a blog on technology in the real world

Let me get it out of the way at the beginning of this post. Monoprice rocks. I’ve used them for years for various cables, usually ethernet and HDMI and have always been impressed with the high quality of their cables and surprised by their low prices. A couple weeks ago I was listening to the Real Deal podcast from Cnet.com and heard about a cable that really fit a need in my life. A caller was asking about ways to get their iPod into their car stereo and one of the hosts suggested a cable from Monoprice that connected via the iPod dock connector and had USB and stereo audio out on the other end. This cable was the answer to my frustrating car audio problems.

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This problem was driving me nuts for the last week, and is more for my own memory than anything else. At work we got a demo unit from HP of the desktop computer we’re going to be rolling out this summer and I was updating the network drivers in our OS Deployment boot images. The Windows PE environment wasn’t getting the network drivers installed and finally I saw the error message “The selected driver is not applicable to any supported platforms.”

The fix was easy. Microsoft KB 978754 has a hotfix that needs to be installed on the SCCM Site Server, then the server needs to be rebooted. The drivers then installed without a problem. The KB article says the cause of the issue was the driver importing wizard couldn’t recognize drivers signed for only Windows 7.

Good to know.

Found a quick workaround for my complaint that you can’t pin items that are on network shares to the Windows 7 taskbar. All you have to do is create a folder for shortcuts to all the items, create a new toolbar on the taskbar using that folder. It shows up like the old Quicklaunch toolbar, and creates a separate icon on the taskbar when the app is launched, but it kinda solves my problem.

Here’s the steps:

1. Create a new folder with shortcuts to the applications you can’t pin.
2. Right click taskbar and unlock it.
3. Right click the taskbar again, select toolbars, then select “New toolbar.”
4. Browse to the folder you created, and click “select folder."