I have a HP laserjet 1100 being shared on my Windows XP SP2 machine and I wanted to use it from MacOSX 10.4.9 without doing anything fancy. This apparently is a little harder than it would seem. I finally found two solutions of which I preferred the first (HPIJS).

• Install Foomatic/HPIJS
• Install Gutenprint
  

Once you have installed one of the two print engines above, you can use the standard Add Printer dialog of MacOSX 10.4.x and browse for the Windows XP machine in the correct workgroup, select the shared printer and choose the correct driver for it (the HP 1100 driver was installed with one of the above two print engines.)

Personally, I found the Gutenprint drivers to have a little too much contrast and boxiness in them. These problems did not happen with the HPIJS drivers.  Gutenprint had many more customization options so maybe enough test prints could give me a better result.

In the standard print dialog, you might also need to manually set the Printer Features option to enable high resolution printing (and then save it as a preset to avoid setting it again.)

Tags: printing, Shared printer, XP

If all of a sudden your network folders/ WebDAV accounts have stopped working after an SP2 upgrade to your Windows software it is actually a new "feature" from Microsoft. In SP2, all webdav accounts now require https secured connections by default (previously http only was the default). Unfortunately you do not receive an error message, the only symptom is that your login fails over and over.

WebDAV extends the HTTP protocol to allow users to publish, lock, and manage files on the Web site like a remote hard disk. This makes filesharing very easy as you are using HTTP traffic. In many ways it is considered the evolution of FTP.

Fortunately there are a few solutions.

1. 
   
2. add ":80" to the end of the domain name like "http://mysite.com:80" (assuming the webdavservice is on port 80). This tells webdav to use the old http login instead of requiring https.
3. 
   
4. make a registry change to enable the old Authentication as described here (KB841215)
5. 
   
6. install SSL security on the WebDAV site (which is really not a bad idea.)
7. 
   

Another Microsoft problem is from a recent service pack update from Microsoft that limits the number of attributes per XML element to 32. More information on that fix can be found here (KB888164).

To make matters worse, there seem to be about 30 different versions of the WebDAV libraries floating about, changing based on the Windows software that you use. This site has a good list of the different versions and problems related to each of them.

Anyways, at least the WebDAV client still works but it is not quite as easy to use as could be expected.

Tags: webdav, Sharing, XP

I recently purchases an Airplus G DWL-G122 wireless USB adapter for my XP Pro machine and boy does that thing loose the connection a lot. It does not matter if the signal strengh is good or low, it just drops it for no good reason. I have a Dell laptop not far from it that has NEVER dropped the signal to the access point (and the D-Link device is closer to the AP!).

Admittedly, it was the cheapest adapter for sale at Fust but I really thought it would be usable. It even had an extra cable to put the receiver closer to the AP and it is now sitting at chest level, around the corner from the AP. So unless my head is putting off a large amount of radio waves (possible) I cannot think of any other interference.

An unhappy customer.

Tags: wireless, XP, d-link

You can configure Windows XP to automate the logon process if your computer is not part of a domain. This is great if you want the computer to always boot to a defult account but still leave the other accounts active.

1. 
   
2. Click Start, click Run, and type control userpasswords2.
3. 
   
4. Clear the Users must enter a username and password to use this computer check box.
5. 
   
6. Click Apply.
7. 
   
8. Enter the user name and password you wish to automatically log on with, and then click OK.
9. 
   
10. Click OK again and you're all done.
11. 
    

This feature allows other users to start your computer and use the account that you establish to automatically log on. Enabling auto logon makes your computer more convenient to use, but can pose a security risk.

This tip and more is taken right from the Microsoft website at www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/tips/default.mspx

Tags: login, XP

When my father-in-law gives me these CD's he bought while traveling and said he wanted to see the photos that were on them. I thought it would be no problem and happily agreed. To my dismay there turned out to be nearly 2000 photos in various folders and I was at a loss.

I remembered that with Windows XP there was a way to select a photo and then use the Photo Printing Wizard of Windows XP but I could not get it to work on the folders I had chosen. Everytime I clicked on a folder the list of wizard tasks on the left never offered the print tasks.

So, finally, I discover that a folder can be identified as a "Picture" folder by right clicking on the folder, choosing customize and then selecting "Pictures" or "Photo Album".


However the trick is to do this to the folder above the folder where the photos are. This means that if the photos are in /home/photosnew/printme you need to make the "photosnew" a "Picture" folder. Then you can select one or more other folders inside of it and see the print picture wizard.


Once that was done I selected all of the folders and used the printing wizard to make a contact sheet for all 2000 photos. It came to about 63 pages (35 photos per page) but it looked good and all of the photos had their file names on them.

Note, the Photo Printing Wizard of Windows XP did not search deep into my folders. For example, some photos were in /home/photosnew/printme/originals and I was in the photosnew directory when I selected the other folders (2 levels higher). I had to move the photos from /originals to /printme and then everything went fine.

Tags: XP, Photo, Sheet