Ever wondered what all those services in the Task manager are for Windows 2000 and Windows XP? I used to know NT4 almost off by heart, but the number of them in Windows 2000 was too much for me to remember. Of course, Windows XP was worse again! Well, Black Viper’s page has handy service lists for Windows XP Home and Professional, and also Windows 2000 Professional and Server. Could be handy for those of us who have to work on Windows every now and again.
This is very handy “How to Reinstall Windows XP without product activation“.
Isn’t it galling that we need to contact Microsoft for “permission” if we choose to reinstall a product that we already legally own and use, and have “stamped” so before?! Well, no worries, there is a trick for getting around product activation for Windows XP when reinstalling.
Looks like Microsoft will stop offering a number of products from January 2nd.
Microsoft Corp. will stop distributing several older products next week as a result of a legal settlement with Sun Microsystems Inc. in a dispute over Java, Microsoft said.
Among the products that Microsoft will cut from its distribution channels on Dec. 15 are all versions of Windows 98 except Windows 98 Second Edition; Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition; all Office 2000 editions; Office XP Developer edition and SQL Server 7, Tony Goodhew, a product manager in Microsoft’s developer division, said Monday.
Not sure how this would affect systems which we sell with Small Business Server 2000, but use the downgrade rights to SBS 4.5 instead.
Spent quite a while this afternoon fighting an…
Error: -2147217900 - Could not allocate space for object ‘TABLE_NAME’ in database ‘DATABASE_NAME’ because the ‘FILEGROUP_NAME’ filegroup is full.
… when doing an “INSERT INTO … SELECT …” query on an MSDE 1.0 (SQL Server v7.0 engine) database. The database was pretty big, and the insert query was going to generate a metric shirt load of rows to be inserted.
This was a bit strange at first because the filegroup in question was set to automatically grow when it ran out of space. The disk holding the database was not full and should have had plenty of space. The filegroup had not grown to fill the disk either.
Anyway, after much headscratching it appears that MSDE (all versions) has a 2Gb database size limit. If you hit the 2Gb limit, Microsoft advises upgrading to the fully fledged SQL Server product.
Applications may grow beyond the MSDE 2000 2-GB data limit or the application’s user base may grow beyond the workload limitation in SQL Server Desktop Engine. If this occurs, Microsoft recommends migrating the MSDE 2000 solution to a SQL Server based solution.
For what its worth, even the fully fledged SQL Server may impose a database size limit. When installed with Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) 4.5 the limit is set at 10Gb. This doesn’t seem to apply to SBS 2000 (scroll down to the “Optimisations” heading) though.
The Small Business Server 2000 component server applications are not limited in any way compared with the stand-alone versions other than the fact that the applications can be installed only on a Small Business Server 2000–based computer.
Although SBS 2000 does carry the same “must be a primary domain controller”, “no more than 50 users”, and “no domain trusts” limitations as SBS 4.5.
Someone posted a pointer to Robocopy on our Local Linux list today. Its a bit like RSync for Windows file shares. Runs on Windows machines.
Robust File and Folder Copy.
By default Robocopy will only copy a file if the source and destination have different time stamps or different file sizes.
The EMDVirtualKeyboard control could be quite handy for touch screen work.
EMD Software’s EMDVirtualKeyboard is an ActiveX Control that is ideal for Visual Basic application developers planning to provide touch screen or keyboardless functionality and requiring a flexible means of providing user keyboard input, function keys, or calculator functionality.
I’ve had quite a number of problems debugging getting VB6 WebClasees working in the development environment on a new Windows XP box. I’ve documented what I’ve done here so that it can help someone else out in the same situation.
Firstly, whenever I tried to access any file in the project’s Virtual Directory via the brwoser I received a 404 File Not Found error. This wasn’t just restricted to to projects asp page, but the HTML templates, etc as well. The problem seemed to be related to the fact that long file names were used in the projects path (e.g. the source was in “D:\Server Code\WebClass Component”). When VB created the Virutual Directory in the IIS Configuration it changed used “D:\SERVER~!\WebClass Component” as the path, which seemed to cause IIS problems even though the two should be equivelent. In the IIS Manager, right click on the Virtual Directory, select Properties, then Click on the “Browse” button. This will locate the full directory name again. While you’re there it wouldn’t hurt to create a new “Application”, set Script Access to “Scripts and Executables” and Application Protection to “High (Isolated)”. Save these changes and restart IIS. You should now be able to browse to HTML files in this directory, but the WebClass project still may not work.
This could be a DCOM permissions thing, which results in an ASP 0178 error.
Error Type:
Server object, ASP 0178 (0×800A0005)
The call to Server.CreateObject failed while checking permissions. Access is denied to this object.
It would appear that under Windows 2000 and XP you need to fiddle with DCOM permissions before you can debug WebClasses. MSKB article 259725 explains how to create a registry file to add VB ASP Debugging into DCOM, and what to permissions to change and why. I set permissions on both the VB ASP Debugging DCOM component AND changed the default permissions as well. This might be overkill, but it does work.
Hpe that helps someone. I did change quite a few other settings in the course of making this work, but these are the ones thart seemed to have fixed the problem for me.
Frez Systems has some handly VB code samples for things like MD5 digests, encryption, and custom message boxes.
A while back I pointed to parts 1 and 2 of a series looking at Windows Server 2003 development. Well, part 3 is now available. Although its called “testing windows” is really a long advertisement for the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC), which allows Microsoft customers to test large scale deployments and migrations in a “safe” environment. Interesting stuff, but really nothing to do with Windows developent.
A couple of weeks ago, my boss started complaining that his machine started to run very slowly after installing a security patch pushed on him by Windows Update. A day or so later my machine did the same. Now that I’ve put up with this for a cople of weeks, I find that Microsoft have acknowledged this to be a problem with the patch, as Ed Bott explains…
Every so often, one of these Critical Updates turns out to cause additional headaches. That’s the case with Critical Update 811493, which fixes a nasty security bug that could allow someone to take over a computer running Windows XP. Unfortunately, this fix doesn’t play well with some antivirus programs on computers that also have Windows XP Service Pack 1 installed, as Microsoft acknowledged in a brand-new Knowledge Base article: 819634 - You May Experience Performance Issues After You Install the 811493 (MS03-013) Package on Your Windows XP SP1-Based Computer.
The MSKB article also suggests two workarounds, and offers an explanation…
You may experience slower computer performance after you install the 811493 (MS03-013) security update package on a computer that is running Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1), or after you upgrade to SP1 on a Windows XP-based computer on which the 811493 security update was previously installed. This problem may be more likely to occur if you use some features of some third-party programs, such as antivirus programs. For example, this problem may occur if your antivirus program is configured to scan all files when you open (or you run) them. This is sometimes called “real-time” scanning.
