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My old TyTn II has had sync issues over the last few weeks, sometimes needing several attempts to sync.

A few days ago it failed completely with sync errors part way through.

I have tried a number of things to resolve the issue, with only partial success.

1/ WMDC 6.1 did not sync at all. I tried turning ‘advanced network functionality’ both on and off on the TyTn II (under settings/connections/USB to PC), and neither worked. The advanced setting is apparently what allows the device to share the PCs internet connection, and is not available with this turned off, although I have not investigated this.

2/ I tried removing WMDC 6.1 and installing WMDC6.0 for Windows 7/Vista 64 bit, but it always installed 6.1 as part of the install, and so was very tricky to roll back.

3/ This procedure worked in the end and allowed 6.0 to install (as per this forum post here):-

Note that as part of this procedure, when deleting the WindowsMobile folder, renaming it first then allows all the contents to be deleted (possibly rebooting after the rename but this was not always required). Note also that I turned windows update automatic mode off so that it would always ask about any update first, in case it was responsible for the ‘invisible’ update to 6.1

Here are the steps that I performed during this cycle of events that has got
my Dopod phone with WM6 sync’ing again with WMDC 6.0:
— Uninstalled the two Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 items from the
Control Panel > Programs and Features list
— Manually deleted the contents of the C:\Windows\WindowsMobile folder.
Initially I could not delete some DLLs but once the two “Windows Mobile
device connectivity” services were stopped from the Task Manager, I was able
to delete the rest of the files in the WindowsMobile folder, except for the
en-US folder containing the *.MUI files. I could not delete them and so
decided to leave them.
— Using Regedit, I deleted all entries from the following two keys that
related to my two devices:
* HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows CE Services\Partners
* HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows Portable Devices\Devices (I left
in the entry for my memory card)
— Using Windows Explorer, I deleted all files in the following folder:
* C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Acti veSync\Profiles
— With my two Pocket PCs disconnected, I tapped on Start > Programs >
ActiveSync > Menu > Options, highlighted the Windows PC and tapped on and
the Delete button. Both of my PPCs had two entries in here so there could
have been some confusion on the desktop at some point, so I deleted both of
them. They do not sync with any other computer.
— Rebooted (Restarted) my Windows Vista computer
— Reinstalled WMDC 6.0 from the Microsoft Download website.
— Recreated the two relationships from my two devices, and they each did
the initial long sync
— I then tested each device that it could perform a sync not long after it
was reconnected, and they both now sync perfectly. I also tested that making
any changes to some contact details in Outlook 2007 would update the devices
after a sync. and it did.

4/ When using WMDC 6.0, I had to disable the Advanced Networking Functionality on the device, as WMDC was unable to install the correct driver for it when I tried.

4/ This now allowed the TyTn II to sync contacts, calendar and tasks. However, annoyingly, it does not sync the textual content of calendar appointments or tasks – only the headers are synced. This is the ‘partial’ solution that I am having to live with. The good point is that at least contacts are synced properly, and at least with the appointments I will get reminders on the phone plus the title details, which is enough for most of them.

5/ I retried the different versions a number of times but this behaviour was consistent. In the end I had to use system restore to remove 6.1 as the driver update would not remove. It may have done so in safe mode but I did not try this. The behaviour was consistent with both USB and bluetooth syncing.

6/ I also tried syncing with a laptop running Windows XP, but interestingly this also failed to sync, which perhaps points the finger at the TyTn II as this used to work.

7/ I tried running SCANPST.EXE (in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12 folder) to check for PST corruption as a possible issue. Interestingly it did find a number of issues. It fixed most, if not all of them ( I reran the check again after it had done the fix and some errors remained). However, these errors have not caused any issues when using Outlook and did not allow the TyTn II to sync with WMDC 6.1

It is not clear what the actual issue is, but it is interesting that WMDC 6.0 at least completes a full sync consistently (albeit without calendar/task text). There are any number of posts on the internet complaining about this issue, and I must say I agree with them. It is hugely ironic that an iPhone can sync with Outlook but in many cases a Windows Mobile cannot.

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Update 7/10/2010

I had some further issues when trying to realign the boot partition of an OCZ Vertex 30GB SSD on an Intel D510 dual core atom ‘always on’ silent pc running Windows XP Pro.
I tried the technique used before below, using diskpar to create the partition and then using Acronis True Image 2010 to restore first the NTFS partition, then restoring the MBR and track 0 as a second subsequent operation. In order run diskpar standalone, I created a bootable CD containing diskpar using Bart PE, as I found that booting a Windows XP CD into recovery mode does not give you full command prompt capabilities – you cannot run an arbitrary .EXE utility at all (a real surprise to learn) – you can only use the commands listed. All this was done as below (see here) so as to force Acronis to re-use the partition created by diskpar. Unfortunately allthough the process went smoothly the resulting system would not boot, citing NTLDR/boot loader problems.

I then upgraded to Acronis True Image Home 2011 and also Acronis Disk Director 11, as these were both supposed to be SSD friendly and handle the alignment correctly. I deleted the partition and restored the original backup with the incorrect alignment, allowing Acronis to create the partition itself, and the system booted fine as before. I then used Disk Director to slightly shrink the partition to ensure that there was space to allow it to realign – there should have been a few MB on the end anyway, but I shrank it by 100MB to be really sure.

I then did a full standalone backup of the system disk with the shrunken partition. I found that just restoring that backup (shrunken but with the wrong alignment) with True Image 2011 was not enough – the incorrect alignment was still present on the SSD, i.e. it appeared that True Image always gives priority to the partition details in the backup. In hindsight it may have been possible to override the partition settings during the restore to cause Acronis to fix the alignment by using ‘new’ partition settings but I did not try – if so, this might have fixed the alignment problem in one go.

However, Disk Director 11 was able to delete and then recreate the partition correctly, i.e. when it created a new partition on the SSD it automatically used the correct alignment (1048576 bytes or 1MB), as confirmed afterwards by diskpar. I created a partition to fill the disk, as I knew that True Image would happily restore the slightly smaller shrunken one to a larger one. I then used the same technique as above with True Image Home 2011, i.e. restore the NTFS partition first without the MBR and track 0, then restore MBR and track 0 as a second operation after the restore.

This time, it all worked fine and I ended up with a bootable system with the correct partition alignment. I’m not sure what the issue was – perhaps the shrinking first fixed it. I do know that this technique has worked fine for me previously as below, when I backed up a 2.5" laptop hard drive via Acronis True Image, created an aligned partition on a new SSD with diskpar, and then restored the backup to the SSD with the same trick.

The resulting lessons learned seem to be as follows:-

1. Use Disk Director 11 with SSDs, alignment will be correct, and you can easily do it standalone by creating a Disk Director boot CD.
2. Using True Image 2011 is also recommended – it is stated to be SSD friendly and is better all around.
3. However, care is needed when restoring an SSD backup with the wrong alignment, as by default even True Image 2011 keeps the wrong alignment. Either the technique above is needed or it may be possible to get Acronis to use ‘new’ partition settings to override the ones in the backup, in which case the restore can all be done in a single step.
4. to be safe, when correcting wrong SSD alignment, shrink partition first by say a few 10s of MB to be sure (I used 100MB) to ensure there is no funny truncation when it is restored and realigned.

I have not done any performance comparisons before and after the realignment, but have confirmed that the alignment is now correct. Whilst I have seen posts on the internet that suggest lower alignment values than 1MB, both Windows 7 when it installs to an SSD, and Disk Director 11 use 1MB (1048576 bytes), so I am sticking with this value.

Original Post

Partition alignment is important for SSD performance to avoid unnecessary read/write cycles. Windows 7 appears to handle this but Windows XP does not. The partition alignment must be set manually when creating it (with diskpar or diskpart – diskpar seems to be preferred as it displays the partition offset in bytes so that the resulting offset can be accurately seen, even though diskpart is newer and has more features)

When restoring or cloning disks with Acronis True Image Home 2010, the original partition alignment is kept providing the operation does not recreate the partitions. See the Acronis forums here for details.

The OCZ forums have some articles on how to create correctly aligned partitions here and here.

Another step by step guide to cloning to an SSD with Acronis may be found here. When doing this, do not (as I did) forget the step which says to set the restore partition as primary and active in Acronis! In my case, Acronis made the wrong partition active so the SSD would not boot. It was simple enough to change – boot a system which can see the disk, then use disk management, right click the correct boot partition and select set as active. It is not necessary to repartition the SSD and re-restore the Acronis backup.

A good balanced article about optimising Windows XP for SSD use is here. There is a lot of misinformation around for example about the performance effects of swap files, which is based on misunderstandings about windows swap file usage, and also based on older SSDs with short service lives. The more informed wisdom appears to say that you should not disable the swap file as it will not make a significant difference.

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This problem affected a laptop running Windows XP Home on our workgroup. It could browse shares by IP address e.g. \\10.0.0.2, but could not see computers by name. Removing it from the workgroup/rerunning the network setup wizard to rejoin the workgroup and rebooting had no effect.

This fix from Microsoft solved the problem, details of the manual version of the fix are as follows:-

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetBt\Parameters
3. In the right pane of Registry Editor, delete the following values if they are present:
     –  NodeType
     –  DhcpNodeType
   Note If the NodeType value is present, this value will override the DhcpNodeType value. If neither subkey is present and if no WINS servers are configured for the client, the computer uses b-node mode. If at least one WINS server is configured, the computer uses h-node mode.
4. Quit Registry Editor.
5. Restart the computer.
6. Try to view workgroup computers on the network again.

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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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cvslock.exe sometimes crashes with the following pair of event log messages :-

1. Failed to bind listening socket: Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted.
2. Faulting application cvslock.exe, version 0.0.0.0, faulting module advapi32.dll…

Initially I thought this was due to not adding it as a firewall/antivirus exception, but the error still appears to happen the first time a repository is created and brought up/reconfigured. The 2 errors appear to be related – the socket error may be due to cvslock being started twice in error (indeed, this may be the cause of the other error too.)

Once the repository configuration is up and stable, the error does not seem to occur.

When the error occurs, a systray icon for cvslock appears, and selecting the debug listing menu option for the tray icon displays the error “no ipv6 address found for host” in a command window.

I tried stopping the services, creating a new repository (which succeeds), and then starting the services. The cvslock service refuses to start, and the tray icon appears as above. After a few seconds, the tray icon disappears, and the service can be started as normal.

This does appear to be a cvslock issue related to new repository creation. As the workaround is straightforward, and operation appears stable after that, the bug appears to be a minor one.

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Download and install TortoiseCVS from here. Note that the release notes for version 1.10.10 state that 64-bit versions of Windows are supported. My installation runs fine on Windows 7 64-bit.

Except for the main preferences screen, all of Tortoise CVS is accessed via Windows Explorer context menus. Note that this also works within the file open dialogs of applications.

Connecting to the server is done from the CVS/Checkout… menu. In the left pane of the resulting dialog, you select the protocol, protocol parameters, the server, and the repository folder. In the case of my Java repository above, this will be /Java. Note that you do not need to tell the client the server side path of the repository root.

Tortoise does not cache passwords for access to the CVS server, so you have to enter it for the first time in each session. You can however add custom switches for the connection protocol, which may allow a password to be specified. Note that this is therefore not encrypted! You will probably want a dedicated low privilege account for CVS access if you do this, and in fact this is recommended anyway  – see here for details on how to set this up.

For the pserver protocol, you can add password=mypassword to the Protocol Parameters box in the checkout dialog.
The settings in this dialog are remembered for the next time you use it. If you access multiple replositories, they are remembered and may be selected in the list box at the top.

You do not want Tortoise control on all your explorer folders, as this can slow explorer down and clutter up the context menus when you don’t want it. Use the advanced tab in the preferences dialog to include/exclude folder trees from Tortoise control. Note that if you add a folder tree to include, all others are excluded – see this post here. You can also exclude network shares etc. (done by default).

Usage Points

1. When checking out, you pick a module name in the RHS pane. You can browse for/refresh the module list first.
2. After checkout, you get a subfolder for the module tree, which contains a cvs folder which contains metadata and is managed by Tortoise.
3. If you do a ‘wild’ checkout you will end up checking out CVSROOT which you don’t need – this can be deleted.
4. You can tag a file or group of files/module etc. to indicate a version, then check this out later using the tag. Note that internally, CVS uses a an “n.n” style internal version number starting at “1.1” for a file.

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This post details the setup of a repository server on a Windows based PC.

Download and install the CSVNT server here.
Make sure you pick the Windows Server software and not the “client trial”.
If you show all downloads you need to pick a server OS, not a client OS like Windows XP, even if installing on Windows XP Pro like I was. (You cannot install on XP home at all  – you must have simple file sharing turned off and Windows XP Home cannot do this). In my case, simple file sharing was off as I had already turned off ForceGuest, see here.
You can pick a specific account for access, or use the client account  – I presume the user/password must also match the server if you are in a workgroup rather than a domain but I did not test this. My installation was in a Workgroup with a specific account on the server PC. Note that you should run CVSNT under an account on the server with the minimum of privilege, rather than an administrator account. See here for details on how to do this.

The server runs 2 services – CVSNT Dispatch Service and CVSNT Locking Service, which both need to autostart (this is done by default). The server administration is via a control panel utility which is also available via the start menus.

Ensure that Simple File Sharing is turned off.
Make sure that you exclude cvsservice.exe and cvslock.exe in both the Windows Firewall and any Antivirus software.
In my case failure to do this caused 2 problems :-

1. cvslock.exe crashed soon after startup
2. The repository was not visible at all from the client side (in Eclipse) and would not connect – connection timeouts occurred.

You can run multiple repositories from a CVSNT server. In my case I am using a common root – “D:\CVS Repositories” and a subfolder for each respository underneath. My Java repository is named /Java and is similarly connected this way on the client. Its Root is therefore defined as D:\CVS Repositories\Java.

Connecting to the server

In all cases I use the pserver protocol – the Eclipse plugin does not support many protocols natively and pserver is the most common. I use the same protocol for Tortoise..  The server does not mandate the protocol used by the client (as far as I know) so provided the plugin is loaded for the protocol (see plugins page in the CVSNT control panel server admin tool) it should work. Pserver apparently only encrypts passwords but if you are running on a secure internal development network behind a firewall this should not be an issue, and should also improve performance as the protocol is not having to encrypt everything.

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