Andrew Ferrier

I recently acquired a Logitech Presenter R800. It’s a beautiful device – not particularly cheap, but very slick and easy-to-use. Unfortunately, Windows XP (Service Pack 3) on my system refused to recognise it – the device was listed as USB Receiver in Windows Device Manager, but Windows kept claiming it couldn’t find the driver. It is presented to the system as a standard USB HID device, so there is no Logitech-specific driver: it uses the standard Windows HID Driver. It worked perfectly out of the box on Ubuntu 9.10.

After 3-4 hours of research, I found the answer. Running a differencing tool between the C:\Windows\Inf folder on a colleague’s PC and mine showed that mine was missing the usb.inf and usb.PNF files from that folder. It wasn’t clear why they were missing, but having copied them over from his machine, the driver installation then worked perfectly. So that’s worth trying if you encounter a similar problem with this product (or indeed any USB HID device).

As I’ve written about before, I use a combination of Vodafone 3G and the AT&T Network Client on Windows to access my corporate VPN. Recently, I’ve been seeing this error a lot when ‘dialling’ the 3G network (I connect it via the Windows dialler, rather than the Vodafone client):

This morning, I figured out what it was that was causing the problem. AT&T was open when I was dialling, and had the modem selected in the ‘Cellular’ tab (which I don’t normally use):

I hypothesise that it’s got a lock on the modem when this is selected (even if the ‘Cellular’ tab is not selected). Quitting the AT&T client appears to allow the connection to be created. You can then restart it and connect to the VPN in the normal way (using ‘existing internet connection’).

Hope this helps someone.

If you’re anything like me, you hate the Vodafone Mobile Connect client - it’s buggy, unstable, and requires frequent reboots/restarts/taking-the-card-out-and-putting-it-back-in-again to make it work. What I only discovered today – although I should have known from ancient dial-up modem connections years ago – was that you can just use the regular ‘Network Connections’ facility of Windows. Just locate the ‘Vodafone Mobile Connect’ entry, right-click and select ‘Connect’ (I think this will only appear once you’ve installed the Vodafone software):

Easy-peasy connectivity. You can still track how many bytes have been uploaded/downloaded in the current session by turning on ‘Show icon in notification area when connected’ from the Connection’s Properties dialog. You’ll then see an icon in the system tray with a pop-up showing usage. Sadly, this is only for the current session, not the month as a whole – haven’t yet found a decent bit of software to do that (surprisingly).

My work Thinkpad (a T61) was becoming a little crufty, so I decided to reinstall it from scratch. Here are a few lessons I learnt along the way:

• Making a hot copy of your entire drive onto a USB hard disk with VMWare Converter beforehand is a great idea. This basically means you have your entire previous installation still bootable, so you can rescue any data or settings you forgot about, after you’ve done the reformat and reinstall. VMWare Converter is free.
• Windows XP won’t install if the BIOS has the SATA controller set to AHCI mode – it won’t find the HD to install to. Read the install instructions for the SATA driver before installing Windows. Doing this without a floppy drive involves installing Service Pack 2 first (see below).
• Windows, surprisingly, does not contain a driver that can work with the Ethernet controller. Have a copy of it ready on a USB stick.
• The redistributable version of Service Pack 3 isn’t standalone, despite claims to the contrary; it pre-reqs. at least Service Pack 1. Windows Update won’t take you the whole way there, so it’s easiest to get the SP2 and SP3 standalones.
• The USB ports will not operate at high speed until you install the Intel Chipset Device Software.

Until recently, I was having problems with fullscreen video in Windows on my new T61 Thinkpad, which uses an NVidia Quadro NVS 140M display adapter. Video would regularly flicker when fullscreen was enabled in a variety of players, including Windows Media Player and various embedded Flash players, and had to be taken out of fullscreen and put back – sometimes as many as 10 times – before the image was stable.

After doing a bit of hunting around yesterday, and noticing that at least one other person had the same problem, I came to the conclusion that it was power-saving based – my suspicion is that the refresh rate is reduced under some power-saving circumstances.

The following set of steps seems to remove the problem (or, to be more exact, I haven’t seen the problem return since following them):

• Open the NVIDIA control panel (from the Start Menu or the system tray).
• Navigate to Mobile / Change PowerMizer settings.
• Select Not manage my power consumption (Disable PowerMizer).

Hope this helps someone else.

Normally I don’t touch pre-release software these days (apart from the IBM software I work with, of course). But I just downloaded and installed Firefox 3 RC1. And boy, Mozilla weren’t kidding – it’s noticeably faster and snappier than Firefox 2. Very impressive. For someone like me who spends a lot of time in a browser, this is just great.