Archive for September, 2009

Find out information about your processor with CPU ID

I’ve found a great little freeware utility that gives you valuable information about your processor, and other hardware devices on your PC – CPU ID

http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

From their site, heres what information is retrieved:

CPU

  • Name and number.
  • Core stepping and process.
  • Package.
  • Core voltage.
  • Internal and external clocks, clock multiplier.
  • Supported instructions sets.
  • Cache information.

Mainboard

  • Vendor, model and revision.
  • BIOS model and date.
  • Chipset (northbridge and southbridge) and sensor.
  • Graphic interface.

Memory

  • Frequency and timings.
  • Module(s) specification using SPD (Serial Presence Detect) : vendor, serial number, timings table.

System

  • Windows and DirectX version.

 

I ran this on my mums’ pc, in order to find out what processor it had, and here’s the results:

cpu-z screenshot 

 cpu-z2cpu-z3 cpu-z4cpu-z5  cpu-z6cpu-z7

How to change the language on a Buffalo LinkStation from Japanese to English

I recently had massive problems with my LinkStation and had to flash the firmware on it….

When I finally got it up and running again, my admin screen was in Japanese!!

I followed the instructions on the FAQ – http://www.buffalo-technology.com/knowledgebase/users/kb.php?id=10213&category_id=5&sid2

I thought I’d just put a few pics up to illustrate it a little better:

Step 1

Log in to your admin panel
You’ll see the screen below:

Step 2

Click the 2nd option on the left, as shown here with a red arrow:

 Link station admin screen in Japanese

Step 3

Change the text in the box indicated by the first arrow (not sure why, but that’s what the FAQ says….)

Then, change the first drop down (indicated by arrow) to English, and the second drop down to CP437.

Click the button at the bottom.

Exit the browser, and restart.

Voila!

Link station admin screen in Japanese

How to use MagicISO

MagicISO is a brilliant piece of freeware that I use.

It enables you to mount an ISO file, as an actual drive.
For example, MSDN provides subscribers with ISO images of their DVD’s – We can then mount these files, and they will appear to the computer, as an actual drive, and so, can install the software.

Simply download MagicISO from here – http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-overview.htm

Install it, and it will provide you with a system tray icon.

Right click it, and select Virtual CD/DVD-ROM – You will notice that in my case (below) F: has no media.

Mount Virtual Drive

Select Mount, and then select the ISO file you wish to use.

There are many other options – you can configure many virtual drives etc…

In this freeware version, you can’t edit the contents of the ISO files, you’ll need the paid for version of the software to do that.

Upgrading from Navision 4 to Navision 5 – Database Error

This is a tad of a messy blog post, so apologies for that, however it’s mainly for my own reference.

Here at Crocus, we run Navision to handle product inventory, orders, and the like…
We wanted to upgrade from version 4, to version 5.

After following the upgrade instructions, I got this error:

Msg 8662, Level 16, State 0, Line 1
Cannot create the clustered index "VSIFTIDX" on view "Nav5.dbo.Crocus Live$OrderRequestDetail$VSIFT$1" because the view references an unknown value (SUM aggregate of nullable expression). Consider referencing only non-nullable values in SUM. ISNULL() may be useful for this.

Annoying.

There wasn’t anything obviously wrong.
So I opened up SQL Profiler, and re-ran the update process in the Navision client, to capture the exact SQL queries that were causing the error….

I saw it created a view called Crocus Live$OrderRequestDetail$VSIFT$1

Heres the create view script:

CREATE VIEW dbo."Crocus Live$OrderRequestDetail$VSIFT$1"
WITH SCHEMABINDING
AS
SELECT "PaidFor",COUNT_BIG(*) "$Cnt",SUM("Amount") "SUM$Amount",
SUM("AmountIncludingVAT") "SUM$AmountIncludingVAT"
FROM dbo."Crocus Live$OrderRequestDetail"
GROUP BY "PaidFor"

It was failing on the following query:

CREATE UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX "VSIFTIDX"
ON dbo."Crocus Live$OrderRequestDetail$VSIFT$1" ("PaidFor")

Problem was:

Some of the columns specified as “boolean” within Navision, were in fact NULLABLE tinyint columns within SQL Server.

I suspect that this was due to some legacy version of SQL not supporting bit columns, or something along those lines…

Anyway, none of the values in the column (close to a million rows within the table) was null, so I changed the datatype to BIT and set NOT NULL. I did this for each of the columns in the table which should of been a boolean (and were specified in the CREATE VIEW statement (in my case was Amount, AmountIncludingVAT and PaidFor)

This immediately solved the “Cannot create the clustered index” problem

OWA Tray – Outlook Web Access notifications

I often use OWA to access my emails where I don’t have Outlook installed (work PC’s for example)

One problem is, understandably, there is no pop-up alert (it is a web-app after all!) for new emails.

Using Growl (for Windows) – OWATray provides this much-missed feature (see below)

owoTrayMonitor

Set up is simple. Simply enter your Outlook Web Access settings, and OWA Tray does the rest!

OWATray Settings

Download OWATray

http://www.owatray.com/