The set up

I have a single gold account and two Xbox 360 consoles. One of these consoles is always online and is used exclusively for watching Netflix (because the drive tray is broken). The other console works fine for games, but is physically located where wired Ethernet isn’t available, and I haven’t purchased a wireless adapter. In order to get the same gamertag on both consoles, I used the recover gamertag feature to bring it down to the online console. This means that the Netflix gamertag is regularly connecting to Xbox Live while my gaming is done on the same gamertag, but offline.

Microsoft doesn’t seem to want to support this sort of arrangement, as it appears that gamertags are associated with individual Xbox consoles and that only the last-to-be-connected gamertag is seen as legit.

The problems

The first problem I’m facing is how to get all of these achievements that were earned offline sync’d up with my Live profile. One might reasonably think that simply connecting the offline Xbox to Xbox Live and logging in would do this, but Live sees the account as invalid (presumably because the account associated with the other box has connected more recently). Upon connecting to Xbox Live, I’m prompted to recover my gamertag, which I know from experience will erase my offline achievements (I’ll get the gamertag as it exists on the online console – which will also render the gamertag on the online console invalid).

I also tried to use a USB flash drive to move my gamer profile from the offline box to the online box. The move itself was successful, but when I tried to connect to Live, it again found the account to be invalid and invited me to recover my gamertag. I was able to move the gamer profile back to the USB drive, remove the drive, and then recover the online gamertag in order to keep using Netflix, but I was back to square one.

I haven’t yet tried moving the offline console’s hard drive with the gamertag to the online console. As of right now, this is the only thing I can think to try.

The second problem I’m facing is that the offline Xbox doesn’t yet have the new dashboard and some of my games have updates available that are supposed to fix some bugs. I’ve read that it should be possible to get these updates by creating a silver account and logging into Xbox Live under that account. That would be somewhat helpful, but unnecessary if I can solve the first problem.

Starting from square one, I decided to try installing the current version of SetPoint in the guest OS. The installation went fine, but the usual functionality of the SetPoint settings utility was absent.

SetPoint Settings in an XP virtual machine

As shown in the screenshot, the SetPoint Settings utility displays only the Tools tab. It is missing the My Mouse tab (and if a keyboard were installed, I presume it would be missing the Keyboard tab, too).

After some Googling around, it appears to be a due to the way VMware approximates the physical mouse. VMware seems to treat USB mice connected to the host as PS/2 devices in the guest. SetPoint, then, doesn’t detect any Logitech hardware that it can configure.

The question of how to obtain SetPoint functionality in virtual machines is one that has been asked many, many times before, without a satisfactory answer. More on that in a little bit.

The best work around

Thankfully, it seems that, at least in the case of a Windows host and a Windows guest, installing SetPoint inside the virtual machine is not necessary. Installing it on the host seems to make all of the functionality available in the guest. This is the solution that I’m implementing now, and it is what I would recommend, provided you have rights to install software on the host.

Paths to follow if you want to pursue installing SetPoint inside a VMware virtual machine

I applaud your courage. There are a few settings that can be tweaked that may get you closer to a working installation.

Possible setting number one

From the post at http://coreygilmore.com/blog/2008/04/30/better-multi-button-mouse-support-with-vmware-fusion-and-workstation/

Add the following line to the virtual machine’s .vmx file:

mouse.vusb.enable = "TRUE"

From what I can tell, this setting allows me to use the Forward and Back buttons on the mouse, but does not make the mouse detectable by SetPoint. The remaining mouse buttons do nothing.

Possible setting number two

From the post at http://superuser.com/questions/35830/back-forward-mouse-buttons-do-not-work-in-vmware-workstation-6-5-guest-os/304583#304583

The solution given (which did not work for me) is to:

First add the following line to the virtual machine’s .vmx file:

usb.generic.allowHID = "TRUE"

An explanation of what this does, by a VMware associate, can be found in the thread at http://communities.vmware.com/thread/110919?start=15&tstart=0

If you’re feeling really adventurous and/or desperate, you can take out the mouse.vusb.enable line and add this option instead:

usb.generic.allowHID = “TRUE”

Then, you’ll notice that your main mouse and keyboard (if they are USB) are available to pass through into the guest via the USB devices menu.

The dangerous part here is that once you pass through the mouse, it is actually disconnected from the host, so you won’t be able to ungrab from the guest just by mousing out of the Fusion window. You can still ungrab with the keyboard (ctrl-cmd I believe is the shortcut?). If you actually pass through your keyboard and your mouse, you’ll be stuck in the guest and you’ll have to shut it down (or worse, reboot your physical machine).

This sounded like a great idea, and I was willing to set up a second, PS/2 mouse to control just the host, if necessary. Without connecting a second mouse, I tried passing the Logitech mouse as a USB device to the VM, just as I would an external hard drive, but VMware prevented this, with a warning message:

[Machine Name] – VMware Workstation
Cannot connect “Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse” to this virtual machine. The host requires this device for input.
[OK]

The second step would have been to go into Device Manager, click Actions, and then choose “Scan for hardware changes”.

I didn’t get to the second step, as I was too lazy to track down a PS/2 mouse to keep attached to the host, and I still wanted to find a software solution. I suspect, though, that this would be were to begin, were I to need to get SetPoint running in the guest OS.

Summary

While I wasn’t able to figure out how to install SetPoint on a guest OS, the workaround of installing SetPoint on the host OS seems to accomplish my goal.

The main specs

CPU: Dual Core Intel Xeon 5060 3.2GHz, 4M Cache, 1066 MHz FSB
RAM: 2GB DDR2 PC2-5300, CL=5, Fully Buffered, ECC, DDR2-667
HD: SAS Fujitsu MAX3073RC 73GB, 15000 RPM, 16MB Cache
Video: Nvidia Quadro NVS 285 PCI-Express, 128MB

This is not a normal tower

Right away, the size of this thing suggests it isn’t a normal tower. It’s about up to my knee and weights 70 lbs. It feels like it’s made with heavier gauge steel than the typical chassis, but that may be me projecting.

I immediately shopped around for more RAM, obviously. 2GB seems a little thin, even by 2006 standards, when considering the way everything else is high-end. The mainboard has 8 slots and supports up to 32GB, but I figure 6GB is a safe place to start.

The workstation has three enormous fans, like, big-as-your-hand big. Running it with the chassis open causes some sort of thermal protection system to kick in and it spins the fans up to the point that they were blowing stuff on the floor half-way across the room.

The CPU has a big, passive heat sink with six copper pipes and sits between two of those fans. I’m tempted to buy a second CPU, but I’ll hold off.

I’m still on the fence about the SCSI drive. It should be super fast, but I’m a little spoiled by the SSD in my machine at work, so it’s hard to get excited about a mechanical drive, even one running at 15k RPM.

The Nvidia Quadro card is also fanless, and has a bizarre DMS-59 connector. An adapter converts the DMS-59 connector into two DVI outputs.

The message in the command line window read:

Execute: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Temp\[random].tmp\syslinuxnew.exe -maf G:
Syslinux Errors 1

A message box would then appear with the following warning:

Universal USB Installer 1.8.6.3 Setup

An error(1) occurred while executing syslinux.
Your USB drive won’t be bootable…
[OK]

When I opened a command prompt and ran syslinuxnew.exe -maf G:, the result was zero FAT sectors. When I ran syslinux.exe -maf G:, I got a much more informative message, or at least one that I could better understand: this doesn’t look like a valid FAT filesystem.

And of course, the flash drive wasn’t FAT32, it was NTFS. I had forgotten to format the drive as FAT32 before running the utility, but I also managed to not check the box next to “We will format G:\Drive as FAT32.” in the utility itself. No wonder Google wasn’t returning any results when I searched this – who’s going to have missed properly formatting the drive twice?

I installed XAMPP to E:\xampp, and I have pinned the XAMPP Control Panel (xampp-control.exe) to the taskbar for easier access, but starting up xampp-control.exe from that shortcut throws an error:

XAMPP Control

XAMPP Component Status Check failure [3].

Current directory: E:\xampp

Run this program only from your XAMPP root directory.

[OK] [Cancel]

Strangely enough, I even get this error even when running xampp-control.exe from my XAMPP root directory, which really is E:\xampp.

The last post in the thread at http://www.apachefriends.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=44320&sid=a41029c6a36bbf5b3bb5817f37842340&start=60 offers a simple solution: change the Install_Dir value under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE to point to C:\xampp. According to the thread, the error message is due to a bug where the Install_Dir is checked against a hard-coded path on C:\. That may or may not be the case, but the suggested work-around seems to be effective.

Here’s a registry merge for Windows 7 64-bit that will make the change for you.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\xampp]
"Install_Dir"="C:\\xampp"

Now xampp-control.exe launches without the error, and I haven’t noticed anything (PHP, MySQL, etc.) not working because of the bogus path.

What happened to all the stuff in the “old” forums?

For a limited time, all your posts from the previous version of the forums live on forumsarchive.xbox.com (will be available shortly after the new forums have gone live). They are available for you to go grab any FAQs, walkthroughs, and other valuable posts that you created, so you can repost them in the new forums.

http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/forum_faq/f/6/p/3058/19910.aspx

That isn’t quite true, as I’ve found links in posts on ardamis.com to at least one thread that I’d started on the old forum that is missing from the archive, so there has obviously been some culling happening.

I suspect that not only were countless useful threads simply abandoned or even deleted, but probably millions of inbound links to xbox.com were left to 404.

Instead of redirecting all of the links to the old forum threads, visitors following those links now see an ugly IIS server error message.

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.

The resource cannot be found.

Description: HTTP 404. The resource you are looking for (or one of its dependencies) could have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Please review the following URL and make sure that it is spelled correctly.

Requested URL: /31685953/ShowPost.aspx

It’s stunning, actually, how poorly this transition was handled, and I’m not alone in thinking that. There are even threads on the new forum about how much better the old one was. I cannot picture any metric by which improvement is measured that would indicate this change was successful. And I would love to know how the decision was made to let tons of inbound links 404. Who on earth would allow this to happen to their site?

One of my most popular articles at ardamis.com was a description of the slow death of my Xbox 360 at the hands of FFXIII, which thankfully didn’t link to the forum threads that it referenced for support. All those threads on how either a) Final Fantasy XIII broke dozens of Xbox 360s, or b) dozens of Xbox 360s just happened to break as people were playing Final Fantasy XIII, disappeared. But I’ve begun a new one, for posterity (and not because I still play the game, which I found to be a huge disappointment). So, to keep the flame of discontent burning, here’s the link to the new thread on Final Fantasy XIII freezing on Xbox 360.

On the upside, a quick look at the HTML of the new pages suggests that the links are not nofollowed, which is something else I found interesting about the old forums.

It is less known, perhaps, that Microsoft has implemented a similar method for delaying the activation of Office 2010 for up to 180 days. The steps below are from the Deploy volume activation of Office 2010 instructions on TechNet.

To rearm your Office 2010 installation

1. Make sure all Office 2010 applications are closed.
2. Open an elevated command prompt.
3. Go to %installdir%\%Program Files%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform. If you installed the 32-bit edition of Office 2010 on a 64-bit operating system, %Program Files% is the Program Files (x86) folder.
4. Run ospprearm.exe.

(The italics are mine, as I was tripped up for awhile by looking for ospprearm.exe under C:\Program Files\, rather than the Program Files (x86) folder.)

The Office 2010 rearm delays the activation requirement for 30 days, and it can be used five times, for a total of 180 days of activation-free use.

If you want to update your install media with the ‘slipstreamed’ version, grab a torrent and then check it against the official Windows 7 SHA1 and ISO/CRC hashes.

The filenames for the 5/12/2011 versions of Windows 7 Ultimate are below.

Windows 7 Ultimate with Service Pack 1 (x64) – DVD (English): en_windows_7_ultimate_with_sp1_x64_dvd_u_677332.iso
(http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6391716/Windows_7_x64_SP1_MSDN_Technet_May_2011_Refresh)

Windows 7 Ultimate with Service Pack 1 (x86) – DVD (English): en_windows_7_ultimate_with_sp1_x86_dvd_u_677460.iso

But when I tried to boot that install, all I got was the word GRUB on an otherwise blank screen after the POST.

I did some Googling and found the How to remove GRUB loader!? post at ntcompatible.com.

Basically, you can get around this problem by replacing the boot sector and MBR.

1. Boot into Recovery Console with the XP install media by choosing the Repair option
2. Choose the installation to work on
3. At the command prompt (assuming your installation is on C:), enter: fixboot c:
4. Proceed through any warnings
5. At the command prompt, enter: map
6. Record the name of the device on which you will be writing the new master boot record
7. At the command prompt, enter: fixmbr [device_name] (where the device name is something like \Device\HardDisk0
8. Proceed through any warnings
9. Exit Recovery Console and reboot

Resources: Windows XP Professional Product Documentation – fixboot and Windows XP Professional Product Documentation – fixmbr

Just add these macros as buttons to the QAT to quickly protect and unprotect it. I prefer two buttons to a single button because I don’t know of a way of telling, visually, the current state of the read-only attribute of a file. I’d love to change the appearance of the button to indicate the state, but I haven’t found a way to do this. So for now, two buttons allow the user to take exactly the action desired.

Why would you ever need to do this?

Buttons disappearing from the QAT is a pretty common occurrence.

If your Quick Access Toolbar contains buttons from templates or COM add-ins, these custom buttons can be lost when Word is closed and reopened. To demonstrate this, add such a button to the QAT, then close Word and reopen it from the command line with winword.exe /a (the /n switch may also demonstrate this). Word will open, but without any add-ins. Instead of creating a temporary Word.qat with the default buttons, the working Word.qat file is edited to remove all the non-native Word buttons. The appearance to the user is that Word loses the custom buttons. Once the buttons disappear, they do not return when Word is opened normally.

From what I can tell, the QAT buttons disappearing isn’t a random event or a bug, but an intentional consequence of initiating a Word instance without any add-ins or a result of a badly written function in a template or add-in.

The LockQAT Macro

Sub LockQAT()
'
' LockQAT Macro
'
'

    Dim appdata, thepath, objFSO, objFile

    Set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
    appdata = oShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%APPDATA%")
    thepath = appdata & "\Microsoft\Office\Word.qat"

    Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
    Set objFile = objFSO.GetFile(thepath)

    'Determine if the file is ALREADY Read-Only
    If objFile.Attributes And 1 Then
        MsgBox "The Word.QAT file is already Read-only."
    Else
        MsgBox "Locking the QAT from further editing."
        objFile.Attributes = objFile.Attributes + 1
    End If

' Resources
' http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/112600-1.shtml

End Sub

The UnlockQAT Macro

Sub UnlockQAT()
'
' UnlockQAT Macro
'
'

    Dim appdata, thepath, objFSO, objFile

    Set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
    appdata = oShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%APPDATA%")
    thepath = appdata & "\Microsoft\Office\Word.qat"

    Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
    Set objFile = objFSO.GetFile(thepath)

    'Determine if the file is ALREADY Read-Only
    If objFile.Attributes And 1 Then
        MsgBox "Unlocking the QAT for editing."
        objFile.Attributes = objFile.Attributes - 1
    Else
        MsgBox "The Word.QAT file is already writeable."
    End If

' Resources
' http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/112600-1.shtml

End Sub