I’m not exactly sure how or when it started happening, but whenever I would try to save a document as an Acrobat PDF document (or try to print to the Acrobat PDF printer), it would create the PDF document fine but leave me with errors in the printer queue that said it had failed to print. Deleting these entries would get rid of the errors and the printer icon from your system tray – a minor hassle.
I didn’t bother to deal with it for a while since I could just cancel the errored out jobs in my printer queue and not worry about it since the PDF would still be created, however I figured I would finally figure out the problem and try to fix it. Of course, searching on Adobe’s website turned up nothing of relevance, and a few websites I found just said to re-install the Adobe Acrobat PDF printer which was what I figured I should do anyways, so I did.
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If you’ve ever tried to get a Bluetooth headset to work in Windows Vista, you know you’re in for a world of hurt if you want to try and make it work with the existing Microsoft Bluetooth stack. You have to steal drivers from other manufacturers or basically just give up and switch to using the Broadcom WIDCOMM Bluetooth drivers.
For the longest time I refused to use the WIDCOMM drivers because their look and feel was stuck in the Windows XP days – it wasn’t horrible, but it didn’t integrate nicely in with Vista and it completely took over the Bluetooth stack which I didn’t want to do because I was afraid it would prevent my Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Desktop 7000 (Bluetooth keyboard & mouse combo) from working.
Well, the other day I decided to replace my old Plantronics Explorer 320 headset (Bluetooth 1.2) with a new Sony Playstation 3 Bluetooth headset (cheap, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR). I went and paired up the new headset with Vista, however the sound was just as choppy as before and it really didn’t seem to be any better; those old Bluetooth Audio drivers I hacked in to Vista needed updating…
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If you have the Java Runtime Environment installed on your Windows (Vista) system – and chances are you do – you may have tried disabling that Java system tray icon without much luck. The problem lies in registry permissions, and the solution lies right here!
As the Administrator user in Windows, you can easily go in to the Java control panel and disable the “Place Java icon in system tray” setting and it will stick (meaning the setting actually gets saved in the registry). Problem is though, the setting seems to be per-user, so you’ve only disabled it for your Administrator account – not much use for your normal user account(s) in Windows now is it.
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Like most of you, I have a USB key that I store some of my portable stuff on (quite useful if you move computers – say from home to work). I’ve found it extremely invaluable, especially when combined with PStart and RoboForm2Go. To make my life even easier, I whipped up an autorun.inf file for my USB key that would load up PStart for me when I plugged it in to the computer (well, close to it – it initiates Windows Vista’s AutoPlay feature which shows me a “Load Start Menu” action which I click to run PStart).
However, there was one very big problem that I encountered early on – the “shellexecute” and “shell\verb\command” actions did not work very well when there were spaces in the path names. Now, most of you would say, “well, did you quote the path names in double quotes?” – the answer is yes, I tried that. In fact, I tried all sorts of things and found that the only way I could get it to work was by using double quotes and having to specify the drive letter. That sucked – that meant that my portable USB key was no longer really portable, since if the drive letter wasn’t what was in my autorun.inf file, it wouldn’t run (or worse, run the wrong program). So that solution wasn’t acceptable – I had to find a solution.
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I’ve spent the last week with a very very odd networking problem, and all my attempts at figuring it out and fixing it have yielded nothing but more questions than answers.
I first noticed the problem after having taken my network apart because I got a new Rogers VOIP cable box (Rogers Home Phone service) added, and I opted to hook it up myself so I could do a nice wiring job. I got that done and hooked everything back up just the way it was – powered on my firewall/server box, cable modem and router all hooked up just they were before. Things seemed normal until I tried to go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and my browser stalled half way trying to load it up – refreshes wouldn’t help much, sometimes it would get a bit further, but it never got to loading the ActiveX part of it. Other sites were working fine though which was really confusing.
I thought maybe Windows XP was pwned or something, so I tried Vista – it worked which led me to think XP was in trouble – so I spent countless hours searching for anything – something – that I thought might be the cause. I tried fixing *everything* from network stacks, registry, hardware, drivers, WSH reinstall – you name it. Nothing worked. Then I noticed file transfers were very slow for uploads through XP and Vista, so I got to tinkering with stuff to figure that out.
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Categories: General Tags: ActiveX, cable modem, D-Link, DHCP, firewall, Gentoo, Internet, Internet access, iptables, LAN, Linux, MTU, network, network card, NIC, Realtek, Rogers, router, SSH, VOIP, Windows, Windows Vista, Windows XP, wireless router, workstation