One Care breaks VPN

Was troubleshooting a laptop today that vpn via pptp was not working on Vista and was producing a dialog box referencing a failure with error 800

Event logs was showing rasclient with event id 20227.

Turns out that the computer has OneCare installed which has its own firewall settings and pptp and vpn were unchecked. checked them and it is now connecting with vpn fine

F11 = Recovery Partition

Well only when the recovery partition is set to active.  :(

Set the recovery partition active to enable the F11

START/run/compmgmt.msc and press enter
select Disk management
Right click the recovery partition
Mark partition as Active
restart pc.

Uninstalling a hotfix using Recovery Console

Original from:http://windowsxp.mvps.org/spuninst.htm

From the Recovery Console, you can not just run the spuninst.exe from within the $ntuninstallkbXXXXXX$ folder.

Within the recovery console you need to do navigate to the spuninst folder and then do:

batch spuninst.txt

When the Recovery Console Password does not work.

This registry edit causes the Recovery Console not to ask for a password. This works for both XP Home and XP Professional.

Start | Run | Regedit
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Setup\RecoveryConsole
Set the DWORD SecurityLevel value to 1
Exit Registry and Reboot

MICROSOFT'S "ULTIMATE STEAL"

In today's economy we can all use deals like Microsoft has released on their Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for $59.95. The only catch is that you do need to be a student. Maybe it is time for you to finally sign up for that class you have been talking about taking. If you are a procrastinator, you will need to decide before the end of 2010 to purchase at this price.

If you need a refresher on what is included in Ultimate... here it is:

• Word
• Excel
• PowerPoint
• Outlook
• OneNote
• Groove
• Publisher
• Access
• InfoPath
• Accounting Express
  

Don't forget to check the Additional Products. They have VISTA Ultimate Upgrade for only $64.95.

So for those with a student, it is a deal you should not pass up. Click here http://www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/theultimatesteal-us/ to go to Microsoft's website for more details.

WINDOWS HOME SERVER DESKTOP RECOVERY ROCKS!!!

A customer that has Vista Home Premium with SP1 installed, went out and purchased Ulitimate Upgrade. He proceeded to install and got a warning message that it could not be installed over a SP1 without wiping everything. Unfortunately the customer proceeded with install and lost everything.

Then he called. Via the phone, we booted the desktop from the Desktop Recovery CD included with WHS and in about 10 minutes the “Recovery Wizard” comes up. After a few clicks of “next”, it does a complete recovery from the WHS backup.

HAPPY CUSTOMER.... PRICELESS!!!!

IPHONE RETURNED

It had some really great features, but at the end of the day.... the features I needed for it to replace my business pda were just not there. The key features that we will be watching for Apple to correct are:

• calendar issues... inability to invite people to a meeting; update the notes field and have it sync with Outlook (nice to have of color coding meeting blocks)
• email issues... inability to sort/search; inability to mark a email as unread
• notes issues... inability to sync notes (would be happy if they came over with a hard sync)

So back to the Apple Store they went. But we did come out with one iPod Touch, so my wife will have access to her email and calendar (although limited), not to mention the aps!