Useful solutions

When your ActiveSync keeps refusing to sync with your device, even though it has been working all the time before, you should make sure that Windows Media Player isn’t running. On my device, It tries to sync the device and both its SD Card Slot and its CF Card Slot with my Media Library. This causes ActiveSync to hickup and stop synchronisation. In my case, you could work around the problem by just closing Windows Media Player.

Hi there,

This is for all of you who are annoyed by ctfmon.exe, for whatever reason (maybe it is crashing etc.), and want to get rif of it.

It is really simple: just download CTFMON-Remover from Gerhard Schlager’s Website, get the English or German File from the bottom of the Website, unzip it and execute. To restore, just re-run CTFMON-Remover. You might have to run CTFMON-Remover after an Office Update or something similar.

Afterwards, you won’t have problems with ctfmon anymore.

I recently created a Windows XP SP3 slipstreamed install using nLite. There was an option to reduce the delay when the XP start men ushows up after clicking the start button. I set it to zero, but now I found out that I liked the old way with 400 ms more. The value is stored in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\MenuShowDelay, given in milliseconds. Default is 400. Just change it to your likings.

Source: http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/tipmonkies/2005/07/23/changing-xp-start-menu-delay/

To start the device manager as Administrator, issue the following command in the Run dialog (Win+R):

runas /user:Administrator /savecred “cmd /c devmgmt.msc”

This way you can edit device settings quickly. You may use any other control panel applet (.msc or .cpl files) instead if devmgmt.msc, too. You will be prompted for the credentials of user “Administrator” once, but then runas will save the credentials (thanks to the /savecred flag).

If you selected the option start each folder in a separate process in the Administrator’s folder settings, you can similarly start an explorer windows with admin rights:

runas /user:Administrator /savecred explorer

With that window, you can install MSI files requiring admin privileges, start up control panel, etc.

If you simply want to start a single program as administrator, just right click the .exe file and select “run as”.

When you try to connect to a remote Windows file share, you might find that you are not asked for username and password (but you should have been), but can connect to the share server. But when opening any share, you won’t be granted accesss since your credentials are wrong. A similar issue might be that you won’t be given access to a remote windows server at all in first place, and the file share server doesn’t ask for credentials, too.

The solution for this issue is simple:

1. In Control Panel, select User Accounts.
2. On the left hand side, select “Manage own network passwords”.
3. Add a new entry with the server you wish to connect to (without leading \\’s) as server name and SERVER\USERNAME as username, where SERVER is the remote server and USER is the username you wish to authenticate as on the file share.
4. Now, try to connect to the share again. You should be either given access immediately, or you should at least be asked for your credentials which you can enter then.

Hi there!

In this blog, we will post solutions about problems we experienced with our computers. Maybe you can find some of these solutions useful, too.