Alert all PHP developers.  The download for the latest SQL Server driver (1.1) is now available!

I recently booted my MacBook Pro via BootCamp to Windows 7 and discovered my printers mysteriously disappeared.  Upon poking around, I got the following error message:

Windows can't open Add Printer.
Operation could not be completed (error 0x000006be).

I had also recently installed VMWare Fusion 3, and created a virtual machine to point to my BootCamp partition.  After snooping around some more, I discovered this was causing my print nightmares.

Solution

Remove the following registry key and reboot!

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors\ThinPrint Print Port Monitor for VMWare]

I am a big fan of the Internet Download Manager (IDM).  It has drastically reduced my download times.  A typical installation will “hijack” the download process from any installed browser.  Usually I don’t mind.  However, my Silverlight experience started to suffer recently, and it was due to the installation of IDM.

When visiting some Silverlight sites, IDM started it’s “magic”, as seen in the following dialog box:

The bad news is that this “hijacking” of the download process diverts the .zip to a compressed folder, and the Silverlight application will not function properly.

Solution

One simple way to divert the dialog box is to hold the [Alt] key down when initially viewing a Silverlight application that would prompt for more downloads.  The downside to this is that you will not know if you need to press the [Alt] key until a download happens.  Another solution is to disable the “hijack” process in the IDM options.

I am currently running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on my MacBook Pro via Bootcamp.  So far my experience with Windows 7 has been amazing.

Every once and awhile, I will be in the middle of some activity and the entire operating system freezes.  No mouse movement, no keyboard interaction – nothing.  My only way out of this frozen experience is to press the power button down for several seconds until my MBP shuts down.

While working on some important files today, it happened again.  This time, I decided to search the internet for some answers.  I found one.

Solution

Essentially, the NVidia drivers provided by Apple are causing the problem.  If you are a fellow Mac owner who loves running Windows 7 (or Vista) via Bootcamp and you are experiencing this intermittent problem, check out this blog from winston smith on how to prevent Vista from freezing using Bootcamp.  I have confirmed that this works for Windows 7 as well.