How to use Windows Mobile Sync Center on Vista with F-Secure Client Security
We’ve been using F-Secure as our virus/malware protection in our company for a little over a year now. I have been and continue to be impressed with the product and the company support.
Recently I purchased my new laptop with Windows Vista installed. More recently I purchased a new HTC P4300 smartphone with Windows Mobile 5. It’s been working great, and I love the phone. The only weird issue has been syncing with the USB cable. In order to make it work I had to temporarily turn off the firewall inside of F-Secure Client Security. Syncing via Bluetooth was working fine so I tended to lean on that.
Today I decided it was time to fix the issue. I gave a call to the business support line at F-Secure, explained the problem quickly to the technician. She told me right off the bat that this was an issue she had no experience with, so she asked if I minded giving her a little time to investigate. Of course I said that was fine.
Within 30 minutes I had an email from her outlining the solution. My total phone time was about 5 minutes and then another 5 to put the fix into place. Thank you!
The problem is simply that the Sync Center in Vista uses some ports over the USB connection that are new enough not to be included as a standard. After adding the ports and making sure that one of the applications was allowed, everything worked great. Since I do not believe they have a technical article yet, I thought I would outline the solution here in case anyone else needs it.
Please note that these steps only work if your security policy allows you to edit a few things. If you are running in a corporate environment you may need to give these instructions to your network administrator to include in the corporate policies for your virus protection.
Step 1
The first thing to do is to get into the Client Security configuration screen where we’ll be doing most of the work. Right click on the F-Secure icon in your system tray and choose Open F-Secure Client Security. This will bring up the main window. You will want to choose the Internet Shield menu option on the left, then click on the Change link next to Application Control.
Step 2
Next you need to add the application that does the communication to the allowed list in Application Control. wmdHost.exe is the component that performs the actual communication requests. It is possible that this application may already be there, but if it is not, simply click Add it to include it in the list. If it is not in the list it should be found in C:\Windows\WindowsMobile\ If you do have to add the file, I’ve noticed that my Client Security software will default to the access level of prompt for a new application. The other bit that is odd is that it will not let me change it when I’m adding the file. I complete the addition to the list, then go back in to the details to modify it. At this point it will let me change the behavior to Allow.
Step 3
Finally you need to create a new service and add the necessary ports. There are 5 inbound and 1 outbound port necessary.
Start by switching to the Firewall configuration screen, then to the Services tab and add a new one. I simply called it Windows Mobile Sync Center. Make sure to choose the TCP protocol.
On the screen where you add, there are two areas for ports. They are termed Initiator ports and Responder ports. These map to inbound and outbound. Here are the correct settings:
Initiator (inbound) ports:
- 990
- 999
- 5678
- 5721
- 26675
Responder (outbound) ports:
- 5 679
Once you’ve made all of those configuration changes you are ready to give it a shot. Grab your Windows Mobile device and your USB cable and hook them up. You should get the Connected check box and see it synchronize as expected.
I hope that helps you out!
Vista Gadgets are cool!
Ok, so I was a Vista nay say-er. The truth is, there are still items that drive me nuts, but I’m getting by. There are some very nice things that Vista brings.
First, and perhaps one of the nicest, is the new hybrid sleep mode. Your laptop goes to sleep but does some intelligent writing of memory to the hard drive in the background. If the power gets low enough it will shut down as though you hibernated. Start-up is only slightly longer than waking from sleep. I like that.
Speaking of start-up, that process seems much nicer. Logging in also seems to become responsive much sooner than it did in XP. The programs that run on startup would appear to be given a slightly lower priority, but that is just my uneducated guess.
Gadgets! I love them! A colleague of mine and I talked recently about it so I took a screen-shot. It’s true that some of them are probably not necessary; however, they are cool! The gadget framework (based on IE7) seems to be fairly good on resource usage so I leave them running most of the time, even while playing Dungeon’s & Dragons Online. not bad! The only downside I’ve seen is that if there is a problem (like one of the battery monitors I tried) then it gets grumpy and closes. When it reopens it loses most of the saved data so you have to redo most of it. Not a big deal if you can track down the problem gadget and quit using it.
My favorite gadgets? Well, I love the Now Playing which integrates with Windows Media Player, WinAmp, foobar and more. WChannel is also nice for a weather forecast.
What to do when your bluetooth headset stops working in Vista
Since getting my new Dell Inspiron 1720 with the BH200 stereo headphones I have had many frustrating days. The initial installation and pairing went smooth and they seemed to work just fine; however, some days I would fire up the headset, connect it to the Dell and it would not start playing. After fiddling with settings and, at times, re-pairing the headset to the laptop I would finally get them working again. I had no clue why they stopped working!
A recently read this excellent tutorial from Katy Coe which enabled me to quickly fix the problem each time it happened. That was a step in the right direction! Now at least it was only a handful of clicks to get it working. I could now devote more time to figuring out why it would quit using the bluetooth headset automatically. Essentially she explains that Vista remembers at least the last 2 default audio devices you configured so setting the speakers as default, applying it, setting the bluetooth headset as default and applying again fixes the issue.
I finally tracked down what I believe to be the culprit and, since I could not find anything in my on-line research about it, I thought I’d share with you all. Here’s the trick:
Never let your bluetooth headset’s battery run out while connected to Vista!
That’s right. This seems to be the problem. If the battery runs out while it is connected something happens to change the default audio settings remembered by Vista. My guess is that it removes the bluetooth headset default setting altogether when the connection is terminated unexpectedly. This would go down as a bug in my book, albeit a minor one. It would be nice if Microsoft fixed this one in a weekly patch sometime. At least I know know the quick way to fix it. 
Outlook ate my shortcuts! (Favorite folders and calendar disappearing in Outlook)
This one has been bothering me for a long time. It also happens that three or four others in the office are having (soon to be past tense) the same problem.
About Outlook favorites
In Outlook, one of the features that is very nice is the one where you can create a set of “favorite” folders. This extents to public folders and even calenders (which are just folders that hold appointment items). I use this constantly, changing out my favorites when I am moved from one project to another.
The Problem of disappearing favorites
Several months ago my favorites began ‘resetting”. When I would add or remove a favorite folder, my changes would disappear the next time I started Outlook. This held true for shared calendars as well. I would add another persons calendar to my list, but the next time I started Outlook that person would no longer be in my list.
Getting my favorites back in Outlook
This, of course, was frustrating. I did quite a bit of research at the time to no avail. Today it finally got me riled up again so I decided to take another stab at it and wouldn’t you know it, I found two possible solutions!
- You can create a new mail profile. This resets everything you’ve customized unfortunately, so it is, in my opinion, a last resort.
- You can navigate to the folder that Outlook stores settings in. In Windows XP it defaults to:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
In this folder you will find a file called Outlook.xml. Very innocuous sounding, don’t you think? This is the file causing all of the woes! You should exit Outlook completely then rename the file (never delete outright, bad form my good Pan!). Restart Outlook and you will notice all of your favorites and calendars are gone. Reset them to the way you would like, exit Outlook again and restart. *Poof* they are back!
Now the problem appears to be some sort of corruption to this file. The odd thing is, the file is only saved when you exit Outlook. I have confirmed this by watching the file system when starting Outlook with the file already gone. It does not reappear until I exit. My best guess is that if a corrupt file is loaded it messes something up within Outlook itself. No error that I could find is generated; however, the file is never saved again.
After some more poking around (it was easier to search for Outlook.xml than for the symptom itself) it seems that the general consensus is that this file becomes corrupt more often than you would imagine. If you’ve had this problem once, chances are pretty good that you will once again find your Favorite Shortcuts not being saved so keep these instructions handy!
An observation
As a side note, it was interesting to view the “corrupt” version of Outlook.xml and a “good” version of the file. They are very similar, but it would appear that one section called <userDefined> is the one that does not get saved after the file has went down the drain.
Useless Feature of the Month
Some people prefer to install everything they believe they will need on their workstation as soon as possible. Others tend to wait until they need it before installing. I tend to fall somewhere in the middle of that road.
I have a list of things I know I use every day which gets installed right off the bat. Next comes things as I need them. I know I will probably use them at some point, but it’s not worth taking the time right now, rather it’s worth taking the time later. It is simply a matter of priority, or procrastination. You decide.
Recently I ran into the need to use Microsoft Visio. I had Office 2007 installed of course, I use that almost daily. Visio is one of those things that I know I will need, but I usually only have the requirement for 1 week out of 6 or 7. This was that week so I happily inserted the DVD and let the installer work its magic.
Now comes the fun part. I created a nice high-level use case diagram for a preliminary requirements document. I decided that I would simply copy and paste it into my Word file, no problem! I noticed that the paste operation had left an unsightly amount of white space at the time.
No biggie, I’d simply convert it to a bitmap and then crop it. First, right click on the diagram. There’s my convert option, now we are cooking! Click on the option and…
Now how useless is that? I have the option to convert it from a Microsoft Visio Diagram to a Microsoft Visio Diagram. ugh! Thanks a lot, MS!
Now you might say that I simply have something wrong, or I only have to click x option to get what I want. I will argue that I shouldn’t have to do that. It’s a simple operation. There’s a menu that promises a conversion. There should be something to convert it into other than the format it is already in.
</gripe>
Review – VI emulation for Microsoft products
If you, like me, find yourself using Microsoft products for your daily operations (or are forced to as some) yet you have a background in which you have a comfort level using vi, the *nix based text editor.
The percentage of people that prefer to use vi is probably small compared to the people using notepad, emacs or pico or other simple editor. It takes a certain amount of masochism to plow through the various commands used to move around, edit, replace etc.. inside of vi but for those of you that have that trait as I, vi gives you a productivity increase that is unparalleled, in my opinion.
Now, if only we had that in Windows!
Fortunately we do. For several years now the vi project has had a Windows text editor which I use. It is a very good implementation within the Windows environment. For editing text based files where you do not need any further functionality, I highly recommend it.
Now, on to the fun stuff!
Jon at NGEDIT Software has a few products that have made my life a lot easier. It falls under the heading of VIEmu, the vi-vim editor emulation for Visual Studio, Word, Outlook and SQL Server. I can tell you that, after downloading the Visual Studio trial and running with it for a few weeks, I have purchased all 3 (Word and Outlook are combined in 1 package) products. They are wonderful!
You should not expect 100% vi-vim compatibility, there are some things that just do not work quite the same, however most of the basic and much of the advanced functionality is available. There are a few quirks as well, such as the need to use Shift+Esc instead of just Esc to get out of some modes, but they are workable once you get use to them.
I should say that this review was not sponsored in any way, nor did Jon or anyone at NGEDIT Software know about my writing of this before publication, I do believe in full discloser of sources and sponsorship when posting (thanks Robert Scoble for the inspiration), this is purely a fan-driven review of these products.
The Word and Outlook version is a bit young, only version 1.0, however the Visual Studio product has been around a while and the SQL product just a bit less time. So far all have been performing well and my productivity has increased, at least I believe it has.
If you are/were a vi-vim junkie living in a Microsoft world, I urge you to head over and try it out for yourself. I think you will be happily comfortable again within the embrace of vi-vim!
A Milestone!
Apparently the Windows 2000 daylight saving issue is on the mind of many network administrators. My original post pointing to the patch that we used is getting quite a bit of traffic. It is understandable with the new date for daylight saving time looming only a few weeks away.
But that is not the milestone.
Most of the traffic that post is receiving is coming from search engines. I decided to check out how people were getting there by searching on Google for Windows 2k daylight saving patch and was surprised, very pleasantly I might add, to find the #1 link for that search term to be my post!
I know that the rankings on google are fairly fluid so I thought I would capture it for posterity. Thank you Google and thanks to all out there who may have linked back here to help get me a milestone such as this!
-
Pale’s Social Graph
Google Reader Shared Stuff- Microsoft releases Bing app for Android, iOS, not Windows Phone 7
- Google Tweaks Algorithm As Concern Over Bing Grows
- First Android Device Certified For DoD Personnel
- Stupid Router Tricks (or how to use DD-WRT to extend the range of a network)
- Steve Jobs Biography Reveals Reflections On Apple, Contempt For Android
- Galaxy Nexus signup page includes seven US carriers, endless speculation
- I swear to God this is what they must be doing
- Google Promises Android 4.0 For The Nexus S, “Theoretically” For Gingerbread Devices, Too
- Mac Trojan Disables XProtect Updates
- HTML 5 and CSS: Six complete lessons, free for students, faculty, you and me too!
