Salient Soft

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 3/2/2012

One note to be aware of when doing this is that depending what other upgrades have been done, it may also be necessary to reset the boot order in the bios. Failure to do this may mean that the Windows boot manager on an old hard drive may still be presented at boot time even though bcdboot has run correctly as per the process below.

In my case, resetting the boot order solved the issue and boots were then done entirely from the SSD. I still had the option to boot from the other system by using the bios boot manager to pick the other hard drive to boot from.

Original Post

I needed to do this after installing Windows 7 64bit on an SSD, when I already had A Windows 7 installation on another HD.
I wanted the SSD to be the active partition/primary boot device – perhaps I should have made it the active partition in disk manager before installing but anyway I did not.

The install therefore kept the HD as the boot dev and installed a boot menu on it. The boot files were missing from the SSD. These can be added via the bcdboot  utility as follows :-

>bcdboot c:\windows /s c:

This had to be done from an elevated privilege command prompt (right click command prompt option or icon, run as administrator).

Microsoft information on bcdboot may be found here.

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According to Microsoft here you can do this if you install them in increasing order, i.e. you must install the earliest first.

In my case, Office 2000 would not play ball at all, as Word 2000 froze on startup.

Office XP ran ok, and does seem to coexist with Office 2007, but there are some issues.
I had to mess around with compatibility mode for XP, but ended up taking it off as it appeared to try to run Word XP in administrator mode even though this was not enabled – strange. I ended up not needing it and Word XP started OK but was initially a bit flakey as said.

Two issues remain outstanding, but they are possible to live with:-

1/ Double clicking a .doc document always opens Word 2007, even if you try to change the file association. I had it working correctly for a little while (loading up Word XP for .docs and Word 2007 for .docx, but Word 2007 ended up taking over. This may have had something to do with the next point – ‘re-registering’

2/ Both versions wanted to reconfigure themselves each time you switched from running one version to the other one. Even on a fast PC this takes 10-20 seconds of thrashing with a conifiguration dialog displayed – not nice, although Microsoft say that this is normal behaviour if you have multiple versions (Word XP did its configuration a lot quicker). This post  describes the way around this by telling both versions of Word not to ‘rereg’ themselves, by setting the following registry keys :-

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Options\NoReReg = 1 (DWord) – for Word 2007
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Word\Options\NoReReg = 1 (DWord) – for Word XP

This fixed the problem, although it is not entirely recommended as it may cause issues during fixes/updates that may need the ReReg to be run. I would imagine that removing the keys temporarily and re-adding them would solve this.

If I was in this situation again, I would certainly try to avoid installing multiple versions on the same OS – it is clearly not supported well. It would be best to use another machine or a VM.

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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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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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