Recently in Hardware Category

After my last debacle with Windows Live Meeting where all four cores of my processor were pegged, my heat alarm was beeping and my patience was being quickly exhausted, I decided to give up on WLM—at least before Microsoft stepped in. When I got back in town from my penance trip to Leavenworth, Kansas and the biker wedding at the tattoo parlor in Ruidoso, NM (film at 11), I called up the WML support team (866-493.2825) (on a Saturday afternoon). To my delight a friendly voice answered and was able to offer a number of suggestions. Apparently WLM has free support 7/24. So, what were the suggestions?

• Disable Hardware Acceleration on the video card. This is easier said than done in Windows 7 as I’ll explain next. The support pro told me that this solves 90% of the performance problems. It did occur to me that if this is really the case (as it seems to be), why doesn’t WLM just make this change on its own as it starts?
• Use the Content tab to choose just those applications to share—not the entire desktop. Again, this makes it harder to run a smooth demo unless you open up the applications to share ahead of time and add them to the Content tab. However, this can lead to poorer performance as WLM might be overwhelmed by the increased workload. Since I have two monitors and many windows open that should not be shared (including gadgets) I can see how this would help. I would like to see an option where WLM shares applications on a specific monitor. While one can setup a sharing window, I could never get this to work correctly—perhaps if this was fixed…
• Don’t share your screen-cam  Window—it’s okay to get WML to show your video, just don’t include it as one of the shared windows.

Turning off video card hardware acceleration has always been a problem with screen scrapers and application sharing. I should have remembered this trick as we ran across it a decade ago while I was evaluating screen sharing programs at MSTE in the 90’s. My problem is with Windows 7—it seems the dialog to change these video card settings has been disabled for some reason. This means you can’t use the Advanced Settings | Troubleshooting | Change Settings  technique that we could use in XP and Vista to make this change.

Fortunately, I discovered that if you install the DirectX SDK, you can disable hardware acceleration in Windows 7 by clicking on the DirectDraw tab and un-checking the Use Hardware Acceleration checkbox as shown below. The DirectX SDK can be downloaded from here.

hth

Another day lost. As many times as I’ve helped others get connected, nothing worked today as I tried to connect from one system in a Workgroup to a SQL Server on a local (trusted) domain. I tried everything imaginable including:

• Checking to see it the server properties were set to permit remote connections. They were.
• Was the SQL Browser service running? It was.
• Did the SQL Server Configuration Manager say that the right protocols were enabled? Yes, they were.
• I tried to Telnet to the IP address and port being used (based on SSCM). It worked locally but not over the network.
• I stopped the Windows Firewall service as I was running Small Business Service and it thinks it knows best about configuring client firewalls (despite the fact that I have other firewall hardware). That made no difference.

Nothing made any difference. I could not connect from other domain-based systems either. The rest of the story? Well, I remembered having installed Windows 7 on top of an existing Windows Vista system. I had assumed that it had joined the SBS domain correctly (I ran “Connect” which was supposed to do that). Apparently it didn’t. When I dropped the offending system from the domain, went into SBS, dropped the system there, and rejoined the domain it worked fine. Everyone could see the SQL Server. That only took 6 hours of fiddling to figure out. I’m hesitant to run connect again…

Sigh. How does anyone get any work done if all we do is frutz with systems?

Bill

After updating a working Vista system to Windows 7 several things happened that made what seemed like an easy transition to Windows 7 from Vista less than productive. I detail these issues to help you avoid the same issues. Yes, Windows 7 is worth the pain. It’s noticeably faster at every step, the UI is different but I get it. It’s more secure, but that’s a PIA sometimes—and that’s not a Primary Interop Assembly.

I used the IBM/Lenovo Rescue and Recovery to restore my hard drive (to solve another Vista issue) only to discover that the NTLDR could not be found. After trying FDISK /mbr, Acronis' Fix MBR CD and a witches brew of other utilities I could not restore the boot record and files needed to reboot Vista.

What did work in the end? I used Vista's Repair utilities. Boot with the Vista DVD, ask for Repair My Computer and let it try to fix the boot files issue. Okay, this did not work the first time, but on the second try, it launched another window of utilities that was able to repair it.

Thanks Microsoft. You got this one right.

Jack Burlin responded to my recent editorial in Processor Magazine. His feedback was very interesting... I thought others might feel so as well. He reminds us that if the light on your surge protector is off, the MOV component used to shunt high voltage spikes to ground might be dead and no longer protecting your equipment.
__________________
Bill:
I enjoyed your article in the January 19 issue of processor. Your discussion of VA compared to Watts was interesting, so I did some checking.

Here is the link to the UPS portal page on our website:
http://www.iscdfw.com/onlinecatalog/powerstrips/ups/ups_main_menu.htm

If you look under the descriptions on the Enterprise series UPSs, you will see that the VA - Watts correction factor is .60, just like you said in your article. However, if you look at the descriptions of the CPE series you will see the VA - Watts correction factor is .70!

You might also like to look at the newsletter article I wrote on surge protection and MOVs. Here is the link:
http://www.iscdfw.com/newsletters/2006%20Newsletters/February06/February06.htm