At home, I have a perfectly good laptop that is sitting unused. This is because about two months ago the battery stopped recharging. Click here for a brief history of that saga.

Yesterday, the motherboard I purchased off of eBay arrived. Last night, I eagerly installed it. You know, I was really afraid while I was taking it apart that it would be impossible to put back together. In the end, it wasn't that hard. (Except I have two extra screws left over and I don't know where they go. Oops.)

So after I put all of the parts back in, made sure everything was secure. Plugged the laptop back into the wall, and attempted to power up.

Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Put the battery in, it boots up fine but the battery doesn't recharge. Take the battery out, and no power.

So it turned out to not be the motherboard. What else can it be? The two other suspects are the power cord, and the battery. The power cord costs less than $10. I've ordered one off of eBay, and it will take another week or two for that to arrive. New laptop batteries run around $100, and I would have to think twice before trying that option.

Well, now I have an extra perfectly good motherboard. What I'm going to do is take the new one out and put the old one back in, and sell the one I just received yesterday on eBay. Maybe I'll take that money and put it towards a battery if it comes to that.

There is a lesson in here somewhere. I should have tried replacing the $5 part first, and then replaced the $70 part if that didn't work, EVEN IF the $70 part was the most likely culprit. I am so used to doing things in order from most likely to least likely, I forget to take cost into the equation.

Update: The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 7000, circa 1998, in case other people are searching the web for information on the possible causes of this problem.

I am getting a lot of people coming to this site, looking for help with “Startup procedure cannot be found in MSDART.DLL” errors. Obviously, information on this type of error is something that people are often looking for. Here is a link to my original post on the issue.

MSDART.DLL contains the Microsoft Data Access “OLE DB Runtime Routines”. MDAC 2.7 SP1 has a version number of 2.71.9031.4 for this file. Not sure about MDAC 2.8 which is now out.

When I did my original Internet search for information on this error, I found several recommended solutions:

1. Try the MDAC Component Checker. This free Microsoft utility will check your system to make sure data access is installed and configured correctly. This tool has only ever told me everything is fine, however, so I don't know how helpful it will be if things are not fine.

2. Rename MSDART.DLL to MSDART32.DLL. If you're encountering this error during a Windows Install, like I was, this might not be easy to do.

3. Just keep clicking OK until the error goes away. Some people report clicking the OK button 200 times or so in order to make it disappear. In my own personal experience, I clicked OK about 20 times before I gave up.

4. Hold down the Control key and keep clicking OK until the error goes away. I don't know what holding the Control key is supposed to do, but some people suggest this anyways.

5. Just wait. I found that the Windows install finished on its own, once I left the computer alone for a few hours. Don't ask me how it did this, but perhaps there is a timeout of some sort.

6. Use the system against itself. Hit Shift+F10 to bring up a Command Prompt. Type taskmgr.exe to bring up Windows Task Manager. Kill the messagebox from there.

I hope these suggestions and links help. As always, understand that there are a lot of possible problems and a lot of possible solutions for any error message, and so what worked for me may not work for you.

As you may know, the leap from Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic .NET is a long one. VB.NET is basically a whole new language, and thus will take a long, long time to migrate all of the existing VB6 programs out there to .NET.

Microsoft does provide a conversion wizard, which helps make the transition easier. I have never used that wizard before, so this evening I decided to take one of my old VB6 applications and convert it to VB.NET, to see how easy that transition would be.

Using the wizard itself is very easy. In Visual Studio 2003, choose File | Open | Convert from the IDE menu. VS.NET will then ask you a few questions to locate your old project. After a warning that indicated some conversions can take hours, it ended up taking not more than a minute for my tiny Windows application.

The conversion wizard is good in that it tells you where it had trouble converting, and marks the code accordingly. The wizard isn't perfect of course. It would be too much to expect that it could be. In my case, the wizard thought it had a problem converting one of the ADODB recordsets. But it didn't - everything was OK. The program compiled and ran correctly without any major modifications on my part.

As you know, programs under .NET are fundamentally designed differently than the old VB6 way of doing things. For instance, data access using ADO.NET is completely different than ADODB. ADO.NET uses disconnected datasets to enable database access. In my experiment, the conversion wizard retained the ADODB way of doing things. My program could be signifcantly improved (performance, scalability, extensibility, portability, etc.) if I made the extra effort to convert everything to ADO.NET.

So it's up to the developer to rewrite the program for the .NET way of doing things. But all in all, the wizard was a great help.

Omar Shahine, who works for Microsoft, points out something that has been bothering me for a long time: software is expensive.

The other day I decided I needed Photoshop CS. So I figured I’ll buy it. However at $600 or so dollars I have a hard time justifying that purchase since I’m only going to use it to edit digital photos...

Companies like Adobe want to sell Photoshop to the professional graphics designers. If I was a professional graphics designer, I would gladly pay the money for a tool I would use all day, every day. (More likely, I would get my employer to purchase it.)

But what about us amateur photographers? Am I going to shell out $600 US for software, when my Canon PowerShot A60 cost less than $300 US? Software that costs twice as much as the camera itself?

It's outrageous.

A trillion here, a trillion there... pretty soon we could be talking about real money!

The U.S. Federal debt officially exceeded $7 trillion for the first time this month. As of yesterday, That number was $57 billion higher than that. The debt has increased by $1.4 trillion in the last four years, and the OMB predicts an additional $5 billion shortfall over the next 10 years.

This could become an election-year issue, from CNN:

The government debt ceiling stands only a few hundred billion dollars ahead at $7.384 trillion, and Treasury would need Congress's blessing to borrow beyond that. Treasury officials say they expect the limit to be hit sometime between June and October.

Yesterday, my home computer (Windows XP Pro) lost its ability to connect to the Internet.

This happened once I plugged both my Hauppage WinTV USB box and my digital camera into the computer for the first time. The symptoms were:

• Internet Explorer was telling me the “Server could not be found”
• I had a new Network Adapter is installed on my system (Microsoft LAN/TV Network)
• “ping 127.0.0.1” had bad characters in the results
• nslookup was returning an error message
• upon rebooting, my dhcp ip configuration was all screwed up

It could quite a bit of digging, but I finally found the problem. My Winsock key was corrupted. Here is a link to the exact way to diagnose this and solve it. It's under “Accepted Answer“ on this page:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/WinXP/Q_20786932.html

It's amazing to me sometimes the amount of effort people will go through to help each other, for free.

How to determine whether the Winsock2 key is corrupted:
==============================================

To determine if the symptoms are caused by a problem with the Winsock2 key:

Method 1: Use Netdiag

To use Netdiag the Support Tools must be installed. Use a retail XP CD and follow the following steps to install the Support Tools
 A) Insert the CD and browse to the Support\Tools folder
 B) Double-click on the setup file
 C) Go through the prompts until you get to the "Select An Installation Type" screen
 D) Select Complete and click Next

Once setup completes or if the Support Tools are already installed:
A) Open a command prompt.
B) Type "netdiag /test:winsock" (without the quotes) and press Enter

It will return the test results for several network components including the Winsock. For more details on the test, use /v at the end of the command.

Despite how bad the movie Zoolander was, one of the funniest lines has got to be:

“The files are inside the computer.”

“The files are INSIDE? The COMPUTER?”

Well, I just opened up my old Dell laptop. I can honestly report that the files aren't in there.