Occasionally, I help out friends and family with their PC problems and recently a case came to me that involved a Windows laptop. This laptop was sitting in a corner of some office for the past two years and eventually was given to a family member of mine as a parting gift. The only problem was, the username and password set for the login, didn't work and no-one was giving the situation attention from the original source, so it was brought to me.
Initially I was going to blow the partition away and then install a nice Linux distribution, but my family member wanted to keep the Windows installation. This was a bit difficult, because I needed to get into the system as an administrator in order to reset the password for the account, but no-one had the administrator password. In comes Hiren's BootCD. I unfortunately didn't have a CD or DVD available, so I grabbed a copy of WinCDEmu to mount the ISO in Windows and followed the instructions on using a USB key (of which I had a few) to boot the system. Following the guide to resetting a Windows password, allowed me to enable the local administrator account, reset the password and login in 15 minutes flat. After that I reset the password for the account that was there and set it to autologin (so it's more of an appliance than anything else). Another job well done, thanks to open source software.
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Sharing a TSTT Blink Broadband stick using your Windows 7 laptop
So I was using a Windows 7 laptop that had a TSTT blink broadband USB stick and the Internet speed wasn't half bad. Unfortunately, the USB stick isn't one of those neat mobile hotspots which let you easily share your Internet access with other devices. This was disappointing because I really wanted to connect my Android phone to it so I can get data on my phone. In the past, when I had a similar situation (Windows, Mobile Broadband, want to share wirelessly) I had installed a product named Conectify. Connectify was OK, but it wasn't great. It was a bit slow and had a custom interface that was rather unnecessary. There was a free version though, but as updates came out (and it nagged you about the updates) and the updated free versions restricted/eliminated your ability to share your 4G connection. I'm not keen on spending too much money on something I'll use for a week at the most for the year.
In steps open source, more specifically a neat application called Virtual Router. The download and installation was a snap, but when I tried to start the Virtual Router manager, I got a message that the "Virtual router manager the service is not running". Some googling later I found a forum post that suggested that you remove the tags from the VirtualRouterClient.exe.config in the installation directory. Luckily for me that seemed to work and I was on my way.
Then, I got a different error. A new error: "Group or resource is not in the correct state to perform the requested operation". Arg. What does that even mean? Some googling and I ended up on a number of different sites, one which suggested to turn on Internet Connection Sharing for the connection before you start up the virtual router. Seems like an easy fix. Unfortunately I got an error that ICS has been disabled by the administrator. What? Arg again! I suspected it was due to the group policy that the laptop was subject to as a result of having joined a domain. I googled some more and found a post that showed you how to delve into the registry and change group policies and other crazy stuff. I was not keen on doing that and so almost left defeated, until I looked at the comments. I've included one particularly helpful comment below:
Hmmmm. I can change one registry key from a 0 to a 1. It's pretty easy to do (and pretty easy to undo if it doesn't work), so I did it, rebooted and voila, I was able to enable ICS on the mobile broadband connection. A few minutes later I had the Virtual Router up and running without error and sharing the connection with my Android phone. Yay!
In steps open source, more specifically a neat application called Virtual Router. The download and installation was a snap, but when I tried to start the Virtual Router manager, I got a message that the "Virtual router manager the service is not running". Some googling later I found a forum post that suggested that you remove the
Then, I got a different error. A new error: "Group or resource is not in the correct state to perform the requested operation". Arg. What does that even mean? Some googling and I ended up on a number of different sites, one which suggested to turn on Internet Connection Sharing for the connection before you start up the virtual router. Seems like an easy fix. Unfortunately I got an error that ICS has been disabled by the administrator. What? Arg again! I suspected it was due to the group policy that the laptop was subject to as a result of having joined a domain. I googled some more and found a post that showed you how to delve into the registry and change group policies and other crazy stuff. I was not keen on doing that and so almost left defeated, until I looked at the comments. I've included one particularly helpful comment below:
In my case (company owned laptop) the change of
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Network Connections\NC_ShowSharedAccessUI" key to "1" was enough to re-enable the sharing. Nothing else was needed. No group policies were configured.
Hmmmm. I can change one registry key from a 0 to a 1. It's pretty easy to do (and pretty easy to undo if it doesn't work), so I did it, rebooted and voila, I was able to enable ICS on the mobile broadband connection. A few minutes later I had the Virtual Router up and running without error and sharing the connection with my Android phone. Yay!
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
