Friday, January 8, 2010

Network Printer Offline

Yesterday I was at a client site where everyone prints directly to the printers, rather than sharing via a print server. One of the PCs kept showing a printer as offline, even though everyone else was printing to it. From the PC you could ping the printer and even browse to the builtin web server to see that it was low on cyan.

After chewing on this for quite a while, I found the issue: a checkbox on the Ports tab "SNMP Status Enabled", which when checked (along with SNMP turned off on the print device) will result in the printer being listed as Offline. Once the box was unchecked, it was back online and the customer was back to printing once again.

Monday, January 4, 2010

God Mode in Windows Vista or 7

Following Paul Thurrott's blog such as I do, today's post listed a way to see a hidden GUI. There is quite a list, some of which are not normally exposed but via the Registry.

This is really a pretty simple hack:

Create a New Folder, rename it GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

You can actually name it whatever you want before the dot, i.e. LinusMode, Dave, Matrix, etc. The icon will change to the one used for the Control Panel, and when opened it will list a plethora of settings.

Have fun, and be careful.