A fantastic source with service manuals and disassembly instructions for many makes and models of laptop.

I recently encountered a problem when attempting to install ACT! 2009 Premium on a clients computer. Every time I ran the installation program, the following message appeared on the screen.

error 1327.Invalid Drive: N:\  

Then the installer would close itself.

The machine was running Vista Business and had a mapped drive to a NAS called N:\.

Early searches led me to think it was a problem with either a previous installation or the Installer program itself. This did not make sense as ACT! to my knowledge had never been installed before on the machine.

Disconnecting Drive N: did not make a difference nor did running the Sage ACT! special uninstaller program just in case.

A quick phone call to Sage was next, who denied the problem was with their product but with the installer service on the computer itself. However, they did give me some information in passing which eventually helped me fix the problem.

According to Sage, ACT! copies some demo databases to the My Documents folder on the PC which is hardcoded to be on Drive C. This PC had the My Documents folder mapped to the NAS drive for backup purposes. Once I remapped the My Documents back to the local drive, the ACT! installation was able to run and it installed without any further problems.

So if you are seeing this error then check that your system does not have any odd drive name allocations or remapped My Document folders.

This community-driven site geared towards any embedded NAS device or vendor. The wiki is a place for gathering general hacking info for linux based NAS devices so it can be reused more easily.

Rough and ready snippets of information not suitable for the main blog.

Today I had a user call about a problem with iTunes not finding any music after migrating to Vista.  The problem was that they'd not kept all their music in the "iTunes Music" directory and it was spread out all over the "My Documents" directory on the old machine, and the username was also different so the default link that Vista creates (from "Documents and Settings" to "Users") wouldn't work. So instead of recreating the iTunes library from scratch or relocating all the files I remembered that Vista now supports symbolic links, so all that was needed was to create a directory in users with the old username then use MKLINK to create a link from the old location (C:\Documents and Settings\oldusername\My Documents) to the new one (C:\Users\newusername\Documents) and all was well.  

Using MKLINK is fairly easy, but you need to run the command prompt as administrator in order to do it.  To create a symbolic link to a directory you use the /D switch like so :

mklink /d "c:\Documents and Settings\bob\my documents" "c:\users\Robin\Documents" 

Which will link them so when you try to access the old location, it will look in the new path.   Also you can remove a link by removing the directory, if you're unsure then DIR will show you if the directory is a real directory or a symbolic link. 

After removing the fraudware Antivirus 2008 XP program, it can be found that you have some missing tabs in the Display Properties dialog box.

Lucky for us, Ramesh Srinivasan at windowsxp.mvps.org solved this issue in 2006 with a little vbs script which can be found on this page.

If you find you have an annoying picture on the logon page, you will need to remove the default wallpaper via the registry.