OS Upgrade was must Home Editions never an option. Re-installing all the drivers and OS, can always lead to road blocks.

Mine was on a VGN-SR43G  – After installing a new OS constantly got a windows alert “Your battery is not connected properly or is not compatible, Please click OK to hibernate”

And no matter what I tried it wouldn’t go away.

Solution:

1. Goto the the task manager – CTRL+ALT+DEL

2. Find the Process ISBMgr. exe – The Sony ISB Utility, Kill the process

3. Goto MSConfig – Startup, Uncheck this process from there and you are good to go.

This utility checks whether the battery is connected properly and if it is genuine – It gives the alerts even if it is genuine but that is besides the point

The particular code uses GD Library a add on for PHP which was not installed on the server.

How to check if GD Library is installed?

Create a php file with the code phpinfo() ; on running the file on the browser if you don’t find GD in a seperate table block then its not installed.

Shared Hosting – Contact the hosting company

VPS/Dedicated – You will need SSH Access

Run the following command

yum install gd

or

yum install php-gd

If you do not have root access it will give an error

Prefix the command with sudo – this will run the command successfully.

Restart apache server and all should be good.

This particular problem took a while to figure out… hence, sharing it.

You are nearly there, orders are being place, you implemented a 3rd party payment gateway and the works. You login to the admin to Ship/Invoice an order that has been places and you keep getting the error on the screen

“No Order exists”

You know it does! They are all there! You try EVERYTHING possible, track back on what you may have done, but in vain.

The brain at times forgets the obvious, Magento, does have an error reporting area! – Lies in var/reports – Pull up the latest error report – it will create one everytime you try to place an order.

The error occured due a custom shipping module that I was trying to create a while back but rolled it back.

The report says “Invalid model for shipping method: <your shipping method name>”

Now for some reason the database stores entries with the shipping method name that we need to get rid of and bingo.

1. Login to your database using PHPMyadmin

2. Take a backup of your database – ALWAYS

3. Locate table core_config_data

4. Sort the table by the column ‘path’

5. Locate the rows that have the path with <your shipping method name> and delete these rows.

I got a complaint that the documents were not downloading correctly and were converting to zip file with random XML files in them. I checked  a few times but couldn’t replicate the problem. Reason? I use Firefox the client was using IE7.

Apparently IE7 has an inherent bug that causes all MS Office 2007 formats and Open Office formats to open incorrectly.

To fix the problem additional MIME values need to be added on the server where the site is running. Below is the list. Please restart Apache server once you make the change.

# MIME type                                                          Extension
application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.12                          docm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document   docx
application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.12                          dotm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template   dotx
application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slideshow.macroEnabled.12                   ppsm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow    ppsx
application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.presentation.macroEnabled.12                pptm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation pptx
application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroEnabled.12                     xlsb
application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroEnabled.12                            xlsm
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet         xlsx
application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument                                            xps
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text                                   odt
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-template                          ott
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.graphics                               odg
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.graphics-template                      otg
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation                           odp
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation-template                  otp
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet                            ods
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet-template                   ots
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.chart                                  odc
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.chart-template                         otc
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.image                                  odi
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.image-template                         oti
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.formula                                odf
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.formula-template                       otf
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-master                            odm
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-web                               oth

Incase you don’t have access to the server and are just a user on a site that’s causing you this trouble, you can do two things.
1. Don’t use IE7 )
2. When the zip files downloads simply rename it to the correct extension.

2 months down the line had to move the hosting server.

Boom something goes wrong. I copy an exact mirror of the completely running version but I keep get 404 errors.

Problem: URL Rewrites not working

Solution: Add this line to your .htaccess file

Rewritebase /

Path to be defined as per the location of the site folder.

It was working perfectly fine when you first installed everything and all was pretty. But somewhere down the line the alerts completely stopped.

You know that your mail server settings are in the admin area, then what?

Do not miss to check on the Windows Services to ensure that the ‘Sharepoint Timer’ Service is running. This keeps turning off at times causing the alerts to die. You may need to enter the authentication details again if your service is set as ‘Log On’.

Even had a case when it was totally unrelated – Web gateway that was defined on the MOSS server was incorrect – now that wasn’t very smart!

One common problem that is hard to discover on your own is the hidden NTUninstall folders – Check in your C:/Windows, enable show hidden folders and if you see multiple folder with the names “NTUninstall” in them – this is the cause to your problem.

These folders get created when you Windows Automatic Updates are enabled. The downloads keeps a roll back of these updates in these uninstall folders. These folders are heavy in size and eat up a large amount of disk space. Its safe to delete these files unless you ever have the need to uninstall a update/hot fix.

I didn’t particularly ‘delete’ mine but took a back up on a external HDD – just in case.

The problem arises due to the Outlook PST file reaching its maximum size limit at 2GB.

To resolve the problem follow these steps -
1. Disabled automatic send/recieve so that you don’t loose any more mails.
2. Create a new PST file and move you sent items / deleted items if you want to store them. This will free up space on your main PST.
3. Enable weekly/monthly archiving to keep the problem from repeating…