Dell XPS 7590 laptops have an annoying tendency to overheat after going into sleep mode while plugged in. The laptop gets VERY hot and the fan runs full blast, for no apparent reason. I found a post on the Dell Community forum claiming the problem had something to do with the fingerprint scanner. It linked to another post explaining how to disable power management for the fingerprint driver.

To do so:

• Open Device Manager
• Under Biometric devices, open properties for Goodix fingerprint
• Open the Power management tab
• Uncheck Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power

It seems to have fixed the overheating issue for me.

So, I had to replace a failing hard drive in my computer at work. It was the D: drive and only had data on it, so no big deal. Put in the new drive, copy the data over, remove the bad drive, rename the new drive to D:, and should be good to go, right? Well, not quite… See, when I had installed SQL Server, I told it to put all of the databases on the D: drive, including master, model, etc. Even though all of those files got copied over to the new D: drive, SQL Server wasn’t happy. I kept getting this error when trying to start up SQL Server:

FCB::Open failed: Could not open file D:\SQLServer\MSSQL10_50.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\model.mdf for file number 1.  OS error: 5(Access is denied.).

SQL Server was configured to run under the Network Service account, so I checked the effective permissions for that account on the model.mdf file. They appeared to be sufficient, but not “Full Control”. So I gave Network Service full control on the MSSQL10_50.MSSQLSERVER folder and after that SQL Server started up just fine.

I looked at permissions on some other systems and the account SQL Server is running under does not typically have full control over those files. In fact, it usually seems to have the same, or even more restricted, permissions than what mine had when it wasn’t working. I’m not quite sure what exactly it needs to work, but it’s working now and giving the service full control to that folder probably isn’t too dangerous.

Notepad++ is my favorite text editor on the Windows platform; however, I’ve often wished it would recognize other file extensions and use the appropriate language setting. On several occasions I have poked around in the Preferences, but was never able to find a way to get it to do that. (It’s a testament to my laziness that I hadn’t bothered to put much energy into figuring it out, despite the fact that it repeatedly annoyed me.) Well, today I noticed the Style Configurator menu option and wondered what it was. It turns out this is where you get Notepad++ to recognize other extensions!

Simply go to the Settings menu and then click on Style Configurator dialog:

In the Language list, select the language you would like an extension to default to. For example, I typically want *.config files to be opened as XML files. To do this, select the XML language, enter “config” into the User ext. field, and then click Save & Close. That’s it! Now when you use Notepad++ to open a file with a config extension, it will default to the XML language. If you want to associate multiple extensions with the same language, simply enter them all in a space-delimited list.

I’m sure this information is out there somewhere, but I was too lazy to look for it, and I needed to write something on my blog. 😉

Note: this does not create a file associate in the operating system. So if you want to also be able to double-click on a config file and have it automatically open in Notepad++, you’ll also need to create that association in Windows.

I finally got around to getting an Xbox 360 last weekend. This weekend I wanted to try streaming pictures and music from my laptop and Droid X to the Xbox via DLNA and my wireless network. No matter what I tried, I could not get the Xbox to see my phone or laptop, nor them then Xbox. I spent hours and hours this weekend searching the Internet and trying everything I could think of, but I couldn’t get it to work. Since none of the devices could see each other, it seemed like it was likely a router issue. While perusing the router settings for the umpteenth time, I noticed that an unfamiliar setting, called AP Isolation, was set to “On”, which was not the default. I looked up the documentation on this setting for my Linksys router and it said:

Creates a separate virtual network for your wireless network. When this feature is enabled, each of your wireless client will be in its own virtual network and will not be able to communicate with each other. You may want to utilize this feature if you have many guests that frequent your wireless network.

Doh! I don’t ever remember turning that setting on, but it sounds like something I would have done. None of the wireless devices on my network have ever needed to talk to each other before, so it probably made sense to turn it on, until now anyway. As soon as I turned off that setting all the devices could suddenly see each other. As the documentation says, this setting only isolates the wireless devices from each other. Since I’ve never tried to get any of my wireless devices to communicate before, it was never an issue. My wireless devices were still able to communicate with all the wired devices, though.

I’m posting this on the off chance it might help someone, and as a reminder to me to be careful when tweaking things because I often forget what I did.