Windows 7 and Intel Graphics 4

My laptop was on repairs for a while. Since it came back, I decided to update Windows with newest bits. One of installations Windows Update offered was also new driver for graphic adapter. Nothing fancy - just standard Intel Series 4 Graphics chipset.

Few days ago I, as I changed screen brightness, screen went black. And not pure black. I could see image but very dimly. I saw it before. It looked as background light is gone. I already saw myself packing laptop back for second round of repairs.

I shut it down (with good old Alt+F4 repeated multiple times). When I started it once again everything seemed to be alright. I was puzzled and when it happened again after some time. Since broken back-light doesn’t fix itself too often, I decided to search my system for cause of error.

It ends up that whenever I bring screen brightness to lowest setting (either by key combination or selecting it on slider) it turns off backlight completely. And there is no obvious way to turn it back on. No matter how much you increase brightness after that nothing brings light back.

Well, almost nothing. In Windows 7 you can use Win+P key combination to call upon window that gives you choice of display you wish to use. It was enough to change display to “Duplicate” in order to restore brightness. Since that left screen in resolution that was not optimal one, another call to Win+P window and selecting “Computer only” was needed to restore everything where it was.

Since I often change screen brightness, this is my workaround to avoid reboot each time I go one notch too far. I tried to restore driver to older version but, for some reason, I cannot get driver rollback to work. Updating to latest Intel drivers didn’t help much (Microsoft delivered 8.15.10.1872, Intel had 8.15.10.1986) since same “feature” is present there.

I am not sure how wide-spread this error is since I could not find anything about it on Internet (or I didn’t search good enough). However, I do know that my particular combination of HP 6030b and Intel Graphics 4 Series is affected. Lately, with this laptop, I feel that driver gods are not on my side.

P.S. No, screen is not broken, I tried older Windows 7 installation (VHD boot) and problem cannot be reproduced there. Only installations (both VHD and normal boot) where I use Windows Update regularly are affected.

Eating at McDonald's

Whenever I am in foreign country (in my case those are all countries that are not Croatia) I usually get my first touch with any food at McDonald’s. I definitelly cannot say that they are best possible choice. I cannot even call them cheap choice. But I always counted on them as being safe one.

I always valued McDonald’s as place where I can get same food no matter in which country I am in and I could always count on that food to be of certain quality. I am sorry to say that my belief has been quite shaken lately.

I made an error when I went to Berlin east train station. It was late and I figured that McDonald’s is better choice than some local fast-food stand. To make long story short – I got cold Big Mac, with cold fries and cold Cola – at least they were consistent. I was hungry and I ate it. That was my mistake. My stomach wasn’t well to begin with, after 5 hours of train, 2 hours of airplane and few hours of waiting in-between, this was last straw of patience.

In my town of Osijek there is also one McDonalds. They got me used to fresh hamburger, good fries and clean environment. I cannot remember that I ever ate stale food there.

With little care you can avoid making too much things in advance and still serve all your customers without too much waiting. I am sad that their coworkers in Berlin haven’t learned the same lection.

Team Foundation Server Does Not Like Encryption

I got my laptop from repairs and I got puzzled with Team Foundation Server not working. At once I saw one reason - SQL Server would not read from database files. Tracing back my steps before repair, I just decrypted files and everything was fine once more.

However, although I could see my collection in Team Foundation Server Administration Console I could not connect to it neither through Visual Studio 2008 neither through Visual Studio 2010. I just received message “Unable to connect to remote server”.

After confirming that indeed my server was down, I tried to start it back up from IIS Management Console. That failed with message that two additional services are stopped too - Windows Process Activation Service (incorrectly refereed to as Windows Activation Service) and World Wide Web Publishing Service.

Working on a hunch, I decrypted inetpub directory. After that was done, both services could be started once more. With that my Team Foundation Server went back among living.

Lesson of a day: be careful what you encrypt.

Core Configurator 2.0

For those that use Windows Server Core installations there is new candy in store - Core Configurator 2.0.

Not only that this collection of scripts will help with quite a few of administration tasks, but it will do it with basic graphical interface.

Lovers of GUI, rejoice.

Google Public DNS

Few days ago Google announced new project. This time, DNS is thing they wish to change.

What they decided to offer is public DNS service for anybody willing to re-configure his IP settings. Since having DNS at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 is quite easy to remember, there is no problem to change it at all computers that you use.

What Google gives here is promise of speed and I must say that they deliver. Their DNS is quite speedy and stable. While I cannot say that I would miss it much if they decide to pull a plug, I must say that I had no issues with it. And little bit of speed is not a bad thing.