Posts Tagged ‘Windows’

Adding custom palettes to Dundas pie charts in .NET 3.5x

One of the new features in Dundas 6.x and above, is the ability to create custom palettes of colors and apply them to pie charts. This way you no longer have to settle for Dundas’s default fluffy colors. In order to change the color palette, create a Color array and assign it to the series like this:

Color[] clrSteps = new Color[] {
Color.Red,
Color.Green,
Color.Magenta,
Color.Blue,
Color.LightBlue,
Color.Coral,
Color.LightCyan,
Color.Goldenrod,
Color.Gray,
Color.GreenYellow,
Color.Honeydew,
Color.Ivory,
Color.Khaki,
Color.Lavender
};
yourPieChart.PaletteCustomColors = clrSteps;

Now your pie chart will start with red for the first slice, then continue to use the clrSteps array for each slice’s color. If there are more slices than colors you’ve provided, don’t worry, Dundas will start at the beginning color in the array and continue through all of the colors as many times as needed.

Windows service failure while running in a QEMU virtual instance

If you are running Windows under QEMU and see Event ID 7000′s like these below–

If you get this Description:

“The Parallel port driver service failed to start due to the following error:
The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it.”

Then you have the ParPort service not starting. This happens if you upgrade your W2K3, W2K, or NT server from hardware (motherboard) that HAD a Parallel Port, but are now on a new motherboard that has no Parallel Port.

The fix is simple:
1. Open Regedit and go to–
HKLM\System|CurrentControlSet\Services\Parport
2. Edit the Start key and change the value to 4. Changing the value to 4 will “disable” the service.
3. Reboot the server

You should no longer get that annoying popup dialog when Windows starts.

Windows Vista how to boot up without network

For security, sometimes you do not want your computer to automatically start up allowing network connections. In Windows Vista there is a way to ensure that when your machine reboots, network connections will not be enabled. They will only be enabled once you log in the first time.

To do this, go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services.

Then change the Network Connections service to Manual.

This will prevent Windows Vista from establishing or allowing any network connections until the first time you log in.