now I was starting to get a little concerned. Was the hardware flakey?. Was the Windows 2008 build OK?. Did I screw up or install anything that might be causing this?.

I did some searching on google however came up blank. We decided to have a meeting with the customer to assess what our next course of action was going to be. It was during this meeting that we decided we would either possibly rebuild the server or do a repair on the server just in case some files were out of whack or whatnot.

However I wasn’t convinced that there was a problem with the build though. I again went searching on google and found a strange Microsoft knowledge base article that pretty much just had a number, a brief description and a hotfix link.

We decided to wait a week or so before applying the hotfix (as we knew it died every 2-3 weeks) because I wanted more information before applying a untested hotfix.

After a few days, Microsoft fleshed out the KB article and detailed under what conditions this problem appeared under.

It appears there is a bug in a file called tdx.sys. It only affects machines running Windows 2008 Server and Windows Vista service pack 1. It also only affects machines with dual CPU’s and running software such as antivirus, firewalls etc.

As of writing, there are two solutions. One is to install the hotfix or edit your boot.ini file to force the system to only use 1 CPU. Why you would want to do the latter is beyond me!. Hopefully this will be fixed in service pack 2 for Windows 2008 and Vista.

I uninstalled McAfee, rebooted, installed the hotfix, rebooted again and then finally installed McAfee again.

It’s now 2.5 months on, and I have not heard a peep from the customer!. Another bizarre problem solved.

Technorati Tags:
Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Hotfix, McAfee Antivirus

It was only when a desktop requested a new lease and did not get one, was the problem discovered each time.

The main problem was that according to the Windows Server’s Event Logs, it reported that there was a secondary or rogue DHCP somewhere on the network. I originally suspected that another of their servers had it’s DHCP server service switched on by accident. After painstakingly auditing all servers, no DHCP servers were found, so it was back to square one.

We then suspected that VMware was causing the problems as it bridges a connection between the physical NIC and a virtual NIC. It can also be setup so that the physical NIC gets a normal network DHCP address or a fake virtual address. No dice on this suspicion however.

I then decided to employ the DHCPLOC tool which is part of the Windows Support Tools. It is fairly easy to run and is command line based.

Unfortunately DHCPLOC turned up nothing except for the standard Windows Server DHCP server.

However after several days of running the tool, it picked up a DHCP server running on one of the local addresses in the IP range. Tracing this IP became a nightmare, as everytime I tried to ping or locate this IP it would timeout.

It turns out that I was purely doing the ping checks etc at the wrong time of the day. I know that sounds strange but it will all make sense.

When I ping’ed the address during the day, it actually responded, however at night it timed out. After tracking down the hostname associated with this IP, it was found that it belonged to a users iPhone that was connected via wifi.

You may be thinking how can an iPhone interfere with a DHCP server?.

Well it was quite easy to figure out from here. This particular iPhone was jailbroken and was running PDANet. PDANet is a program that allows you to tether your iPhone to your PC/Mac via wireless. The problem is it also provides a DHCP server of it’s own.

This DHCP server was basically causing the main DHCP server to shutdown each time. Unfortunately the reason it took so long to find was this user was not always in the office or didn’t have the iPhone connected via wifi all the time when they were in the office.

Technorati Tags:
Windows Server, DHCP, iPhone, PDANet, Tethering