IT professional

Excel Printing out Duplicates

 Well here’s a good one for you, and I hope that this helps someone if they run into the same issue. Two PC’s both have the same printer, and both have the exact same drivers. The printer was an HP LaserJet 1320. The issues was that Excel would print out duplicate copies of everything. Running Excel in safe mode, resulted in the same issue, duplicates. One would think that renaming book.xlt may fix the issue as it may be an underlying setting in the workbook, but that wasn’t the issue either as one did not exist on either PC.

The next step was to go after the printers. Now here is the kicker… the old printer was a USB Printer shared to other PC’s, thus the printer would show up as “HP LJ 1320 on pcname” but the port was a TCP/IP Port pointing to 192.168.1.25. What I ended up doing was wiping the printer out completely, and installing from scratch, using the existing port. After doing that excel printing was fine.

I guess the moral of this story is if you having printing issues with Excel, check to see if it is Excel causing the issues, running Excel in safe mode* will give you a temporary clean slate  to work with. If Printing issues persist, check the workbook file(book.xlt), just search for it under program files. Lastly for duplicate print-outs in Excel… wipe out and re-add the printer. More troubleshooting tips can be found here on the official Microsoft “How to troubleshoot startup problems in Excel” KB article 280504

NS

* click on start – run – then type “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Excel.exe” /s (change this based on the location of your installation)

NetBooks What are they good for?

I’ve been following Netbooks closely, not too close, but close enough

Jenny, yes our Jenny, asked me a couple notable questions. Answering that question will inform people that there are options out there to make the Netbook experience a joyful one.

“I enjoyed your coverage on Netbooks earlier in the month; did you end up getting one? I’ve been considering one myself, but I’m concerned about the memory and whether it will run smoothly enough. Where do you think netbooks perform the best (under what types of work situations)?”

First off, Netbooks i think are a great idea for a travel bug. They are small enough and just as powerful as some notebooks people are using out in the world. I like to travel quite a bit, and the Netbook bug has bit me, although I am very stubborn when it comes to purchasing “toys” Now your average Netbook will come with a 1.6 or 1.66Ghz Processor, remember the N280 chips are coming out full force, make sure you get a Netbook with at least the 1.66Ghz N280 chipset. Its not really the clock speed that makes a difference its the 134Mhz jump in the FSB. 1GB DDR2 SDRAM and 8GB are the norm for the baseline models. These will work well if you just check your hotmail, webmail, or gmail. But are also powerful enough to play streaming movies, music, iTunes, winamp, internet, and even have a webcam built in. If your the kind of person who does those kind of things then the base model is a great starter Netbook. Only caveat is the SSD HDD is only 8GB once the OS is in there, you loose 30-40% depending if you got Windows XP or Vista.

If you’re like me, well then we cant go with the base model… we need to amp it up a bit…

The HP Mini 1000 XP Edition Netbooks comes with the Intel Atom N70 Processor, but has a 60GB HDD… lots of storage for the avid traveller, but its limited to 1GB Memory, not so good…. The HP Mini Mi Edition lets you install up to 2GB memory, although it runs “HP Mobile Internet” built in Linux(not exactly mainstream)

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 is about the same specs although you can only go up to a 16GB SSD Drive, and the camera isn’t standard. There is an option to add bluetooth, I personally have no need for bluetooth. The Dell Mini 12 comes with either the Z520 or Z530 Processor. The hyperlink will take you to Intel’s page, which shows you all the Atom Processors and their differences. The Mini 12 also has the option for either a 40GB or 60GB HDD (4200rpm) for 30$ more then the 60GB HDD you can get an extra 20GB to bump you up to 80GB of space.

Acer has a model that comes with 160GB HDD and up to 1.5GB of memory.

And last but not least, my pic of the crop, ASUS, their N10J model, comes with the N270 Processor, 1GB DDR2 memory, up to 2GB max, a 160GB 5200RPM SATA Drive(up to 320GB), a built-in 1.3Mega Pixel Camera, integrated 802.11a/b/g/n(the only one in this blog to come with draft-n wireless technology), 6-in-1 card reader, VGA/DHDMI, HD Audio and microphone, all this jammed into a 10.2” screen Netbook. And yes you are correct, i know what your thinking, “Wow this isn’t going to be cheap…” its not, its about 1,000CDN

My honest opinion is that if you haven’t bought a Netbook wait for the N280 Atom chip, with its accompanying GN40 chipset, that’s when you’ll see a real multimedia boost. ASUS, Acer and Gigabyte are all expected to announce new Netbooks using the Atom N280 in the first half of 2009, HP and Dell to follow closely behind.

Remember that you could always go out and buy yourself a 2.5” SSD Drive. Just make sure you get a high performance one. The fact that SSD has 0 seek time, would greatly improve the usability of Netbooks. As always they come with a  price… and I would LOVE to get my hands on one of these for my future Netbook… a 256GB SSD Drive with an amazing 200MB/s data read rate, click here

Well i think I have blogged just about enough for tonight… Let me know how your Netbook experience goes!

NS

NVIDIA Ion Platform means HD for Notebooks

They call it a Pico-ATX which measure in at a whopping 10 cm x 7.2 cm!

The reference motherboard is very simple; you’ve got an Intel Atom CPU and a GeForce 9400M next to each other, a single SATA connector and a DDR3 SO-DIMM slot on the other side of the board. And this little thing is powerful enough to play HD video (8 - 25Mbps H.264) the CPU has been measured at 27% utilization while doing so. Ion also has full support for 8-channel LPCM over HDMI.

Built into the board is USB 2.0 ports, a dual-link DVI connector, an HDMI Connector, a SATA 3G connector, and a DDR3 SO-DIMM connection.

Nvidia also says that a GeForce 9400 paired with the Atom Processor will net 10 times the graphics and video transcoding, Fulll HD Video Decode and Display, and is half the size but same battery life. The reference board is Vista Premium and Windows 7 Ready.

For more interesting details check this out.

VMFS and Block Sizes

Well i ran into this error today (4:30 am CST, don’t ask me why I am up right now!) “File too large” when trying to create a virtual machine with a 30GB drive and a 300GB drive. I tracked it down to the fact that the block size on my second LUN is 1MB which gives a max file size of 256GB. I will have to change the block size to 2MB which will let me create 512GB files, unfortunately I need to move a couple VMs off there to do so, I will just end up utilizing vmotion to move the VMs then reformat the LUN using a 2MB block size, then vmotion back. Sounds like fun! Well it isn’t, but its an interesting learning experience. Don’t make the same mistake, and you wont have to deal with this issue yourself.

The table below is the Block size in correspondence with the max file size

1MB Block Size: Maximum filesize = 256GB
2MB Block Size: Maximum filesize = 512GB
4MB Block Size: Maximum filesize = 1024GB
8MB Block Size: Maximum filesize = 2048GB

NS

“MSTSC /console” Where did you go?

I just noticed this in the last few days, I guess its because of the fact that I waited so long to update to SP1, but it seems that with Vista Service Pack 1, Windows XP SP3, and Server 2008 the /console switch is no longer available…

Running mstsc /? will give you the following screen

As you can see the “/console” switch is gone, and I am running Vista Ultimate SP1. The only way to connect to the console now and ONLY on systems NOT running Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3 or Windows Server 2008 or later installed is to use the “/admin” switch.

Anyways, check this out for more info.

Windows Vista and Server 2008 SP2 Beta

I just read from a TechNet email, Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP2 are out, and its a single update file for both! How you say? Well basically because Windows Vista and Server 2008 share the same code base. You need to already be running Windows Vista SP1 or Windows Server 2008 to install. The update is supposed to add new features like support for Bluetooth 2.1, native Blu-Ray media recording, “Windows Connect Now (WCN)“, ex-FAT file system, and windows search 4.0 integration. The list is not complete but it gives you a taste of whats to come. If you feel adventurous then download the update here

I don’t install Service Packs until they are out of beta phase and have been out for at least a few months, if you are like me and would like to block the service pack updates download the Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool

The tool works on Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (valid through March, 2008), Windows XP Service Pack 3 (valid for 12 months following general availability), and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (valid for 12 months following general availability)

NS

Terminal Services Printing Workaround

Would you like to print to that HP Printer that just wont connect through RDP?

Let me lay out the scenario for you.

You have an USB HP Printer of any type.

No matter what you have done you cannot get it to map.

Well here is a little work-around that I put together a while ago.

Take Printer #1 share it; give it any name you would like.

Add a new printer, I usually use Laserjet 1100, assign it to LPT1.

Open up a command prompt.

Type net use LPT1: \\pcname\printer_share_name /persistent:yes

Once you connect to an RDP or citrix session you will see the Laserjet 1100 as a selectable TS Printer.

Print to it, and the print job gets forwarded to the shared printer and will print.

All HP Printers can be mapped this way(the print engines haven’t changes much since the early 90’s), I have even used it once to be able to print to a Kyocera Printer using HP Drivers…

I usually put a batch file on the users desktop for them to delete and remap to the printer in case the connection gets broken.

Anyways this is to be used as a last ditch effort… USB Printers are NOT recommended for Terminal Services or Citrix, nor are any on the compatibility list.

Here is a good link to a lot of useful information… http://www.ccaheaven.com/citrixPrinting….. This page also has some nice information in it on Windows Server 2008 TS Easy Print.

HP iLo doesn’t Connect - Java Error

The specific error im talking about is this one…

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Symantec Backup Exec - Backup to Disk Issue

By default a backup to disk folder is setup to have a maximum size for backup-to-disk files of 1GB and a maximum of 100 of these. Well what happens if you have a backup of say 265 GB’s? It will eventually have written 100, 1GB files, thus provoking backup exec to ask for another drive(which may confuse many)

What you do is you double check you Backup-to-Disk Folder Settings under the devices tab.

You will notice the points below

- Maximum size for backup-to-disk files was set to 1GB

- Maximum number of backup sets per backup-to-disk file was 100

Change them to these settings

- set Max size to 100GB (if NTFS; if Fat32 max size will only be 4GB; at which point I would set the max number of backup-to-disk files much higher)

- set Max number to 4

These settings will allow up to 400gb backups after compression, thats about 850gb of Data. Set the 2 above settings to whatever your system can handle, just make sure you account for enough space!

You can teach a Young Pup an Old Dog’s Tricks!

Well wouldn’t you know it, an old issue creeps up in Vista and it has the same resolution as before..

“The remote session was disconnected because the local computer’s client access license could not be upgraded or renewed. Please contact the server administrator.”

1 . Use the Registry Editor to navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\MSLicensing key on the Windows XP client.

2 . Delete the MSLicensing key.

3 . Close the Registry Editor.

It should now be fixed…