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Posts under ‘Windows 7’

FIX: The Parallel port driver service failed to start

After you have disabled the Parallel Port in your BIOS, the following error may occur every time you start Windows.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7000
Date:  8/13/2009
Time:  9:15:47 AM
User:  N/A
Computer: computername
Description:
The Parallel port driver service failed to start due to the following error:
The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it.

View the BIOS version of your motherboard

As an administrator, there may come a time that you have to upgrade the bios. A new firmware may fix some bugs and may have new functionality. It also may be a required before you can request support from the manufacturer.
In all these cases, the first step to take is to determine the current BIOS version / firmware version. Yes: you can determine the firmware version by rebooting the computer and going into the BIOS, but in production environments this is often not recommended. :-)
Especially for these situations, you can view the BIOS version while running Windows. There are two easy ways to determine your current firmware version.

Windows Update error 0x80072ee2

Windows Update error 0x0080072ee2 is a very general error code and may cause much frustration. With this post I’m trying to help you to solve error 0x80072ee2 :) . After each step, try Windows Update to determine whether the issue is resolved

Get the MAC address of a remote computer

As a system administrator, I’ve been in many situations that I needed to write down the MAC-address of a remote PC. For example to boot the PC with Wake-On-LAN in the near future.

There are several ways to get the MAC address of a computer. Below are the two methods I mostly use. There are probably many more.

Change default folder of Windows Explorer – advanced

In my previous post Change default folder of Windows Explorer, I explained how to change the default folder of Windows Explorer to a normal path, like “C:\itexperience”. In this post, I’ll explain how to change the default folder of Windows Explorer to a more extinct folder, like Favorites.