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HP 280 G1 MT/Intel HD4600 Dual Monitor DVI Problem Finally Resolved

Personally I’d been fighting this Intel HD 4600 DVI/dual monitor issue for several months now, but at the time I had bigger fish to fry, so I kept putting it off until today. Those poor people on the Intel forums have been complaining about this issue for like three or four years now because “they weren’t able to reproduce the issue”, very sad. Indeed it is a very strange problem. Initially I was convinced it was strictly a driver problem, but now I think it may be some sort of weird driver/OS oddity.

If you’re unfamiliar with the issue, there are multiple threads out there on the Intel forums and several I’ve seen on the HP forums as well. The problem is that after a system reboot, the display on the DVI port is no longer detected and all you get is a black screen. The second monitor is not detected in the operating system whatsoever and the monitor shows no input signal. Right after the initial installation of the display driver, dual monitors would work, but only until the next system reboot. One workaround for this issue was to uninstall/reinstall the display driver and just never reboot the machine again, which totally sucked donkey balls. Continue reading “HP 280 G1 MT/Intel HD4600 Dual Monitor DVI Problem Finally Resolved”

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HP Support Assistant – The Epitome of Spyware and How to Disable It

Sure there are several legitmate cases where the HP Support Assistant can be helpful, such as updating drivers or flashing the BIOS on the computer, but if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already established the fact that the software basically hijacks your computer and does a lot of shady shit in the background. I would absolutely classify the product as being spyware and would highly recommend that you take all steps necessary to disable it when it is not being used, and here are some reasons why.

My first problem is that by default, the HP Support Assistant does an intrusive scan of your network to search for “devices” every time the software runs and it appears you can’t turn that off. It doesn’t get much shadier than that folks, seeing as how you don’t really know what they are up to and why they are taking an inventory of your entire network.
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Server 2012 – RDesktop: Fix Disappearing Mouse Cursor with Group Policy

Boy do I sure feel like a dumbass sometimes. I researched and wrestled with this damn issue for a week or more only to find out that I had come across the answer to this problem about a dozen times but was looking in the wrong freaking spot. For whatever reason, when people were referring to disabling the mouse pointer shadow, I immediately thought of the place in windows System Properties > Advanced Tab > Performance > Settings > Visual Effects Tab > “Show shadows under mouse pointer” but that wasn’t fixing my problem and now I know why. Here’s the whole story.

I’ve got a mix of around 100 Neoware CA19, CA21, and HP T5145 thin clients, all with 128MB of flash running HP ThinPro build T3X31012 and rdesktop version 1.6.0 that I’ve been testing with on Server 2012 and this was a major problem. I was just about finished locking down this 7 server RDS deployment I’ve been working on and when I had my first few users start to log in to test everything, they had no mouse cursor, fucking awesome!

At first, I thought this may have been a VMware tools problem, so I had reinstalled it and had scoured all the forums there, trying various different little tweaks, registry keys, and what have you, but that was only the beginning. Then I tried adjusting the various RDP settings on the thin client with no luck. I tried all the different things on the various Windows forums and still no luck. I got to know all the ins and outs of HP’s thin client architecture, their use of the Manticore registry, config files and everything that goes along with it and how it all works.
Continue reading “Server 2012 – RDesktop: Fix Disappearing Mouse Cursor with Group Policy”