Archive for the ‘win7’ Category

Brother Network Scanning Installation Error – InstallNetworkDriver

Sunday, February 19th, 2017

I recently had to set up a Brother DCP-L2540DW. For whatever reason, on one Windows 7 Pro machine, the installer would not complete. I got various error messages, all with InstallNetworkDriver in the description, some coded IS034 and IS052.

The printer worked out of the box with a USB cable. But I wanted to move it to a networked connection. This required the proprietary Brother software to get the network scanning to work.

The official Brother support page, The error message “IS052 InstallNetworkDriver” appears when installing the MFL-Pro Suite from the CD-ROM or the Full Driver & Software Package is downloaded from the “Download” section.  didn’t help. Neither did random results from Google.

In the end, I ended up installing under a different administrative account!

The user account I had been using had full administrative permissions… but it just didn’t work. I suspect it’s my use of EFS encryption on multiple of my user folders, or maybe some weird conflict with the networking setup in my day to day user account, or something weird involving the virtual machines that I sometimes run, or maybe with the multitude of programs and devices that I end up installing or uninstalling via my account.

Windows 7 ReadyBoost with the built-in SD card reader in a Dell Lattitude E5550

Friday, August 28th, 2015

I bought a 16GB Class 10 SD card on super-sale, and I wanted to set it up with ReadyBoost on my new Dell laptop. To my dismay, I couldn’t get the ReadyBoost setup prompts to come up – for years I’ve been annoyed at constantly seeing that option when I plug in a Flash drive or SD card, and now, when I actually wanted it, it wouldn’t come up. Figures.

Apparently few people use ReadyBoost – there weren’t any search results specific to my Dell model.

I did find a reference to removing the manufacturer drivers for the SD card controller for a similar ReadyBoost problem, so I gave that a shot.

In the Windows Device Manager, under Storage Controllers, my card reader was listed as a “BayHubTech/O2Micro Integrated MMC/SD controller”, Driver version 2.2.2.1060, dated 5/12/2014. I have no idea if there is a newer driver, or if such a driver would support ReadyBoost. I did the right click, update driver, manually choose driver, “standard SD card controller” thing (not the exact words).

And… magically, it worked.

I now have a top level “SD host adapters” branch, and below that “SDA Standard Compliant SD Host Controller” in the Device Manager.

Whether or not I’ll be able to notice any difference with 12-13GB of ReadyBoost added, well, I’m not sure. I feel it did help on my previous laptop running Vista with a 4GB card.

Remotely Enable Remote Desktop in Windows 7 Professional

Friday, February 22nd, 2013

I recently needed to login to a computer on a LAN that did not have Remote Desktop enabled. Here are the high-level steps that I took.

If you search online, you will typically find references to a registry setting to enable RDP.

Specifically:

HKLM Hive  -> System -> CurrentControlSet -> Control -> Terminal Server > fDenyTSConnections  should be changed to zero.

See: http://pctech.blog.ca/2012/04/07/enable-remote-desktop-connection-in-windows-7-using-regedit-remotely-13444092/

That’s not sufficient in most cases.

You also typically need to allow Remote Desktop through the firewall. I did this using Sysinternals psexec tool to get a command prompt to the remote machine.

i.e. psexec \\remote-computer cmd.exe

Then running a netsh rule to enable RDP:
i.e. netsh firewall set service type = remotedesktop mode = enable

 

Also, I needed to add the user to the local computer’s Remote Access user’s group (not the exact name).

A reboot was required.

See:

netsh firewall rule:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc736451(v=ws.10).aspx

psexec: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx