Matt's Homepage

Let’s say you want to install the latest XAMPP software so you can do some local wordpress/html work. But after installing XAMPP, you get this message when trying to start the Apache server:


4:33:47 PM [Apache] Problem detected!
4:33:47 PM [Apache] Port 443 in use by "vmware-hostd.exe"!
4:33:47 PM [Apache] Apache WILL NOT start without the configured ports free!
4:33:47 PM [Apache] You need to uninstall/disable/reconfigure the blocking application
4:33:47 PM [Apache] or reconfigure Apache to listen on a different port


In order to get over this, you must change the SSL port number that XAMPP Apache listens to (or change VMWare).  I found changing XAMPP was easier.

Here’s the steps:

1. Close the XAMPP control panel
2. Open http-ssl.conf using notepad in the ...\xampp\apache\conf\ directory
3. Look for the line that has:
   Listen 443
4. Change that port number to anything you want (i.e. 4430 worked for me)
5. Search the rest of the document – replacing 443 with 4430 (or your port)
6. Save the file
7. Restart XAMPP and Apache should start up properly this time.

Sigh.  Had ANOTHER problem with Battlefield 3 recently.  More annoyance than problem, but the icon in the tray for the Origin client was showing up as a busted link:

The Origin program worked fine, but it was annoying because sometimes I forgot I’d opened it and having the ‘broken icon’ button on your toolbar isn’t exactly helpful for finding it.  I tried right-click setting properties.  Changing the icon to a different icon then back.  Removing the program and re-pinning it.  Nothing worked.

Then I found this link.  Basically, you need to destroy and then rebuild/repair your icon cache.  You do this via:

1. kill explorer.exe
   taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F
2. Deleting your icon cache files:
   del %userpofile%\AppData\Local\IconCache.db /a
3. Reboot
   shutdown /R /f /t 00

Upon restart, your entire icon cache will get rebuilt (which could take awhile).  Mine took about 2-3 minutes during which the machine was almost unresponsive.  After that the icons re-appeared and all was well.

Link to script that does all this for you and further information.

I wasted WAY to much time on this absolutely poor product validation problem.

I have an old Asus P8P67 motherboard that I suspected had a bug with it’s RAID controller hardware/firmware.  I would nightly put the machine into sleep mode, but when I’d wake the machine from sleep the next day the hard drives would start reset clicking and timing out madly.  It was so bad, you’d get 2-5 second delays just trying to access a file.  But if you rebooted, even a warm reboot, the drive would stop its schizophrenic timing out and run smoothly.  Further, it was always the third drive in the raid, even though I’d hot swapped the drive several times and the drives would be flawless when not in the RAID set.

Fortuitously, Fry’s had a sale on the new P8Z77-V Pro motherboards.  However, when I installed the motherboard, I had a different problem.  The machine started up first try without a problem, and I set the SATA mode to RAID so I would get the ‘Press <CTRL-I>to enter configuration utility…’ BIOS message and set up the hardware RAID.  The funny thing was, the message would pop up and I’d frantically press CTRL-I, but to no avail.  It was like it was ignoring me.  I tried turning on USB legacy mode and other USB settings and noticed strange things with the keyboard lights not always coming on/etc.

So, what do I do?  In searching forums, I found that other people were having even worse problems.  Some couldn’t even enter the UEFI BIOS setup at all. When I got my machine to boot into windows, they keyboards didn’t work at all.  I try plugging in another USB keyboard. I have a Logitech G15 and a no-name generic one. Initially, no luck, but I do notice the behavior of the keyboard change. I would toggling the scroll/caps/num locks during BIOS setup and sometimes the I can see both keyboards toggle the light correctly, and other times do not.

I try all the different USB ports. The rear, onboard ones fared the worst. They never worked for the RAID BIOS. Even in windows, the keyboard and mouse would sometimes not work at all depending on which port I had them plugged into. The ones on back that seemed to work best? The top usb port above the green outlined USB flashback port. Still, I cannot enter RAID setup, but windows sees my USB device correctly at startup.

Now, I leave one keyboard plugged into that top port, and then start playing with the headers on the motherboard. I take the USB backplane extender and start plugging it into the headers on the board. You know what? Each one acts differently! However, when I have it plugged into the front-most plug, the one closest the reset/power switches – THEN IT WORKS! You can then press CTRL-I and it registers.

Strangely enough, once you get the machine booted, then all the USB ports work perfectly.  But not while you’re in POST.

All I have to say is HFS – this is BUSTED ASUS. I’ll be sending in a trouble ticket this afternoon. Please let me know if this works for you.

UGH.  I went through tons of this headaches back on Battlefield 2 with Punkbuster, and now it appears to have come up again on BF3.  I had been playing along for months without a single issue, but then re-installed recently when I reconfigured my machine. Then I started getting this dreaded message:

Game disconnected: you were kicked by PunkBuster. Stated reason: PunkBuster kicked player  (for 0 minutes) … RESTRICTION: Service Communication Failure: PnkBstrA.exe

The forums are full of people with this same issue.  Here are some solutions that pertained to my particular problem:

1. Punkbuster didn’t even get installed.  You need to go to Punkbuster’s website, download the installer, and install it yourself.  Go here and follow the directions:
   http://www.evenbalance.com/index.php?page=dl-bf3.php
2. Punkbuster isn’t getting updated automatically.  There are HTML ‘key’ files that need to be installed and updated regularly.   You need to select 7 different links and save them in the correct folders.
   1. The first is: pbsec.htm, it goes in C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\Battlefield 3\.  Be careful!  When I first saved it from the link, it saved it as pbsec-1.html – that doesn’t work.
   2. Update the remaining 6 htm files like ‘PB Client v2.317 for Win32’ et al. go into C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\Battlefield 3\pb\htm
3. pbsvc.exe is missing(!).  One post mentioned that you could manually run C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\Battlefield 3\pbsvc.exe and it would test everything for you.  I actually found this file was missing.  However, a copy of it was there in C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\Battlefield 3\__Installer\punkbuster\redist\pbsvc.exe.  I copied it to the root BF3 directory and then everything worked.

Thanks again Origin for really making PC gaming a viable environment and reminding me why consoles have eaten half your gaming lunch.

 

 

Oh – yet another way in which Microsoft has made my, and others’, lives much more easy.

Problem:
You open Windows Media Player, and try to rip a CD, but it won’t rip despite the fact you’ve done this dozens of times before.  You get the message ‘Windows Media Player cannot rip one or more tracks from this CD’.

You open Tools->Options->Rip Music.  You see that the ‘Rip music to this location’ is blank – so you click ‘Change’ to set it.  But nothing happens.  Click, click, click.  No dialog opens to allow you  to set the output directory.  Any time you try to rip the CD, you get the same error saying it can’t rip.  You try running the Troubleshooting app and reset all the user settings to default.  Still no luck.

Solution:
The problem is caused because the drive and/or directory media player had been pointing to no longer exists, and the change directory button doesn’t work IF THE ORIGINAL DIRECTORY OR DRIVE IS GONE.  Too bad you can’t change where it is pointing at.  Too bad you also can’t even see what it THINKS it should be pointing at to recreate it.  Guess you’ll just have to remember the path from memory.  Shucks – that’s great design.

You either have to re-create that directory (from memory) – or do THIS highly intuitive operation to fix it:

1. Start menu -> right click ‘Music’ and get the properties.

2. Either: see what directory has a checkmark by it and re-create that directory/re-attach the drive, or add/pick a listed directory that DOES exist – (i.e c:users”your user”)

3. Right click on a directory that does exist, and select  ‘Set as default save location’

Close and reopen media player.  This will solve the problem.  The fact that clicking on the ‘Change’ button doesn’t work is just fundamentally broke.  That needs fixing.  Also, fix the automated troubleshooter to actually reset the default location back to something sane too. The troubleshooter is broken as well.

Sigh.

After 5+ years of using these continually award-winning $120 headphones, the covering on the ear pads we’re starting to flake off and leave little black flakes around.  A common problem.  At under $7/each – and designed for easy replacement – getting replacement earpads was considerably cheaper than getting a new set of headphones.  Finding replacement pads, however, was somewhat difficult.  People had 3rd party pads, but the last replacement set I bought previously didn’t last much more than a year.  I went to Sony’s store, but didn’t have much luck finding them on their parts site.  Anyway, jumped on chat and got the skinny:

https://servicesales.sel.sony.com/ecom/accessories/web/productSearch.do
Once you’re there, please choose any of the items below (remote, adapter, etc). Then it will lead you to a new page and on the upper right hand there is a search box in which you can enter a search by part number.  Enter the part number and on the drop down menu, please choose “part number”.

Sony part number: 211566803
MDR-V6 headphone replacement ear pads – 211566803

They’ll show up as super-generic: PAD, EAR, but should be what you need.  Or at least I hope, since I just ordered them. 🙂

Lord I love things that make sense.

If you’re experiencing Skype crashing after about 5 seconds of audio, then try this:  It worked for me.

Find and delete the shared.xml file in the Skype data folder located here:
C:Users%username%AppDataRoamingSkype

How that does ANYTHING is beyond me, but it did work.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on my PC was causing me MAJOR grief.  I’d get into a game, and about 5 minutes in, I’d get dropped and ‘connection to EA server lost’ message.  UTTERLY annoying.  Appears tons of other people have the same problems.  Various solutions from turning firewalls off/etc – but that didn’t work for me.

Changing your router’s UDP and TCP endpoint filtering to “Endpoint Independent” certainly helped – but it would still drop after about 10 minutes.

What seems to have worked is this.  Go to your steam client and:

Steam Library -> rightclick BC2 -> properties -> Set launch options… -> “-pingInterval 50000”
Paste the “-pingInterval 50000” phrase without the quotation marks and that’s it.

That seems to have solved the problem for me; but this was pretty much utter fail on EA/Dice’s part. The amount of hate-forum mail that’s gone on for over 2 years relating to this problem is amazing.

So, when playing the AIX mod for Battlefield 2, I kept getting kicked after about 2-3 minutes of play when punkbuster(!) complained that:

PnkBsrtrB.exe handshaking failed ; PnkBsrtrB.exe heartbeats stopped ; PB init failure ; Packet loss

The basic problem boiled down to the fact that when Punkbuster installed, it created the outgoing rules in windows firewall, but it did not create the INCOMING rules.  I simply added incoming rules for:

c:windowssysWOW32PnkBsrtrA.exe
c:windowssysWOW32PnkBsrtrB.exe

And set them to ‘allow’.  That turns out to fix the problem.

I still can’t believe how horrible the solutions to prevent cheating were back in the day.

I recently started getting blue-screens with stdriver64.sys. In doing my blue-screen debug, very little useful information was given:


SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED (7e)
This is a very common bugcheck.  Usually the exception address pinpoints
the driver/function that caused the problem.  Always note this address
as well as the link date of the driver/image that contains this address.
Arguments:
Arg1: ffffffffc0000005, The exception code that was not handled
Arg2: fffff8800970bbe8, The address that the exception occurred at
Arg3: fffff8800676d7f8, Exception Record Address
Arg4: fffff8800676d050, Context Record Address

Debugging Details:
------------------

EXCEPTION_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0xc0000005 - The instruction at 0x%08lx referenced memory at 0x%08lx. The memory could not be %s.

FAULTING_IP:
stdriver64+1be8
fffff880`0970bbe8 49              dec     ecx

EXCEPTION_RECORD:  fffff8800676d7f8 -- (.exr 0xfffff8800676d7f8)
ExceptionAddress: 0000000000000000
ExceptionCode: c0000005 (Access violation)
ExceptionFlags: 00000000
NumberParameters: 158383080
Parameter[0]: fffffffffffff880
Parameter[1]: 0000000000000002
Parameter[2]: 0000000000000000
Parameter[3]: 0000000000000000
Parameter[4]: 0000000000000000
Parameter[5]: 000000000022dba8
Parameter[6]: 0000000000000000
Parameter[7]: 0000000000000000
Parameter[8]: 0000000000000000
Parameter[9]: 0000000000000018
Parameter[10]: 0000000000000000
Parameter[11]: ffffffffffffffff
Parameter[12]: 000000000000007f
Parameter[13]: 0000000000000000
Parameter[14]: 0000000000000000
Attempt to execute non-executable address 0000000000000002

CONTEXT:  fffff8800676d050 -- (.cxr 0xfffff8800676d050)
Unable to read context, NTSTATUS 0xC0000147

DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID:  VISTA_DRIVER_FAULT

BUGCHECK_STR:  0x7E

CURRENT_IRQL:  0

LAST_CONTROL_TRANSFER:  from 0000000000000000 to 0000000000000000

STACK_TEXT:
00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 0x0

STACK_COMMAND:  .bugcheck ; kb

FOLLOWUP_IP:
stdriver64+1be8
fffff880`0970bbe8 49              dec     ecx

SYMBOL_NAME:  stdriver64+1be8
FOLLOWUP_NAME:  MachineOwner
MODULE_NAME: Unknown_Module
IMAGE_NAME:  Unknown_Image
DEBUG_FLR_IMAGE_TIMESTAMP:  0

BUCKET_ID:  INVALID_KERNEL_CONTEXT


I dug around on my support forums, and exception 7E has been related to loads of different problems: bad logitech mice drivers, cardbus adapters, audio drivers, failed USB drivers when it happens on awake from hibernate, etc.  Basically, any and all services seem to be known to cause it.  Also, having the module and image names completely unknown wasn’t very hopeful either.  I considered the idea of stepping into the memory location specificed until I found this write-up.  It mentions the program SoundTap as a very common source.  I had recently got Soundtap as part of a kit including the excellent Switch sound converter.  I uninstalled Sound Tap and sure enough – bluescreens went away.  Soundtap installs an audio driver to divert playback so you can do raw rips of anything you play on your pc (think sound ripper for youtube/shoutcast streams/shockwave players/etc).

So, it’s always a good idea to keep track of what you’ve changed on your pc and suspect even the unlikely things such as a simple software install.  That and googling for others with the same problems. 🙂