PhishThis! » Vista

How to install WMP54G Drivers on Windows 7 64 bit (or Vista 64 bit)

Tom — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 04:51:59 +0000

My media center machine is my guinea pig. It’s relatively old with it’s nForce 440 based motherboard, Athlon 64 3200+ (Socket 989), and 1 whopping gig of memory. It’s also got a Hauppauge MCE500 dual analog tuner and an ATI 4550 with HDMI out to my Samsumg A550 40″ LCD.

I couldn’t be happier with how Windows 7 performs with minimal hardware. This machine is easily 3.5 years old, and it wasn’t exactly top of the line when I bought it. H.264 at 1080P plays flawlessly (thanks to AVIVO), and the Media Center interface is incredibly responsive, even right after bootup (which, I’m sad to say, wasn’t the case with Vista).

Anyway, last night I reinstalled Windows 7 Beta x64. Every single driver installed out of the box…except this damn WMP54G, which also didn’t work on Vista 64. So, here’s how to make it work.

This card is based on a card by RALink…that, or they use the same chip. Either way, they offer a driver that works.

http://www.ralinktech.com/ralink/Home/Support/Windows.html

I downloaded the RT2500 installer. Then I installed it. *EDIT* Here’s the updated link location, thanks to “Heroin” the commenter (had to clarify): http://driverscollection.com/?file_cid=410099446353e5b327a2d97a64c

So, install then, then head over to Device Manager. You should see this:

Double click that device and go to Update Driver.

Select Browse my computer for driver software

At the bottom, select “Let me pick from a list of drivers on my computer”

In the next window, scroll down to Network Adapters and double click. Then click “Have Disk”

In the box that pops up, navigate to/enter this path: C:\Program Files (x86)\RALINK\RT6x Wireless LAN Card\Driver

Hit OK then scroll down to “Ralink Technology Corp” in the box on the left side. On the right side, select “802.11b/g Wireless Adapter.”

Click YES on the warning.

Success! Now try to connect to your wireless network.

Lite-On Wireless NIC Driver – Lite-On makes wireless cards?!

Tom — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:08:40 +0000

Recently, while doing some work for a client, I needed to reinstall Vista. She had Home Premium, but needed to be able to RDP. So, she purchased Business, and I did a clean reinstall on her Hewlett Packard Pavilion Elite m9402f. Sidenote: I was pretty impressed with the machine overall. Quad core Phenom, 8GB of RAM, Asus motherboard. Then again, it’s only 2 weeks old, so who knows what might happen.

I was able to install all of the nVidia forceware drivers directly from nVidia’s website. The HP site just pointed me to older versions of them, which is fine since I don’t like re-package/branded crap (see: Dell laptop video drivers).

No matter what I installed, I couldn’t get the wireless driver to install. The driver page (Here) was no help. No wireless. The labels on the riser card itself had some stuff printed on them, but Google and HPs website turned up nothing. I searched for about an hour before I took the card out and saw “WN7600R” stamped on the PCB. A quick Google search returned this:

http://certifications.wi-fi.org/pdf_certificate.php?cid=WFA6846

I guess it’s a Lite-On. A little more searching Google (about 30 minutes worth, finding nothing), led me to an old copy of the Lite-On wireless driver, which eventually let to this: The HP Hewlett Packard Pavilion Elite m9402f Vista 64 bit Wireless Card Driver.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?softwareitem=pv-60719-1&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&lang=en&os=2100&product=3771771

Using HttpWebRequest to perform HTTPS post fails with strange error message

Tom — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:30:45 +0000

Recently, after upgrading a server to Server 2008, some developers (ok, about 15 developers and BAs) began complaining that a post to a 3rd party vendor was no longer functioning. One of the devs whipped up a winform app to test from the server and locally from his workstation. From his Windows XP workstation, it was fine. From the Server 2008 box (and from my Vista laptop) it failed to connect with:

The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send.

Descriptive.

A full stack trace revealed:

System.IO.IOException: Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host. —> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host
at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.Receive(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size, SocketFlags socketFlags)
at System.Net.Sockets.NetworkStream.Read(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size)
— End of inner exception stack trace —
at System.Net.Sockets.NetworkStream.Read(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size)
at System.Net.FixedSizeReader.ReadPacket(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 count)
at System.Net.Security.SslState.StartReceiveBlob(Byte[] buffer, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest)
at System.Net.Security.SslState.ForceAuthentication(Boolean receiveFirst, Byte[] buffer, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest)
at System.Net.Security.SslState.ProcessAuthentication(LazyAsyncResult lazyResult)
at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.runTryCode(Object userData)
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.RuntimeHelpers.ExecuteCodeWithGuaranteedCleanup(TryCode code, CleanupCode backoutCode, Object userData)
at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state)
at System.Net.TlsStream.ProcessAuthentication(LazyAsyncResult result)
at System.Net.TlsStream.Write(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size)
at System.Net.PooledStream.Write(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size)
at System.Net.ConnectStream.WriteHeaders(Boolean async)
The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send.
at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetRequestStream()

Keep in mind that this worked fine on XP and 2003. Vista and 2008 always threw that exception…without exception. The code was just doing a basic XML post to an HTTPS service with authentication enabled.

ASCIIEncoding ascii = new ASCIIEncoding();
string requestToSend = body;
byte[] data = ascii.GetBytes(requestToSend);
HttpWebRequest webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(destination);

webRequest.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("User", "Pass");
webRequest.Method = "POST";
webRequest.UserAgent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2";
webRequest.ContentType = "text/xml";
webRequest.ContentLength = data.Length;
webRequest.KeepAlive = false;                                              

//Throws an exception HERE
Stream outStream = webRequest.GetRequestStream();
outStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
outStream.Close();

From that stack trace, I could see that the remote server was closing the connection…but, I had no idea why. Something in how it made the request was different than XP or 2003.

ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Ssl3;

As it turns out, the defult behavior in Vista and Server 2008 is to use TLS first for secure connections. If the server doesn’t support TLS, it’s supposed to negotiate with the client to use SSL3. In this case, the remote server wasn’t negotiating at all…It was just dropping the connection.

http://blogs.msdn.com/wndp/archive/2006/04/12/tls_enabled_by_default.aspx

Long story short:

If you upgrade to Server 2008 or Vista, and your HTTPS XML POSTs are failing due to some strange error, try to force SSL3.

www.chaoscollectibles.com and PowerShell system.net.webclient Script

Tom — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 05:47:18 +0000

I finally did it. I got the e-commerce bug and started my own shop. I’m working with Dave K on it, and we’re progressing quite well with a lot of mentoring from Bill and all of his XekoShop experience.

So, PhishThis will contain a lot of posts related to how I’m making like easier for myself as far as batch watermarking, getting images, etc.

Here’s one:

I need to scan all of my cards for Chaotic. But they have them all online and could save me some trouble. However, I don’t feel like right-click-saving 250 times. Enter, you guessed it, PowerShell.

I need to create a web client to connect to the site.

$wc = new-object system.net.webclient

Now, the site requires a login. You might say “CRAP!” However, the webclient supports passing credentials, as long as they’re typed as system.net.networkcredential

So, I can login to the site, from PowerShell with:

$wc.credentials = new-object system.net.networkcredential("username", "password")

Now, there were around 250 images, so I construct a simple for loop that uses $wc.downloadfile(“source”, “location”) and we end up with:

$wc = new-object system.net.webclient
$wc.credentials = new-object system.net.networkcredential("username", "password")
for ($i = 0; $i -lt 250;$i++)
{
  $wc.downloadfile("www.foobar.com/getimages.aspx?ImageID=$($i)", "C:\images\$($i).jpg")
}

This script saved me HOURS of scanning and stuff…and now, even if the card is out of stock, I still have the image. That makes sense in my head.

After, I set my view for that folder to EXTRA LARGE icons. This shows a readable preview of the jpeg. I renamed the first one, and instead of hitting enter after each one, I hit tab, and it went to the next file to rename it. I didn’t know you could do that, and tried on a whim. Saved me many keystrokes.

Next, I’m going to need to add them all to Zen Cart. Since I’m ~~lazy~~ a script kiddy, I’m going to write a script that will look at all of the product images in a folder, and write my SQL queries based on them. Hopefully I’ll even get it to do all of my formatting, too. We’ll see. Look for that this weekend sometime.

Windows Media Player 11 Won’t Minimize to Taskbar AKA – Mini-Mode

Tom — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 04:10:11 +0000

This has nothing to do with PowerShell :p

That said, I was sitting here working on ye olde blog when I thought “I want to listen to some Foo Fighters”…then I minimized WMP and it just…minimized. I wanted mini mode, where I get all of the controls on the taskbar…it works on my laptop, why not my desktop?

I don’t know why this took me so long to find. Wait, yes I do. I was looking all over WMP 11 for the setting. Turns out it isn’t there. To get WMP 11 to minimize to the taskbar (aka, mini-mode), right click your taskbar, go to toolbars, and make sure Windows Media Player is checked. Maybe I turned that off on my own a while ago and forgot it was there. I can’t remember the default behavior.

What makes this all more amusing is that I have a Logitech G15 keyboard, which has all of the controls right on top…