NICE Convention - 13th September 2014

Wow, so I'm a whole week late on this one! It's been a busy week though so you'll have to forgive me!

On the 13th September me and James took a trip over to the Bedford Corn Exchange for the NICE convention. I really, really wanted to go because Charlie Adlard was there and James came along for the ride (he's two, he really didn't get a choice)
Unfortunately, I didn't take any  pictures, and so I just have pictures of what I left the convention with, and pictures that popped up on Facebook.
I was lucky enough to meet Mike Carey who signed my Human Torch volume, and I got to meet Charlie Adlard, and he signed Lucille (my guitar) and my favourite Walking Dead cover, issue 111. I also picked up a couple of Game of Thrones sketches and James got a Spiderman sketch and some action figures.
Overall it was a really good day, and I was a bit gutted I didn't get to meet all of the artists and writers that I wanted to see, but it was pretty hot and James was getting a bit stressy so we had to get going after we'd met Charlie. But here are the pictures I did get!

So next up is London Film and Comic Convention, Winter 2014, which is 5 weeks away! I'm so excited for that one! I think I have the convention bug!

Nice Con!

Ok, so now all the boring IT stuff is out of the way, I thought I'd do a quick post on what I'm going to be up to tomorrow.
As you all undoubtedly know I'm a big fan of comic books. And I'm a massive fan of the Walking Dead comics, so tomorrow I'm heading off to Nice Convention in Bedford, with James of course, because Charlie Adlard, who draws the Walking Dead comics, is going to be there! So I shall be taking Lucille so that he can sign her, and issue 111 because it's my favourite cover!
Steve Dillon and Garth Ennis are both there too so I shall be taking one of my Preacher volumes for them to sign, and I'll have to go through all my comics so that any other artists and authors who are there can sign my comics!
For those of you who don't know who Lucille is, here she is:

Pictures from the weekend to follow!

Common Names Resolution and How to Resolve Them

Another basic problem/solution post, you know what to do if you have any other problems/solutions involving names resolution.

Most names resolution failures occur in one of two ways: the user does not receive a response when attempting name resolution, or the user receives a response but the data is incorrect.
If the user does not receive a response the first step is to check that the user's IP information is correct. If the DNS server information is incorrect then the user will not be able to perform any names resolutions.
If the IP configuration is correct, and you get wrong information when you perform an nslookup, try flushing the cache, as this will force information to update, and then try running the names resolution again, and this should hopefully be all you have to do!

Common Network Connectivity Issues and How to Solve Them

If your PC is having problems connecting to a wired network the first things you should check are that your ethernet cable is plugged into both your PC and the router/modem that you are using, and that the router/modem is switched on. If all of the wires are connected properly, green LEDs will flash on both the RJ45 slot on the computer where the ethernet cable is plugged in, and on the port on the modem/router where the other end of the cable is plugged in. If one of these lights isn't flashing you will be able to see whether the problem is the PC or the modem/router. If neither light is flashing, try using a different cable and see if you get a result that way.
If the problem is with your computer, you can also try downloading network drivers from your computer manufacturer's website. If the problem is with the router/modem you may have to call your ISP to have someone come out and look at it.
If updating the computer drivers doesn't solve the problem you may have to consider purchasing a new network card, or having someone fit a new network card.

As always these are just the basics!

Common Logon Problems and How to Solve Them

Occasionally, you'll try to log in to your PC, and find yourself totally unable to (I've done this loads of times, and so have a few of my work colleagues). More often than not, it's a simple case of typing the password or username wrong. Key things to try when you are having trouble logging in are checking whether or not caps lock is on. All passwords are case sensitive, so it is important to make sure if caps lock is supposed to be on it is, and it's off if it's supposed to be off. Try typing the password slowly, so you know that you are 100% typing the right password.
If you cannot remember your password, you will need to reset your password, either by using a password reset disk (you create one when you set the password, you cannot create one to reset the password), or using an administrator account.
 If you're using a computer on a network the network administrator may have changed your password. If you think this is the case you should contact your system administrator.
If there is more than one user account on your PC you may be trying to log in to the wrong account, so you should double check the user.

Like always, these are just basic. Feel free to add any other problems you have faced and solutions you have found into the comment box!

Identifying and Resolving Network Printer Issues

There are number of common issues that you may come up against when using or installing a network printer.

When installing a network printer, the most common error you may come across is the "access denied" error. If you are trying to install a network printer on your computer and you are seeing this error it could be because you don't have administrator privileges on the computer, or you don't have permission on the network to use the printer.

When you are installing the printer, another problem you may face is your computer not finding the printer that you want to connect to. To solve this problem, in the window that shows the printers that have been discovered, you need to click on the option that say "the printer I want isn't listed" or words to that effect. You will then need to select how you would like to find the printer you are looking for, and then follow the steps in wizard, manually adding the information as you go.

If you are unable to make changes to the printer properties it will most likely be because you do not have administrative permissions. You can try logging in as an administrator and seeing if that works.

 If you are having problems printing to a network printer you should ensure that you are connected to the network that the printer is on, check the status of the printer in the print queue, or go to the printer and check that it is powered on, with a network connection. If the printer is attached to another computer and shared on the network, ensure that the computer is turned on with a network connection.

Like always, these are just basic problems and solutions, and if there any others that you can think of, feel free to drop them in the comments box.

Common Remote Connectivity Problems and How To Solve Them

If you are connecting to a PC using Remote Desktop protocol there are a number of issues that you may come up against.
If you cannot connect to the remote PC at all, there are a number of things that could cause this.
It could be that you don't have enough memory to make the connection. You should try closing any open programs that you are not using in order to free up RAM. If this doesn't work try rebooting your computer as this will close any processes that may be running in the background, and then try making the connection again.

Another problem could be that you don't have a network connection. Ensure that your router is switched on. If you are using a PC with a wired connection make sure that your ethernet cable is plugged into the port on the back of your computer, if you are using a wireless connection make sure your WiFi is turned on. You should also make sure that your network adapter is working.

The issue could be that the computer  you are connecting to cannot be found. Make sure that you have typed the name of the computer correctly, or try typing the IP address of the computer instead.

Another problem could be that the remote computer is not accepting incoming connections. On the remote PC you will need to right click on Computer in the start menu, select properties and in the sidebar of the Properties windows you will need to select Remote settings. You can then see if the computer is accepting remote connections, and if it isn't you can tick the box so it does.

Once you have connected to the remote computer, another issue you may face is being unable to log in to the remote computer. The most common cause of this problem is not having the right username or password to log in to the computer, so you should double check this information. You may also need to be added to the administrators group for the remote computer.

These are just some very basic problems and solutions, if you have any others you would like to add, feel free to drop them in the comments box!

How to Solve Software Configuration Problems

Occasionally a program that is known to be compatible with Windows 7 can fail. If this is a program that is compatible with Windows 7, and is the only program running, the problem could be with the software configuration, for example it could have been installed wrong.
If a program suddenly fails, you should go through all of the menus at the top of the screen and check any configuration settings, ensuring that they are correct. If you are using a program that requires access to a database you need to ensure that the database file is not corrupted, and make sure it is accessible. If the program relies on another kind of specific file you need to make sure the file that is needed is not corrupt and is accessible.

You can also use the event viewer within Microsoft to view any errors that the program may have caused. This will allow to look back and see when the errors started appearing, which can help you determine what could have caused the failure.

An application can also fail because of changes to the operating system. If a program stops working after you've made a system change or applied an update, consider using system restore to roll back system changes to a time when the application worked properly. This method won't remove any user files such as documents or emails, but it will remove any applications and updates installed after the system restore.

If software stops functioning but you cannot revert to an earlier state, you can try to repair the installation, if a repair option is available. This enables you to reinstall a program without losing any user data. To reinstall a program just insert the install disk into the PC and select repair when prompted. If there is no repair option you can simply back up the user data and totally reinstall the program.

If a critical application fails and you can't repair it using any of these methods you should restore the whole system from a backup where the program worked,

Common Software Installation Issues and How to Resolve Them

When installing new software occasionally you will come up against problems.
One of the most common problems with installing software, well the most common issue I see, is that the person installing the software does not have the permissions to do so.
Generally you have to have administrator priviliges to be able to install software, so you may find if you are not the administrator you will be unable to install software. The easiest way to solve this is to contact your system administrator.

If you are the administrator and you are still having problems installing software it could be that you already have the program installed on your computer. The easiest way to check is to open the control panel and select add or remove programs. A list of the programs installed on your computer will then come up and you can check if you already have the program installed.

If that doesn't solve the problem it could be that there is no free space on your hard drive. The easiest way to solve this problem is to delete any programs that you don't need or don't use. You could also move any media and files onto an external hard drive or upload it to the cloud, and then you can free up a lot of space! You could also try perform a disk cleanup, Windows will then remove any temporary internet files and other things that are taking up space.

So, those are the simplest solutions to new software installation issues, if you have come across any other problems, or know of any solutions, drop them in the comments box!

Common Software Failure Issues and How to Solve Them

We all rely on software in some way or other to run what we're doing, for example we rely on internet software to browse the web, word processing software to write college work, school work, or work documents, spreadsheet software to prepare reports for work, etc, etc. Sometimes, however, for no apparent reason, software crashes.
One thing that causes software to stop responding is RAM being used up by a number of programs. If you have several programs running in the background your computer's RAM get's stretched pretty thin, and your computer has to work harder. The easiest way to solve this problem is to close down any programs that you're not using, either by clicking the red 'x' in the corner of the window or opening the task manager and ending processes that way. You should avoid keeping more programs open than is necessary, and when you are finished using a program you should close it in order to free up the RAM that it was using.
Viruses can also cause software to freeze or crash, so you should ensure that you perform regular scans on your PC using antivirus software to ensure that your PC is free from anything malicious.
If software randomly crashes when you open it you can try closing the program and starting again, sometimes a conflict with another program that is running can cause a program to not start up properly.
Another thing you can try if software you are using has crashed, is undoing any recent hardware or software changes, as sometimes programs can clash. For example, if you are using AVG antivirus and you install Norton antivirus the programs will clash and one of them will not run properly.
You can always try surfing the internet to see if anyone else has had a similar problem and how they have solved. You can try typing an error code into your search provider and seeing what solutions come up. Normally if you type in an error code the software developer's sites will be one of the search results, so finding a result should be fairly easy.
If you still don't find a solution that helps try rebooting your computer. This will stop any background processes that you may not realise are running, which will free up more RAM when you start the computer back up again.
Of course there is the chance that this won't help, so this is when it might be worth uninstalling and reinstalling the program, just in case anything went wrong during installation and any files got corrupted.

Another issue that you may find when installing software, especially if you have upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7, is that software you had downloaded and used for XP may not be compatible with Windows 7. The easiest way to solve this problem is to go on to the software developers website and see if there is an updated version for Windows 7.
You can also choose to run programs in compatibility mode, so you could select to run the program in Windows XP compatibility mode and then the program will think it's running in Windows XP.

If any of you guys have any other software problems and solutions that you want to share feel free to drop them in the comments box!

Common Hardware Issues and How to Resolve Them

Ok, so last night at 5 to 5, typically, our general manager's PC had a bit of a fit, the mouse locked up and stopped working, so she decided to reboot the computer. However, when she turned it back on, she got the a non-system disk error.
There are a few issues that could have caused this. I'm going to start with what the issue actually was and then work my way through other possibilities.
Because the PC decided to give up at 5 to 5 we felt it would be best to leave it overnight to then work on it this morning. When we got in this morning we switched the PC on and wahey! It actually booted up without complaining about the disk not being present. What it did do, however, was say that there had been a recent hardware change and a new hard drive had been put in the PC. Now as we hadn't swapped the hard drive out the only logical conclusion was that it had somehow forgotten that the hard drive was already in there and so thought the hard drive was new. This lead us to the conclusion that the BIOS battery was possibly on its way out, and so when it had locked up and the PC had been restarted it totally forgot all of it's settings and that was why it couldn't see the hard drive. We took the old battery out and put a new one in, set the time and date settings, and the computer booted up no problem. So it was a really simple solution.You'll know if the BIOS battery in your PC is dying because it will lose any BIOS settings, including where to see the hard drive. If you switch your PC on and need to set the time and date settings again that will be because the BIOS battery has lost settings. Putting a new battery in the PC is a quick and easy job, and you won't lose any data on your PC.

Before we booted the computer up and worked out the problem was the BIOS battery we considered a couple of other problems.
Because this computer has had a history of switching itself on and off my first thought was that the problem may have been caused by the power supply. or the extension lead that the power supply was plugged into. Occasionally if a power supply is not powerful enough to power a computer (I think I used the word power far too many times in that sentence), the computer will periodically shut down, because obviously there would not be enough power getting to the motherboard in order to keep the computer running. Generally, if you haven't put anything extra in the computer yourself, and your using the build the computer came with, this shouldn't be a problem, as the computer manufacturer will have put the correct power supply into the PC. If you have built your own PC, or added any extras into a PC that you have bought, you will need to ensure that the power supply you are using is the right one. The best way to work out what kind of power supply you need is to add the wattage of all of the components together, and add 30%.This will give you adequate power to run the PC.
If you are using a standard build PC and it is still shutting down without warning, and you've confirmed that it isn't a BIOS issue, it may be the plug socket/extension lead that you have the PC plugged into. For example, if you have a PC, monitor, TV and games console plugged into one extension lead and they are all on at the same time (believe me I've known people to have a PC and games console running at the same time plugged into the same extension lead) it could be that the PC is not receiving enough power from the socket because it is being shared out to other devices. The easiest way to remedy this is to turn off and unplug anything you are not using, or plug your PC into a different socket. This should ensure that enough power gets to the PC.

Another idea we considered was simply that the hard drive had died, because occasionally this does happen. Partitions get corrupted, motors fail, power failures in the PC can cause corruption (which is what we thought might have happened) or a virus can corrupt the hard drive. Unfortunately once a hard drive has failed, the only viable option is to replace it. You should always ensure that all data is backed up regularly so that if your hard drive does fail you don't lose too much data. You should also make a recovery disk so that if your hard drive does fail (all of them do eventually) you can easily reinstall your operating system onto a new hard drive from the recovery disk, and if all of your information is backed up you can easily restore that too!

So, there are a few common hardware problems that may effect the day to day running of your computer system, and a few ways to solve them. Remember if you do plan on opening your computer case you need to make sure that you use an anti-static wrist strap, or discharge any static energy by touching a metal portion of the case.

Invasion Exhibition + Stockwood Discovery Centre

Ok, so I'm a little behind with this one because I've been up to other computery related things, but better late than never!

On Saturday August 30th me and my mum took James down to Luton for the day, to go to a exhibition called Invasion. It was just a tiny little thing, but there was a lot of cool stuff there. It was basically just an exhibition of costumes and props used in Sci-fi movies. We saw the creature from Alien, Predator's head, the Mars Attacks alien, the sleep chamber thing from Alien: Resurrection, and a bunch of other cool stuff! Although I was confused by Pin Head's prescence, I didn't really think HellRaiser was a sci-fi film, but there we go.
The exhibition was being held at the stockwood discovery centre, which is about a 15 minute out of Luton Town centre, and they have some really cool things on display, including old carriages, including a couple that I saw dating back to the 1800's. Seriously, if you're after a good day out I totally recommend taking a day trip down to Luton. You can hop off the train and then it's a 5 minute walk into the town centre, and then from there you can take a bus ride or a walk up to the Discovery Centre and see all the cool stuff they have on display. Invasion has finished now though so you won't get to see the really cool stuff!

Configuring Windows 7 to Use IPv6 Address.

IPv6 is the latest version of Internet Protocol, introduced due to a shortage of IPv4 addresses. Because IPv6 is made up of a random hash of numbers and digits. Due to the randomness of the address there are enough IPv6 addresses for the "foreseeable future".

We have an IPv6 enabled router, with two PC's connected to it. Both of them are using IPv6 and connect to each other quite happily using the default link-local address, but we can't get them to connect to the internet, so if anyone has any tips that would be great, for now I can show you how to turn it on and get it working so that you can comminucate with other PC's on IPv6 across a workgroup.

Configuring IPv6 in Windows 7 isn't really that different to configuring IPv4, in the way that it's done. Obviously because the addresses are long and random it's easier to leave the address to be automatically assigned.
To configure your PC to use IPv6 you need to open up the network and sharing centre. There are two ways you can do this. You can go through the start menu and control panel.

Or you can right click on the little computer icon next to the clock and open the network and sharing centre that way.

Once you have the network and sharing centre open you need to select Change Adapter settings in the sidebar

You then need to right-click on the network adapter you would like to enable IPv6 for. If you only have one network adapter in your PC there will only be one option here.

In Windows 7 both IPv4 and IPv6 are enabled by default.

To disable IPv4 you need to untick the box, leaving the IPv6 box ticked, so that only IPv6 is enabled.

Now select IPv6 protocol and click on properties.

You can set the PC to get it's IPv6 addresses automatically. This is easier than trying to generate your own IPv6 address.





When you have done this you can open a command prompt and type in ipconfig. As you can see, the PC now has an IPv6 address, but as we do not have an IPv6 gateway set up here it's not finding the gateway and therefore there is no internet connection, but we can still communicate with other IPv6 computers over the network.

I'm fairly sure once I've got the hang of this I'll come back and do a full walk through, but for now I get to tick another box off my college module list ;)

Capturing and Deploying a System Image In Windows 7 Part 5: Deploying the System Image

Now that we have captured our system image, we can deploy it onto our destination computer.
You need to put the Windows PE disc in the computer and restart. If you saved the image to a USB flash drive you will also need to insert that into the computer, if you have saved the image onto the network ensure that your destination computer has a network connection.

When the computer boots you will see the same command prompt you saw to capture the image. If you have a brand new unformatted disk you can skip this step You can choose to format your hard disk by removing it from the computer, putting it in an external hard disk reader and format it using the disk management utility on another windows 7 computer. You can find a guide on how to do that here.
You can also do this using the Windows PE command prompt.
You need to type:

diskpart 
select disk 0 
clean 
create partition primary size=200 
select partition 1 
format fs=ntfs label="system" 
assign letter=c 
active 
create partition primary 
select partition 2
format fs=ntfs label="Windows" 
assign letter=f
exit

Each of these commands needs to be typed on a seperate line, and every time you type a command you will receive an acknowledgment message. For example when you type "select disk 0" you should see "disk 0 is now the selected disk" etc.

Once your disk is formatted you need to copy the image from where you have stored it onto the local drive.
If you are using a USB flash drive you need to type (this is assuming your USB flash drive is assigned the letter f, you need to replace f with the letter of your USB flash drive. If you are not sure which letter the flash drive is using type dir followed by drive letters until you find the one with the image on it) :

copy e:\win7.wim f:

If your image is stored on the network you need to type:

net use y: \\<server>\<share>
copy y:\win7.wim f:

You then need to apply the image to the hard drive, using the imagex tool included in the Windows PE image:

d:\imagex.exe /apply e:\win7.wim 1 f:

You then need to use BCDboot to initialize the boot configuration data store and copy boot environment files to the system partition of the hard drive.

f:\windows\system32\bcdboot f:\windows

And that's the image deployed. Now you just need to do that for any other destination computers that you have. If you are doing this as a test, to make sure it has worked you can reboot the computer. It should boot into the Windows setup. You shouldn't need to provide any additional information because the image you have contains the install, so it should be a simple case of windows just needing to install the files!

Capturing and Deploying a System Image In Windows 7 Part 4: Capturing a System Image

Ok, so we have created our Windows PE disk, and we're now going to use that to capture a system image of our reference installation and then save that onto a network share.
On your reference computer you need to insert the Windows PE disk and restart the computer.
You may need to select to boot from the disk. Windows PE will start and you will see a command prompt. (These photos were taken from my phone, since I don't have the option to screenshot here!)

To capture an image of the reference installation you need to use imagex in the command line, to do this you need to type (I did have a picture of it but when I looked at my computer it hadn't come out very well :( ):

e:\imagex.exe /capture d: d:\win7.wim "Win7 Installation" /compress fast /verify

The capturing process will then start.
Once the capture is finished you can then copy the image onto a USB flash disk using the command (this is assuming your USB drive letter is F, if you're not sure what it is just type dir followed by a directory letter until you find the right one):

copy d:\win7.wim f:

If you would rather save the image onto a network share you can do this by typing:

net use y: \\<server>\<share> 
copy d:\win7.wim y:

And that's it, you've now captured the image and stored it where you want it to be. You can now deploy your system image. 

Capturing and Deploying a System Image In Windows 7 Part 3: Creating the Bootable Windows PE Media.

So, in part 2 we created our reference installation, now we need to create the bootable Windows PE disk, which is the Windows Pre-installed Environment. You need to do this on your technician computer.
This disk allows you to start a computer for recovery and deployment purposes. Windows PE RAM boots straight into the memory, so once the computer has booted you can remove the media.
Once you have booted into the Windows PE disk you can use the ImageX tool to capture, modify and apply disk images.
To create the bootable Windows PE disk you use the copype.cmd command.

On your technician computer, click Start, select All Programs > Windows AIK and find Deployment Tools Command Prompt.

You need to right click on Deployment Tools Command Prompt and select Run as Administrator. You will need to click yes in the UAC.

The command prompt window will open. The environment variables will already be set to point to all of the necessary tools.
In the command prompt you need to type "copype.cmd <architecture> <destination>" where architecture is either x86 or amd64, depending on your processor, and the destination is where you would like to copy to. This will create the directory structure and copy the necessary files for the architecture you have selected.

Now you need to copy the winpe.wim file. This is the file that will be used to boot the disk. It needs to be copied into the ISO folder of the directory you have just created. If you're using a 64bit processor the folder will just be called winpe and the file will be called winpe.wim.  I hit the enter button to put this at the bottom to make it easier to look at, but I'm not really sure how successful that really was.

You now need to copy ImageX into \winpe_x86\ISO. Again this would be \winpe\ISO if you are using 64bit, and the folder you are copying from will be c:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\amd64\imagex.exe.

You now need to create the Windows PE ISO. You do this using the Oscdimg tool. The command is all one string, but I couldn't widen the window to display it all on one line! (just winpe if you are using a 64bit system)

When it is finished you should see this:

You now need to burn the iso to a disk. Windows 7 has disk burning software built in, so you need to navigate to where you have stored your iso, in this case it is c:\winpe_x86\winpe_x86.iso, right click and select burn disk image (ensure that you have a blank DVD-R or DVD-RW in your optical drive).

You need to click Burn and then the disk burning will start. Make sure that you write a label on the disk so that you know what it is.

You are now ready to capture the system image.

Capturing and Deploying a System Image In Windows 7 Part 2: Building A Reference Installation

Ok, so in part 1 we built an answer file in order to be abee to perform an unattended installation of Windows 7. You can find my post on how to do that here.
In this section we will be using the answer file from part 1 to create a reference installation.
You will need to insert your Windows installation disk and the UFD with the autounattend.xml file on it into your reference PC. You may need to overwrite the boot order to get the PC to boot from the installation disk.
Windows Setup will automatically look in the root directory of any removable media for the file called autounattend.xml.
The setup should then automatically start without you having to enter any information.
Once the setup has finished you can check the file has worked correctly by opening internet explorer and making sure the home page you set in the answer file is the home page that opens up.
Once the setup is complete and the computer has booted up, you will see the System Preparation Tool window. You now need to generalise your system image. This means removing any information that is specific to the computer you are capturing the image of.

To do this you need to select Enter System OOBE from the first drop down menu, tick the generalise box and select Shutdown from the second drop down menu.

Sysprep will then start working.

When it is ready the PC will shut down.
The next step is creating the Windows PE Media.