thumbs.db can't be deleted because it's in use

If you are like me, you keep all your media on a network drive.

In what it thinks is an aid to productivity, Windows 7 (and Vista) will go to these network drives and automatically create a hidden file called thumbs.db which contains a thumbnail image of every media (video or photo) file. Naturally this takes time if you have hundreds of images or some large videos, and I often try to delete the directory before the thumbs.db have finished being created... and get an annoying error message saying that the file can't be deleted as it's still opened by another application.

You can turn off the generation of this file by going:

Start > Run > Gpedit.msc

User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Explorer > Turn off caching of thumbnail pictures in hidden thumbs.db> Enabled

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Microsoft seem to make every effort to hide the Google Search provider for IE9 - here's the direct link:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/en-en/default.mspx#

0x8007010b errors in Task Scheduler

Windows 7 and 2008 introduced a new, more comprehensive Task Scheduler.


While the "Create Task" button provides you with every option available, I could not run any tasks without the  0x8007010b error message.


It turns out that this error is caused by the "quotes" in the Start in field. The "Program/script" field needs quotes (if there is a space in the path to the file, but all quotes must be stripped from the "Start in (optional)" field.


It's counter-intuitive, but that's the way Microsoft wrote it.

Anyway, I hope this tip helps, and don't forget to click on the ads to show your appreciation :)

Popcorn Hour Samba issues with Windows 7

I have owned a Popcorn Hour media streamer for a couple of years now, and been very impressed with it's support for pretty much any video file I throw at it.

I recently upgraded my NAS from a DroboShare to a Windows 7 Professional PC with the drobo attached directly.

Everything wa going swimmingly, but for some reason the PCH kept losing connection to the SMB share on the Win 7 machine. It kept giving me a "No content found" message whne connecting to the share.

When I browse to the share, I can see the server but the PCH reports that there are no shares on the PC. Other Windows clients have no problem accessing the shares.
If I rebooted the Popcorn Hour I got an "out of memory" error when accessing the server!

After much reading around, I started to despair.. turning off Homegroup didn't work, neither did wuninstalling Windows Live Login Assistant.

Eventually I spotted the following error in my event log:

Source: srv

Event ID: 2017

Level: Error

The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations.

Now I had something to trach down, and sure enough at the bottom of http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897446.aspx

I found the follwoing instructions:

Set HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache to 1
Set HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Size to 3

Womder of wonders, the issue has now been fixed!

Hopefully this tip will help you out, and if it proves useful, feel free to click onto one of the ads on this page to show your thanks.

SharedView - a free alternative to Webex and GoToAssist from Microsoft

Having to support people in remote sites has its difficulties, especially when you need to take them through complex procedures.

Often, viewing the Remote Desktop is the only way to get the job done. Traditionally, this has been very expensive for companies, who need to purchase a license for each potential user of Webex/GoToAssist or whatever application they want to use. If you have five peope in your Tech Support team you're looking at quite a bit of money.

Now, Microsoft have released a new free application that provides you that facility. In this article I will take you through how to use it.

Installing the Agent.

Both machines need to have the SharedView application installed, but only the initiator of the call needs to have a live.com account. If you are in a support organisation, you may want to set up a Windows Live ID with your business email address here. To install SharedView on your PC download the application here (3.2Mb).

Starting a session

The chances are that the other user doesn't have SharedView installed, but that's OK. Just fire

up SharedView and once you have logged in with your Live ID, and click on "Start a new session".

You can use the "Copy instrctions to the clipboard" or "Open a new e-mail message" buttons to send the other user the details, or tell them to go to https://joinsvw.sharedview.com/join.aspx and enter the Session Name and Password.

The click on Start to commence the session.

You will be prompted when the other user connects.

Sharing the screen

Each user can choose to share a running application, or the whole desktop. To do this, just click on the SharedView toolbar at the top of the screen and select what you would like to share.

You can then request control by clickiung on the "Request control" button. The end user will need to approve this before you will be able to make changes on their PC.

And that's it!

SharedView is simple, quick and comes from a trusted source.

Enjoy!

Fix Windows 7 Media Player Internet Streaming

I'm not going to go into the details of how you set up Windows Media Player in Windows 7, it's pretty self explanatory, streaming across PC's on the same network works well once you have a homegroup set up... until you get to the point when you want to stream across the Internet.

I was able to stream when in the same network, my office PC was in the same homegroup as the one at home and I'd set up my authorised users but still it wouldn't work...

After much head scratching I decided to give Microsoft a call as they must have experienced the issue before.

Initlaly they said it wouldn't work because my laptop (the machine in the office which was the client) would not be able to play music from my home PC as it was a member of a domain.

After reading the message out loud to the engineed a few times he accepted that it did indeed state that a Domain PC can't be the media server, but can be the Client.

Then we had the confusion because my home PC was Windows 7 Home Premium and the work one was Windows 7 Professional.

Finally I get escallated to someone else who then asked me the all important question:

Have you configured your firewall?

Apparently the firewall should be configured automatically by UPnP, but as a lot of routers are unreliable with UPnP it's a good idea to enter the port forwarding directly.

If you click on Stream - Allow Internet access to home media... you get the option to Diagnose Connections.

You need to set your home router up to forward TCP/44687 to TCP/10245 to your home PC.

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Windows 7 and the Technisat Skystar HD Satellite card - SOLVED

With my fresh new install of Windows 7 I was very keen on finally seeing Media Centre working with satellite.

Once I had installed the latest drivers from Technisat everything looked fine, MCE recognised that I had a satellite card installed.

However, the problems started when the automatic scan for channels failed.

Then when I opted to manually configure the card I get a very nice interface to choose the satellite and type of LNB.

Then I chose to do a full transponder scan which should scan all the wavelengths on the satellite and add the TV channels it finds there.

Imagine my consternation when I find out that no channels were found.

I tried running the Technisat TV Center appliaction and it had no problems displaying channels.

Oh well I thought, it's probably a driver problem.. after all it is a brand new Operating System.. so I dropped Technisat a polite line asking when they would be releasing new drivers.. and this is what I got back:

Thank you for your inquiry and your interest in our products.

Technisat is always ready to offer its products on the latest hardware and software development.

We do not offer drivers for Microsoft's Media Centre Edition.
The reason is that with the built-in Microsoft driver architecture. This is inadequate for digital TV cards, which would create too many restrictions. For example, in the BDA architecture there is no support for DiSEqC.

The software that is offered by us, offers and contains even more additional functional elements than the Media Centre in Windows 7.
We have therefore renounces adapting our driver to the Windows 7 Media Center.

Oh briliant.. so they are not going to support Media Centre which is going to be on virtually every copy of Windows 7 sold in the next few years because they don't like the driver model... well tough! The arguments my be valid, but you cannot deny the fact that you are throwing away a very large sector of the market.. it's business suicide!

MCE - whilst not perfect is the first point of call for non-geek users who are thinking of using their PC in the living room, it's user interface is slick and the remote control is a joy to use with it even powering up your PC at the touch of a button... not to mention the streaming capabilities.

So in short... you can't use the Skystar HD in Windows 7 MCE.. sorry... it sucks... go out and vote with your wallets and make Technisat understand that the customer should come first.

GREAT NEWS!
You can use the Technotrend drivers instead of the Technisat ones and they work perfectly in Windows 7 and MCE.

You can download them here
Just go into device manager and update the driver and point it at these ones and choose TT-budget S2-3200 (BDA).

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Running Nokia Software Updater on Windows 7 x64

I have been running Nokia PC Suite and NSU on my Windows 7 x64 PC with no problems for a while... but now Win7's been officially released, NSU tried to run an upgrade when I ran it, then told me that it doesn't support the operating system!

Looks like someone is covering their backside until they get a copy of Win7 to play with :-)

Anyway, the good news is that it DOES work on Windows 7 32 and 64 bit.

1. Forget about the automatic updater...
2. Download the updater file direct from the nokia site
3. Right click the file you downloaded and select Properties
   
4. Select the compatibilty tab and choose Windows Vista (Service Pack 2)
5. Click OK
6. Right click on the NokiaSoftwareUpdaterSetup_en.exe file again and select Run as Administrator
   
7. Install as usual and away you go!

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Windows 7 64 bit and Adobe Acrobat preview bug

So you've just installed Windows 7, and decided to go 64 bit because you think one day you'll need more than 4Gb of RAM. Then you fire up Outlook, click on a PDF attachment and you get:

This file cannot be previewed because of an error with the following previewer:
PDF Preview Handler for Vista
To open this file in its own program, double-click it.


What!!! How can my nice shiny new Operating System not understand a PDF!

Anyway, it's an Adobe bug and there are a couple of ways to fix it.. because it's been around for a couple of years and Adobe can't be bothered to!

First you could ditch Adobe as the previewer and use Foxit previewer crafted by Tim Heuer (it's free).
Alternatively you could try this registry fix by Leo Davidson at http://www.pretentiousname.com

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