Just another Wordpress blog...
If you’re in the EU, you qualify for free enrolment for Windows 10 Extended Support Updates (ESU). (Other territories may have to pay a fee). This is useful if you are running Windows 10 on hardware that won’t support Windows 11, or you just want to stay on Windows 10 for compatibility or other reasons. … Continue reading Fixing Windows 10 Extended Updates enrolment error →
We have a lot of Sonos V1 smart speakers in our house, and for as long as I can remember, starting the Sonos V1 app on my main Windows machine is extremely slow. Initially, it warns that it can’t find any Sonos equipment. Then it spends 30-60 seconds doing some sort of network discovery, and … Continue reading Sonos V1 on Windows – Slow Startup →
My brother has a Roku Streambar but had difficulty getting it to work reliably. The network connection test reported that both the Wired link and the Internet link were working correctly. However, most of the streaming services wouldn’t start. As this was tricky to figure out, I’m recording the solution here for the benefit of … Continue reading Roku Streambar Can’t Access Internet →
While performing some maintenance and updates on an ancient Windows 2008 Server VM, I upgraded it to Service Pack 2, in an attempt to resolve various ongoing issues. Shortly afterwards, I discovered Windows Update was no longer working; it gave an obscure failure code and all the usual efforts to revive it, such as flushing … Continue reading Resolving Windows 2008 SSL problems →
As an embedded systems developer working primarily from home, I often need to remotely power-cycle development boards located in the office. In the past, I’ve used a Denkovi USB Relay 4-port controller with some success. Wiring individual power supplies through this is fiddly though, and It’s not convenient to swap between different power supplies. It … Continue reading Command line control for…
With luck, you’ll never need any of the information below. If you do then (a) you have my sympathy, and (b) you’re welcome! One of my clients has an aging Microsoft IIS installation comprising a variety of Windows 2000 & 2003 servers (SQL, IIS, Domain Controller, File Server, Linux VMWare) running on a mixture of … Continue reading Windows 2000 0x0000007B INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE →
My development PC from five years ago was relegated to secondary status when I upgraded. Now it acts as my main backup server for the network, and also an occasional disk copy station when I want to copy or recover drives without disrupting my main machine. It uses a Crucial CT500BX SSD as its C: … Continue reading Recovering a dead SSD →
My previous attempt to stop the Windows 10 default route vanishing turned out to be unreliable; after a few Windows Updates, the default route was gone again. However, I’ve finally found a way to make a statically configured default route properly persistent across reboots (something that other operating systems, and older versions of Windows, have … Continue reading Windows 10 Default Route…
A number of my PCs have a persistent problem with the default route disappearing when the system is restarted. Since I use Remote Desktop to control most of these machines remotely, it’s rather annoying; if the PC reboots, I no longer have remote access. I hoped it would correct itself when I upgraded to Windows … Continue reading Default route keeps vanishing on Windows 10 →
Ireland’s new postcode scheme, Eircode is officially launched today. It’s been a long time coming and like it or lump it, we’ll all be using it soon. There’s been plenty of debate and criticism of Eircode in recent months, some of it valid, some of it misplaced. However, I did read one thing that caught my … Continue reading How big is the Eircode database? →