The Todd Today

A customer recently brought in an IBM Thinkpad Model T43 in which the sound was not working.

On this model the volume and mute buttons on the unit work independently from Windows. If the volume is all the way up and the mute button is not checked in the sound manager, there still could be no sound if the volume is turned all the way down or has been muted using the buttons.

There is no way to tell in Windows if the buttons were used to turn the volume all the way down or mute the sound, which makes this easy to overlook.

If you open the sound manager in Windows and it looks like there should be sound but is none, try the buttons on the unit to make sure that someone did not use them to control volume level.

If this was your issue let me know in the comments, if this was not your issue let me know what your solution was in the comments

If your print spooler keeps stopping every time you start it hopefully this fix will work for you.

I ran into this problem today and after much searching on google I was able to come together with a few solutions as well as the one that ended up working for me.

The problem seems to be a faulty printer driver that may have been corrupted or messed up by a windows update.  So if your printer had been working and now is not try the solution below.

The solution is to delete the print drivers on your system and re-download the latest drivers from the manufacture website but that’s not as easy as it sounds.

Most posts wanted me to open a “Print Management” which can be found in the control panel under administrative tools to delete the printer drivers.

The only problem is that I did not have “Print Management” under control panel because my print spooler is stopped so this was not much help.

Another way to bring up “Print Management” is to run the command “printui /s/ t2″ without the quotes.  This did bring up the “Print Management” for me but I could not delete printers because my print spooler was still not running.

My final solution that worked:

1. Unplug all of your printers
2. Navigate to where your printer drivers are stored C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\PRINTERS\
3. Make a new folder called OLD
4. Copy all files into the new folder called OLD
5. Go to the control panel – click Hardware and Sound – click Devices and Printers (Make note of printers deleted for step
6. Right click on all of your printers and click Remove Device
7. run “printui /s/ t2″ from the start menu / run dialog box
8. Select the printers that you deleted in step 5 and delete them.
9. Restart your computer (Your print spooler should now stay running)
10. Download the latest drivers from your printers manufacture website
11. Install the drivers and hook up the printers again when prompted to do so by the software.

Did this work for you?  Let me know if the comments.

With the following steps you will be able to backup your Windows 7 or Vista Windows Mail even if you can not boot into Windows.

What you will need

• External Drive Case or USB Drive Connection – This allows you to connect your hard drive from your computer to any other computer.  You can usually get one of these from your local computer store.
• Flash Drive

1. To start if you do not have access to login to Windows we will need to pull the hard drive out of your desktop and or laptop.  To find out how to do this refer to your manual or manufacture website.
2. Once you have the hard drive out install it in your external case or hookup to your USB Drive Connection.
3. Then plug it into another working computer.
4. Show hidden files  (Open Computer, Click Tools – Folder Options, Click View Tab, Click “Show hidden files and folders”)
5. Navigate to ( (Drive-Letter):\users\(user-name)\AppData\Local\Microsoft\) where Drive Letter is the drive letter of your drive and user-name is the username of the account you want to get the email from.
6. Copy the Windows Mail folder to your usb flash drive.  You now have all of your emails, contacts, and account information.
7. Once you have your non-working computer working again you can simply copy the Windows Mail folder to (C:\users\(user-name)\AppData\Local\Microsoft\) and all of your email, contacts, and account information should be restored.

Let me know if that works for you, Good luck!

So suddenly you can no longer add or remove new programs because everything is gone in your Add/Remove applications list?  Same thing happened to me and luckily the fix is quite easy.  It seems that the culprit is an installation of Adobe Air, but don’t worry no need to remove Adobe Air and lose all of those cool programs., just follow the simple instructions below:

1. Close all open applications, you can keep this browser window open
2. Open a terminal session (Applications -  Accessories – Terminal)
3. In the terminal type:

   sudo apt-get install gnome-app-install --reinstall

4. Hit enter and watch the gnome-app-install reinstall
5. All done, your Add/Remove Applications list should be working like new!

Let us know in the comments if this worked for you or if you had any issues.

Image via Wikipedia

So today we had a customer bring in a laptop running Windows XP that would not print websites correctly using Internet Explorer 7.  Instead of printing the text and images it would print the HTML code that created the webpage.  After digging around in several forums I was able to put together the following solution.

1. Click start
2. Click Set Program Access and Defaults
3. Most likely Custom is selected, click the down arrows off to the right to expand the field.  Even if custom is not selected do the same for the field that is selected.
4. Under choose a default web browser, select Internet Explorer
5. Then hit Ok

Thats it, now go and try print another website as it should be working fine now.

Let me know in the comments if this works for you.

Image via Wikipedia

Ok so Microsoft definitely does not make it easy to backup Outlook Express when you can boot into Windows so when you can not, well that’s when the following comes in handy.

The first thing you will need to do is hook your hard drive up to another computer or perhaps use BartPE to get access to your hard drive.  The goal here is to get access to your hard drive files.  Outlook Express stores each e-mail folder as a .dbx file.  To back up your outlook emails then you need to copy these files to a CD, flash drive, etc.

Outlook Express keeps the .dbx files in a location called Store Folder.  By default Store Folder is found in “C:\Documents and Settings\(Your User Name)\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{4D2652B7-E489-4302-B4A7-80B37678B194}\Microsoft\Outlook Express”.  Make sure to go into your specific user folder as each user’s emails are stored separately.  Also the numbers in the folder tree may be different.

Next go to your Store Folder and move the .dbx files to a floppy, CD-R, or other removable medium. Once they are saved on a removable medium then you are good to go.

You may also want to backup your address book which by default can be found at “C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data\Microsoft\”.  Just copy the entire Address Book folder to a removable medium.

You can now go ahead and reload Microsoft Windows or whatever you would like to do.

To restore your saved e-mail, open Outlook Express and select File, New, Folder. Give the new folder the same name as the one you’re restoring (it’s the archived file’s name, minus the .dbx extension), and press Enter. Click the new, empty folder and close Outlook Express. Now copy the archived.dbx file to your Store Folder. If you named the new folder properly, Windows will ask you to confirm that you want to replace the file; click Yes.  The next time you reenter Outlook Express, your saved e-mail files will be there.

To restore your address book simply go back to “C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data\Microsoft\” and paste the address book folder back in.  If you changed your login user name you will have to go into the address book folder and rename the .wab file to your new user name.

Hope this helps, let me know in the comments.

Running a computer repair shop you end up running into things much more than most people.  This issue of Microsoft Windows XP Updates failing has bite us a few times but every time this same fix has done it for us.  Many of the other sites give this answer only after a Windows XP repair but we have found that it works many times even when a repair has not occurred.

So this is the first thing that we alway try, so if you find that Windows Update refuses to install patches it is very possibley because of the following DLL‘sfailed to be registered with Windows.  Just follow the instructions below to fix it.

Step 1. Open Notepad (or any text editor).

Step 2. Copy and paste the following command lines into the Notepad window (the /s switch runs the commands silently, freeing you from having to press Enter after each line):

regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
regsvr32 /s wups2.dll
regsvr32 /s wups.dll
regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll

Step 3. Save the file to your desktop, using a .bat or .cmd extension.

Step 4. Double-click the icon of the .bat or .cmd file.

Step 5. A command window will open, run the commands, and then close.

Let us know if this works for you or not in the comments.

Image via Wikipedia

Ran into a very interesting Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 bug today, could not display the menu bar even though we clicked the menu bar option in the tools menu.  After clicking menu bar it put a check next to it in the tool menu meaning that it should have been displayed but it was not.

After searching high and low the fix ended up being very simple.  Simply click tools – toolbars – links which will bring up the links bar.  After that the check mark that was next to menu bar in the tools menu should be gone.  Now just click Tools – Menu Bar and your menu bar should be back, feel free to remove links bar as it is not necessary to keep it on.

This is the first time we have run into this but I would bet that Microsoft will issue a patch for the bug eventually.

Image via Wikipedia

Slipstreaming has become so much easier than it was not to long ago thank to tools such as nLite, Windows Updates Downloader, & WMP11 Slipstreamer.  We have been using this method for quickly reloading desktops and laptops with Windows xp, 2000 and Vista for quite awhile at the shop,  I figured I would write up a post about it for your and our future reference should we forget.

The tool that does most of the work here is nLite, nLite takes all the work that it takes to put together a slipstream disc and automates most of it.  All you have to do is answer the prompts that come up as you work through the wizards.  For a list of all the features go to http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html .   A couple big things that we love about nLite are that you can add any drivers you would like to the OS install CD as well as its ability to incorporate all the updates from Windows update onto your install disc, and that where the Windows Updates Downloader comes into play.

Windows Updates Downloader is one of the greatest time savers you can find, it takes all the work out of hunting down every windows update you could ever need.  You simply download the program and then download the url list that corresponds to the version of Windows that you wish to install, select the updates you want, hit continue and bam, you have more updates than you know what to do with.

Finally the last tool is optional but if you want to slipstream Windows Media Player 11 then you will need it.  WMP11 Slipstreamer once installed is automatically used by nLite to slipstream WMP 11 onto your Windows install CD.  No need to do any customization of this tool as it works out of the box just fine.

One last things to note is that not all updates will slipstream so during the build process of nLite you will get errors but fear not just coninue on and you will have a nice slipstream disc in no time.  If you need help at anytime referr to the forums on each products site as they seem to be very helpfull in our experience.

Hope this helps someone!

Image via Wikipedia

On Fridays episode of WEAU‘s Technology Sport is a segment of myself doing a custom computer build , check it out and let me know what you think in the comments: http://tinyurl.com/4akz2a