Dell XPS M1210 & nvidia 7400 & Games

I just went the hard way with my new laptop.. I wanted to see how it handle games ! I just put the Need For Speed Most Wanted DVD and fire the setup.

When i launch the game, it does nothing...hugh.. I upgraded to 1.3 of NFS, already have the latest drivers & firmware...

Anyway, i just bought "Just cause". Guess what ? It refuses to launch, saying my video card doesn't do pixel shader 1.1 or vertex shader 1.1.

After looking at the 7400's spec, it does the job.

As you may know, official nvidia or ati driver don't work on laptop, you normally must install the manufacturer one.

Thanks to Internet, guys modify the official drivers to work on laptop.

For ATI, look for DHmodtool3

For Nvidia, go to http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/index.php?drivers

Now both games works great. A Dell customer advocate contacted me for another problem (weird noise), i sent him a mail about this issue.

Hard drive failure ? freeze it!

I just read an article about people puttint their dying hard drive into the refrigerator about an hour...Working again enough time to get the data back !

Here is the article (in french): Here

MSDE2000A install error 1603

Everything look fine, the windows installer is stepping forward...until it rollback while it needed only 3 seconds to finish..

MSDE2000A need the server service started to be able to install itself.

I found this information in a chm from Application analyzer for Lotus.

Microsoft Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino

everything goes fine except when generating the report:

---------------------------
Microsoft Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino
---------------------------
Error showing the report - Error in File C:\Program Files\Microsoft Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino\ReportFiles\ExecutiveMainReport.rpt:
Invalid table number.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

 

I have looked on the net without result... anyone knows what's going wrong ?

I installed a clean station : XP + SP2 + Last update + MSDE2000A + last DotNet.

Vista RC1 & VmWare : blocking in "loading file"

Do not start crying, just do this trick:

Create you VM

add the following to the vmx:

svga.maxWidth = "640"
svga.maxHeight = "480"

Install Vista

Install VmWare Tools

remove the 2 lines inserted before

enjoy

NLB monitoring

One subject I am working at the moment is: How to monitor NLB Cluster ? How to automatically remove any member still alive but with the application clustered down ?

I have two applications about to be NLB cluster:

-ISA 2004 as reverse proxy

-IIS 6.0

 

ISA 2004 enterprise can work in NLB integrated mode: If ISA is in bad mood, it remove itself from NLB. NLB is not aware of ISA, but ISA is aware of NLB. That's better than nothing !

Old fashion way was to use cluster sentinel, that came with the Windows 2000 resource kit.

The actual way would be to monitor through MOM, which have packages for both IIS and NLB, and can trigger action on event.

My vmware is burning, i will try out MOM 2005 :)

printer & default user & changed profile location

we had an issue in our citrix environnment:

-All new users didn't have their default printer mapped, and could not set one. They have roaming profile but they forced to use local profile for performance.

-Another main trouble : their registry was missing critical key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows

We are using Citrix policies and a lot of GPO to tail down the environnement (no client drive, no desktop, windows task locked, windows keyboard shortcut disabled, no to everything...).

We finally found out: The "default user" profile was still in the original Documents and settings, while all users profiles were stored on another folder. Moving the "Default User" to the same directory made everything back !

I know, it sound obvious this way, but reality is different...

CA eTrust kill lsass.exe

eTrust bug is currently hitting windows server. This antivirus things taht lsass.exe contains the Win32/Lassrv.B virus. Then it kill lsass.exe.

check it out

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redirection folder uncovered

Before starting : I am not spealing about My Documents 's redirection.

Redirection folder may seems a great solution to US. Logon/logoff is fast, but data remains on the server, which means protected.

As we have been using redirection of both Application data, desktop and start menu, i would like to explain the downside which made us going back to standard roaming profile.

We encountered 4 main troubles:

1/When the file server is not available, users feel it immediately:

Redirection:Desktop

consequence:all files on the desktop disappear

Redirection:Application Data

consequence:softwares using it don't work anymore. Quick Launch icons disappear

Redirection:Start Menu

consequence:all shortcuts disappear

2/A lot of software use relative path, which doesn't work with application data

With redirection folder, the local profile doesn't have an application folder. Many software, once in the user profile, issue a nice "cd ..\Application data", which fails.

3/Even clustered, when doing a failover, users feel it

Same consequences as 1/. They have to issue a refresh to get the desktop back

4/ redirection & Internet Explorer maintenance issue

Having both IE maintenance (proxy settings) and redirection was an issue. Even if splitted into 2 GPO. We had to apply an hotfix for Windows XP SP1 and SP2.

For now, we just have roaming profile and My documents redirection + offline.

Hope it helps,

MS NLB and crossover = bad trip

For those that are installing MS NLB, do not think about a private network !

To the contrary of MSCS cluster, you mustn't have a cross over or isolated network:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;242248