Windows XP Pro Upgrade

Yesterday I upgraded my Desktop and Laptop PC’s to Windows XP Pro. I wanted to have them join my domain here at home so I wouldn’t have to type my username and password in all the time.

First one I did was my Desktop. I ran a fresh install after the upgrade failed very badly. (Video card wouldn’t recognize) So with a fresh install of XP Pro I joined it to the Domain which is served by my Ubuntu Linux server. Joining it was no problem. This is how I did it

Start -> Right Click on My Computer -> Properties

Then under “Computer Name” tab, click on “Change…”

Where you see “Member Of” click the “Domain:” button then type in your domain. In my case it was “miller”.

Now you need to restart your computer. Now here where I had another problem. All Domain Controllers have a logon.bat script witch is run every time any user logs on to a computer within the network. Now in my home, we have never had Windows XP Pro so this is the steps I had to go through to get it working. On the server there is a Samba server that basically talk on the windows protocol. I followed this tutorial on how to setup the server.

Ok now I’ll get to the good part. In the /etc/samba/smb.conf file there is few lines that read this…

# Default logon
logon drive = Z:
logon script = logon.bat
logon path = \\server1\profile\$U

So that worked fine when I was connecting manually to the shares but now that I want permissions and such working I need this logon.bat to work. After going through a few Google Search pages I figured out how to get this to work. All I had to do was add the line “path = /home/netlogon” So when I was done though’s few lines, it looked like this…

# Default logon
logon drive = Z:
logon script = logon.bat
path = /home/netlogon
logon path = \\server1\profile\$U

Ok now I created a logon.bat in the /home/netlogon folder. My logon.bat mounts three shared drives I have created. (The How To Forge link will show you how to make other shared folders.)

net use Y: \\server1\shared
net use X: \\server1\programs
net use W: \\server1\pictures

So now your asking your self “Why didn’t he use Z:?” Will I didn’t because I specified Z: as the mounting point for the users home directory in the smb.conf. So now I can logon and off my computer with ease. My dad and sister can logon my computer and have access to all there files and none of myna.

Next I’m going to talk about upgrading my laptop. Now I ran the upgrade from XP Home to Pro. Every thing went well till I started using certain things. First thing I notices was Windows Updates would not run. It said there was 34 to install, but when I would run them they would all fail. The second thing I noticed was Internet Explore 6 was installed. So again I went to my good friend Google and started searching. A few people have had this problem and the easiest way to fix it was to make a simple batch file. I will go through this step by step.

  1. Open up Notepad (Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Notepad
  2. Copy the following lines into the file
  3. regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
    regsvr32 /s wuaueng1.dll
    regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
    regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
    regsvr32 /s wups2.dll
    regsvr32 /s wups.dll
    regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll
  4. Now save the file as update.bat onto your desktop
  5. Close the file then open it from the desktop.

Or Download the Batch file from Here

windows-update-fix.bat

A command prompt window should pop-up then disappear. Now if I run Windows Updates all install will work. Basically XP Pro Upgrade took out all the patches that XP Home had. But XP Pro didn’t know what was already there. So by running “regsvr32” we tolled windows that, Hey these files are here. Windows Updates is now fully functional.

Well hope this helps you in your indevers of Windows and Linux. If you have any questions or comments please post them on the Forums.

Vista

Well Vista is gone now. There were to many problem with software running on it. I don’t have a Vista disk with me or I would do a fresh install so instead XP is going back on it. I may install it later on but not until I get more RAM for my laptop. Till next time…

Later

Visual Basic & Vista

I have finally taken the Vista plunge! And I have to say it isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Me and another guy at my co-op placement decided we need to educate our selves for the growing Vista world. Working at a IT place saying “Vista sucks’ didn’t get us very far with customers that liked it. ๐Ÿ˜› Anyway’s, I ran the upgrade script and only had 2 applications that didn’t work to well in Vista.

  1. AVG… It didn’t like the upgrade… Had to un-install and re-install it… no bigy
  2. Norton Ghost… I new this one was going to shit badly ๐Ÿ˜›

Still having a few issues with little things like Miro. Miro will not start at all, even after upgrading Miro. Second thing would be, the Documents, Pictures and Music buttons in the start menu. They just don’t work.

All in all it’s a good OS. The problems I just mentioned is enough to drive me to just do a fresh install. I’m hoping to do this next week.

Next Topic I want to discus is Visual Basic. I downloaded and installed Visual Basic 2005 Express the other day. I have to say that VB is one kick as language. Only took me a day to get the concepts although I’m still going through tutorials and stuff. I’ll post some of my applications later on.

Anyway’s that’s all for now see yall later.

Winamp LED Visualization

Well I have made myself a 8 LED segment that flashes to the beat of music with Winamp. It’s fairly straight forward. I started with this tutorial.

Here is the parts list

  • 1.5 Volt LED’s (under 30mA)
  • 1 Sided circuit board
  • 1 Male LPT plug
  • 160ohm Resisters

The steps are fairly easy just go through it and you shouldn’t have any problems.
Here are some pictures on the construction of myn.

At first I had lade all the components out onto a bread board where it’s sat there for about a year. Just Yesterday I got the idea of buying a board to stick all the components on. Heres a picture of the before.

Bread Board

This next picture is of all the components soldered onto the board.

p1010322.JPG

Little bit of carpet tape had here it is.
p1010323.JPG

Done!
p1010331.JPG

Birthday

Well my birthday was on July 23 and my parents decided to get me a new mixing board. Well it arrived today and boy is it neat! ๐Ÿ˜€ It’s the new Alesis MultiMix 12 FireWire. It is a small version of the bigger recording studio mixing board. It does have firewire witch is already built in so there is no $500 add-in card later on. For around $300 it is a very nice digital mixer.

The FireWire port is what made me really want this board. It connects to the PC or the Mac and sends all 12 tracks through the firewire into a multi track recorder. In my case I use Adobe Audition. It alows me to set the diffrent devises to diffrent tracks. This makes fixing sound problems very easy when editing.

Another cool feature is the Firewire allows sound not on to come in, but go out to. So it acts as a sound card as well as a recorder and a mixer.

Another thing that the MultiMix has is a Digital output (Yellow Plug on the top). This again, acts as another output from the main mix.

To sum up this board is very cool and I would recommend it to anyone that wants to get into small recordings and or Podcast which is the reason I got it.

P.S. I have a tutorial on how to convert you PS2 Head set into another sound card. I havenโ€™t made it step by step yet but I will post it later on.