Force mounting NTFS drives in Linux

Sometimes when you try to mount a NTFS drive under Linux it fails because the drive hasn't been "unmounted" under windows correctly. Well to force it to mount you can use the following command:

Sudo mount -t NTFS-3g /dev/sda1 /media/Windows -o force

Where /dev/sda1 is the HDD and /media/Windows is the label of the partition (or HDD) that you want to mount.

The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded

Another big problem appeared today with Vista. What new? I got the 'The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded' error message. What the heck is that? Oh well off online to check for solutions. I couldn't find something that was giving me a definate answer.

As time was getting by i was getting angry. When suddenly i saw something on the account i was trying to log in. It had became 'backup'. Hmmm. Lets go on the registry to see what that meant.

I navigated to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList and I checked the SID for that account. At the end of the string had a '.bak' to it and above it the same SID without the .bak extention. So i deleted the one WITHOUT the .bak and I renamed the one WITH the .bak not to include the extention.

And VOILA the problem was fixed. Hope this helps to anyone with the same problem.

Fixing slow Windows Explorer copy in Vista

OK i thought i had finished with tinkering on vista. I was wrong! More problems arised. 'Great', i thought, 'what else?'. This time the Windows Explorer was freezing up while copying or going through directories on a network drive. I was puzzled? The machine had a 1 Gbit NIC! Switch was 1 Gbit too. What's the problem?

I went through alot of web sites to find out a solution and as i was searching for answers i found 2-3 web sites that were refering to the same problem with different solutions to it.

With alot of trial and error i found out that if i do the following the system became alive again.

1) Disable the autotuning, as per previous entry.
2) Disable indexing on the computer. Not crucial but hey why not?
3) Disable Remote Differential Compression.
To do that go to Control Panel, click Program and Features, click on Turn Windows
features on and off, and untick the Remore Differential Compression checkbox.
4) Open Control panel again, go to Network and Sharing Center, click Manage Network Connections. Right click your Local Area Connection and click Properties. On the new screen that appears click the Configure button under your NIC card. Click Advanced and select Speed & Duplex. By default will say Autonegotiate. Depending on the NIC it will have some values. On mine i selected 100 Mbps Half Dublex.

And that was it. The computer seems a bit speedier to respond but with a drop of actual speed from 1000 Mbps. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.

Enable verbose mode on Vista

OK sometimes you want to see what the heck is going on when Vista is loading up and the 'Please wait' doesn't cut the mustard. Well in that case you can add a registry entry that will show abit more information about the procedures running on the background.

Copy and paste this into a new text file with the extention .reg and double click on it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
"verbosestatus"=dword:00000001

That should add the new entry. One quick reboot and you are done.

TCP Tuning off for Vista

Well sometimes Vista in a network environment misbehave. It has a new function that tries to Auto-Tune the connection. That can cause poor intermittent network performance. So what can we do to turn this option off? Easy. Type:

netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

as an administrator and that was it.

You have new unopened items missing in the taskbar

People asking me all the time about the small yellow envelope, in outlook, that appears in the taskbar when a new email comes in. They keep on loosing it! Where is it? Where did it go?

Relax, it's not that bad. To get it back do the following:
Click Tools
Click Options
Click E-mail Options
Click Advanced E-mail Options
Tick the "Show an envelope icon in the notification area"
Click OK 3 times.

And that's that! Easy.

Vista loses network connection. AGAIN!

Argg!! It happened again. I lost connection to the Internet thanks to a drop of the TCP/IP stack!! I thought that I had fixed this problem so I typed in

Netsh winsock reset

And I though everything would be OK. WRONG! My previous fix didn’t work!! What the heck? After lot of questions and searching I found this command too

Netsh Int IP reset resetlog.txt

Which resets the IP address or something. And in an instance the connection was up and running again. I’m telling you, Vista has A LOT of way to go before it’s a OS that stands out. Wait! Isn’t that what Windows 7 suppose to be? Hmmmmmm!