Update 18 December 2007:

I’ve discovered a better way to force Finder to browse the contents of a network drive. You can read more here.

I wrote recently about the problems that I was having connecting to a network drive from my MacBook.

I still haven’t solved the problem, but I have come across something else: If I share a drive on my Windows XP computer, the computer will be displayed in the Finder Window, along with my network drive. I can browse the Windows machine, but for some reason, I still can’t browse the network drive.

Luckily, the Packard Bell website had all the necessary SW51 drivers for XP, so the install should have been simple enough: back up his profile, wipe the machine, install XP, apply service packs, install drivers and do a Windows Update to get the latest patches, install the necessary programs, and put back on his data.

There was only one issue – the wireless LAN driver provided by Packard Bell for Windows XP, doesn’t work on Windows XP. It’s a Ralink RT73 USB Wireless LAN card, but the supplied driver just doesn’t work. So it was time to go hunting for the correct driver. I was lucky that I wasn’t the first person to come across this issue, and I was able to locate the correct driver here. It’s the ZyDAS ZD211B driver, but it works perfectly.

UPDATE: As per Guillaume’s comment, the original lik was broken, so I have changed the link to the new download location. Thanks Guillaume.

If you’re lucky, Apples iSync will recognise your device, in which case you’re pretty much good to go straight out of the box. However, if you have a smartphone that isn’t recognised by iSync, who’ll have to splash out on a 3rd party solution.

I recently purchased the HTC S710, which unfortunately, it isn’t recognised by iSync. After a quick Google search, I came across “The Missing Sync for Windows Mobile“. Missing Sync allows you to sync via your Network, Bluetooth or USB. Providing plugins for your Contacts, iCal, and all your multimedia content, Missing Sync has all the bases covered. If you have Microsoft Entourage installed, it will also provide a conduit to sync your data directly with Microsofts attempt at a PIM for the Mac OS.

Setting up your device is straightforward and I was up and running within minutes of downloading the program.

Costing $39.95 for download, or $49.95 for the CD version, it’s certainly worth it if you have to sync your smartphone with your Mac.

“Thank you for your interest in obtaining updates from our site.

This website is designed to work with Microsoft Windows operating systems only.

To find updates for Microsoft products that are designed for Macintosh operating systems, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/mac.”

The process is fairly straightforward:

1. Download the Orb software to your Windows PC,
2. Follow on the on-screen instructions and install the Orb program,
3. Set up a login account,
4. Start the Internet Channel on your Wii and go to mycast.orb.com,
5. Login to your Orb account,
6. Browse for the audio, video or photos that you want to play.

In order to get the best from Orb, you do need a broadband connection, and your Wii needs to be connected to the Internet. Although it does work, I found that watching videos through the Orb interface is patchy, but that is more than likely down to the fact that my upload connection is terrible. Another thing – at the moment the Orb software is Windows only, but apparently they will be releasing beta versions of the platform for Mac OS and Linux next year.

First off it’s a bit on the clunky and heavy side. Using the stylus is a bit fiddley on the smallish screen. Wireless was problematic to set up. It won’t sync with my MacBook. Using the WLAN really drains the battery. It runs Windows Mobile. So far those are the bad points.

Now the positives: it has an FM tuner, a TV tuner, once the wireless was setup it was a breeze to connect to the Internet and send and receive emails. There’s enough room for all my text messages on the miniSD card included with the phone. (It’s only a 256MB card, so I’ll be upgrading that soon enough). It may not be an Nokia N95, but for less than €200, you can’t beat the price.

UPDATE:

I’ve just posted my full review of the Ubiquio 401. You can read it here.

In order to increase security and to protect against attack, Microsoft have introduced a new driver signing requirement in Vista. By requiring that drivers are signed, Microsoft hoped that this would ensure that only drivers which were verified as being clean and compatible with Vista could be installed.

ATI duly had their drivers signed by VeriSign so that they could be installed on a Windows Vista system. Unfortunately, their was a flaw in one of the drivers. Apparently the flaw was originally intended as a shortcut in the driver that allowed ATI developers to load modules into the driver for testing. When the driver was released, either no-one thought to remove the shortcut or ATI forgot about it.

In order to close the hole, ATI will have to patch the flaw in their driver, have it signed with a new certificate, roll-out the update via Windows Update, then have the original signing authority revoke the original certificate. It’s not a straightforward process and it’s by no means foolproof either.

I tried searching Google and the Microsoft Knowledge Base for answers, but not one of the pages I found seemed to deal with my particular problem. Given that the problem would resolve itself after a hard restart I began to think that it might be a hardware problem – this kind of symptom might be related to a component which wasn’t initialising correctly, and was causing the OS to blue-screen. By the time I restarted the system, it had “warmed up”, and that’s why it was only on every second boot that I was seeing the problem.

This particular machine is only a couple of months old, and as you can imagine I wasn’t too happy that it was beginning to fail on me, especially as I store all my important data on it.

But more in hope than expectation I decided to ignore the possibility of a hardware issue, and troubleshoot the software side. From experience I’ve found that more often than not when Windows blue-screens it’s driver related, and even more often than not the driver responsible is the video driver.

My PC has an nVidia Geforce 7500 card, so I updated the drivers to the latest ForceWare driver version 94.24. A quick restart, and the problem was solved.

While my problem is resolved, I don’t know what caused it in the first place. I haven’t installed or changed anything on the machine in a while, except for the usual Microsoft Updates. The only thing that I can think of is that an update from Microsoft didn’t like the video driver on my computer, and that there was a timing issue with the initialisation of the driver. That’s not s definitive answer, but I think it’s a fairly decent guess.

Apparently an update to Internet Explorer is causing issues with a file called svchost.exe. This file is in fact a generic name for any service that runs from a DLL instead of an EXE. At the moment, the exact cause is not known, but Outlook users have been hardest hit, while the issue also affects users of Windows Server Update Services.

No official fix has been released as of yet, but some people have reported that another hotfix available from Microsoft seems to resolve the problem, although it has not worked for everyone. The hotfix is available for download from Microsoft.

BITS is used by Windows Update to automatically download updates in the background and by Microsoft Messenger to transfer files. The fault lies in the fact that BITS bypasses any installed firewalls, and does not require any suspicious actions to start the download. By using BITS, an attacker could automatically download whatever they wanted to your computer, including password/ credit card logging software, remote access control software, the possibilities are endless.

While there are no major infections using this method, it is just a matter of time before one does come along. Hopefully, Microsoft will have addressed the issue before that happens.