Indiscriminate Transgressions

Dell sells this card and it’s supposed to have GPS in it. Only, it doesn’t seem to. The help in the Dell Mobile Broadband Card Utility tells you how to use the GPS option in the tools menu, and/or the GPS Status button in the card manager. So here’s the card manager:

I don’t see me no GPS Status button. I contacted Dell tech support a few times over the last few months, and they eventually refer me to Sprint, which is ludicrous since Sprint a> sucks, b> doesn’t have customer support to speak of c> doesn’t support this card. I tried once.

So lo and behold on my final chat session with tech support tonight, the one where I’m planning on getting mad and demanding 40% of my purchase price refunded for false advertising, the man in India types these magic words: “The Dell Mobile Broadband Card Utility (DMBCU) determines the presence of GPS software when the software is installed.” Aha. Aha!! Registry.

So I fire up the process monitor. I run the DMBCU and capture events. I search for GPS and I find on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Novatel Wireless\NextGenCommon a key called GPSHWStatus:

…and it’s set to 0 or not there…

I’m running Vista x64 - this key would be different on 32 bit windows machines, should be the same but without the Wow6432Node\ part. So, on to registry editor:

Indeed, it is there and set to 0. So ah sets it to 1:

And the next time I run the DMBCU, it installs a driver(!) for … the GPS!

and would ya lookie here:

It seems to work. I’m inside and I haven’t checked it out yet, but when I hit that button it finds the GPS on COM6 and starts to search for satellites.

I did all this while the Dell tech support guy was connected to my machine remotely. He tried to pull down the Tools menu to look for the GPS entry, moused over all icons in my tray, and then told me I would have to contact Sprint. [sarcasm]I’m SO glad I allowed the remote connection.[/sarcasm] When I got angry about that, he spent 3 minutes looking up information and then mentioned the bit about the install. I did the rest and then near the end when I said “Did you see that? It installed a driver!” he says to me “Great. Glad we could fix your trouble.” Uh huh.

I hope this helps someone. I have seen many posts on the Dell Community forums about this with no solution.

I had to rebuild the OS on my laptop, so I started from scratch with Vista x64 Ultimate. All went well during the install, and updates were installed. No crashes, no problems.

When I started using the system, I noticed some differences from the other installs. I first noticed when adding the debugging symbols to Visual Studio. When I browse folder, this is what happens:

The User profile folder, which is my case is supposed to be my username, “kk” ( and is on my desktop), instead is empty. When I click on it, I get the error “The folder cannot be used.” If you look at the image, there’s an extra space in there, it’s like the folder name being retrieved by the system is null.

Visual studio recovers from this and I can browse for the folder. Apple’s iTunes, however, fails. I keep my music on an external hard drive, but when I click on “browse…” to point my music folder there, I get the same error as above, but iTunes becomes unusable after I clear the dialog. Which sucks because iTunes also base64 encodes their preferences xml files rather than just writing them out as UTF-16 encoded, but I won’t pick on Apple too much since I am a shareholder. Oh wait, yes I will, what the hell kind of boneheaded decision was that?

In Internet Explorer, you can relocate your folder for cache. Here is what comes up on a properly working system:

And here is what happens on my system:

Note the lack of the User Profile folder in this dialog. So IE wins on the “smartness” of dealing with this issue, but it’s still an issue. On a system where this works properly, you can also browse “up” in certain dialogs to the top, which brings you to that User Profile, I get the same error in that case as well.

Some things I’ve done to try to fix this:

• I tried searching through the Microsoft knowledge base, and I find many articles about “special folders” like Music and Pictures not having the correct icons, but nothing like this.
• I spend about an hour with procmon watching what kind of registry access is made on the system to see if it’s some kind of problem there. That was so painful — when you open a browse dialog there’s a massive flurry of activity and nothing jumps out as a problem.
• I’ve compared permissions, etc, on a working system with this system, identical.
• I decided to create a new account on the machine, all new accounts being created have exactly the same problem.

It’s weird how crippling this is, it’s minor issue but it comes up a lot and it makes it hard to browse for files in general. If anyone has experienced this problem, please share your findings.

…without all the crap.

The main Nero Burning ROM program is perfect for what I use burning software for. I can make data CDs and DVDs, dual layer DVDs, and if I have VOBs I can create a Video-DVD. I can save a disk layout, and load it later and burn it. Burning works, supports some nice features like overburning and verification, and that’s about it.

The problem is, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to install just the Nero Burning ROM program. No matter what you do, it installs Nero Scout, which then immediately starts indexing files on your hard drive. It installs a variety of other crap, and you end up with 4-5 loaded processes. That’s if you JUST chooses Nero Burning ROM.

So, NERO is dead to me, in the same way that Real Media is dead to me. (Backgrounder, Real Media had a completely deceptive install program that turned on all kinds of features. It did so by showing you a scroll box with 4 items shown, all unchecked, and then if you scroll down you see 4 “Adware” type programs are checked.) On principal, I will NEVER install any Real product on any platform ever again.

So with all of Nero’s crap, and the fact that they are charging $50 upgrades every 18months or so for not a lot of new stuff, means that I’d like to send that the way of Real.

Does anyone use a CD/DVD burning program that does as I described above? If so, can you comment?

Thanks in advance.

I plug in my 160GB iPod classic to sync. This process now takes upwards of 5 minutes.

I play a few (8) songs the PC, so all sync has to do it perform a few simple tasks like update the playcounts and played dates for the songs, then eject. I plug in the classic, 20 seconds later iTunes says “syncing iPod” and then iTunes becomes totally unresponsive for 45-60 seconds. Then it’s responsive again for 30 seconds, then unresponsive for another 45-60 seconds. This continues for 5-7 minutes. I can connect my old 60GB iPod and an iPod mini, and do the exact same thing in 7 or 8 seconds without iTunes freezing.

The first update to the firmware did nothing to fix this.

I called Apple Care last night, and was on hold for 45 minutes. Then I got to talk to a “genius,” or whatever they’re called on the phone, and he told me he had never heard of this issue (even though it’s all over the interwebs). Then he put me on hold for 15 more minutes, then came back and told me to reboot. (Wheeeeeee!) He put me on hold again while I was rebooting, then disconnected me. I called back and got to hear a recording that told me to call during their normal business hours.

Hi Apple you suck.

(full disclosure, I am an apple shareholder)

I just started using Sprint broadband in my laptop today, with their Novatel Merlin EX720 ExpressCard. The card is pretty sweet. It’s an EVDO rev A (aka EV-DO, aka 1xEvDO, aka 1xEV-DO, official name: CDMA2000, High Rate Packet Data Air Interface) card. Here’s a speedtest.net result from inside my office in Montclair, NJ:

So that’s kind of impressive.

I ordered on Monday. Someone changed my corporate Tax ID along the way, and I was flagged for a deposit. After trying 3 times to have them change it and that not working (India), I let them take a $100 deposit. I ordered on Monday, was told I’d have it by Wednesday, Thursday at the latest. Got it today (Friday) so still good.

The out of box experience is miserable. You install the software, plug in the card, and the software tells you it’s “locked” with a “user lock code.” There’s nothing in the documentation about this, so I called the “activation number” that is on page 4 of the manual, figuring it may not be activated. After being on hold for 25 minutes to talk to someone, they had no record of my order in their system.

They asked a bunch of questions like did you order it from Sprint or Nextel? I bought it at sprint.com - I guess Sprint? I find out later no, I ordered through Nextel somehow, and I got to hear all about their “recent merger” (which began in December of 2004 and was “completed” in August of 2005). I learned they are bringing new software online in their offices next month called “Ensemble” and was placed on hold while he talked to the people that are rolling that out or whatever. Then they told me my account was neither with Sprint or Nextel but with a company he had never heard of before.

He put me on hold again, and asked me for my wireless phone number again. I again explained I don’t have it. I also mentioned that I’d log into my online account that was created when I ordered, and get the information there, but according to the email I received, my username is text.nextel.store.orderreceipt.acctmgmt.membernametext which doesn’t seem right.

So I dug out the packing slip and started reading random things to the guy: customer number, order number, address, tracking number, P2K number, and then here’s a barcode with MDN written next to it. Lo and behold, that’s my “mobile device number” and that’s the same as my phone number. He tells me that that’s what he needed at the beginning of the call and if I had provided that we wouldn’t have gone through all of this. I explained that he asked for my “phone number” and when I said “I don’t see that here, could it be called something else?” he told me no, it would be under phone number. From there, I got my “unlock code” which was 1709, which doesn’t correspond to anything.

What’s that rationale on shipping a data device with an unlimited plan in a “user locked” state? And then not mentioning anything about it in the manual or other included papers? Like:

1. FIRST STEP: Install software.
2. SECOND STEP: Plug in device.
3. THIRD STEP: You must CALL Sprint at THIS NUMBER and sit on hold for 20 minutes to get your unlock code.

That would make it clear.

Hopefully I’ll never have to talk to them again as long as I live. My first cell phone was a Sprint PCS phone back when they had just started, and the customer service was so horrible that it took me two weeks to cancel my service. I had to call sales and act like a maniac to finally get to talk to someone, and they disconnected me. So I let them disconnect me. It seems that not a whole lot has changed there. They still have 20+ minute hold times. According to Sprint, I still owe them approximately $350 for that service (which I was unable to cancel) even after they lost a class action over their behavior.

ANYHOW…

I’m excited to use the device. I’m using it now and so far so good. I have to figure out how to use the GPS part of the device, it appears to have added some COM ports to my system (weird) so maybe that’s how it happens. More later.

So here’s a new hobby of mine: Troubleshooting why my computer hangs when I try to map a disk to a drive letter. Sounds fun, right?

I keep my iTunes library on an external USB hard drive, since my media collection is now far too large for my laptop’s built-in hard drive. I have another external hard drive that I use for backups, and another that has stuff on it like software installers, weird games, etc, which I call “Goods.”

I’d like to map these when they plug in to M: for the media, B: for the backup, and G: for the goods.

The first thing I realized in the Windows Disk Manager is that B:, while definitely not in use for a floppy or anything ridiculous, is “odd.” this could be a BIOS issue or whatever else, and I don’t care enough to look into it, but it doesn’t work on my current machine. It puts it into some kind of unusable state where Disk Manager can’t be quit, and Vista eventually hangs and needs to be power cycled. Fine. So I called that one Z: and that works well.

My Goods drive was mapped to G: with no problems whatsoever.

Now, the Goods drive is a 160GB Western Digital Passport II (WDP2). The Backup drive is a 120GB WDP2, and the Media drive is also a 120GB WDP2. These drives are all formatted NTFS.

For some reason, I can assign the Media drive to a mount point, like C:\Mount\M with no problems at all. But, no matter which drive letter I assign to it, it hangs the system like when I was trying to assign the B: drive. I’ve tried M:, N:, I: they all hang disk manager and then put the system in an unstable state ultimately ending in the system needing to be shut down hard.

I tried using the “remount” from a useful USB troubleshooting site, and when I tell it

remount C:\Mount\M M:

it hangs the system in the exact same way. It’s frustrating.

However, now I’m in a really crappy situation. The drive doesn’t get auto-assigned a free letter anymore when it’s plugged in, even if I delete all the mount points in Disk Manager. I’d love to know how to be able to do this. I have a suspicion that if I could somehow figure out the Registry crap associated with this stuff I would be able to figure this all out, but I can’t tell which drive is which in there. I could delete a mount point fairly easily, but that’s not my problem. I guess I need to delete my drive and let this re-build. So I’m going to take a second to do that after I reboot. Hang on…

Ok, so first, I learned that Device Manager can be told to show non-attached devices. How? Oh, would you believe an environment variable? I created a CMD file with this in it:

set DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1
devmgmt.msc

And ran it. Then I selected “View-> Show Hidden Devices” and under “Disk Drives” I was presented with every USB, Firewire, etc disk I had ever attached to my system. I determined which was mine, removed it and replugged the drive, but no go, it still put it at my mount point.

So here’s a fun registry location - “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MountPoints2″ - that appears to have every mount point, including network shares, that I’ve ever had on my system. My gut feeling is that if I delete all this I’ll just have to remap, but I’m not sure yet. There’s also “HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices” which I also think will be rebuilt.

So, you only live once I though, and so I renamed both these of these keys to _old, and inserted my drive. It showed up as E: (great!) and now I’m going to try to make it M: - still hangs. Maybe I should have rebooted in there… Same problem.

OKay, so THAT didn’t work, and I put all the old registry back in place, but it did give me enough information to manually trash the entry for my M drive and then manually create an entry for it in the MountedDevices. Which works. I could even write a program to do this part of the equation now. But THIS SUCKS that I can’t just use the built-in tools, and I feel like I’m missing something since my method didn’t result in a hang, even though the stuff in Windows and the other guy’s 3rd party thing did hang.

If anyone knows why this would be hanging or has solved this problem, please let me know how you solved it.