Problems with your DVD-ROM CD-ROM drives

You are having problems accessing your DVD-ROM and CD-ROM drives. The problem happened after you opened an email attachment. You need to make sure your drivers are the correct versions. However, you do not know how to do that. What should you do that will allow you to determine whether correct versions of the drivers are installed?

Run the DRIVERQUERY command-line tool.

• Open a command prompt window.
• Type driverquery /? (to get a list of the driverquery options)
• Type driverquery | more (to see a pageview display of drivers). note: the | sign on the keyboard is the broken line above the \

Driverquery is a quick way to generate a of list of installed drivers on your system.  However, in my opinion, a better way is to use DriverView, a free utility from NirSoft. DriverView works under all versions of Windows except for 98 and ME.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/driverview.html

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490896.aspx

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Wireless enabled and no internet connection

The following is a repost of an unusual problem encountered a few years ago while troubleshooting a friend's Windows Vista laptop:

I installed a free anti-virus software.  After the installation, I encountered one problem after another.  Windows Firewall connection turned off and became disabled.  I was unable to connect to the Internet even though my wireless connection was showing as enabled.  Internet Explorer was showing a "Page cannot be displayed" error.

I googled "wireless connection showing enabled and no Internet", as I had never before encountered that problem. A blog entitled, Repair and reset Windows Vista TCPIP Winsock Catalog Corruption popped up and described the situation. It was easy and solved the problem in five short steps.  Be sure to click on the link for an explanation as to what caused the Winsock corruption.  This fix could save you a lot of potential headache. Here is the Microsoft Knowledge Base article for  How to determine and to recover from Winsock2 corruption in Windows Server 2003, in Windows XP, and in Windows Vista.

Find IP address of Network Printer

Image via Wikipedia

If the printer has an Ethernet port, then it probably has a menu button to configure settings and you will have an option to display the IP address of the printer.

If there is a computer set up to use the printer:

1. Go to Start
2. Go to Control Panel (In Vista, type Printer in the search box on the Start menu)
3. Go to Printers and Faxes
4. Right click the printer
5. Click Properties
6. Click the Ports tab to display the IP address

You can ping your network from a computer connected to the network and look up an arp table:

1. Click Start
2. Click cmd
3. Type ipconfig to find your network address.  Most of the time it will be 192.168.1.1 (the default gateway) on a home network.
4. Ping your network using the broadcast address.  If your network address is 192.168.1.1, the broadcast address is 192.168.1.255 and you would ping 192.168.1.255.  If your network address is 192.168.2.1, the broadcast address is 192.168.2.255 and you would ping 192.168.2.255.
5. Then type arp -a to see the devices connected to the network.  One of the listed devices is the printer.

Related articles

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Troubleshooting Workgroup Connections

A common network configuration is a workgroup consisting of a few computers.  Each computer is connected to a router or hub, through an Ethernet cable or wirelessly, in order to share files or printers in a small office or home.  Problems connecting in this type of network can occur for many reasons.

Part of the troubleshooting process is to verify the computer name and the workgroup name.  The user could have changed the name of the workgroup or name of the computer in the Systems Properties dialog box, ran Network Connections Wizard, or Network Setup Wizard.

One way of checking the computer name, user name, workstation domain, and other info is by using the command-line utility net config workstation.

Go to Start

Click Run

Type cmd to access the DOS command prompt

Type net config workstation

Press Enter

Detailed info about the net config workstation utility

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