Drivers Causing "This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer" On Startup

This weekend I had to reinstall a driver for a laptop touch pad. I went to the Sony site and got the driver, it came in a zip file and looked pretty standard. A load of driver files and an install file.

It install all OK and the touchpad started to have its scroll options, however then I rebooted and found each time the laptop started up Windows Vista kept asking to confirm I wanted to run the programs, "This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer". Straight away I thought it had to be the file was blocked from running as it came from a download. I went to the files unblocked them all, clicked apply and rebooted again only to find it happen again.

Just to ensure I hadn't forgotten to click apply I tried this again only to find the same thing. After Googling for the issue I found the issue was that the installer had simply copied the drivers and files. This meant that the NTFS information was also copied, this information contained the flag "downloaded from internet" along with others.

The solution was to strip these files of this information, luckily you can obtain a free tool to do this. "Streams" from Sysinternals, I simply downloaded this,http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/Streams.mspx, ran it on the directory, command prompt only, and rebooted to find all was well.

Certainly one to remember as I have came across this before and removed the program.

Windows Vista + Loosing the Ability to Hibernate

I'm one of the few people I know that use the Hibernate feature on my laptop. I find its helpful when shutting down for the evening but want to resume exactly where I left off the next day. Sleep even S3 doesn't work for me as I often find my battery depletes as on this laptop it is shockingly poor.

The other day I was performing some basic maintainence and decided to run disk cleanup to see if it was any better than XP's counterpart, it ran well and asked me would I like to remove my hibernate file. This is where my troubles began, I expected the file to be recreated upon my next hibernate, however what did happen was hibernate ceased to exist on my start menu.

After much hunting through the Control Panel I was unable to find a definitive option to renable the hibernate file, power options was all setup to hibernate however I was still unable to hibernate. I then found a simple command line setting you need to run to renable it, or even turn it off if that is your desire.

First open a command prompt window in administrative mode, its annoying when you forget to do this, then simply run the following: powercfg -H ON. The -H switch indicates hibernate and then its a simple on off. And that's it Hibernate restored and my laptop is back to it's normal self, good stuff.

Going on a Safari

So earlier today Safari 3 Beta 3 was released to the online community. Not only will Safari 3 be a long overdue update for the Mac but it will also be the first version of Apple's gem on Microsoft Windows, Vista and XP. For me as a web developer, and I'm sure other web developers will agree, this is a good thing. No longer will developers that use MS Windows as their primary OS have to borrow a mate's Mac or use an online screen grabber just to see if their site works ok in Safari. This is great news especially if you are developing a lot of AJAX and YUI based interface's which can be time consuming to debug on two different machines. So being an excited geek that I am I decided to download this beta on to the laptop I am currently using. Needless to say the installation was smooth, although having to choose if I wanted quicktime, is this really necessary???, and if i wanted to use Bonjour! was a minor niggle to me. After a quick install I fired up Safari and I must say it loaded very quickly, and I was presented with a very familiar Safari interface that trys to make your machine look more like a Mac than a PC. What struck me most was the anti-aliasing all over the GUI. I knew this is how Mac's worked but I never figured it would port to XP that well. Vista I expected would work but not XP. I can happily say it works amazingly well. In fact I'm writing this post in it, input fields look round and sexy, none of my text looks jagged its all smooth and yummy! Any how I decided to check a few of my favourite site's to see if I could spot any issues, especially JavaScript ones, but so far I haven't spotted any. Although I must admit I have only visited big mainstream sites that you would expect to work anyway. So far every site I have loaded has done so in a very quick manner and can i just say it again, anti-aliasing. Obviously a quick half an hour play doesn't really constitute a full tech grilling, and as it's only beta 3 I wouldn't recommend putting it on a machine which you wouldn't want harmed, but so far so good. A few month's ago Thom Shannon blogged about having to get a Mac or use screen grabbers to test site's, it now looks that this isn't the case. Just goto http://apple.com ;) I look forward to playing with this beta over the next few weeks and you never know, maybe Safari could still my heart and become my general web browser when I'm not developing. You never know ;)

More Vista Tips - IIS 7 and Visual Studio 2005

IIS 7 Woes

Tonight I decided to carry on with Old Roan's site, I havn't touched it since I reinstalled Vista on the weekend. Everything is running pretty sweet now, even got my "New Day" office 2007 installed. All was grand. Until I resetup the old roan site in IIS7. When I tried to view the site: oldroan.mjjamesdev.mj for example I got a nice: HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error Yummy, after about 10 mins of faffing I realised that the security permissions on the folder were set to, Administrators, Creator Owner and my user only. When copying the data back to my main drive off my backup the Users group got lost. So a quick add user group with read and execute permission solved everything.

Visual Web Developer Express 2005 Woes

By default, the VS 2005 range including the express editions don't like IIS7. When you try to open a site that you have running in IIS7 its says the product is not compatable. I was gutted to hear this but for the past month I have been using Vista I never really thought much about it as I know 'Orcas ' is only around the corner. However stumbled upon Scott Gu's Blog article detailing how to get it all working. Needless to say this is great and really does help :D

Must be the night for Blogging - iTunes & Vista

Well part three of my early encounters with Vista has lead me to quickly post about using iTunes with it. I have been using Vista for three days now and on neither day have I been able to connect to the iTunes music store and auth my music. I kept getting: "Connection attempt to Apple web site was successful. Connection attempt to iTunes Store was successful. Secure connection attempt to iTunes Store was unsuccessful. An unknown error occurred (-9808)." However tonight I decided to try and fix it, first I disabled my firewall just to check that wasn't blocking it, even though iTunes is an exception and it still err'd. I then decided to reactivate it and restart the service. Lo and behold it worked and now all my lovely iTunes purchases are back ;) So if you get this problem try restarting the Vista Firewall.

Frolicking with Vista - 2 - How Not To Do It

So yesterday was a long day, Im way behind in doing me mates church a website and was meant to be working on that al day. However I decided to try out the new Orcas CTP. Mistake, started installing it and the .Net Framework 3.5 install failed. Not only did it fail but it corrupt my entire ASP.Net. DOH. So I could no longer code. So I tried to do repair installs on all my frameworks, but nahdah. So, I decided to get my spare HDD installed into my machine, and configured it to be my main hdd and successfully installed Vista as I thought this would be quicker than trying to fix my XP's. Now I tried to do a clean install of Vista by doing a bodge However when i tried to activate with my official key it failed and told me i had to do an upgrade from XP :( So I was gutted, I then tried to reboot into my old XP's using the bootcfg app I posted on del.icio.us the other day but they fail to load. So Im currently royally screwed. Cant get to old boots and new vista although working fine won't activate, looks like I'm going to have to format all 3 OS drives, then install XP on 2 of them and then upgrade one of those for Vista, oh the joy. At least Ill get another storage drive out of it ....

Frolicking with Vista - 1

Well after waiting roughly 9-10 weeks for my Vista "free" upgrade, which actually cost me £12 handling and shipping :S It finally arrived. A nice new shinny Vista Home Premium - OEM. Now as expected this was an upgrade edition, so as with all older Windows OS' i was expecting to do a clean install and simply provide my XP media to prove i qualified for the upgrade. So after slapping another HDD in so i could triple boot, Dev1, Games and now the new Dev2 which will eventually lead to Dev1 being formatted, I started up the install process, slapped in me key and then was very nicely told that i couldn't clean install a Vista Upgrade it could only be done in an existing OS. Slap in the face number 1. So I then and rather rashly might I add, decide to get rid of me third HDD for now, as it was running off the slave IDE on the Secondary controller anyway and was installed under the cdrom, which took some fiddling. I decided to upgrade Dev1 as it was only reinstalled no more than 2 weeks ago following some tedious AMD X2 upgrade. I started this process fine, loads up, copies files in windows, all looked very pretty. Scheduled reboot so it can uncompress the Vista image and take over your old OS and guess what happens when the OS Setup kicks in. STOP: 0x0000007B Yes thats right a dreaded BSOD. Bugger was the first thing i said, and felt like cussing our mate Bill again. Slap in the face number 2. So here I am pondering what my next move is. Reboot and try it again. Reboots BSOD again. So here's to me hoping i can get the Old OS back as really its not changed anything, so i reboot and choose load previous version of windows. Luckily this then presented me with the usual choose your XP boot and I was happy again. However when ever I reboot now it trys to start installing vista again and if i forget to cancel it I get my loving BSOD. So after waiting for an age my Vista experience has been a bit crap so far. And last night I had another friendly encounter with it. I helped a guy from church setup his new laptop, printer and wireless Internet. Wireless took no more than 15mins. To then find that his brand new printer didn't come with Vista drivers was shocking. HP should be ashamed! So we then spent about 20mins downloading 180Mb Vista drivers off of the HP site. So it all worked fine once we had the drivers but it not shipping with them is, in my opinion, shocking. Any how hopefully tomorrow I will grace these bloglines with more joyful tales of my Vista experience