Month: February 2013

Windows 8 – well almost

I have just spend a good few hours trying to get Windows 8 on my laptop, so I could get a bit more involved with it.

You would think that in today’s world things would be easy enough to do – installing the latest Windows Operating System should be one of those. Hmmm not quiet

I download an iso of W8Pro x64 and burnt it off ready to install. I pop it in the laptop, boot from it, put in my key and let it install. I come back about 30 mins or so to find an error message on the screen – Error Code:0x80070570

A Quick look on the Knowledge Base that is Google tells me that there could be something up with the hard disk or the DVD media, but as the laptop had W7 on it and had no problems and the DVD was a fresh burn of an iso I used to install the last W8 Hyper-V machines I gave the disk and the dvd rom drive a clean and tried again.

Again I wander off while it’s doing its stuff and then come back a bit later, again to find the same error message! This time I binned the DVD media and burnt a new copy off in case there was some kind of burn issue.

Again I wander off and go and do some more stuff, leaving it not so long this time before I came back. Again I find the same error message! Ok, so this time I downloaded a different ISO and burnt it off. I then booted and went to install that.
This time I sat there watching it, only for it to do the exact same again!

Last thing I could do was to swap the hard disk with another. So I done that, put the DVD back in, booted and let it do its install.

This time, I paid more attention to it, watching it as I was doing some web dev. Yet again it done the same thing at about 11%!

So, still got problems and I have swapped the hard disk and the DVD media, I don’t have a laptop to swap to see if it was that, but then it was working ok with W7 4 hours before I tried to install W8.

Again, I started an install off, paying even more attention to it. It got to 10% and the DVD stopped flickering and spinning, so I checked the mouse worked and then got a CMD prompt up to see if I could get to a log file. No sooner had I typed in DIR than the DVD started to spin up again?! Seriously what is that all about. So I left it carrying on copying more data only for it to do the same again. Another DIR caused it to spin up again. This went on for a good few time until it seemed to carry on ok. So I done the off and went down stairs.

A little later I came back up to find what looked promising, but turned out to be a hung machine – or so I thought. No mouse, no keyboard – no nothing! Bloody thing! So I pressed the power button getting myself ready to have to start again, only to find that it flickered and suddenly sprung back into to life! It then carried on doing its stuff and installed W8.

Really have no idea what was going on there, as I have never seen anything like that before. But it is now installed and working fine!

Another one fixed

Today I done one of the things that I love doing – helping someone out.

I was given a laptop that was knackered and on it was the users personal and company data. Added to the already stressful situation of it being knackered was the fact that there was no backup of the data! Needless to say, they were not in the best of moods and were way from happy.

The situation reminded me of a time at my old company, where some one else was asked to look at one of the bosses computers. I had previously fixed it twice before so was surprised to not do it again.
Anyhow, I sat and watched not one, not two, not three, not four but five people spend time looking at this computer on and off with each other. It took them all day to get it working, well when I say get it working, they said that they installed a dodgy copy of Windows 7 on it and said it would be much better than the operating system that it had on it before?!?!?
Vista may be many things but it was a legal copy and it had been working fine for several years.
I had to have a laugh to myself, while thinking – Idiots!! Any proper technician would not do that, but then …..

So, back to the problem in hand, several hours later I had managed to get all the important and critical data off of the knackered disk and go about setting the laptop back up again.

Its nice to get a good feeling of helping someone out, while kind of saving their life.

Dumbing it down!

You know, sometimes you really do have to dumb it right down to ID10T level – that im afraid is a lesson that I should have remembered from my old company when I was working with some of the people there.

I guess sometimes I look at things far too technically – for example for the past 4 days I’ve been trying to unlock a TA612V Netgear VOIP adapter as I found a couple on eBay cheap. I suggested to the silver fox that he should get one to replace his dodgy ATA device that has been playing up.

While the TA612V is a old bit of kit, I have had one sat in my comms room linked up to my Sipgate service running with no problems for years.

So, 2 TA612V`s turn up for me to find that they are brand new and locked to Sipgate. Not a problem as that is who I want to use it with. Sadly they no longer support the TA612V and have no config files or L2 passwords for them. OH!
So I spend time looking for a way to unlock them. I went searching for a way to get a L2 password and found a few instructions how to get them. I spend the next 2 days researching and soldering wires on the the pcb to establish a com connection, only to find that I had the wrong cable.

So new cable ordered I thought I would leave it for a bit, but then found a 3rd TA612V in my broadband equipment box, which amazingly was unlocked.

I configured it to use the details of the Silver Fox`s VOIP connection, which took a few tries as it seems the specifics were different from mine. Finally I got it configured and it went off and connected. I tested a phone call but found that I could not hear the other end.

So I changed IP addresses and put it in place of my box and plugged the phone in and turned it on. My firewall was set to point certain traffic to my TA612V so I guess that was the issue. After it connected I made another phone call and got the same problem. So I compared configs to make sure that nothing was different, but they were exactly the same. I then changed the settings back to my account and tried that – still the same problem.

I then put my box back on and let that boot up, only to find that the same problem was happening! How could that be, as I had not changed anything on my TA612V.
So, what the hell was wrong? Maybe the TA612V was blocked as I had been swapping 2 of them around?
I left the TA612V to `settle down` for a few hours but it made no difference!
I left the TA612V off all night but it made no difference!
Maybe my firewall had got confused – rebooted it but no different!

I then spoke to the Silver Fox who told me that his TA612V worked fine, not only could he hear other people and they hear him but he had his working behind his firewall with no ports open??

By this time I had lost the plot and was ready to go back to the fast food industry, when I had a thought – let me try the landline phone on the TA612V instead of the phone i have plugged into it.

The rest you can guess!