SCOTIA SYSTEMS BLOG

This is a really annoying problem and appears to be fairly common to Sony SZ model laptops.

The mouse touchpad can randomly reverse it’s direction, so when you slide your finger left, the pointer goes right.   The same is true of the vertical – slide up and the pointer goes down!   Very frustrating!

Researching this it appears there are several possible causes, some due to faulty drivers and some due to faulty hardware.    Here are some pointers (pardon the pun!) to help fix the problem:

1) Restart the process apoint.exe

• Open up Windows Task Manager, and terminate apoint.exe
• Go to c:\Program Files\apoint and then click on apoint.exe  (the icon should look like the touchpad in the taskbar)

2) Disable Wheel Detection

• Go into Device Manager -> Mice and other Pointing Devices -> Synaptics PS/2 Port Pointing Device
• Select Properties -> Advanced Settings
• DISABLE Wheel Detection (set to Detection Disabled)
• Un-check the Fast Initialization box

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If the above doesn’t help, you’ve probably got a hardware problem.   If you’re feeling brave, there’s a good walkthrough of how to fix the problem here.

Another good site about the problem can be found here.

Posted in IT Hints and Tips | No Comments »
Tags: apoint, Sony, SZ, touchpad

This happens fairly regularly at a client site with a mixture of XP and Vista PCs.    It’s common for users to remote from an XP machine to a Vista machine, only to find that when they return to the Vista machine, the screen is blank (black) and there’s no way to bring it back to life without switching it off and rebooting.

Believe it or not, it appears that the problem is related to smart card authentication (which isn’t even used on the site).   On the machine establishing the connection – go into the remote desktop properties, under the Local Resources tab, press the More button.   If you deselect “Smart Cards” – the problem is fixed

There is a long discussion of the problem with other possible solutions over at asp.net if the above fix doesn’t work for you.

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Tags: Vista

I’ve seen this a couple of times now with Vista, and thankfully it’s a fairly straightforward fix:

Log on as another user with Administrative rights.

Start regedit and go to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Here you’ll see a list of SIDs for each user profile, and you should find there are two with the same SID, however one ends with “.bak”.   You need to swap these around – essentially restoring the backup SID.

Once swapped – set both State and Refcount to 0 and then reboot. Fingers crossed, everything should be back to normal!

For a good step through of the process – take a look at this walkthrough.

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Tags: Vista