Alienware M14x with Windows 8 – USB 3.0 ports and Corsair thumb drives issue

by | Feb 22, 2013 | ,

alien

I have an Alienware M14x laptop and a few Corsair USB 3.0 thumb drives.  The thumb drives most of the time would not get recognized by Windows.  They throw an “unrecognized device” error when they are plugged in.  I can plug the same thumb drives into a USB 2.0 port on the same laptop and they work fine just not at USB 3.0 speeds which is not cool.  I can plug other USB 3.0 devices, like a Western Digital external hard drive, and they work just fine at USB 3.0 speeds.

After some searching I found some rather lengthy instructions here that fixed the problem perfectly for me and a co-worker with the same laptop.  Essentially the instructions walk you through getting Windows 7 drivers installed for the USB 3.0 hub and ports.

I imagine this applies to more than just the Alienware M14x and would work for other laptops as well.

SQL Server Reporting Services get a percentage of group total from column value

by | Feb 15, 2013 | ,

I have rows from a query such as:

Name                  Type            Quantity

Customer01       A N              5
Customer01       A P               4
Customer01       O N              3
Customer01       O P               2
Customer02       A N              3
Customer02       A P               9
Customer02       O N              5
Customer02       O P               7

So, I can do a grouping and get the total for each customer:  (using sum(Fields!Quantity.Value))

Customer01     14
Customer02     24

What I needed is on the report to then show what percentage of the total each line represented.

I finally found that the sum function has a scope you can define to do this.
So I ended up with an expression added to a new column out to the side of the Quantity column on the report that looked like this:

=Fields!Quantity.Value/sum(Fields!Quantity.Value,”table1_group_code”)

The “table1_group_code” is the name of the grouping where I needed the percentage calculated from.

You can find this name in the Row Groups area of the reports designer.

Capture

Windows Update Services shows Windows 8 x64 as Windows XP x64

by | Feb 13, 2013 | ,

My Windows 8 machine was not getting updates from our Windows Update Services server.
When I looked at my computer account it showed the operating system as Windows XP x64 which is definitely wrong.

I found the following instructions on Microsoft’s Technet site:

ReInstall KB2734608 (found here, scroll down towards the bottom for the actual download)
Open an elevated Command Prompt
net stop wuauserv
rd /s %windir%\softwaredistribution
y
Use regedit to delete HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate
net start wuauserv

This fixed my issue and my Windows 8 machines now report as having Windows 8 as their operating system and they immediately found updates that needed installed.

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