SwisherTech

I have been needing this for along time. I can not count how many times I have sat around waiting for a Windows XP machine to start Microsoft automatic updates. In Windows Vista the Widows update window has a button to force the OS to go out to the internet (unless your using a Windows Server Update Service (WSUS)) and get updates. In Windows XP use this command line tool:

wuauclt.exe /detectnow

I have recently setup an IMAP email account in Outlook. After using it for a few days I notice that none of the mail items I delete disappear. Each time I delete a mail item it just becomes grey with a line crossing it off. I thought at first it just took time for the message to leave the server. After a couple of days of a cluttered inbox I did a search on the internet and found that you have to tell the Outlook email client to purge all the deleted mail from the server. Here are the steps:

When you want to delete all the crossed out emails go to Edit->Purge->Purge Marked Items in “your email account”

Two things happened to me today when I tried setting up Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 on my Windows 7 x64 development machine. First I received an error saying "Virtual PC could not open the virtual machine network services driver." To solve this problem I had to go into the network adapter properties of the host machine and enable "Virtual Machine Network Services." Here is a picture of the network adapter property you want to have checked.

I found the solution to this problem at http://www.aspdeveloper.net

After the network service error was gone I then received an error when starting the virtual machine. The error said "The network adapter with address "00:00:00:00:00:00" of virtual machine 'VMName' failed to initialize because the address is a null address." To fix this problem I had to edit the registry by using regedit. Here are the steps:
1. Examine the key value at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002bE10318}\nnnn\DriverDesc to locate the desired host adapter where nnnn is a four digit number.
2. Look at the GUID value for the NetCfgInstanceId key value.
3. Add the DWORD key named "Flags" at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VPCNetS2\Parameters\Adapters\"guid" and set the value to 0 where "guid" is the GUID found in step 2.
4. Restart the computer.

I found the solution to this problem at http://blogs.msdn.com

I was trying to create an image of Windows 7 for Windows Deployment Services (WDS) when I ran into a problem with sysprep. Every time I ran sysprep I would receive this error. "A fatal error occurred while trying to sysprep the machine." I tried both a command window and the GUI interface of sysprep. I then came across this webpage http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproinstall/thread/8f5002e1-95b4-47bf-b031-4b72b3eb388a/. The problem seemed to be with one of the Microsoft Media Player processes. The process I killed was wmpnscfg.exe. You may need to show processes for all users. Once wmpnscfg.exe was ended sysprep ran just fine.

After about a whole day of scouring the internet I have found a solution that seems to work. Before I give the solution let me explain the problem.

The Problem:
When I try to install a driver for the nvidia GeForce Go 7600 the computer would restart to a blue screen. The only option of booting up was with safe mode. Once in safe mode I could uninstall the driver and restart into regular mode. This went on all day trying to install video card drivers from the nvidia site and HP site. I also tried updating the bios and manually specifying the inf file rather than running the setup.exe file. The problem machine would still boot to a blue screen unless I was using the standard VGA driver.

The solution:
After many hours I came across a post here http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=51785. The suggestion to use the tweaked driver here http://www.tweakforce.com/ solved my problem. The driver acts just like the nvidia driver with the nvidia control panel, but does not cause the computer to blue screen on boot.