HP Notebook Power Bank bug (and fix!)

There is a bug in the external HP battery, “HP Notebook Power Bank”, p/n N9F71AA#ABA.

There are two places this bug appears, and if one happens, the other also happens:

1.                   Plugged into your laptop, with one of these conditions:

•        The external battery will turn off after about 10 seconds, then flash all LEDs repeatedly.

•        The laptop will display a message saying that you need to use a full-power device to charge your laptop, and after about 10-20 seconds, the battery icon in your system tray will no longer show it is plugged in.

2.                   Plugged into a phone:

•        The external battery will charge with low power mode only.

If you have this bug, here is how to fix it:

1.                   Plug a power supply into the battery pack.

2.                   Plug laptop into the battery pack.

3.                   Unplug battery pack from the power supply.

4.                   Briefly press the battery pack button once.

5.                   If the LEDs flash again, repeat step 4.

At this point, the bug should be fixed.

HP: The software had trouble scanning or was cancelled.

So your HP scanner stopped working?

 

When trying to scan, many HP multi-function printers, such as the M2727, M1522, etc. have a problem that pops up and says:

 

The software had trouble scanning or was cancelled.

 

 

Here is the fix: 

• Uninstall the printer.
• Run Regedit
• Make a back up of your registry.
• Do a search (include keys/values/data) for the description of your printer, e.g., Hit F3, then search for M2727.
• Delete all HP-related registry entries that have that printer listed.
• Reboot
• Reinstall the printer software.

That should do it for you.

pop3.email.msn.com doesn't work (here's the answer)

Summary:

You'd like to use Outlook with MSN email.

You follow Microsoft's instructions which say to use pop3.email.msn.com, yet it doesn't work.   And since you're a tech-type, you do a test telnet to pop3.email.msn.com port 110, and that connection is d-e-a-d.

So you continue to search another hour or so, and you find additional instructions from Microsoft with HTTP protocol instructions, but those also don't work and since you're a tech-type, you test the Outlook URL they use (oe.msn.msnmail.hotmail.com) and it is also d-e-a-d.

Now what?




The Fix:  MSN/Outlook 2003 Configuration Instructions

Step 1:  Download and run the Outlook Hotmail connector.  Restart Outlook.

Step 2: Configure a POP3 setting as follows:

1. Click on Tools....E-Mail Accounts...
2. Click "Add a nwe e-mail account"
3. Select "POP3" and click Next
4. Enter your name, your MSN email address.
5. For Incoming mail server (POP3), enter in:   pop3.live.com
6. For Outgoing mail server (SMTP), enter in:  smtp.live.com
7. Change your user name to include "@msn.com"
8. Enter your password, and check the box "Remember password"
9. Check the box "Log on using Secure Password Authentication (SPA)
10. Click "More Settings..."

11. Click the "Advanced" tab.
12. For Incoming server (POP3), change it to 995.
13. Check the box "This server requires an encrypted connection (SSL)
14. For Outgoing server (SMTP), change it to 587
15. Check the box "This server requires an encrypted connection (SSL)
16. I suggest leaving a copy of your email on the server (MSN), so check the box "Leave a copy of messages on the server"
17. I also suggest that if you delete a message from Outlook, then you delete from the deleted items, that it should also remove from MSN.  So check the box "Remove from the server when deleted from 'Deleted Items'"
18. Click OK.
19. Click Next
20. Click Finish
21. Click "Send/Receive"

Now your email should be streaming in.  Phew!  Go grab a cookie to celebrate!

Final note: If you use 64-bit Windows, here is the connector you'll want to download.

Osama Bin Laden's House

I normally wouldn't post something like this, but I was really curious as to where Osama Bin Laden's house was.

I knew the town from news reports, and had this photo from the CIA:

I spend too much time (grin) looking at satellite photos, looking at different places around my town.  I love maps.  :-)

So looking at Google Maps, I found the location - here is the link:
Osama Bin Laden's House, plus a photo:

There are a number of wrong maps floating out there, so I figured I'd post this.

Update:  Here is another photo released by the CIA:

Microsoft Word Timer - How does it work? (Answer below!)

I was trying to understand the "Total Editing Time" information in a Word document.  After a lot of searching online, I came up with one blog post which alas, was wrong.

After a bit of work, I found the answer.


Here is a letter I sent to the original blog author:

I ran a test on a spare HP laptop I have.  I can give you the gory details if you want, but the bottom line, is that on my test computer with Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 Pro SP3, the timer didn’t work on my test laptop the way you describe.

In my test environment, the Word document “Total Editing Time” timer will run under these conditions:

-          The Word document needs to be open.

-          There cannot be another Word document open as the primary document.

With a new MS Word document, the timer continued regardless of if I opened a web browser and surfed for a while, regardless if I minimized the Word document, regardless if I opened up an Excel spreadsheet and worked on that.  The only way I could stop the MS Word timer was to create another Word document, and have that new Word document be the primary document.

If you want to see my hand-written notes on this (archaic, eh?), see the gory details here.

HP 8440p video driver problem solution

If you have an HP Elitebook 8440p (and specifically, model WH256UT#ABA, but possibly others), there is a bug in the Windows XP 32-bit nVidia driver that causes the screen to appear to lock up when it blanks.

To test this, set the screen to blank after 1 minute.  Your screen will go blank, but will not come back to life.

If you plug in an external monitor, voila!  it does come back to life.

The problem is the video driver.

Either use an old video driver, or use one that HP hasn't released yet, version 261.55 (shows up in device manager as 6.14.12.6155, dated 3/9/2011).

Here is the driver:  261.55_H12298_XP32.zip

Note:  HP's support site should have the latest, but for now, I have the latest.
:-)