Salient Soft

Symptoms as follows :-

1/ LED on front edge not lit, no wireless networks seen

2/ switch on front edge toggles bluetooth but wireless stays off

3/ Tried all drivers available on Lenovo site – no joy

4/ Broadcom wireless utility has an enable box – does not work

5/ Broadcom wireless utility has a diagnostic. This runs ok AND LIGHTS THE LIGHT ON THE FRONT –
   it says all hardware working no problems (which I believe)
   However, still can’t see wireless networks afterwards

6/ Googled all the forums – lots of people with same issue, no real solution.
   Possibly a patch/update has shafted the driver, but don’t know which patch.

7/ I found another driver on Softpedia here:-
   http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/NETWORK-CARD/OTHER-NETWORK-CARDS/BROADCOM-Wireless-802-11b-and-802-11g.shtml

   This is an HP Driver, but it WORKS! Installed it and wireless working fine now!

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Unfortunately XP home does not have a remote registry service, so remote admin is limited.
You cannot remotely view the event log for example. You can however remotely shut down an XP home computer.

XP home remote admin is governed by the ForceGuest registry setting, whereby remote connections are forced to be guest access even if the connection is with other credentials such as an administrator. for XP pro this is on by default, but for XP home it cannot be turned off – it appears to be a side effect of xp home simple file sharing, which also cannot be turned off. You can however get around this for remote shutdown, but only by making the Guest account an administrator, which carries significant risk (it will allow any PC on the workgroup to shutdown the target pc) but within a small family home workgroup may be deemed acceptable. Do this as follows :-

1. To make Guest an administrator, enter Start/Run/Control userpasswords2. This opens the advanced user management control panel applet, from which you can open the properties for Guest and add it to the administrators group (you must also enable the account – it is disabled by default).
2. Unfortunately, a side effect of this is that Guest then appears on the login screen, which in this case we definitely do not want. You can remove Guest from the login screen by adding the following registry value as a DWord with a value of 0 (zero) :-
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList\Guest
   Note that this forum post describes the process.
3. Having performed these steps, you can then use the shutdown command from another machine in the workgroup. Shutdown /i  from a command prompt will open gui mode which is more friendly, but this does not appear to allow the force (/f) option which forces application shutdown if apps are running. The following example will perform an immediate forced shutdown of the pc named TargetPC with a reason of “planned hardware maintenance” :-
   shutdown /s /f /m \\TargetPC /t 0 /d p:1:1
4. You can add the command to a batch file, but do not do as I did and name the file shutdown.bat, otherwise it will recursively call itself rather than perform the shutdown command!

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Some desktop shortcuts cannot be pinned to the new taskbar/superbar in Windows 7, for example a desktop shortcut to a url.
You can enable the old quick launch toolbar to do this as follows :-

On the taskbar, right click and pick Toolbars/new toolbar…

1. In the Folder box at the bottom, paste in the following :-

   	%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

2. Click Select Folder to save the change
3. Note that the quick launch bar may end up to the right of the superbar. Dragging it to the left seems to be a fine art! I googled for a while and could not find out how to move it. In the end I discovered that the speed of dragging is very important here. It should be dragged by left clicking the dotted lines, or by left clicking just to the right of them so that the cross arrow appears. Click and hold and drag with a swift motion over the other bar, and drop, and this should work. If you are too slow with the drag it will not work and will just hit the adjacent bar. In my case, dragging the dotted lines seemed to work in either direction (i.e. can either drag superbar over quick launch or vice versa), but dragging with the crossed arrow only seemed to work rightwards. I did read a blog post that advocated unpinning everything from the superbar first, but this was not required, in the end it all comes down to the dragging technique. Once you have tried a few times and got it working it becomes second nature, but it is certainly very counter intuitive!
4. You may also find that the quick launch bar disappears on reboot. You can re-add it back as in 1. above, and you should find that its contents are still there as previously. This post details how to modify the registry to remedy the disappearance problem, but this post on sevenforums states that you only need to make sure the that the current theme is saved (right click desktop, select personalize, right click and save the current theme). I’ve tried saving the theme and will see if it still disappears, and then try the registry mod.

This will also give access to the hidden 3-D Window Switcher that was in Windows Vista.

Full details of this may be found on here.

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I had a NetDisk attached via an HP Procurve gigabit switch, connected at 1000BaseT, but transferring at intermittent slow speeds, sometimes as slow as 1MB/sec. This was on a Core I7 920 with 12GB ram running Windows 7 64 bit (!)

This note from IOCell’s FAQ #6 fixed the problem :-

My computer is moving very slowly when my NetDISK is enabled, and the ACT light
…. on my NetDISK is solid yellow. What is going on?

This is a result of a bad connection between the computer and the NDAS device. Please make sure that you are using only network switches and routers, and that you are not using any network hubs. Also, if you have any software firewalls installed on your computer (i.e. Norton Internet Security, McAfee Personal Firewall, etc.), make sure to add ndasmgmt.exe and ndassvc.exe into their list of programs to Allow with full access. You can also try disabling your Antivirus software to see if that makes a difference. Please also try power cycling your NetDISK and switch as well.
 

The problem was the Windows Firewall – adding ndasmgmt.exe and ndassvc.exe to the list of allowed programs, both for private and for public, fixed the problem. Note that Antivirus can be a problem but it was not for me – I use Kaspersky and it was fine and needed no adjustment.

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I hit this problem trying to connect to a local Oracle XE 10.2.0.1 database.
The problem is due to a bug in Oracle’s networking layer. It cannot parse program locations containing parentheses, and by default Toad installs to “Program Files (x86)” which causes the bug.

More details on OTN here.

The fault is designated Bug 3807408, and whilst there is an Oracle patch for it, the patch is not available for Oracle XE.

The easy way around the problem is just to install TOAD in “Program Files” rather than “Program Files (x86)”. The different directories are purely to aid in distinguishing 32 bit applications from 64 bit ones – it does not matter where applications are installed.

I removed and reinstalled TOAD in “Program Files” and this completely eliminated the problem. The problem would also apply to other applications which access Oracle, so worth bearing in mind.

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