I was recently asked to repair an HP Pavilion 733n running XP home which was caught in an endless ‘reboot’ loop.  The ‘repair’ function provided by the on-disk recovery partition repeatedly failed to repair the installation.  Time to fix this the old fashioned way.

Normally this is how an over-the-top reinstall would go:

1. Boot the computer using the XP CD. You may need to change the boot order in the system BIOS so the CD boots before the hard drive. Check your system documentation for steps to access the BIOS and change the boot order.
2. When you see the "Welcome To Setup" screen, you will see the options below

   This portion of the Setup program prepares Microsoft Windows XP to run on your computer:
      To setup Windows XP now, press ENTER.
      To repair a Windows XP installation using Recovery Console, press R.
      To quit Setup without installing Windows XP, press F3.

3. Press Enter to start the Windows Setup.
   

   Do NOT choose "To repair a Windows XP installation using the Recovery Console, press R", (you Do Not want to load Recovery Console).

4. Accept the License Agreement and Windows will search for existing Windows installations.
5. Select the XP installation you want to repair from the list and press R to start the repair.

GULP! R is not available.  We can’t repair!

Here’s the fix:

1. Select the XP installation you want to repair from the list and press L to install.
2. The installer will repair a few files and ask for a reboot
   • **Critical next step**
3. Once again, boot from the XP CD (make sure to ‘press any key to boot from CD’ )
4. Once again, press Enter to start the Windows Setup.
5. Accept the License Agreement and Windows will search for existing Windows installations.
6. You will now see the REPAIR option below.  Press R

This quick tip can save you from having to totally wipe clean the primary HP disk using either the included HP recovery partition or your own XP media.

Our house is new (2006), which provides us many contemporary living conveniences that an older home would likely not (e.g. an open floor plan and Great room, office/music room, walk-in pantry, etc) All the rooms are wired for phone and coaxial, but were not wired with Cat6 for computers and data transfer. This is a bummer because:

1. I would use Cat6 runs. It would be a great convenience when networking our computers, gaming consoles, IP phones and, eventually when IPv6 becomes more and more prevalent (way, way down the road), our TVs, refrigerators, thermostats, and toasters.
2. It can be a difficult, messy, and time consuming task to rewire all the rooms once they’re finished– impossible in some cases.

Until now my computers, servers and printer device were all located in my office. This made the physical network a breeze– a simple wireless router provided enough data ports for computers and servers, and wireless access for my laptop and wifi printer.

Xbox 360 enters stage left

Then, for Christmas, we got an Xbox 360(yes!). There were two main drivers for this:

1. Rock Band. Its the greatest multi-player game created to date. My 3 year old pretends to play the drums, my wife sings, our 6 year old plays the guitar (amazingly well), and I play bass. We all rock. I think Radiohead’s Creep is our favorite song.
2. We wanted to a user-friendly solution to get our mp3s from our computer to the home stereo.

Not only can we drop it like its hot with Rock Band, the Xbox 360 can act as a Windows Media Center Extender. This essentially means that it can act as a front-end for the WMC server on our Vista Premium computer. (Yes, I was skeptical of how well this would work. I am now a believer. Its great.)

The Xbox 360 can connect to our network via Ethernet or wireless connection. However, I’m not wired for Ethernet, and the Wifi adapter for the Xbox is an additional $100. (100 calms for a wifi antenna? Um, no.)

Solution: Build a wireless bridge from the entertainment center to the existing wireless router.
Cost: $45

I used a $45 Linksys WRT54G wireless router (I use this workhorse for home and business clients all the time because of its GPLed firmware and subsequent rich 3rd party firmware development). The Xbox will connect to this WRT54G via Ethernet– I’ll then tell the WRT54G to connect to my existing wireless network in such a way that it will become a wireless bridge.

A wireless bridge is nothing more than a way to connect two or more physically separated network segments. Businesses and campuses often use this type of technology as a cost effective way to interconnect their various building’s networks.

The router’s factory Linksys firmware will not allow you to create a wireless bridge, but the third party firmware, dd-wrt, will.

A quick firmware flash and simple dd-wrt configuration got everything ready for deployment. I placed the new router with the Xbox, connected the Xbox to router, powered them up and, like magic, the Xbox was on-line and streaming music.

My wife was happy.

Is this a permanent solution? Perhaps. Sure, I’d rather have Gigabit Ethernet running the entire length of the network, but, for now, this is a working, cost-effective and acceptable solution. I’m hoping that, as my data transfer needs grow, so too will the available Wifi speeds. Intel says it’s seeing real-world speeds of 100Mbit/sec. to 140Mbit/sec. for 802.11n equipment. Sounds good to me.

It was back to my parents house for a little holiday cheer and, as time allowed, a little family tech support. I enjoy helping out my folks and two other sets of in-laws with their computer troubles. It helps me feel useful when comparing ‘handy skills’ with my Journeyman plumber brother.

The Symptom

The PC wouldn’t grab an IP via DHCP. If assigned a static IP all was good, but ipconfig /renew from the command prompt reported back “an error has occurred while renewing interface Local Area Connection. The RPC server is unavailable”

The Solution

The NIC is fine, but the network stack has become corrupt. OK, fine. However, refreshing the TCP stack in WindowXP isn’t as easy as it was with XPs older brothers.

Here is the fix I use:

1. Click Start, and then click Run.
2. In the Open box, type regedit, and then click OK.
3. In Registry Editor, select File, Export and then save a copy of the registry to the desktop.
4. In Registry Editor, expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services.
5. Right-click Winsock, and then click Delete. When you are prompted to confirm the deletion, click Yes.
6. Right-click Winsock2, and then click Delete. When you are prompted to confirm the deletion, click Yes.
7. Click Start, then Control Panel, and then Network & Internet Connections (or Network Connections).
8. Right-click on your Local Area Connection (the offending NIC), and then click Properties.
9. In the Local Area Connection Properties click Install.
10. In the Select Network Component Type click Protocol, and then Add.
11. You will now see a list of available protocols, click Have Disk…
12. Enter the following path, c:\windows\inf or c:\winnt\inf, and then click OK
13. Selecting “Windows” on the left, you will see an expanded list of available protocols on the right. Select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), and then click OK
14. Reboot

Boom! Back in business!

You can now delete the registry backup you saved on your Desktop.

The beta Windows Live Writer being developed for Microsoft’s Windows Live suite of services is yet another tool available to the minions of bloggers of teh Internets. I’ve given it a shot and find it to be small, nimble, intuitive, and feature rich. Things look favorable so far.

Here’s a quick review and run-through.

I find little jems like this post to be very helpful, usually on a daily basis. A big ‘thank you’ to Sean Aune at Mashable.com for his hard work assembling this list.

From time to time it is necessary to email some type of attached electronic document in the course of business or correspondence.  Inevitably I’m confronted with someone saying “we can’t open [excel, word, powerpoint, pdf, jpg, mpeg, etc] files. Why don’t you just fax it to us”.

Fax it to you?  What… did we suddenly worm-hole back to 1981?!?

Forget it.  I’d much rather convert it into something you can open. That’s when this huge list of file converters comes in handy  …that and when you want to rip those Alton Brown episodes to your phone/ipod.

Viva la Paperless Office!

A while back digg front-paged the “totally revamped” speedtest.net. It is an excellent tool for discovering your true Internet connection speed.

Below are my Northfield/Charter results:

In additon, Dslreports has a popular, tried and true speedtest applet.

…this stuff is oftentimes useful for initial testing/trouble-shooting network problems.