Christopher Shennan’s Blog

For the last few months I have been connecting to the VPN at work via my O2 Wireless Box II quite happily until it suddently stopped working about 2 weeks ago which has caused me no end of headaches (tight deadlines looming etc). Each time I tried to connect I got presented with a “Error 619 – Disconnected”

I have had my laptop checked out by the IT guy and everything connected fine when it was in at the office and even my iPhone could connect to the VPN when using 3G but this Error 619 kept appearing each time I tried to connect to the work VPN via my O2 Wireless Box II using either the laptop or iPhone.
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My Sony VGN-FE21B laptop has been having problems with performance over the last few months, applications were taking a long time to load and the hard drive was getting cluttered with obsolete files, so at the weekend I decided to re-install Windows XP Pro onto my Sony VGN-FE21B laptop.

The original operating system was Windows XP Home but since the laptop has been bought primarily for work purposes, I had also bought a copy of Windows XP Pro but each time I install Windows XP Pro on my Sony VGN-FE21B laptop it always has a missing icon for the memory stick in My Computer. I imagine this is because the hardware is specific to Sony and not a generic Windows XP driver.
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This Christmas was the quietest Christmas I have had in years in terms of the obligatory “if you have got the time” IT jobs as I only had 1 request for fixing a computer this year (instead of the 4 computers and a DVD player I had a few years back… all requested within 2 hours of arriving home).

Luckily this one turned out to be relatively simple and only took 5 minutes to fix although when I first heard about it I thought it was going to take a few hours. My aunt and uncle reported a problem with logging into their laptop (running Windows Vista Home Premium) on my uncle’s profile where it would give an error message “The User Profile Service failed the logon”, after which it would simply return them to the profile selection screen.
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A few months back both my Windows Vista (Business) computers would not longer print even though they had been printing fine for months.  I tried

1. restarting the workstations
2. restarting the server,
3. restarting the print spooler service on the workstations
4. restarting the printer spooler server on the server
5. deleting printers and tryed to re-add them

Regardless what I tried neither of the Windows Vista computers would allow me to printer and always presented me with the following error when trying to add a printer and almost always when the computer booted:-

The local print spooler service is not running. Please restart the spooler or restart the machine.

At that point I didn’t need to print much so I didn’t try too hard to fix it and simply resorted to printing from my only Windows XP machine I had.

Today I finally had enough and decided it was time to find a solution to this local print spooler service is not running problem.

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