As recommend by the Microsoft crew I had enabled automatic updates… Big mistake!

After my laptop installed the batch of updates released on the 9th of January my laptop began endlessly rebooting. It blue screens as soon as is starts to load Vista. To make things even better even safe mode does the same thing.

After a process of trail and error with these update I worked out it was caused by KB943899.

Now obviously this doesn’t affect everyone otherwise they wouldn’t have release it… Or would they? Upon search the Internet I found a number of other reports from users with the same problem… I’ve only noticed DELL owners so far - I own a DELL XPS M1330.

I’ve raised a request with DELL as you can’t directly with Microsoft with an OEM license it appears… now we play the waiting game!

I’m running a development server virtual machine on my Vista laptop using Parallels. Trouble is being on a laptop sometimes I’m on the road so a Host only network suits me, but other times I’m at home so I want the guest machine to connect to my home network. Up until now there has been A LOT of screwing around each time I leave and come just change network the network settings…

First of all I tried the obvious Internet Connection Sharing throws some “(null)” error - Google forums to read about it. Bridged networking not that I really understand how this would have helped? this but someone made mention of it… I don’t profess to being a professional at this, BUT the following configuration made my life a dream.

Now I just simply change my the Network in Parallels from “Host only networking” to “Default adapter”..

Router

• IP - 10.0.1.1
• Subnet - 255.255.0.0

Guest

• IP: 10.0.2.10
• Subnet - 255.255.0.0
• Gateway: 10.0.1.1
• DNS: 10.0.1.1

Host

Parrallels Host-Guest NIC:

• IP: 10.0.2.20
• Subnet - 255.255.255.0

Default adapter NIC:

• IP: 10.0.1.20
• Subnet - 255.255.0.0
• Gateway: 10.0.1.1
• DNS: 10.0.1.1

If anyone cares to provide more insight, or has a better solution - would love to here from you! PS. All ip addresses have been changed to protect the innocent

Having trouble with permissions to a file on Windows XP? So was I even though I was logged as an Administrator.. the same account which created the file.. the permissions hadn’t been modified.. Even worse the files locked were a virtual server I had spent days configuring!

The process to fix it was actually quite simple but took awhile to find:

1. Download SubInACL from Microsoft and install it.
2. Using notepad create a file in the SubInACL.exe directory called “reset.cmd”.
3. Paste the following commands in to this file then run it.

subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=administrators=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CURRENT_USER /grant=administrators=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT /grant=administrators=f
subinacl /subdirectories %SystemDrive% /grant=administrators=f
 
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CURRENT_USER /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %SystemDrive% /grant=system=f

Without reading in to these commands too much I suspect I didn’t need to use them all. But I figured that the Administrators and Systems accounts should have access to everything right? The security conscious paranoid man in me now questions, but its too late so I’m suppressing the voice!