Posts Tagged ‘windows 7’

Installing Sage 50 accounts 2010

Posted by Mohammed on Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

Installing and setting up Sage 50 accounts 2010 is straightforward process – no matter whether the Sage data is stored locally, or on a network share which involves editing “Company” file to point to the Sage data location.

For Windows Vista and Windows 7, the “Company” file is located on the following path:

C:\ProgramData\Sage\Accounts\2010.

When the Sage installation is completed, Sage searches online for updates and then prompts the user to download and install them. If Sage is installed on a Windows 7 operating system, updates might fail and crashes with an error message of;

“Sage SBD Platform Installation Software Update has stopped working”.

This is a known issue with Sage on Windows 7. To resolve this issue, you need to download and install the “Sage SBD Desktop Installer Utility” (See link below), and then Sage will look for updates and will install successfully.

https://support.sage.co.uk/default.aspx?page=22&did=6b6e1550-8d7f-41ee-bc81-35b8b9c285c4

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Windows 7 fails to start after installing SP1

Posted by Mohammed on Monday, March 28th, 2011

Windows 7 fails to start after installing SP1; it hangs up and displays this error message:

“fatal error c0000034 applying update operation 282 of 115544”.

When trying to start it in safe mode, it fails and keeps stopping at classpnp.sys.

I personally, successfully installed SP1 shortly after it was released last February. I started testing the installation in a test environment and then rolled the installation to servers and PCs in a production environment without any issues.

In fact, the errors outlined above indicate a corruption with the installation of SP1. This leaves an option to try to do a system restore using Windows 7 recovery mode. But this fails as well with a message of “no restore points have been created”.

This leaves one option, which is to rebuild the PC following all the attempts above to recover to a previous working condition. However, I found an excellent article which provides a solution to this problem and was able to get Windows 7 to load successfully on a customer laptop where installation of SP1 failed.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itproinstall/thread/1c9a7151-b48c-4a98-aae7-a4b82682ea8e#bcabda57-7338-499f-aee2-d708e76df315

Below are INSTRUCTIONS as suggested in the link above:

01. Reboot your computer while it’s starting up.

02. When your computer starts up again, choose the option “Launch Startup Repair”

03. When the Startup repair starts, click cancel.

04. After you click cancel it will show a box. Click “Don’t Send”

05. Click the link “View advanced options for recovery and support”

06. In the new window click Command Prompt at the bottom.

……please follow the complete steps in the above link.

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Cannot send fax from Windows Vista/Windows 7 PC with “RPC Server not Available” error message

Posted by Mohammed on Monday, February 21st, 2011

“Windows Fax and Scan” may stop working and users may get the following error when they try to send faxes;

“The message could not be sent. The RPC server is not available“

This is an issue with the fax settings on the PC rather than a problem with the fax server itself. When you try to send a fax from the server, it will work fine.

When starting the “Windows Fax and Scan” program, you will notice a message at the bottom which says “All Fax accounts are inaccessible”. This means that the “Windows Fax and Scan” program has an incorrect fax server within its settings.

To resolve this issue, you need to delete the old server entries and reconfigure the new server name instead.

For more information, click here to read a Microsoft article entitled “The local fax account is inaccessible after you rename a Windows Vista-based computer”, which describes how to resolve this issue.

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Cannot Access a CNAME network share from a Windows XP PC

Posted by Mohammed on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

We recently faced a problem whereby a customer’s database server stopped working due to a hardware failure. The server was running on a physical box, and XP and Windows 7 users had a mapped drive which pointed to a share on the database server in order to run the application from their PCs.

The solution was to build a new server, restore the database and connect users to the new server. However, this would have had a major impact on the business due to the fact that a new server would need to be purchased and delivered to site and then rebuilt. This process would have taken at least 2-3 days, meaning serious downtime before users could work on the system again.

axon IT had implemented a Hyper-V solution for the customer a few months previously, so we were in fact able to rebuild a new virtual server (Windows 2008 Standard) to host the database server straight away. The process of having a server ready in the production environment took less than an hour, which then allowed the administrator to restore the database on the virtual the server by around lunch time the same day, saving valuable days of downtime.

We then had to use the DNS entry (CNAME) to point the old server name to the new virtual server. This worked fine for Windows 7 users who were able to connect to the new share on the virtual server and then launch the business application. XP users on the other hand, could not connect.

We carried out some diagnostics on the XP clients and found that we could successfully ping the DNS record, but when trying to access the share on the new server, it failed.

I did some research online and found that this is a known issue with SMB share via CNAME alias. Windows 2008 and Windows 7 will work fine, Windows XP will have issues.

This fix for this problem comes in two stages;

1.Add a registry key “DisableStrictNameChecking” as explained on Microsoft KB 281308, (Connecting to SMB share on a Windows 2000-based computer or a Windows Server 2003-based computer may not work with an alias name):
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281308/en-us;

2. Run the following set on the domain controller:
SetSpn -A HOST/<ALIAS> <Hostname>
SetSpn -A HOST/<ALIAS>.<Domain>.<ext> <Hostname>

This should effectively resolve this problem.

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How to Stop the Local Downlevel Document from Appearing in the Print Queue

Posted by Mark on Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

In Windows Vista and Windows 7 Asynchronous RPC was introduced to speed up communication to a Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 sever. As this is not supported with Windows Server 2003, communication between a Windows Vista/7 PC and Windows Server 2003 using Asynchronous RPC may be lost. There will be a failed print job and an extra document called ‘Local Downlevel Document’ stuck in the print queue. Also, the port and driver tabs in the printer properties will be blank. 

The solution is to disable Asynchronous RPC in the registry of the Windows Vista/7 client.

You can either manually enter the registry entry in the registry editor – to open this, type ‘regedit’ in ‘search programs and files’ on the start menu. Or alternatively, copy the text below into a text file and select ‘save as’ in the ‘File Name’ field and add ‘.reg’ to the end of the file name to save the file with the registry file extension. Then, locate the file, right-click and select merge.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Printers]

“EnabledProtocols”=dword:00000006

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