An I.T. Problem Shared . . .

We had a PC running Vista Ultimate with a Hauppauge Nova PCI dual tuner DVB receiver hooked up to a little stick antenna using Windows Media Center.

Reception on some channels was sometimes a little flaky but then for the last week the video has been pretty much frozen and jittering on all channels but the audio was fine.

At first we thought it might be weather conditions or transmitter changes so re-tuned the channels but still had problems. I then remembered someone had install updated ATI Radeon X1650 drivers and the catalyst control panel.

Although these drivers seemed newer than Vista’s own uninstalling the drivers and catalyst control center and reverting back to Vista’s native drivers restored perfect TV playback in Media Center.

Having just set up a new smartphone running Windows Mobile connecting to Microsoft Exchange we found that the default option on incoming emails was ‘reply to all’ even if the email had only one sender and recipient.

If you selected reply to all and replied the reply was sent to the sender of the original message but also back to yourself.

After a lot of head scratching we found that besides specifying the Exchange account in the mail account settings we also had to enter the email address in advanced settings. Seems that Windows Mobile has to know your email address even if you’re sending/receiving through Exchange so that it can determine that you are the recipient of the email and not include you in any replies you send back.

Certain programs that need to run at startup in Windows Vista require your permission to run. As a result these programs can often be blocked at startup by Vista.

To get these programs to run at startup you need to use task scheduler to run them at logon rather than starting them through the registry or startup folder.

The scheduled task you create must be set to run with highest privilege, it should run under your user account and should run when you log in.

Running PHP on a Windows 2003 Server and connecting to Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4 we found that sometimes the PHP script could connect to the SQL Server but most of the time we’d get ‘mssql_connect() unable to connect to server’.

After Googling the problem I found a lot of references to needing NTWDBLIB.DLL version 2000.80.194.0 rather than the 2000.2.8.0 version that ships with PHP. I copied the DLL from with Windows\system32 folder to the PHP folder and that fixed the problem, for 2minutes! – then we were back to ‘mssql_connect() unable to connect to server’.

I also saw lots of references to Named Pipes and TCP/IP connections so I went into the SQL Server Client Network Utility. Both Named Pipes and TCP/IP were enabled so I changed the protocol order to move Named Pipes above TCP/IP and that fixed the problem – permanently.

We’ve had several people reporting that Microsoft Works 8.0 was coming up with an out of memory error when they tried to print or preview from the Work’s spreadsheet or database. The printer in use was a Hewlett Packard C5180. Other printers were fine.

After re-installing both Works and the printer drivers (as suggested by Microsoft) we eventually found that the problem was caused by Windows XP Service Pack 3.

Removing SP3 with add/remove programs fixed the problem instantly on most but not all PCs. Removing SP3 did result in Windows re-downloading lots of updates that had been applied since installing SP3 though.

You then need to stop Windows automatically installing SP3 again – either through the registry:

http://www.technipages.com/xp-prevent-windows-update-from-installing-sp3.html

or using Microsoft’s Service Pack Blocker tool:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D7C9A07A-5267-4BD6-87D0-E2A72099EDB7&displaylang=en