Today I decided to get to the bottom of the missing driver issue on my computer running Windows 7 RC. It shows up as PCI Simple Communications controller and it really bugged me since I don't have a modem or a similar device on the motherboard.

It turned out that there is a away to identify such a device from the information available in Device Manager. The first step is to open the Properties window for this device and move to the Details tab. After selecting the Hardware Ids in the Property dropdown the device identifiers are displayed.

The important ones are the numbers written after the VEN and DEV keywords. The first one is the Vendor ID and the second one is the Device ID. So in my case the Vendor ID is 8086 (from VEN_8086) and the Device ID is 29A4 (from DEV_29A4).

All that's left to do know is to go to PCIDatabase.com and enter the ids into the corresponding search boxes. In my case it turned out that it was a device from Intel - Intel Management Engine Interface (HECI). Unfortunately it doesn't have a driver for Windows 7 yet and the Vista one doesn't install. But hey, at least I know which driver is missing.

The Xbox 360 Dashboard update released on 4th December 2007 added support for playing DivX and XviD videos natively, i.e. without installing Transcode 360 for Windows Media Center. Unfortunatelly this only works for media played directly from the dashboard and not within Media Center Extender. Since I didn't want to copy my videos to CDs, DVDs or other external devices, the only thing left to do was to setup Windows Media Player media sharing which I never had to use before.

This turned out to be more difficult than I expected - the reason being that the media I wanted to share wasn't stored locally but on a separate file server. By default such media is not shared and there are few steps one has to follow to make this work, as thoroughly explained here:

• Enable remote content sharing by adding the following entry into the registry:
  [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences\HME]
  "EnableRemoteContentSharing"=dword:00000001
• Grant anonymous users access to the shared folders on the file server by adding the read permission on the folder and on the share to the ANONYMOUS LOGON user
• Modify the file server's group policy to allow anonymous access to the selected shares by listing them in the Network access: Shares that can be accessed anonymously policy in the Computer Configuration, Windows Settings, Security Settings, Local Policies, Security Options branch of the group policy tree (just run gpedit.msc to start the Group Policy Object Editor)

Although a MSI file can bi installed by double clicking on it in Explorer or by selecting install from the context menu, you might want to start from command line to include it in a script. This can be done by using the msiexec.exe utility. Although it's parameters are well documented I had to do some searching to find a way for setting a different installation directory than the default one in case the configuration forms are skipped with the /qb option. It can be done by setting the INSTALLDIR property to the desired value.

As a future reference the following command line triggers the setup package to install into the specified directory without opening any additional configuration windows:

msiexec /i MyMSI.msi /qb INSTALLDIR="C:\Program Files\My Install Dir"

Windows Vista unlike the previous versions doesn't have an option to enable or disable hibernation in the Power Options of the Control Panel. Strangely, if you search for hibernation in Control Panel the Turn hibernation on or off option will be found but it will only open the Edit Plan Settings dialog without hibernation available if it is already disabled. Therefore, if you end up with disabled hibernation as I did (probably due to the Hibernation File Cleaner option of the Disk Cleanup tool) the only way to turn it back on is to open a command prompt and run

powercfg -H on

This will make the hibernation reappear in all the shutdown menus and power button combos.

This is nothing new and it has probably been written about hundreds (if not thousands) of times already, but since I’m only encountering the issue every few months or even more seldom, it always slips my mind and I end up wondering what’s wrong.

I’m talking about the fact that any custom identity being used for an application pool in Internet Information Services 6.0 must be a member of the IIS_WPG group which grants it all the necessary privileges. Unfortunately otherwise IIS reports only Service Unavailable when the site gets accessed without any additional information which makes it kind of difficult to determine the cause of the problem.

Hopefully this post will help reminding me of this fact when I need it the next time.

One of the first tasks on my to-do list after buying a new computer with Vista Home Premium edition was setting up Media Center Extender for Xbox 360 along with Transcode 360 to make my Xbox 360 a true multimedia device.

Unfortunately the problems started immediately after setting up the Media Center Extender on my PC. (At this point I’d like to mention that the required 8-digit setup key can be acquired by starting Media Center on Xbox 360. I spent more time than I should, figuring this out.) Browsing pictures worked fine, also music and WMV streaming. On the other hand MPEG streaming resulted in errors.

I quickly dismissed a few probable causes for the problem:

• After noticing that Windows Media Player couldn’t properly play MPEG2 files (but strangely DVDs worked just fine) I installed FFDShow with MPEG2 playback option turned on. It fixed the playback in WMP 11 but the problem on the Xbox 360 side remained.
• Just to be sure I temporarily disabled the firewall although the required ports have already been opened and WMV streaming worked just fine. No surprises there – MPEG streaming still didn’t work.
• The last desperate act was completely disabling my antivirus solution in case it would be causing problems. It didn’t help either.

The weekend was coming to its end so I decided to try out the alternative media server solution TVersity. It worked out of the box without problems, even transcoding of unsupported formats to WMV. But during the following week I was growingly unsatisfied with it:

• Fast forwarding and rewinding of transcoded videos didn’t work until they were played back for the first time and cached.
• To make the matters worse even pausing had its problems causing the playback to stop early for the amount of time it was paused in between. Once again the problem only appeared for directly transcoded videos not yet in the cache.
• While music list was properly organized by albums and authors the video list was completely flat making it a real pain scrolling through a few hundred alphabetically sorted files.

All of that convinced me to revisit the Media Center problem. Not wanting to reinstall my machine being otherwise already quite nicely setup by that time I decided to uninstall PC-cillin Internet Security 2007 just to be sure after reading in a few forums that both  McAfee and Norton can prevent streaming altogether even if they are disabled. It actually solved my MPEG streaming problem although I thought it highly unlikely since WMV streaming worked all the time. I still can’t explain why only MPEG streaming was affected but since then I’m using NOD32 and still waiting for the first problem it would cause. Not to mention that it also uses far less system resources than PC-cillin.

The last of my problems was that the default Transcode 360 installation had problems with UAC therefore I had to manually remove it (uninstall didn’t work) and reinstall it in the unsupported service mode.

Now that all problems are solved, my Xbox 360 really is the universal home entertainment system. Being properly connected to my HD LCD TV and surround sound system I am now using it for watching DVDs, streaming videos from my computer, listening to music and watching photos. Even the user interface is very intuitive and easy to use. Only my music collection still needs some reorganization for all the different views in the Media Center to work as intended.

There seems to be a problem with updating Windows Defender when using Microsoft Update instead of Windows Update in Windows Vista. The problem becomes apparent when Windows Defender puts up a warning in the system tray that its signatures are not up to date. This of course shouldn’t happen at all with Automatic Updates turned on. Manual attempts to update Windows Defender result in an error, while Microsoft Update insists that the system is up to date and no new updates are available.

According to the list of Windows Update 5 errors the above error code is 0x80240029 – WU E INVALID PRODUCT LICENCE: A product with an invalid license was found on the system. This is just plain silly (in my case it was happening on an OEM Vista Home Premium edition that came with my new computer) though a look in the WindowsUpdate.log file sheds some light on it:

2007-03-10 07:30:30:258 1144 1308 Report REPORT EVENT: {3B3B2164-091C-4856-9FBC-9D99EDAE3198} 2007-03-10 07:30:25:259+0100 1 154 101 {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000} 0 0 Windows Defender Failure Software Synchronization Client has an invalid Pid.

Looking at this record you can quickly stop wondering why the Pid is invalid. An empty value instead of an actual one is used. Fortunately the solution is quite simple (once you know what it is): disabling the Use Microsoft Update checkbox in the Turn automatic updating on or off section of the Control Panel.

Once you do that Windows Defender will successfully update itself. Windows Update will also find its updates now and maybe even some other updates that didn’t show up when Microsoft Update service was used.

The functionality of the Run as context menu item is often an invaluable tool. The following two scenarios are probably the most common.

• If you’re using a LUA account (which you always should) you can use it to run specific applications with administrative privileges.
• If you’re a developer you can use it to test how you’re application behaves with different credentials.

The downside of this command is that unless you want to use the administrator’s account, you have to enter the desired username every single time which quickly becomes tedious.

You can work around that if use the Runas command. Its /user parameter allows you to set your desired username in advance. To avoid typing you can create a shortcut pointing to the following location:

C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /user:MYCOMPUTER\MyUser MyApplication.exe

Apart from opening a command prompt for password instead of a nice GUI this should be a perfect solution, as long as you don’t want to run too many applications this way. Creating shortcuts for all of them can once again get tedious.

But fear not, there’s a solution for this as well; create your own context menu command by adding the following entry into the registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\exefile\shell\Run as MyUser...\command]
@="C:\\Windows\\system32\\runas.exe /user:MYCOMPUTER\\MyUser \"%L\""

Of course you should replace MYCOMPUTER\MyUser with your desired username in both above examples; and MyApplication.exe in the shortcut with the path to your application. Use HKEY_LOCALMACHINE instead of HKEY_CURRENT_USER to add the command for all users not only for you.

Microsoft Office 2007 applications (at least Outlook and OneNote in particular) require Windows Desktop Search 3.0 to be installed for their built-in search capabilities to work fully. Since out of the box this version of WDS doesn’t support the indexing of files on network shares you also have to install the WDS Add-in for Files on Microsoft Networks. You still have to map the network drives to be indexed but at least you can select them in the WDS options window afterwards.

In Windows Vista WDS 3.0 is already built-in but you still have to install the add-in for the indexing of files on network shares to work.

Be careful when hosting your web site based on DasBlog from a Windows XP machine. While IIS 6 in Windows 2003 prevents the download of files with unknown extensions by default, the IIS 5.1 in Windows XP allows downloading such files. In the case of DasBlog all *.blogtemplate files are at risk. There are a few sites out there where these files can be downloaded. Although this probably isn’t a big security risk it might be something you want to prevent. Probably the easiest way to do that is by modifying the web.config file. You should add the following line at the end of the <httpHandlers> section:

<add verb="*" path="*.snippet" type="System.Web.HttpForbiddenHandler" />