But all was running fine until a few months later when I’d decided to sell the netbook. When I powered it up I got a message telling me that my copy of Windows was not “genuine” and that I may be a victim of software piracy. It had also turned off the desktop background, so my desktop was now a rather boring, plain black! Based on the fact the netbook had the product key on a sticker attached to it, I was pretty sure this was just another case of Microsoft’s draconian steps being a bit, shall we say, WRONG!

So I opened up the activation screen, activated the software. It took about 5-10 minutes (and I’ve no idea why, presumably it sends a little information to Microsoft, which says yay or nay, amirite?). Now the activation went fine, eventually, but while the message telling me the software wasn’t genuine was gone, my desktop was still black. And as we all know, Windows 7 Crippled Edition Starter doesn’t allow you to change your desktop. Uh-oh – a buyer might not be best pleased by this, especially as I’d just taken a photo to list showing the nice pretty blue Windows 7 background.

Anyway, I Googled a bit and after a while I came across the solution. it’s actually fairly straightforward but just tricky to find – nobody at Microsoft Answers seemed to have an answer, but here it is:

1. Open the Registry Editor (by opening the Start menu and typing “regedit” in the search/run box)
2. Find the key under /HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop called Wallpaper.  This should be empty (hence the plain background, presumably).
3. Right-click this key and Modify the value to the location of the image (e.g. C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper\Windows\img0.jpg )

Now I did this to restore the original image after Microsoft ballsed it up, but it did get me wondering if the same technique could be used to change your Windows 7 Starter background to any image you wanted and thus overcome the stupid restriction impost by Microsoft. To be continued…

But it seems Toshiba netbooks have a disgustingly garish OEM/branded background screen that’s displayed during startup and logon (though Win 7 starter still has the standard Windows 7 desktop background).  Turns out this isn’t too tricky to get rid of (and yes, it works on Windows 7 Starter).

Just head on into the registry and find the key called: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background - change the value from 1 to 0 and you’re back to the default Windows background.

You can apparently also change the background to any picture you want if you’re so inclined, but I just want something slightly less distasteful than Toshiba’s background so I’m done there.  Hope this helps someone.

In the mean time I installed the new Ubuntu 11.04 and set up a number of partitions to get it ready. I set up a /boot partition of about 500MB (for Grub etc.?), a / partition for Ubuntu and a /home partition for my documents.  I also set up a “Win” partition to leave a space for Windows and a final NTFS partition to use for documents etc. when I was booted into Windows or to share across to Linux.  Linux seemed to be working fine and I got on the internet etc.  It was all very smooth, much more so than when I installed Ubuntu 9.10 or whatever it was back in the day.

I got hold of a copy of Windows and began trying to install it from SD card.  When it came to selecting a partition for Windows to live on, I picked my 40GB Win partition but Windows started throwing a strop and told me something it seems to have told a few others before me:

Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. See the Setup log files for more information.

Not impressed, I booted into Linux and tried to set a boot flag on this partition.  That took it off my original boot partition though, as a hard drive can only have one boot partition.

In the end I gave up and wiped all the partitions using the Windows installer.  I then created a 40GB partition for Windows, which proceeded to also create a 100MB “system” partition at the start of the drive.  I’m wondering if I’d left my room for Windows at the start of the drive in the first place if maybe I would have avoided this, but as it is – I now have to install Ubuntu all over again.  Fail!!  Thanks Micro$oft!

Of course once I’d done that and spent hours trying to make it work, I realised the download wasn’t compatible with my shiny new laptop because it’s running Windows 7, and Windows 7 doesn’t like old games or something.  Even when I tried following the instructions, it ran (which was more than I’d managed to get it to do myself) but when the main menu loaded, none of the menus would display properly. Fail!

Enter CnCsector.net, who have packaged the game up into a nice installer package that they assure us works with Windows 7 (including Win7 64-bit!). It took 4-5 hours to download all the files (and there doesn’t seem to be any way to skip this – not good!)… though 99% of that is for the movie files for the cut-scenes, which are optional.

Sadly, the same thing happened again – I never did get it working entirely properly, though I did find a semi-solution.  Firstly I noticed that if I hit the Windows key to go back to Windows, then opened the game again the menu was there on screen.  Actually I noticed this when I tried to find out if the menu showed up if I did a Print Screen (it did), but the menu was there when I came back.

Solution

Some while later I noticed that if I put the mouse cursor over where the menu should be and scrolled (e.g. using the scroll wheel, or the side of the laptop trackpad), it would appear (without exiting to Windows).  It’s not ideal but it’ll do me for now.  Thanks to all the guys at CnC Comm who tried to help.

v1.0.1 uses the new URL and normal service is resumed.

So I’d really like to offer a quick thank you to Jarek Gawor for developing (and releasing) his LDAP Browser/Editor which let me double check that I was connecting to the right server/port and play with the settings enough that I eventually got it sussed. Great wee Java tool.

As it turns out, it’s much simpler than that. Apache was sending the file to PHP to be parsed, but PHP was ignoring my code. Why? WAMP Server 2 comes with “short open tags” turned off (this may be a general PHP or PHP 5 thing, though not sure). Click WAMP -> PHP -> php.ini to edit the aforementioned file and find the line:

short_open_tag = Off

Replace Off with On et voila.

The ‘more correct’ though long-winded solution is to replace all your <? opening tags with <?php if you’re really keen (though that’ll also mean replacing <?= with <? echo). Me, I think I like my short tags.

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I hart lolcatz.

I hart lolcatz so much dat wun dai I thoughted “I can has lolcatz wen I makes teh pooter turn on?” So I maded a Vista gadjit an now I has new lolcatz every dai.

If u hart lolcatz liek mee an wants lolcatz in ur pooter makin u laff, downlodes mah gadjit. I has tested it 4 liek rly long time. It rly works, srsly. An evry1 needses moar lolcatz.

Kthxbai.

* If you think that was hard to read, you should see the lolcat bible.

Just now I’ve used the same tool to fix a similar (I think) problem on IIS7 on Vista. I was trying to get some practice with ASP.NET. I’ve already got IIS7 and I’ve already got the .NET Framework 2.0 installed. However it seemed, again, that IIS wasn’t aware of the Framework’s existence. When I tried to browse to a simple Hello World page I was greeted with an HTTP 404 (404.3 to be precise) informing me that:

“The page you are requesting cannot be served because of the extension configuration. If the page is a script, add a handler. If the file should be downloaded, add a MIME map.”

Despite the different error messages it appeared to be a similar problem. Apparently it was. That wonderful little solution again:

1. Start -> Cmd
2. Navigate to your .NET Framework directory (e.g. C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727)
3. Run the command “aspnet_regiis.exe -i”
4. Wait…