Kangaroo Court {concept47 blog}

“Upgrading” to Windows Xp from Vista

This tongue in cheek article perfectly sums up why no one should be trying to move to windows Vista.

Warning: Geek sense of humor required to read
“Upgrading” to Windows Xp from Vista

Add comment December 17th, 2007

How to solve problem with USB devices not responding on resumption from standby in Bootcamp.

So … I’m running Windows XP on a 17″ Macbook Pro with Bootcamp …
Every now and then, when I put the laptop on Standby and try to resume work from where I left off, the USB devices stop responding all together.
This is a big problem for me, since

• I put my laptop in and out of standby several times a day
• work off an external 250GB Hard drive.
• am pretty hopeless without a wireless mouse

I poked around online, but didn’t really find anything on Google or at the Apple bootcamp forum.
So I decided to try fixing it on my own.

What I found curious about the problem, was that everytime the usb devices stopped working, I’d get this message in the Event Viewer.

Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the AppleOSSMgr service.

So I simply restarted the “Apple OS Switch Manager” service and after allowing it to complete … it would fail, but my usb devices would be operational again.
Here’s how to accomplish it, and I hope this helps someone out.

From the command line

• Hit the Apple btn + R  … the run prompt should come up
• type in “cmd“
• type in [net stop "Apple OS Switch manager"] (note the quotes)
• wait for that to complete
• then type in [net stop "Apple OS Switch manager"]

Visually

• Hit the Apple btn + R  … the run prompt should come up
• type in “services.msc“
• scroll down until you find “Apple OS Switch Manager” (sort the columns by name to help you find it a bit more easily)
• Right Click on it and select “Restart“
• wait a while … it will take a bit of time to complete and it should actually fail, but after its done you should be able to use your usb device again.

Add comment December 7th, 2007

How to access Windows Quick Launch as a folder

Just discovered this the other day, as I was prodding around on Windows XP.
To access the folder that holds the links that appear in the Quick Launch tool bar, the path is just

C:\Documents and Settings\{your user name here}\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

Don’t know why it would be useful, but I was excited to discover it :]

Add comment November 22nd, 2007