Category: IT Tips

Activate the Facebook See First Feature

By Dave Taylor

The Question: I never want to miss a Facebook post from my husband, whether I check five minutes or two days later. I heard that there’s a “see first” feature now for setting someone as important in my Facebook news feed? Good! How do I use it?

Dave’s Answer:
Facebook hasn’t been super transparent about exactly how its new See First feature works in your news feed, but it is clearly something intended to help you identify those people you’re friends with on Facebook who are really important and whose status updates you do believe are higher priority – or just more important – than the rest of your friends. Makes sense to me. For me, it’s my family that rank the highest: I never want to miss any posts from my sister or my children, whether we’re logged on at the same time or whether they’re long gone by the time I check.

The buzz is that Facebook is “rolling out” this feature, but if you do have it enabled, it turns out you can set See First priority for your friends on either your mobile smartphone or through the Web interface. Handy, really!

I’ll demonstrate by showing you the Web-based interface, but then I’ll also show a handy iPhone Facebook app shortcut too.

Article Continued Here

Use Windows 7 Event Viewer to track down issues that cause slower boot times

Greg Shultz shows you how to use some of the new features in Windows 7’s Event Viewer to investigate a slow boot time.

Overview

Windows 7’s Event Viewer includes a new category of event logs called Applications and Services Logs, which includes a whole host of subcategories that track key elements of the operating system. The majority of these subcategories contain an event log type called Operational that is designed to track events that can be used for analyzing and diagnosing problems. (Other event log types that can be found in these subcategories are Admin, Analytic, and Debug; however, describing them is beyond the scope of this article.)

Now, within the operating system section is a subcategory titled Diagnostic-Performance with an Operational log that contains a set of a Task Category called Boot Performance Monitoring. The Event IDs in this category are 100 through 110. By investigating all the Event ID 100 events, you will be able to find out exactly how long it took to boot up your system every time since the day you installed Windows 7. By investigating all the Event ID 101 thru 110 events, you will be able to identify all instances where boot time slowed down.

Getting started

You can find and launch Event Viewer by opening the Control Panel, accessing the System and Security category, selecting the Administrative Tools item, and double-clicking the Event Viewer icon. However, you can also simply click the Start button, type Event in the Start Search box, and press Enter once Event Viewer appears and the top of the results display.

Check out the full article.

via Use Windows 7 Event Viewer to track down issues that cause slower boot times – TechRepublic.

Code Purple — The Compaq/HP Booby Trap

I did a full restore, reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows Vista on a HP system. Everything went like clockwork…

Until I rebooted the machine. Then I got an error that there was a “Configuration error” and that I should call “Customer Care” with “Error Code Purple.” T that point, I could only power off the machine.

What in the world was “Error Code Purple,” I wondered. A quick search on the net revealed that this was a booby trap placed in HP and Compaq computers in which a “tattoo” or numerical signature of the motherboard and hardware configuration is created at the factory and encoded into the restore disks on a particular computer. When you re-install your system, it checks to make sure the system has not been modified. If you have modified your system, the “tattoo” generated by the checking program will be different than the original, and the system will not boot.

In order to fix this, you have to send in your computer to Compaq, or take it so some place like CompUSA or BestBuy where they will modify the “tattoo” so you can run your software on your computer again — until the next time you upgrade memory or swap a card or DVD player.

For a fee, of course.

But not all was lost as I found couple of interesting and simple solutions to bypass this issue and continue with the rest of the installation. Here is one of them for HP systems based on Vista.

When the screen comes up that tells you about the code purple, do this:

Hold shift key and press f10

Type this below in command prompt with spaces like shown

cd C:hpbinCheckDMI

press ENTER

Now, type:

dir

press ENTER

Now you will notice that there are bunch of files listed, we need to find CheckDMI.cmd and rename it as below.

ren CheckDMI.cmd CheckDMI

press ENTER

The file should now be changed. Exit out of command prompt and restart your computer. And walaa…

You’re done! Congrats…you just successfully fixed your Code Purple problem. Now you don’t have to waste half a month of shipping your computer back and forth from an HP tech shop to get it “repaired for free”

Missing Drivers for a dc7800p and Windows 7 | DIYTechTools.com

For reasons none of us will ever understand, though HP offers drivers for the dc7800 and Windows 7, there are a few drivers missing from the HP download page. Specifically, the HECI and LMS_SOL devices appear, after installation, with yellow check marks (no drivers installed). If the names of these rascals don’t ring a bell, they are identified in the Device Manager – as I recall – as  ”Unknown Serial Port“, and, “Unkown Device“.   It’s something like that – and a problem for pretty much everyone.
See more at:

Missing Drivers for a dc7800p and Windows 7 | DIYTechTools.com