This is a quick blurb that may help somebody out with an issue that irks the heck out of me. I used to routinely encounter a problem with Microsoft Outlook 2003 on startup complaining -”The data file Personal Folders was not closed properly. The file is being checked for problems.” Outlook would then spend 30-60 seconds checking the file. While it would always pass the check, Outlook would not complete loading and allow me to read new messages until this check was done. It was more an irritant than anything else. Additionally, if I exited from Outlook, the Outlook process would never die off completely (unless I killed it in Task Manager or Process Explorer), compounding the problem further when I restarted Outlook.

I have tried several things over time to resolve this issue but none worked reliably until I used ScanPst. ScanPst is a Microsoft utility that can be used to repair corrupted PST files. On my Windows XP system, it is located at “C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033\SCANPST.EXE”. Anytime I run into the issues mentioned above, I close Outlook (ensure that the process is dead), launch ScanPst, scan all my PST files (I do have a few ), and repair any PST files that are reported as needing repairs. Relaunch Outlook, and voila – the problem is gone!

PS: You can find more information about ScanPST and using it at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287497.

Over the weekend, I reinstalled Windows XP on a work laptop as my laptop had finally accumulated enough junk and had slowed down enough to make this time investment worthwhile. I had figured that I would need to go into the office to join the laptop to the office Windows domain. However, I was able to VPN in and join the domain without any issues. The next challenge was to login using my Active Directory domain account remotely (outside my office – from home) when I had never logged in to the domain on this laptop.

It appeared that this would be more challenging than it turned out to be.  My initial thought was to use the “dial-up” option on the Windows XP login screen. Nope, that did not work as the dial-up option is to establish a basic internet connection and does not allow you to establish a VPN connection. I did some googling and finally stumbled upon the solution. Once you have added the computer to the domain remotely over a VPN connection, follow these steps -

1. Login to Windows using a local computer account.
2. Connect using VPN to the remote network where the domain controller resides.
3. Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del
4. Lock the computer
5. Hit Control-Alt-Delete again
6. Login using your domain account – it will work!

Simple, huh!

Hey – no blogging for 5+ months and now 2 entries in a day!! Striking while the iron is hot.

You can never have enough backups – I am certainly a believer in that adage. My laptop backups consist of the following -

• I manually create ghost images of my laptop onto an external USB hard drive once a month – these come in handy if the hard drive crashes or if Windows is corrupted. I keep the external hard drive at home.
• I back up key folders on my laptop onto NAS storage at work using Robocopy – this is incredibly fast to backup large folders that only have small changes. And it is fast enough for large changes as well.
• I back up my Outlook PST files using Retrospect onto NAS storage at work because of open file support.
• I have recently started to back up Outlook PST files and other key folders using Mozy Home – in case you don’t know about Mozy, it is an EMC offering that provides secure, remote, online backups.

While I have never restored from Mozy, I certainly have had ocassion to use my other backups at various times. Mozy seems to be (to be verified) great insurance if things go horribly wrong!

Earlier this week, I suddenly had a problem with my laptop not rebooting cleanly. It sat on the black screen with the Windows logo and the blue progress bar forever. I tried giving it time (almost 20 minutes) but to no avail. I eventually rebooted into safe mode successfully, but even there Windows Explorer was taking a long time to open up. I ran chkdsk -f but that did not help me boot into normal mode.  I gave up pretty damn quickly and ended up just restoring my latest laptop image onto a spare Dell Latitude D830, and using a crossover cable between my two laptops to copy over the files (robocopy to the rescue to quickly sync over files). I was up and running on my spare laptop in ~4 hours.

But the next day, I installed a Windows update and had to reboot and to my dismay, I was stuck yet again on the reboot. After a little bit of digging, I finally tracked it down.

The previous week I had completed my inital Mozy backup that took almost a couple of weeks using the default backup sets recommended by Mozy. I then added a bunch of key folders to my backup sets, and one of those folders has a couple of hundred thousand+ files. I remembered that I had just added those folders to my backup sets on the day that my laptop froze on reboot, and I had another key data point that if I logged in using the local administrator account in safe mode, Windows Explorer would open up quickly where as it took 5+ minutes to open up using my domain account. I ended up editing my Mozy configuration such that I turned on the “don’t show restore menu in Windows Explorer” and the “don’t show the virtual drive in My Computer” options.  Once I did that and rebooted in normal mode, I was good to go! Obviously, the Mozy Home integration with Windows Explorer has some issues and/or limitations. For now, I am running without the restore menu and Mozy virtual drive, and I am good. I really do need to test out the Mozy restore to verify that works – a backup without a functional restore ain’t very useful!

Those of you who have been following my Dell Latitude D830 laptop freeze saga, know that I have been struggling for 3+ months with my laptop simply stopping to respond to mouse clicks/keys.  The only way out used to be a hard reset using the power button. In the comments section of my previous post, I had documented all the tweaks that I had tried in hope of resolving the issue, and many people pitched in with their ideas and experience as this is a fairly widespread issue. Well, since my latest changes, I have been freeze free for the last 3+ weeks, and I think I am finally ready to declare victory.

So what might have resolved my freeze issue? I think the key issue is nView – Nvidia’s multi-display software that runs by default on a Dell laptop with a Nvidia video card.  While, I do use dual displays at work and love them, you can manage dual displays just fine using built-in Windows capabilities. So, if you are experiencing freeze issues, consider performing the following steps -

1. Disable nView COMPLETELY - all the startup programs related to nView (NvCpl, NvMcTray, nwiz) and the NVIDIA Display Driver Service (NVSvc). This is a necessary step to resolving the freeze issue but may not be the only step.
2. Update the nVidia driver – I know that I had tried disabling nView but that did not resolve my freeze issue. I then performed several steps and one of them was to update the nVidia Quadro NVS 140M driver to 174.31 XP WHQL, A05, and I suspect that might have been a critical step.
3. Apply Windows XP SP3 - again, I am not sure if this is needed to resolve the freezes, but I know I did this and it is probably not a bad thing to do if you are running XP.
4. Change power options – again, may not be necessary, but I tend to do this anyways – turn off hard disk sleep in power options.
5. Apply BIOS update – patched my BIOS to A13 – this one I really doubt had anything to do with fixing my issue but I did do this before my issue was finally resolved.

I just hope that I don’t have to eat my words that my freeze issue has been resolved – I don’t really have the time to deal with this anymore!

In case, this post helps you get past your freeze issue,  do post a quick comment as that might help others who are experiencing the same issue. All the best!

I recently ran into a problem with “hibernate” on my Windows XP Dell Latitude D830 starting to take 5+ minutes. My laptop used to take roughly 20-25 seconds to complete the hibernation process, but recently it started to take way longer. I did not realize it initially because I would kick off hibernation, close the laptop, and put it away in my laptop bag. Then one day I found that my laptop was incredibly hot and the next time I actually observed the hibernation process take place painfully slowly and I knew I had a problem.

Yes, this problem was on the same D830 laptop that I have been experiencing freeze issues on. I had been fiddling around with various changes on my laptop in the hope of resolving my freeze issues and I figured that one of my changes must have caused this hibernation slowdown. I had done several things including installing Windows XP SP3, updating drivers, and disabling various programs, but none of them seemed like the root cause of the issue other than SP3 which seemed like a remote possibility. Then, I recalled that I had also disabled “write caching” on hard drive in the hope of fixing my freeze issue. Well – turning that back on fixed my hibernation slowdown – I am back to being able to hibernate in 20-25 seconds. Now, why this behavior happens is not something I have bothered to research, but I am happy to be past this as I use hibernation extensively. Of course, am hoping that “write caching” does not re-excite my freeze issue or else I will no choice but to live with a slow hibernate process.

Cutting out all my babble – if your Windows XP hibernation process is taking too long, a possible reason is that write caching is turned off for your hard disk – turn it on and you should be good!

We use an inexpensive NAS device from Iomega (StorCenter Pro 150d) in our office for personal/test server backups. This has been operational for more than a year with minimal to no issues. We had tied the device to our local Windows domain for user authentication and that was trivial to set up as well. Today, we started having issues with users being prompted to login when accessing the 150d as a network share even after logging in to the Windows domain, specifying their correct credentials, and immediately being prompted to login again. Obviously, not very functional!

Given that both our system administrators were out, I figured I would look into the issue. Initial thought was that a restart ought to do the trick – not quite so. Once I realized that the restart did not resolve the issue, I dug deeper and in a few minutes found an issue that I suspected was the root cause. Even though the 150d is part of our Windows domain, it does not appear to synchronize its time with the domain controller. So over the course of the year, its time had gotten badly out of whack with reality. I am not an expert in Kerberos security protocol (understatement of the year ), but I figured that if the time difference between the 150d and the domain controller was large enough, then there was a strong possibility that the Kerberos service ticket presented by my laptop would be rejected by the 150d. I corrected the time on the NAS, restarted and tested access. Sure enough, that resolved the issue!

Nice! Yes, I know enough about a lot of things to be dangerous on all fronts!

I recently changed my laptop and got a new Dell Latitude D830 (with a Intel Core 2 Duo T9300, 4GB RAM, and a 160GB 7200 RPM hard disk) with Windows XP. I was initially very happy with my new laptop but in the last week I have been experiencing frequent system freezes – almost once a day and today had it happen twice! The laptop simply stops responding to mouse clicks/keys after running just fine for a few hours. The only way out is for me to hard reset the laptop. I have yet to see any kind of pattern to these freezes. It is extremely frustrating. I ran a memory test using memtest+ overnight for 8+ hours but everything looked fine. I have run some Dell diagnostics and have not found anything wrong yet. I plan to run more comprehensive diagnostics overnight. I also am running some perfmon logging with the hope that I might see something in the logs that might give me a clue. These problems sure seem hard to track down. Anybody have a clue on what I can do?

PS: Please read my comments below for updates and resolution – yes, the issue may be fixed finally.

PPS: August 3, 2008 update: Nope, the issue is not fixed!

PPPS: September 27, 2008 update: I am hopeful again that my issue has been resolved -read below for updates/resolution.

PPPS: October 5, 2008 update: Check out my follow-up post on a summary of my laptop freeze resolution steps.

Yes, yes, and yes! Last week, I finally decided to admit defeat and upgrade to XP from Vista. The final straw in the coffin was Vista’s repeated propensity for killing IBM Rational Application Developer v7. Yes, RAD is bloatware in several respects, but Vista would also kill Windows Explorer repeatedly. You would think the O/S would be able to control a key component like Windows Explorer better. Anyways, I had it with Vista and reinstalled XP on my laptop. Whew! It is good to be back to a real Operating System that actually delivers acceptable performance.

Some of the performance benefits that I see on XP include -

• The OOTB network performance is just fine. I can actually get all the bandwidth and throughput that my ISP provides.
• When I attempt to startup VMWare Server on my XP laptop, I no longer lose access to my laptop for 2 full minutes  and more before it responds to a mouse click!

I did run into this minor issue with installing XP on my laptop that XP does not have drivers for SATA. So, I had disable AHCI (native SATA support) in the BIOS on my Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop during the install – yes, I could have hit F6 during the XP install and provided the relevant drivers but did not do so as I kind of rushed my XP install. Once, I completed the install, I wanted to enable AHCI support and found that caused the BSOD (blue screen) during XP startup. I had to disable AHCI support to get past this. I finally stumbled on HOW TO switch from IDE to AHCI mode without having to reinstall Win XP (GUIDE). I followed these instructions to the core (updated the registry, copied the driver, re-enabled AHCI, and rebooted) without issues.

It is good to be free! I hope you will learn from my experience and avoid Vista – stay with XP!

I have always had a complaint against Windows terminal services (aka remote desktop connections) that you could not easily transfer files between the drives on the local and remote computers. Well, thanks to Claudio I discovered that my complaint did not have a basis in fact and it was just my ignorance.

Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) does allow you to copy files to/from local/remote drives. To enable this, follow these steps -

• Launch the RDC client
• Click the “Options” button
• Click on the “Local Resources” tab
• Click on “More”
• In the “Local drives and resources” popup, choose the local drives that you want to have access to on the remote computer.
• Now proceed with the RDC as you normally do
• Launch Windows Explorer on the remote computer and you will find your local drives listed as available drives on the remote computer; now you can copy folders and files in either direction to your heart’s content! Is that easy or what?

A huge thanks to Claudio for opening my eyes!

While I am at it, another quick RDC tip – you probably want to disable “Printers” as a resource (again on the “Local Resources” tab) that you want to access on the remote computer. If the remote computer cannot see your local printers, that will generate extraneous errors in the Windows Event log. I hope this helps you out!

I just had a quick update on my Windows Vista issues in general, and my network performance in particular. As I had written earlier, since getting my new Vista laptop, I had experienced slow network performance compared to Windows XP computers with the same ISP connection. I had turned off auto-tuning by executing netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable on a command prompt run with administrator access. This had helped, but not all the way. I was still experiencing occasional issues with using network shares at work.

Well – I tried turning off Remote Differential Compression based on some reading that I had done. However that was to no avail. Then I went ahead and downloaded a Vista hotfix – http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/931770. The hotfix describes symptoms on a Windows Vista-based computer, wherein when you try to copy files from a server on a network, the copy process may stop responding (hang), and you may receive a message that resembles the following:

Calculating Time Remaining

0 minutes remaining

Well, this was very similar to what I was experiencing – so I went ahead and applied this fix. And voila, my performance went up dramatically – I started getting about 4-5x the performance accessing the LAN file shares.

Also conincidentally, just before I applied the fix, I was trying to burn a DVD using the Vista built-in DVD Burn utility and was it slow! Applying the 931770 hotfix seemed to improve the speed of burning a DVD as well. Of course, I don’t recommend that anybody else suffer through using the Windows Vista built-in burn utility – I switched to Nero myself!

Hopefully this is the last of my network performance issues on Vista!