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