BT Infinity static IP addresses with a Home Hub - not showing correct IP

Recently, I was involved in the setup of a new Infinity line for a business. They ordered the line and then requested 5 IP addresses but weren't sure how to get them working.

Once again, BT were not overly helpful with how to use the static IP addresses.

The client was told that the should use 56.23.45.62 (not their actual IP address, but works for this example) and that was it.

If you log into the homehub and go to the "advanced" settings page you can then select "Static IP".

In here, you need to enable it and put in your routers address as they call it. To get this working correctly, we had to enter "56.23.45.61" as using the last available IP (56.23.45.62) would not let the device connect.

However, the really odd thing is that when you reboot, the router will still get a seemingly random IP address not related to the static IP at all.

If you've set it up right, the statics will still work - they just wont appear on the router!

Windows 10 Downloads Folder Slow to Load

Something that's started happening on my PC is that the downloads folder in Windows 10 can take a very long time to load when it contains more than 20 or so mixed items.

After a bit of an investigation into this, it seems as though the system is trying to decide exactly what kind of data is stored in the folder and then display it in the most appropriate way.

To disable this and get the folder to load quickly again, you need to right click on the folder and then go to properties.

In the properties window, select "Customize" and then from the "Optimize this folder for..." drop down select "General". I also ticked the "Also apply this template to all subfolders" option to ensure that other folders in the downloads folder are treated in the same way.

And that's it, the downloads folder should now open up in a matter of moments!

Installing Windows 7 on H500S Lenovo PC - Bluescreen ACPI (Error 0x000000A5)

I ran into a problem when trying to install Windows 7 on a H500s Lenovo PC. I kept getting a blue-screen relating to an ACPI error

Not ACPI Compliant (Error 0x000000A5)


There are a few blogs detailing elaborate ways around this problem such as:
http://bootables.net/lenovo-h500s-bios-update-how-to/

However what no-one seems to have said is that if you still have a working copy of Windows 8 running on the system then you can flash the bios from there instead of creating a boot disk to do it!

To do it from Windows 8:

1: Download http://cdn.bootables.net/uploads/2015/04/IPJY41USA-lenovo-H500s.rar (this is a rar file, so you may need something like WinRAR to open it)
2: Extract the file onto your main drive (keep the folder structure simple, don't do it in your downloads folder for example. I used c:\temp\)
3: Navigate to the folder and find the file called IPJY41USA.exe
4: Right click this and select "Run as administrator"
5: The utility should update the bios - and thats it, you should now be able to install Windows 7

Perhaps this is fairly obvious? But from what I could see no-one in the support forums has mentioned this as a quick way around the problem.

Wordpress Contact Form 7 checkboxes one per line in a list rather than bunched up

Contact Form 7 is a great plugin for Wordpress that allows you to easily add contact forms to your website.

One of the bugbears that I have with it is that checkbox lists are bunched up rather than being on one per line.

There is a really easy fix though - add the following to your sites CSS

span.wpcf7-list-item {
margin-left: 0.5em;
display: block;
}

and that will sort it out - no need to edit Contact Form 7s CSS files!

Bypassing NTFS permissions in Windows when recovering data from a faulty drive

There's nothing more frustrating than trying to recover data from a drive that's on its last legs and to add insult to injury, if you have put the drive in a different PC and you try and access the files in the user folder you won't be able to see them because of the permissions present on the drive.

Normally, you can just take ownership of the folders and get around this - but when its a faulty drive that may fail at any time you really don't want (or the drive may not be able to) go through each file and folder to change the permissions.

there's a simple way to get around them though - as the "system" permission is present on these folders. So all we have to do is launch our favourite copying app as a "system" user and grab the data we need.

To do this, you will need one of the sysinternal tools called PSExec:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/pxexec.aspx

Once downloaded, you can use this tool to run another application (in my case, I've chosen unstoppable copier) as a system process

To get unstoppable copier, download it here:
http://roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29
So, here's how you do it:

1: Download PSExec and put it in a location (c:\temp\ will be used in this example)
2: Download unstoppable copier and put it in the same location (c:\temp\)
3: Open a command prompt as an administrator (right click the start menu in Windows 10 and select "Command Prompt (Admin)" or right click on the "command prompt" menu option in Windows 7 and select "Run as administrator)
4: You will start in C:\windows\system32 - type cd\ and then press enter
5: Type cd\temp and press enter
6: Now type psexec unstopcpy_5_2_Win2k_up.exe (you may need to change this bit depending on the app you're launching or the version of unstoppable copier you have downloaded)
7: This should now launch unstoppable copier as a system user and you should be able to browse to any folders to copy your data without having to take ownership!

I really hope this helps someone - having a drive fail is a total pain

Draytek Vigor 2860 slow loading of websites (hardware acceleration) over VDSL

A few months back I installed a Vigor 2860 at a client who took out a BT Infinity package. Although the connection was a lot quicker than before, websites were still loading quite slowly and often wouldnt "fully" load.

This was evidenced by the site appearing, but web-browsers still processing the site rather than it every completing.

At another site who had a 2860 (but in this case it was being used for ADSL), I decided to update the firmware. Reading through the firmware patch notes, I saw an interesting thing which said:

On VDSL, if experiencing delays in web browsing then disable H/W Acceleration via [Hardware Acceleration] > [Setup]. This will not impact the throughput performance. 

Whats this I thought?

I turned it off immediately on my other site with the 2860 - and things started working perfectly.

So there we have it, ensure Hardware Acceleration is OFF

I have since noticed that 2860s shipping with an up to date firmware have this turned off as standard, but if you have an older unit it would be worth checking

Apple iPhone 5c not downloading email, apps closing and crashing

I recently had a client whose iPhone 5c was not downloading mail from their corporate account. It would sometimes get it, but then randomly stop for no reason.

Along with this, certain apps (especially maps) would close seemingly without reason. Other apps would crash and the whole phone was generally unresponsive.

The reason?

The system had no space free on the storage - 0 bytes available.

Some apps were removed and the problems instantly went away. The phone hadn't informed the user that it was full, therefore they just though it was messing them around

Vipre Business Console not downloading updates - stuck on "work in progress" in the console

Just a quick one - it looks like there's been a bad update sent out recently by Vipre as nearly all of my business consoles have been stuck with the "work in progress" message when trying to download updates.

Clients are reporting that they are up to date, but the definitions are around a week old at this point.

To clear your bad updates out, do the following:

1: Stop the "Vipre Business Site Service"
2: Go to program data/vipre business/
3: Rename (or delete) the threatdb and threatdbfull folders (i put a .old at the end of them)
4: Restart the "Vipre Business Site Service"
5: Re-open the console

You should find the updates are again showing "work in progress" but this time.. work really IS in progress

Spotify Error 4 (No Internet Connection) and iCloud wheel spinning on Windows

The PC in question is on a domain and was using re-directed folders.

I recently had a client who was unable to use the Spotify desktop client on their PC - when they tried to connect they received "Error 4 No Internet Connection". After pulling my hair out and finding nothing wrong with the system at all I decided that the OS must have some underlying issue that I just wasn't able to see and so go the user to use the web-based version of Spotify instead.

This worked fine and they were happy to work like this.

Fast forward 2 weeks later and the user installs iCloud - which will not login correctly. The wheel constantly spins and refuses to connect.

I followed every support article going, installed every update/service pack/hotfix. Updated network card drivers, disabled firewalls and AV software.

You name it and I did it

Eventually, I managed to work out that the issue was realted to roaming profiles - inparticular to having the appdata\roamning folder located on UNC. I moved the contents of the folder back to a local drive and changed the location - gave the system a reboot and everything started working as it should.

I really hope this helps someone (+1 me!) as this wasted a lot of time for me

Android Pay NFC - Please present one card only - Samsung Galaxy S5 with wireless charging

I recently got Android Pay for on my S5 Galaxy and have had a lot of problems trying to make payments with it.

It had only just rolled out int he UK, and I thought that the problem was that it was just to new however after a while I decided that something more must be going on as the payments kept failing witht he same rror:

"Please present one card only"

After thinking it over, I realised that I had custom fitted a wireless charger to the inside of my S5 and decided to remove it and try again.

And that fixed it - the wireless charging unit in the phone must have been interfering with the NFC chip and making the terminal unable to read it

I hope it helps someone :)

Wordpress All Import (WP All Import) WooCommerce - 403 Forbidden when importing

Continuing my Wordpress work, I needed to import a large amount of data into a Woo Commerce based store so decided to use WP All Import with the Woo Commerce add on to do this.

However, when I tried to import from my first CSV I kept getting a 403 Forbidden error. Naturally, I assumed that i'd done something wrong with the .htaccess access file but all seemed OK.

I decided to check the settings, and made a minor change of no consequence but when I tried to save it I again received the 403 Forbidden error.

Now realizing that it wasn't something to do with the import itself, but rather the plugin I turned to the support forums and setup guides for help - but nothing seemed to mention this.

Looking around the settings page, I this time noticed a box  called "Add port to URL" which allows you to change port that your webserver uses. I do all of my development work on a server running Apache on port 8080 and suddenly my problem was clear - the plugin wasn't capable of changing ports, it had to be informed of the port the web-server was using.

After enter 8080 in the box and saving the settings (which actually saved this time!) everything started to work as expected.

WordPress, Contact Form 7 and recpatcha causing "failed to send your message" when submitting forms

I've recently started using the recaptcha plugin for contact form 7 in my WordPress sites. When I made a recent site live, none of the forms were sending.

Upon investigation, the issue was related to having the recaptcha present on the form as if I removed it they would send straight away.

When I originally added it I remember setting up the API key and yet it still wasn't working. On closer examination, the secret key was wrong and resetting the API keys solved the issue.

The reason the key was wrong is because when you highlight the secret key on Googles API page and copy and paste it, it doesn't just select the key - it takes the text description of it too! So you end up pasting the key with extra text at the end which I never noticed when originally adding it.

Bottom line - if the form won't submit and you've got recaptcha running I would double check your API keys as you may have made the same mistake as me :)

One more thing to remember (although not directly related to the above) is that the codes for the contact form objects, such as  [your-name] are case sensitive! So [your-name] is not the same as [Your-Name]