Unable to enable Wireless Adapter in Windows 7? blame Kaspersky

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I recently encountered a pretty frustrating problem: on a laptop with Windows 7 installed, I could not enable the Wireless Adapter.

It was pretty weird: in Device Manager, everything looked good: the device was “working properly”. Yet I did not see any wireless networks. In Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections, I noticed that the Wireless Adapter was disabled. I could right-click on it and select ‘Enable’, but that did not change the status: the Adapter stayed disabled.

Network Diagnostics reported there was an “unknown” problem with it. Not very helpful. I googled for hours, tried all kinds of things (disable/uninstall-reinstall/tried older versions of the driver/…) until finally I found this post which gave me a hint: apparently, Kaspersky anti-virus was the culprit! The Kaspersky NDIS filter caused the issue.

Process to solve it:

  1. Right-click the Wireless Adapter in Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections, select Properties
  2. UNcheck Kaspersky Anti-Virus NDIS filter
  3. Select the Wireless Adapter, click Diagnose this device – to reset the adapter

Et voila, I (finally) had a working wireless connection again.

Importing .VOB files into Adobe Premiere with audio

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I had some video recordings in DVD format (MPEG2, .VOB-files) that I wanted to edit in Adobe Premiere CS3. Unfortunately, Adobe Premiere does not support .VOB files.
After renaming the .VOB files to .MPG, I could import them in Premiere, but the import only contained video, no audio. Some searching on the internet brought relief: apparently it’s as simple as copying a .DLL file from the Adobe Encore CS3 program files folder to the Adobe Premiere CS3 folder. The file you need is ad2ac3dec.dll.
I copied it, restarted Premiere, and indeed, the .MPG file imported nicely with audio.

Windows 7 + IIS 7.5 + php 5.3.1 + MySQL 5.1: no good combination

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I recently installed Windows 7 on my laptop. I also configured IIS 7.5 on it, installed php 5.3.1 and MySQL 5.1.

Everything seemed to be installed correctly: I could see the IIS 7 Welcome screen, I could look at the php configuration with phpinfo() and I could see the MySQL tables using the MySQL Administrator GUI.

But when I tried to use phpMyAdmin, I got stuck: after trying to load the homepage of phpMyAdmin for 20-30 seconds, I got an HTTP Error 500. I searched the internet for hours, trying to find somebody with a similar experience, but I did not find any valuable resources.

Even a very simple test-script like

<?php
echo "#1. Try to connect to mysql server...";
mysql_connect("localhost", "username", "password") or die(mysql_error());
echo "Connected to MySQL<br />";
?>

generated a HTTP 500-error, after a 20-30 seconds wait.

Eventually, I decided to look at what I had installed when I was still using Vista. The difference seemed to be php: on my previous system, php 5.2.10 was installed.

I finally uninstalled MySQL and php 5.3.1, and then reinstalled php 5.2.11 and MySQL 5.1.41. That combination seemed to work without issues.

Conclusion: IIS 7.5 + php 5.3.1 + MySQL 5.1 does not seem to be a workable solution (for now). Stick to the 5.2-branch of php if you want to use it on Windows 7/IIS 7.5.