Norton Technical Support Phone Number: (800) 695-0678. Norton Customer Service Phone Number: (800) 695-0678

Norton Technical Support Phone Number: (800) 695-0678. Norton Customer Service Phone Number: (800) 695-0678

Lenovo ThinkPad S Drive and Q Drive (aka How to remove or hide the S Drive and Q Drive on a Lenovo ThinkPad X200, X200s, X300, X301, T400, T500, etc.)

If you purchased a Lenovo ThinkPad lately, you will have noticed that there are now Q and S drives for the recovery and boot partitions. Historically these were hidden. Now they're probably conflicting with your network drives. You can remove the Q drive (it's just the recovery media and you'll automatically reclaim the partitioned space on your C drive) but without lots of work , you cannot remove the S drive. (By lots of work you could use bcdedit to install the bootloader on the C: drive and then edit the MBR to make it bootable, or you can roll the dice, delete the S drive and use a Vista CD to "repair" the OS--this should work but not guaranteed).

Solution(s)
To Remove the Q Drive:
Just use the built-in recovery media creator program to remove it and reclaim your unused space.

To "Remove" the S Drive:

Don't. Instead follow the directions in the following article: How to work with the Q and S partitions on ThinkPads - ThinkPad X200, X200 Tablet, X301, R400, R500, SL300, SL400, SL500, T400, T500, W500, W700. (http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-71742)

If you're unfamiliar with using diskpart.exe here's a step-by-step:

1. Download and run Lenovo_Hide_Drive_S.exe available at the link above.  You can launch the program by double-clicking it.  It has no UI, but if you wait long enough (1-3 minutes) when you open My Computer, you will notice that the S drive is missing.
2. Open an Administrative command prompt (click on the Start button, enter cmd, right-click cmd and choose Run As Administrator, answer any UAC prompt, and continue).
3. Enter dispart.exe and press enter.
4. Type select disk 0 and press enter (this sets the program's context to disk 0 which should be primary physical drive where the C and S drives live.  If you'd like to be certain, you can enter list disk to display which disk is the correct one).
5. Type select partition 1 and press enter (on a factory install it should be partition 1, as above, you can enter list partition to find the right one).
6. Type set id=7 and press enter (always do this).
7. Type assign letter=D and press enter (set the drive letter to whatever you like).
8. Type exit and press enter
9. Open my computer and look and check out the results.

That's it!

Battery life on the Dell E4200 and E4300 Laptops including battery slices

E4200

• 4-cell 3.7hrs 0.2 kg (0.44 lbs)
• 6-cell 7.3hrs 0.37?0.38 kg (0.82?0.84 lb)
• slice 14.8hrs 0.59?0.61 kg (1.3?1.34 lb)

E4300

• 3-cell 4.5hrs 0.191 kg (0.4211 lb)
• 6-cell 7.3hrs 0.3366 kg (0.7421 lb)
• Slice 13.3hrs 0.59?0.61 kg (1.3?1.34 lb)

How to troubleshoot corrupted virus definitions for Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition (SAV)

This is really a post for myself as a reminder--I find that every year or so a server out there downloads corrupted definitions and starts kerfuffling an entire network....

Some symptoms:

• rtvscan.exe 99% cpu or high cpu utilization
• the rtvscan.exe process won't start with the error 7203 - Environment Incorrect

Some fixes

• How to determine if virus definitions used by Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition are corrupted
• Error: "0010, The environment is incorrect" or "Could not start the Symantec AntiVirus service on [server name]. The environment is incorrect."
• How to manually repair or backdate virus definitions

That's all for now.

How to install Windows Vista Enterprise 32-Bit Edition on a Dell D630 Laptop

If you have problems installing Vista, see my previous post How To Install Vista Enterprise on a Dell m1330. Once you have Vista Installed, here's the order in which you need to install the drivers (depending on what components you have):

1. Dell Notebook System Software
2. Intel Chipset (Reboot)
3. Video (Reboot)
4. Smart card (Reboot)
5. Turbo Memory (Reboot)
   
6. Broadcom NIC
   
7. Wireless
8. Modem
9. Touchpad
10. Bluetooth
11. (WWAN)
12. TPM
    

How to install Windows Vista Enterprise 32-Bit Edition on a Dell XPS m1330 Laptop

1. Download the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager (e.g. via http://ftp.us.dell.com/SATA/R154200.EXE)
2. Extract the drivers to a flash drive
3. Boot from your Vista Enterprise CD
4. When you get to the setup section, choose repair and then cancel and then advanced
5. Open the command prompt
6. Type diskpart and press enter.
   
7. Type select disk 0 (assuming disk 0 is the internal hard drive on which you want to install Vista) and press enter
   
8. Type clean and press enter. This will remove all existing partitions effectively wiping your hard drive clean in order to avoid kb939727.
   
9. Type exit and press enter.
10. Type setup and press enter.
11. Insert the flash drive you downloaded the extracted drivers to
12. Load the drivers from the flash drive
13. Install vista on the blank hard drive or create partitions as you like.
14. Install drivers in the following order:
1. Intel Chipset (Reboot)
   
2. Ricoh
3. Broadcom
4. Wireless
5. Intel Turbo Memory (Reboot)
   
6. Dell Notebook System Software
7. nVidia Drivers (reboot)
   
8. Audio Drivers (reboot)
   
9. Dell Quickset software
10. Touchpad (reboot)
    
11. Webcam (reboot)
12. Webcam software
13. Roxio
    

References:

• http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=149762 re Matrix drivers
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939727 re "Windows installation encountered an unexpected error. Verify the installation sources are accessible, and restart the installation. Error code: 0xE0000100"
  

How to use Config files with Exchange Managed Event Sinks

If you like C# or VB.net, no doubt you'd like your Managed Exchange Event Sink to be configurable. In .Net 2.0 you'd use the Settings class to wrap your App.config file in a strongly typed class. Alas, you'll find that when you deploy your Event Sink, whatever changes you make to your MyEventSink.dll.config file are completely ignored. Problem: not only is your sink a dll which is hosted by %windir%\system32\dllhost.exe but it is also a COM+ application. You can resolve this problem either of two ways (the first one being a terrible idea):

1. Create a file called dllhost.exe.config, put all of your app.config text in there and deploy it to %WINDIR%\System32\ and pray that no one else has the same terrible idea; or

2. Create two text files, application.manifest and application.config, and point your COM+ application's "Application Base Directory" to whatever directory contains these files. Then add the contents of your pre-existing config file to application.config and the following to application.manifest

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0"/>


Once you're finished, stop and restart your COM+ application and you're all set! Your Managed Exchange Event Sink will read whatever configuration data you've specified in the application.config file and you no longer need MyEventSink.dll.config.