Artifact Weblog

Recently a customer of mine was experiencing problems with WGA under Windows XP with SP3.  Upon boot-up and login WGA some of the PCs would state that the Windows installation was not legitimate.  This was odd as I had recently reinstalled Windows XP on these machines with the correct volume license key. Comparing the actual product key (using Belarc Advisor ) I found that it differed from what it was supposed to be… very odd.  So how to remedy this?  Here we go: Step 1: Start | Run | regedit Go to: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\WPAEvents Right-click OOBETimer and choose Modify Change at least 1 digit of this code Step 2: Start | Run | %systemroot%\system32\oobe\msoobe.exe /a This runs the activation wizard.  Choose Yes I want to telephone… and hit Next Choose Change product key I entered the correct product key and hit Update Choose Remind me later I think a restart was then required… can’t ...

Piriform, who brought us the wonderful CCleaner along with Defraggler and Recuva have just brought out a free tool called Speccy.  It’s a really nifty and polished system information tool.  If you want to find out what’s under the bonnet of a PC without having to lift the bonnet then I highly recommend this.

I’ve been running Windows 7 Ultimate (32 bit) on a white Core2Duo MacBook for quite some time now but could never get the audio working and there was a red light coming out of the Aux port.  I was had used the Snow Leopard Boot Camp drivers on the CD and this had worked for most of the other devices.  Any drivers I downloaded and installed from the web failed to work.  I got a great tip for dealing with this problem on: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1860928&tstart=0   The key seems to be running the installer Administrator in Vista compatibility mode… Insert the Snow Leopard install CD Browse to \Boot Camp\Drivers\IDT SigmaTel Right-click the “SigmaTelSetup.exe” file and choose “Troubleshoot compatibility” Choose “Troubleshoot program” choose the first tick box and hit “Next” Choose “Windows Vista” and then “Next” Choose “Start the program…” and then “Next” The driver will now install, click on the progress balloon...

A customer of mine recently had a problem with Excel 2000 – yes lots of people are still using Office 2000 as it’s very fast and does most of what they need.  It had crashed and they hadn’t saved their changes in a few hours. Now, if this had been Office 2003/2007 the next time they opened Excel it would have prompted them with an “AutoRecovered” version of their file.  By default Excel 2003/2007 AutoRecover an open worksheet every 10 minutes – this can be changed. But this didn’t seem to be the case with Excel 2000.  I had thought it was available in Excel 2000 but nothing could be found in Tools | Options.  It was there in Word 2000 in Tools | Options | Save so what was the deal? Turns out that, by default, AutoRecover isn’t installed in Excel 2000. It’s there as an Add-In.  You must first install the Add-In by going to Tools | Add-Ins and choosing the “Autosave” Add-In.  Once this installs you’ll see the Autosave option in the Tools menu.  Cli...

I just wrote a mini review of the superb little D-Link DNS-323 on Komplett and thought I’d copy it here.  About the size of a tiny toaster, this device is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) which you connect to your home or work network and it behaves rather like a miniature server, providing shared file/folder access, printer sharing, remote FTP access, and UPnP media streaming.  artifact can supply this device for around €134 ex. VAT although hard drives must be purchased and added to the device before it is fully functional.    Images taken from www.dlink.co.uk Mini Review on Komplett This is a super little piece of technology. I've had one of these for about 3 years now and it has never given me a second's trouble. This kind of reliability is certainly rare. I put 2 Seagate 500GB drives in it running in RAID-1 mode and have enjoyed dependable, zippy performance. This, of course, was back when Seagate still made hard drives that weren't diabolical. The ...

Recently I had to setup a connection to a shared printer in OS X.  The printer was being shared on a TCP/IP network by a HP server running Windows Server 2008 Foundation.  I had some trouble setting up the printer using the printer set wizards in System Preferences and discovered that Mac OS X has a built in web server for CUPS (the Common Unix Printing System) that allows you to setup a printer with much greater granularity and, it would appear, a greater chance of success! Open up Safari and browse to the following address:  http://localhost:632 The wizards are then relatively straightforward as shown in the samples below…

First off, Happy New Year to you!  I hope you had a great Christmas. My day to day laptop is a white Apple MacBook which runs Snow Leopard and Windows 7 Ultimate using Boot Camp.  This is fab as it enables me to go out to both Mac and PC customers and bring just one laptop.  However, I’ve often needed to take a screen grab when in Windows mode and couldn’t figure out the keyboard shortcut, here it is: fn + shift + F11 For the full list of these shortcut follow the link below, it’s for MacBook Pros but gives a good idea… http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1220 Note: If you have a USB PC keyboard connected the PrtScr button should work fine.