Windows Phone 7 and SBS 2008
Like many others that have tried to access Exchange on and SBS server from Windows Phone 7, I discovered this evening that I too fell victim to first to error 80072F0D and then to error 80072F06.
I solved the error 80072F0D by installing the root certificate for SBS 2008 and sending it via gmail to the phone and just installing it from the email.
I solved the error 80072F06 issue by changing my description of the mail server address from mail.[domain].com to remote.[domain].com, which evidently corresponds to what is described in the SBS root certificate.
In any event I can now access my SBS 2008 Exchange server from Windows Phone 7, but this was TOO hard to implement and should have been easier—like it was when I connected with my old iPhone!
Best of Journalism and Kindle Fire–A Great Combination
Conor Friedersdorf has a weekly newsletter called Best of Journalism that provides links to excellent feature pieces available on the web.
Most are long pieces that I would rather read on the couch than in front of a computer. Unfortunately, I tried and failed to use the list on a conventional Kindle. But with the Kindle Fire and its ability to receive emails and decent web access I can now read the pieces on my couch using my new Fire. An improvement in my life that probably won’t make its way into the GDP deflator.
(Sure, I could have done this with another tablet, but I did not own another tablet because they cost significantly more than $200.)
Forgive the long absence of posts, I just lost the habit when I became busy and never picked it back up again. I’m hoping to change that with this post.
Recovering Data from Xbox 360 USB Memory Stick
With out first purchase of an Xbox 360S to replace one of the original Xbox 360s, I could no longer use the original Xbox 360 Memory Unit to move my GamerTag and saved games between the multiple Xbox 360s in our house (the 360S does not support the old Memory Unit). So I purchased an HP v100w 4 GB USB Flash Drive to use for that purpose. Unfortunately after a day of use the Xbox no longer recognized the drive, putting our three little girls’ Kinectimals in jeopardy. Even after adjusting the Windows 7 Explorer to show hidden files and folders, USB stock showed only a single zero byte .tmp file, although the properties of the USB stick showed 3,7GB being used.
An internet search led me to discover that I was not alone in having this problem.
I talked to Xbox support, and after about 45 minutes was told there was nothing they could do—indeed I was told multiple times that it was “impossible” that I was having this problem.
The story has a happy ending, however. Using the Easeus Data Recovery Wizard application $60 with a money back guaranty, I was able to restore the raw files from the USB stick to my PC hard drive. I then reformatted the USB stick using the Xbox 360, deleted the six files in the hidden Xbox 360 directory on the USB drive and copied over the six recovered files of the same name from my PC hard drive. I was thus able to recover all the information on the USB drive.
I note that several times in the process of trying to reformat the USB stick that the Xbox 360 indicated it had failed a data integrity test. Needless to say, I received no such indication when first formatting the USB stock for use with the 360.
I have since replaced the HP USB stick with one from Sandisk, which appears to be working ok after several hours of use. I also have done a backup (by copying the hidden files in the Xbox 360 directory to a PC hard drive) in case this problem arises again.
I can understand why Microsoft doesn’t like backups of game saves and profiles on USB sticks, but they are sufficiently unreliable that users should really be able to keep game saves in the cloud via Xbox Live.
Recommended: Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500
Four of the six PCs in our house (excluding servers) are laptops. Laptops can be put in places like the living room and be closed so that they remain aesthetically unobtrusive.
I can get used to the smaller screens on laptops, but anytime I try to work on them, the mousepad is a serious hindrance to productivity. A portable, wireless mouse eliminates that problem. I have tried several, but they one I prefer is the Microsoft Wireless Mouse 3500.
It is reliable (unlike a HP wireless mouse I bought with a laptop and replaced once only to have it break (it moves the on screen pointer jerkily) a month later. It has an extremely unobtrusive USB stick transmitter that sticks out only a few millimeters from the USB port. It is also fairly inexpensive: I bought it for $17.50 from Amazon recently.
Dell Enterprise Support Rocks
We have Dell PowerEdge T105 server in our house running Small Business Server 2008. It is cover by Dell’s Silver Premium and Next Day Support, which as I discovered this week, is really excellent—a better experience that any other OEM support I have used.
Here is what happened. Several days ago I noticed some problems with the server, that I traced to three of its seven USB ports suddenly having ceased to function. I switched some devices over to working unoccupied ports and fixed the problem, but I wanted the issue fixed. So I called Dell at about 10pm on December 29. There was no wait, the tech asked a couple of questions and concurred that this was a system board issue. The call took about 30 minutes (and would have taken less absent some issues with running and mailing back the diagnostic report he wanted). Dell shipped the part the next day and they scheduled a repair visit for December 31. I was going out with our kids during the day so I was able to schedule the service for a time of my choosing (in this case 4:00 p.m.).
The repair tech arrived a little early and quickly installed the new motherboard. Only issue was that it had a new firmware version so needed new drivers (including the Ethernet driver). However, because this is an SBS box, it runs the DNS server for our network, making it normally impossible for other PCs at our house to access the internet and download the new internet driver. We solved this problem by hooking one of our laptops directly up to our cable modem and downloading the drivers that way. The Dell tech on the phone did a great job of walking me through this process (and a few false starts). A reboot or two later and the server was as good as new.
Sure, in an ideal world Dell would have anticipated the need for new drivers and sent them with the new motherboard, but given the situation all involved did a great job in expeditiously resolving the issues that arose on New Year’s Eve, when any consumer tech support would have been closed making me wait an extra three days. What I saw was a real commitment to problem solving, not to reading through a script (as when it took me 2 hours on the phone with HP to get a replacement mouse) and that is well worth the $300 I paid for three years of such support.
In fact, when it comes time to replace our Media Center PC, I am tempted to buy a Dell Server, add the Ceton OCCUR tuner and call that our new Media Center PC.
Playing Back Blu-Ray Rips on Xbox 360
I had some large chunks of time over the past couple of days to try out some new methods for playing playing back Blu-Ray rips from a the network on my Xbox 360 acting as a Media Center Extender.
I had previously used MakeMKV and AnyDVD to rip Blu-Ray movies to MKV files. With the installation of the Haali spliter codecs on my Media Center PC, these would play on the extender, but not without transcoding. The transcoding produced annoying video issues and audio sync issues. I eventually found this sufficiently annoying that I shelved the project.
Recent threads on The Green Button about successful and (this is important) relatively simple strategies for re-encoding Blu-Ray rips for playback on the Xbox 360 led me to restart the project. My goal was to get video files that would play back on the Xbox 360 with 5.1 audio and no audio or video issues. The ability to get fast forward, rewind, multiple audio track or subtitle functionality was not essential. The process also had to be no more than a few steps. I have no interest in 16 step processes that span multi-day periods for encoding a single movie.
With that said, here is my new approach to ripping Bu-Rays for playback on the Xbox 360:
- Rip the Blu-Ray to my hard drive with AnyDVD. (2 hours)
- Use MakeMKV to turn the main movie into an MKV file with the only the audio track I want. (30 minutes and probably could be combined with step 1)
- Use DVRMSToolbox’s “MKV to DVRMS mencoder” profile to rencode the MKV file to a WMV file that I output to the networked drive where I store all my movies (3-4 hours)
To get DVRMSToolbox to work with Blu-Rays that use the VC1 codec, I had to:
- Create a Codecs subdirectory as in the following: G:\Video\DVRMS Toolbox\Applications\Mencoder\Codecs
- Download the mencoder codecs from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/windows-essential-20071007.zip
- Copy the files from the downloaded zip file into the above subdirectory
This approach produces WMV files a little smaller than 10GB for a two hour movie. Playback is not flawless (a few times when sound will stutter or get out of sync (easily fixed with a pause and restart if you can’t wait until it works itself out) but is much better than trying to play transcoded MKVs,
I tried a number of other approaches and found them unsatisfactory for a number of reasons:
- RipBot264. This is a nicer application than DVRMS Toolbox and I would probably prefer to use it if I could. A nice guide for setting up Ripbot264 can be found here.
Unfortunately, I had audio sync problems that got progressively worse as the movie progressed (and could not be fixed by a stop and restart of playback). It is possible these problems are not widespread as there is a thread describing the audio sync problems using Ripbot to re-encode a rip of the Sherlock Homes Blu-Ray I was using to do my tests. The solution involved demuxing the audio with another application and then remuxing it with just the video encoded by Ripbot. These extra steps are a bridge to far for me at this point, however.
- PavTube. Encodes to WMV I can FF/RW with no audio sync issues, but the video was softer that I would prefer and had many noticeable macroblocking artifacts and no obvious way to adjust the encoding process to eliminate them. Also would have cost me $40. These problems don’t disappear even when encoding to only 720p rather than 1080p.
- Xilisoft. Video seemed softer than I would prefer, and this would not encode to WMV files with 5.1 audio. I did not get the chance to try this with longer than a 3 minute clip without purchasing it for $40, so there may be audio sync issues with longer clips.
Upgrading to the Ceton InfiniTV 4
This weekend I upgraded out Media Center PC to the Ceton InfiniTV 4 muti-stream CableCard OCUR tuner. This replaced the dual internal ATI TV Wonder OCUR CableCard tuners that we had had since CableCard tuners fist became available for Windows Media Center about 3 1/2 years ago.
The install of the Ceton tuner went relatively smoothly. It wasn’t recognized in the first PCI express slot I put it in, but when I moved it to a new slot the system recognized it just fine. Perhaps it just wasn’t seated correctly in the first slot. In any event, the diagnostic application that installed along with the Ceton drivers identified that the card was not being recognized, which was helpful.
Once installed, I put in a Motorola multi-stream Cable Card from one of the old ATI tuners in the new Ceton card and call Comcast to get it paired to the new card…
Comcast “technical specialists” are still unfamiliar with the concept of a CableCard tuner in a PC and I had to fight off being transferred to “Internet” support. Then they took all my information and informed my that a technician would need to come out to pair the card. A spoke to a supervisor who indicated he had no discretion in the matter—that this was policy, albeit one he could not give any rationale for.
Luckily, there was a slot open next morning (Sunday) and the technician came out and got the card paired with just a phone call—the technician could not understand why this wasn’t done over the phone with me yesterday saving everyone involved a hassle.
In fact, the technician may just buy my old ATI cards, having two Xbox 360s at home himself.
Upgrading to a Smaller SSD
The biggest hassle of upgrading our laptops to a Solid State Drive in place of their hard drives had been the need to reinstall Windows and all our applications. The SSDs are generally smaller than even laptop hard drives and Windows 7 disk imaging software will not let you restore a drive image to a smaller drive, even though the portion of the old drive that was actually used was much smaller than the new drive, e.g. you can’t restore a 40GB image from a 250GB hard drive to a 64GB SSD.
Intel has a utility that comes free with their SSDs that will transfer a disk image to a smaller SSD, but as Intel SSDs were about 50% more than the Kingston models I have used, I looked for another solution.
I found the Paragon Migrate OS to SSD application which accomplishes this task with little fanfare, but also for only $20. I used it in our latest SSD upgrade and it worked flawlessly within about one hour. $20 was a small price to pay to avoid an extra two plus hours of reinstallation work.
SSD Not Panacea for TouchSmart TX2 Speed Issues
Having had considerable success installing Kinston 64GB SSDs in two HP laptops at our house, I thought I would install one in our TouchSmart TX2 laptop that has been slow to boot at whose disk access light seems on quite often.
The results have been considerably less impressive than those with our other HP laptops. After installing the new SSD, I can now boot, logon and get to a MyYahoo web page in about 2:40. That is probably a little faster than previously, but is not the dramaticly faster boot time I got with the other laptops. Further, the drive access light is still flashing quite a bit on this PC. Similarly, the TX2 seems somewhat more responsive when used but not dramatically so.
I can think of several possible explanations (none of which seem that likely to be good):
- Unlike our other laptops that had 2GB of RAM, this one has 4GB.
- The TX2 has a dual core AMD processor rather than the Core2 Duo in the other laptops.
- The TX2 uses offline files unlike the other laptops that never travel outside our house.
- The TX2 has more applications, e.g. Flicks, Synaptics Pointing Device, Sync Center that launch on login and this takes more time.
- The TX2 is located farther away from a wireless access point so its lower quality network connections slow down other aspects of its performance.
I recently dramatically reduced the size of the offline files in My Documents. That did not immediately result in any great increase in speed, but it may over time, so I’ll report back if any noticeable increase in boot speed in the future.
Technorati Tags: HP TouchSmart TX2,Kingston SSD,boot,speed,offline files
Weird Italics in Internet Explorer
For the past several days, my new HP desktop computer (running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit) has shown much of the text of emails and web page text in italics. Some investigation revealed the reason: the non-italicized versions of these fonts (Arial, Georgia and Verdana) seemed to have be uninstalled from the PC.
Although these fonts are not available to download, and running SFC from the command line indicated nothing was wrong with the Windows installation, I was able to reinstall these fonts by doing a search of my C: drive, double clicking on another copy of the regular version of these fonts and then clicking on the install button.
