Using the Altiris Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) Here's a video I briefly made on how to use Altiris SVS to switch which version of the Java Runtime you are using without removing/re-installing anything.

Sorry, video link didn't work ... it's a flash video, and I guess I can't upload it anywhere :(  ¶ 10:38 PM 0 comments

  Resolving CRC Errors on Windows XP Everyone hates errors, right? Yeah, well, I am certainly no exception to that ... so allow me to tell you a short story about some problems I have been having, and how I (finally) resolved them.

To give you a quick overview of the symptoms of my problem, I've been having an ongoing problem trying to install GTA: San Andreas on my gaming PC. I would always get a CRC error at the same spot every time; Needless to say, this was quite aggravating. I had all sorts of ideas flying through my head, including hardware problems (my friend was convinced it was my ECS KN1 Extreme motherboard ... it wasn't).

After trying re-installing the nForce 4 Ultra platform drivers (thinking the software interface between the DVD-RW and mobo was faulty), stopping every single background service I could, removing all un-used devices from Device Manager (search Microsoft support for "devmgr_show_nonpresentdevices"), removing VMware (thinking that it had something to do with VMware's virtual CD interface) , and so on ... it still wasn't working. What the hell??

Well, it finally turns out that the least of my worries, Daemon Tools (v3.47), which has never failed me in the past, and I have relied on for quite some time now, has turned its back on me. After removing DT, rebooting, and installing GTA: SA, everything worked perfectly. So, for anyone out there getting CRC's trying to install GTA: San Andreas ... make sure you aren't running DT!!

Cheers!  ¶ 11:56 PM 2 comments

  Running Novell ConsoleOne as Non-admin So, the other day, I ran into some issues running ConsoleOne under my standard user account. It didn't really surprise me, as ConsoleOne seems like a pretty prematurely released tool, however, it is the latest tool that Novell has provided to work with their products, so it's kind of a necessity. Actually, IIRC, the issues I had were specifically related to the snap-ins for Zenworks for Desktop Management version 7, not ConsoleOne by itself.

I was getting some weird behavior from the Zenworks application objects when I'd try to open up the properties on them; In fact, what happened, was that ConsoleOne would lock up entirely. I started by giving the \Users security group modify access to the ConsoleOne folder. This seemed to clear up the issue of ConsoleOne locking up, however I ran into something new; I began receiving a pop-up message when trying to open an Application object, saying that I was using a Zenworks trial version. Since we had not had any such issues in the past, this led me to believe that I had another issue to work through. Luckily, I had noticed earlier on that ConsoleOne took the liberty of creating a file on the root of my harddisk called licenses7.read. Without too much thought, I granted permissions to this file as well, to the local Users group. Since then, I believe everything has been working OK.

If you have any questions regarding my quest to run my machine at work as a non-Administrator, please feel free to contact me.  ¶ 3:56 PM 2 comments

  Fresh Groupwise Client Install So, the whole Outlook connector thing wasn't quite working out. I get this message saying "The messaging interface has returned an unknown error" when replying to an e-mail on our Groupwise 7 system. I have no idea what's going on, and it's pretty clear that Novell has no intentions of working with Microsoft products (surprise, surprise).

So ... I ended up loading the Groupwise 7 client this morning. Uhm .... anyone see anything wrong here?  ¶ 8:59 AM 0 comments