My DVD drive from my HP G61 Laptop was not working. It was missing from My Computer. It was fine from the BIOS but an exclamation marked in device manager registered the drive as not available. The message in device manager read as ” Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)”.

Thankfully Microsoft have an automated fix for the problem. You get it here.

I hope you too have Found A Fix!!!

Everytime I try to locate and delete NORMAL.DOT, it takes far too long and when there are various user profiles this makes it even more difficult.

Here’s a simple command prompt which will automatically locate and delete all NORMAL.DOT files on your computer.

1. Open a command prompt. Start, Run, type CMD and hit enter.

2. In the black dos prompt, type   cmd /c “c: & cd c:\docume~1 & del normal.dot /s”  and hit enter.

3. This will delete all entries of NORMAL.DOT which will then be automatically recreated by MS OFFICE.

I hope you too have found a fix!

While trying to login to my NTL router, I could not find the default username and password.

To access the router;

1.  Open internet explorer, type 192.168.1.1 and hit Enter.

2. You’ll be prompted for the username and password. Just leave both blank and hit Enter.

If you access the Setup section, you can modify the wireless SSID & password, etc…

I hope you too have found a fix!!!!

When using any MS Office application I would find that the mouse pointer was constantly busy and the pc would come  to a crawl.

The fix for me was to;

1. Stop the print spooler service. (Start, Run, Services.msc). At this point you’ll notice the mouse issue is gone.

2. Either delete and reinstall the printer (or the offending one). Or reinstall the correct driver. If you have multiple printers, you can find the bad one by changing the default printer to another one and restarting the printer spooler service. Repeat the steps until the issue reoccurs. Once the bad printer has been removed, your office applications should return to normal.

I hope you too have found a fix!

My Windows Vista machine kept shutting down unexpectedly. The only indication of the cause was the following message in the event viewer;

“The print spooler failed to reopen an existing printer connection because it could not read the configuration information from the registry key S-1-5-18\Printers\Connections. The print spooler could not open the registry key. This can occur if the registry key is corrupt or missing, or if the registry recently became unavailable”

Thankfully, I was able to resolve the random reboots by doing the following;

 Open the registry editor (start, run/ search, type regedit and enter).

1. Go to Go to HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-18\Printers.
2. Right click and create a new key named ‘Connections’.

I would like to acknowledge the article here in finding this solution. I hope you too have found a fix!

I wanted to setup a DYNDNS.ORG account on my Eircom Netopia 3347NWG ADSL modem. There are no settings on the router itself for this. Luckily however, I found that I could add it using the following steps.

1. Open Internet Explorer and login to your router. It’s usually 192.168.1.254.
2. Go to Expert Mode, Configure, Advanced and Router Password. Create an admin router login with password.
3. Open a command prompt. Start, Run, type CMD and hit enter.
4. Type telnet 192.168.1.254

      5. Enter username and password as previously created. Note: username is ‘admin’ by default.

      6. Type the following and change where relevant (IN BOLD)..

>configure
>set dynamic-dns option dyndns.org
>set dynamic-dns ddns-host-name yourhostname.dyndns.org
>set dynamic-dns ddns-user-name yourusername
>set dynamic-dns ddns-user-password youruserpassword
>save
>quit

Restart your router

Finally, simply wait a couple of minutes for your router to sync with your dyndns account.

To test, simply ping the address i.e ping yourhostname.dyndns.org . you can also check the router logs for something like this: 00:00:00:37 Dynamic DNS update attempt returned good

If you receive this error: “Validation unsuccessful; cannot save current configuration. ”
You most likely have not entered the correct dyndns username and password correctly. Check all your settings including the new host and ensure it is identical from the dyndns login.

My Small Business Server 2003 suddenly for no apparent reason reverted to its original 5 user licenses. I had actually lost 15 CALS without any obvious cause. The only other issue with the server at the time was low disk space.

It turns out that this is a known bug that occurs when an SBS Server runs low on disk space on the OS drive. It can also stem from improper AV Scanning/Removal or poor system resources, etc.

To fix your licensing problem please follow these steps.

1. Find licstr.cpa & Autolicstr.cpa files under thew c:\windows\system32 folder.

Note: Make backup copies of these files to C:\Temp just to be safe.

2. Rename the original licstr.cpa to licstr.old.
3. Rename autolicstr.cpa file to licstr.cpa.
4. Restart the License Logging Service. Start, Run, Services.msc, locate the service and restart.
5.Goto Server Management Console -> Licensing, refresh the page and you should now have your original licenses in tact.

I hope you too have Found A Fix!

I needed to be able to access more than one pc in the office network remotely using Remote Desktop Connection. Since RDP is set to use port 3389 I had to make several changes.

1. Change the default port number on the second (listening) computer. To do this;

- Start Registry Editor. [Start, Run, Regedit]
- Locate and then click the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TerminalServer\WinStations\RDP-Tcp\PortNumber
- On the Edit menu, click on Modify, and then click Decimal.
- Type the new port number, exampleand then click OK.
- Quit Registry Editor and restart the computer.

2. Modify the router to port forward this new port number to the specified IP address of the specific machine you are trying to connect to.

Note: You should ensure that both router firewall and software firewall allow access via this port.

 3. Make sure you specifiy the new address:port when connecting over RDP.

I hope you too have Found A Fix!

The ahsay online backup failed with the message “Expect log sequence ‘xxx’ but found ‘SERVER\Microsoft Information Store\ First Storage Group\xxxxx.log”

The solution and description to this error is set out below;

The problem occurs because another backup has already initiated a change in the log sequence.

To fix the problem, disable all other backup systems (NT Backup, Backup Exec, etc) and restart the online backup.

I could not login to my broadband router from Vodafone.  Its an Equip Router. The  default login page is here; http://192.168.1.1

The username and password that I found in the end was;

Username: admin
PasswordVF-IRhg556

I hope you too have Found A Fix!