Vista SP2 installed

Just installed Vista SP2 but I did not notice any differences yet.

You can either use Windows updates or use the download here.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd262148.aspx

IE 8.0, Compatibility Worse Than Firefox?

I've been using IE8 under Windows Vista for a while and until recently I have not seen any major compatibility issues with websites other than Sourceforge. There are warnings from Sourceforge that it is better to upgraded to newer version of IE or Firefox. But my version of IE 8 is the latest.

Today, I happened to read Linux Today and it has a link to Earthweb (part of internet.com) and IE8 is the only browser which has problem with it. Firefox 3.08 is happy. Google Chrome 1.0.154.53 is happy.

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3815766/Can-GNOME-Regain-the-Evolutionary-Advantage-over-KDE.htm

Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 installation problem on Windows Vista

Today I met one problem when trying to install Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 under Vista SP1 32bit. Luckily Google told me the answer again.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/12/27/install-microsoft-net-framework-11-on-windows-vista-fix-regsvcsexe-fails-error/

We need to slipstream .NET 1.1 SP1 into .NET Framework setup package to have a integrated .NET Framework 1.1 SP1 installer.

From the link:

1. Create a new folder named DotNet in C:\ drive (C:\DotNet is used in this guide, you can change to any folder you prefer, but ensure that you use correct path in the following steps).

2. Download Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Redistributable Package (dotnetfx.exe). Make sure the setup file is saved as dotnetfx.exe.

3. Download Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 (NDP1.1sp1-KB867460-X86.exe). Make sure that the file is renamed and saved as dotnetfxsp1.exe, so that the rest of the steps can be followed easily.

4. Move both installation files into the same directory (i.e. C:\DotNet), if you’re not saving them together.

5. Open command prompt as Administrator.

6. Change to the directory where the two installation setup files for .NET 1.1 are saved (i.e. C:\DotNet).

7. Run the following commands one by one, press Enter after each one.
* dotnetfx.exe /c:"msiexec.exe /a netfx.msi TARGETDIR=C:\DotNet"

* dotnetfxsp1.exe /Xp:C:\DotNet\netfxsp.msp

No status message for this step.
* msiexec.exe /a c:\DotNet\netfx.msi /p c:\DotNet\netfxsp.msp
Wait for Windows Installer for Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 to finish and disappear automatically.

8. Install Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1 with slipstreamed/integrated Service Pack 1 by running netfx.msi created in the working folder.

Microsoft Equation Editor problem with system locale

http://help.wugnet.com/office/Modify-equations-Word-2007-ftopict1094894.html

I was facing similar problems with Office 2000/XP under Windows XP and Vista 32bit. Now I understand the problems. That is because I have set up System Local to use Simplified Chines to be able to display Chinese for some non-Unicode programs. After setting back the System Locale to English (Singapore or USA), equation editor can run again. I believe this applies to other version of Office as well (like 2003 and 2007).

Install XP on HP Compaq Presario V3619AU

There are many articles on installing XP on the HP/Compaq
laptops. The major problem seems to be the chipset,
graphics and sound card driver. Here are some good links
which works for our Presario V3619AU. YMMV.

General overview and dual boot.
http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vista/558994-how-install-xp-after-vista.html
http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/installing-windows-xp-w-pre-existing-vista-on-hp-laptop/page/2

I used Vista's built-in Disk Manger to shrink the C: partition
and create another D: partition (the recovery partition will be
E: now. The I installed XP SP1 on the computer (better not
connect to Internet because of some bugs with XP SP1) and then
updated it to XP SP3. After that, we need to fight with various
driver issues.

Working drivers for chipsets and graphics.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=184457

I used the same Nvidia chipset driver and graphics driver
(NForce 630a+Gefore GO 6150 graphics) and it works for our
Compaq Presario 3619AU.

Nvidia Chipse driver
http://tinyurl.com/3ajgxy
Nvidia graphics driver
http://tinyurl.com//2q6ss4

Sound card was the worst for 3619AU (Connexant HD Audio). I
tried all kind of things to no avail. Finally got an Toshiba driver
and manually edited the INF file to get it working. Still it has
some bugs and occasionally noise comes out. Some people
have lucks with the HP Vista driver, not for us.

[EDIT in October 2008: finally solved the problem by using
the HP XP driver for other models but modifying the
INF files to add the IDs by copying the INF file
section from the Vista driver]

For most of the other things, HP/Compaq's Vista driver/software works
(wireless, card reader, bluetooth, DVD writer, etc). HP puts
the software in C:\SwSetup directory and that is a good thing.

For people who want a real XP based desktop/Notebook, the new
Atom based PCs will be a good option. For instance, I played
with Asus EEEbox and it was not slow at all running XP.

Acer M1641 Ubuntu 8.04 Shutdown Problem Solved

I could not find any BIOS updates to Acer M1641. Therefore I have to use "acpi=off pnpbios=off" option. There was still a problem. Reboot works. Shutdown does not work as it hangs.

Similar bugs were reported for Ubuntu 8.04.
1) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/193125
2) http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=699506
3) http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=698972

The solution in the Launchpad bug report works.

This is certainly not an old PC and Vista 32bit SP1 works fine. However I tend to believe this is more an Acer Bios bug. Actually FreeBSD 7 hangs during startup. If I disabled ACPI in BIOS, FreeBSD 7 will complain about GPF (General Protection Fault) no matter which option I select for startup. If I enable ACPI in BIOS, it could not find the disk. So I could not run FreeBSD 7 at all with this new PC. So Ubuntu 8.04 is at least better than FreeBSD 7 in this aspect.

FreeBSD problem with Acer M1641 is reported here.
http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/questions/2008-08/msg00806.html

Notes on 10-April-2009:
The latest kernel does not need the options any more for Ubuntu 8.04.

A New Vista PC Acer Aspire M1641

My old desktop suddenly went south. So I have to buy another PC. I was eying the Asus EeeBox (XP Home, Atom CPU, very cute). but later decided to buy a cheap Acer Aspire M1641 (47M32) instead. Its cost is SGD640 (no monitor) with upgraded DDR2 RAM to 2GB since I know Vista will be happy with 2GB RAM. The 47M32 model is the 47MR32 model without the Nvidia 9300 graphics card. Since I do not really play games, the 7050 integrated graphics is good enough to me.

http://www.acer.com.sg/products/aspireM1641/

Many people do not like Vista. And Vista really have problems with old hardware and old software. Still most of the desktops and notebooks now come with Vista only and the vendor does not provide XP driver. Anyway, I'd like to try out Vista myself. I have spent a few days to install the software packages I like to use. So far I have not met major problems with it but I did notice a few IE7 stability problems.

Of course, I also installed Ubuntu 8.04 on it. Vista has one good feature. It is so easy to shrink a partition under Vista. Shrinking the empty D drive took only seconds.

Samsung SCX-4200 Scanner Hardware I/O Error Problem Solved

I bought this Samsung SCX-4200 printer/copier/scanner early this year. The printing and copying function work fine. At its price, it seems to be a good investment. Since we have another old Acer S2W 3300U and it works very well so we have not used the scanning function. But the first time we tried to use it, it gave us "Hardware I/O error". I have tried it under three different PCs, under Windows Vista, XP and Ubuntu Linux. All have the same error even though it works fine as a printer under all three OS. So I was thinking to call Samsung coming Monday since it is still under Warranty.

Today I read this solution here. Finally I understand the problem. The problem seems to be that the scanner does not work fine
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=245545&page=2eh

Under Linux, one can rmmod the EHCI driver (high speed USB) to force it to use Full Speed USB transfer. Under Windows, my solution is to put a USB 1.1 Hub in between. After that, the scanner works fine.

Vista Problem Solving Part 2: Vista SP1 installed

I tried to update the Vista installation using Windows updates but it was not there. Therefore I just downloaded the stand-alone x86 installation. It was quite fast to download the 400M+ file from my 8Mbps Starhub Cable Online (I believe Starhub is Microsoft Singapore's ISP). The installation took quite a while (about 50minutes) and finally it was finished without incident.

I will still need to check if it helps on the stability of the computer. One problem my wife has is the stability with Windows Media Player (or the alternative Media Player Classic) when viewing RealPlayer files (rm or rmvb files). I do not want to install RealPlayer since it has caused problems in the past.

Vista Problem Solving Part 1: Excel has stopped working

My wife now has more and more complains about the Vista notebook we bought on Christmas day of 2007 (http://mcuee.blogspot.com/2007/12/new-vista-notebook.html).

The biggest complain is that often Excel will often say that it has stopped working if she double-clicks an Excel file to open it. She has to open Excel and then open the file from within Excel.

Google found the solution.
http://help.wugnet.com/office/Microsoft-Office-Excel-stopped-working-ftopict964442.html

Quote what johnko99 wrote:
*****************************
Click "start" - the button down left to your screen Select "run" and type "regedit".
Click OK. The Registry Editor opens in a window.

In the registry editor locate the following: HKEY, LOCALMACHINE, SOFTWARE, MICROSOFT, OFFICE, EXCEL, ADDINS, BtOFFICEAddin.BtOFFICEIntegration.1

Under label "Name" there should be a line: "Lodbehavior". Now in the same line under "Type" there should be REG_DWORD" and under "Data" there should be "0x0000003 (3)" or something similar as far as the last digit is concerned (in this case 3).

Behold, you are close to the solution... Change the last digit AND the one in brackets (in my case 3) to read 0! In my case under "Data" now reads "0x0000000 (0)".

That's it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Close the registry editor and restart the computer.

Your Excel now is working perfectly!
*****************************

This is the perfect solution to this problem. The forum mentioned Excel 2007 and Excel 2003. Actually it works for Excel 2000 as well.

2GB RAM Makes Vista Happy

Yesterday I went to Funan Digital Life Mall, one of the leading IT shopping center in Singapore along with Sim Lim Square.

One interesting thing is that many shops are offering free upgrade to 2GB RAM for Vista notebooks. This is a good thing. Vista is not bad but putting Vista to a lowly configured notebook is not going to give the users a good experience. I played with some of them and I think 2GB will make Vista happy. Another good think is that I see that most of the Vista notebooks come with Vista Home Premium or Vista Business. No more Vista Home Basic.

I also played with Asus Eee PC a bit. Its response was ok and the underline Linux OS was not bad. But I do not think I will like the small keyboard and I am not a mobile worker. So it is not for me. Its price is also not low compared to some low end full notebook. But I understand it is targeting a different group of users. Comparable ultra-portable notebooks from Sony and other vendors are quite expensive.

Windows Vista First Impression

Windows Vista has been out for 1 year and many reviews on the Internet is still negative. XP is quite decent now that it has been in the market for quite some time. XP SP2 is pretty stable to use and many companies has not deployed Vista. Still most of the consumers are buying new PCs and most of them come with Vista bundled.

I just started playing with the Vista notebook bought 4 days ago. It is not bad, I will say. As the first step, I removed the two trial version software (Office 2007 and Norton). For antivirus, I installed AVG Free. For spyware detection, Vista comes with Windows Defender installed. With some education done, my wife is now a careful enough Windows user. I've used IE7 in my desktop so I have no problems with IE7 under Vista. Still I installed Firefox as an alternative. IE7 seems to be faster with Windows Live Hotmail.

I think 4GB of RAM helps so that I do not feel Vista is slow. My desktop is a 3 year old AMD64 single core with 1GB RAM running Linux/FreeBSD/Windows XP. So this notebook should not be slower anyway.

I do not like those eye candies so the sidebar feature is not so useful. My wife may like it. As for specially effect of Aero, I do not think it is any useful so that I have not tried it. Anyway, I do not like Compiz under Linux and always switched it off.

UAC is kind of annoying but I decided to leave it on as this will be used by my wife. I am just preparing the notebooks for her and getting familiar with Vista so that I can be he IT support helpdesk. Unfortunately the fine control of UAC options is not available for the Home Premium version of Vista.
http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/0d75f774-8514-4c9e-ac08-4c21f5c6c2d91033.mspx?mfr=true

Hardware compatibility is still a problem. My wife's Nokia 6280 Mobile Phone works (on the other hand, it did not work under my Linux Desktop. It originally did not work under XP with the same Desktop either but with the updated software it now works under XP). Her beloved Samsung SPP-2020 Photo Printer does not work even though Samsung claims Vista support in their website. I am still investigating this issue. Hopefully I can solve this issue with new software from Samsung or Vista SP1 (now under testing).

Edit: 10 minutes after I posted the blog, I found the solution. It work after deleting C:\windows\inf\INFCACHE.1 and reinstall the printer driver, it works now. It seems to be a common problem.

My newly bought cheap S$75 Orient MP4 player 2GB (looks like IPod Nano, MP3 sound quality is okay, but FM is pretty bad, anyway, I have my trusted Sony Radio.) failed to work (it works under XP and Linux by appearing as a USB storage device). Anyway, I think that is mainly a firmware fault. There are so may buggy USB device out there.

Edit: This again works now after getting SPP-2020 to work.

As this notebook is not intended for my use, I will not install development tools like MPLAB on the computer. Anyway, MPLAB and many other Microchip development tools are now supported under Vista 32bit.

Overall the first impression of Vista is that it seems to be okay. There is nothing too exciting but nothing too disappointed. Anyway, it is not that bad as reported.

New Vista Notebook

On Christmas day, we bought a notebook with Vista Home Premium. It is Compaq Presario V3619AU (GX855PA) with RAM upgraded to 4GB from 1GB as the promotion. It costs S$1299 for the base 1 year warantee option. Since I did not trust the quality of any notebook vendors due to my bad experience with Dell Inspiron 600M I bought back in 2003 (1st year HDD and motherboard gone but luckily under warantee. Now keyboard controller is bad so I have to put an external USB keyboard), I opted to upgrade to have 3 year warantee which cost another S$199. So alltogether it is S$1498.

Specification:

Product Name: Compaq Presario V3619AU
Product Number: GX855PA
Microprocessor: 1.90 AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Technology TL-58
Microprocessor Cache: 512 KB + 512 KB L2 Cache
Memory: 1024 MB (2 x 512 MB) (now upgraded to 4GB)
Memory Max: Up to 4 GB
Video Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce Go 7150M
Video Memory: Up to 287 MB (not seem to correct now that it has 4GB RAM)
Hard Drive: 160 GB (5400 rpm)
Multimedia Drive: LightScribe SuperMulti 8X DVD±RW with Double Layer Support
Display: 14.1” WXGA High Definition BrightView Widescreen Display (1280 x 800)
Fax/Modem: High speed 56K modem
Network Card: Integrated 10/100BASE-T Ethernet LAN
Wireless Connectivity: 802.11 a/b/g WLANBluetooth wireless networking
Sound: Altec Lansing speakers
Keyboard: 101 key compatible keyboard with 1 Quick Launch Button
Pointing Device: Touch Pad with On/Off button and dedicated vertical and horizontal Scroll Up/Down pad

PC Card Slots: One ExpressCard/54 slot (also supports ExpressCard/34)

External Ports:
5-in-1 integrated Digital Media Reader for Secure Digital cards, MultiMedia cards, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, or xD Picture cards
VGA
3 USB
RJ-11
RJ-45
Headphone out
Microphone in
IEEE 1394 firewire
Consumer IR
S-Video TV out
Expansion port 3

Dimensions : 33.4 cm (L) x 23.7 cm (W) x 2.6 cm (min H) / 3.9 cm (max H)
Weight: 2.45 kg
Power
65 W AC Power Adapter
6-cell Lithium-Ion (Li-Ion) battery

OS: Windows Vista Home Premium, Microsoft Works, etc

Bundled Junk:
Microsoft Office 2007 Home/Student (60 day Trial)
Norton Internet Security (60 days trial)

What is a Vista Home Basic Machine with 512MB RAM Good for?

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx
Microsoft typically published their system requirement a bit too low for real world. But I've seen some Vista Home Basic machine with only 512M of RAM. What is that machine good for?

The best answer so far comes from Dell Singapore website.
http://www.dell.com.sg/vista

It is great for " Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games".

Nice demo machine to show off Vista, huh? ;-) ;-)