Replies

Hi Susan,

Just for your information … years ago Malwarebytes used to sell a version that never expired, and its ownership is transferable. I’ve got one. I can’t easily send you a screen shot of the account screen that shows this because it includes my account number and keys but, believe me, it does exist.

I was disappointed when they switched to the present subscription model back around 1998, but they needed the subscription renewals in order to keep their project going.

It was licensed to one machine at a time, but they have been letting me move it from machine to machine down through the years. They won’t, however, let me extend its license to multiple machines even though the present version is normally licensed to three machines.

In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, my wife and I are ancient geeks. My wife (a CPA) was a principal at Anchin & Co. in New York for 40 years. We jointly wrote a 1040 tax program for the TRS-80 Model III back when CCH was still using Hollerith cards to input data to their Blue System III mini terminals.

Paul_L in New York.

 

@doriel – I had forgotten about the netsh command. Your idea of using a batch file looks workable, I’ll give it a try. You must be Czechoslovakian, wireless network connection would be bezprzewodowe połączenie sieciowe in Polish. My grandfather emigrated from Spytkowice just west of Krakow to New York in 1896.

@Paul T – I don’t want my machines to be accessible from the internet when I’m not actually trying to use the internet. Pulling the cable from the router is not practical since it is upstairs in my attic along with the cable modem where it seems to deliver better RF levels to the house.

@Alex5723 – If I kill the router power it will not be available to serve the other computer and the router is up in the attic.

@PaulK – I want to isolate each computer from the local network on an ad hoc basis.

There are entirely too too too many Pauls around here. I didn’t think it was that popular a name.

Paul_L in NY

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doriel

Hi Paul_T,

That did it! I had to hold the power key down for over 30 seconds to force the power off. It took several tries to find that out. Anyway, it’s working again. I’ll probably forget about trying to log off a user in the future.

Paul_L

Hi Paul T,

I first substituted a generic gaming keyboard to verify that the problem was in the keyboard but I couldn’t type on it. Next I began swapping another Unicom keyboard between machines and then bought a new Unicom keyboard. I now have two old heavily used Unicoms here which are malfunctioning. I will send them back to Unicom for rebuilding. I think they charge about $40 for the rebuild which is a bargain.

If you moved from IBM mainframe keyboards to PCs the only keyboard you will be comfortable with is the Unicom. You may recall that when IBM spun off the PCs to Lenovo the buckling spring keyboard production equipment, design and the building in Lexington KY was spun off as a small independent company and many of the original employees stayed right there.

Besides, the clickety clack proves that I’m doing something. Thanks for asking.

the other Paul in NY

 

1 user thanked author for this post.

Paul T

The defective keyboard is a 10 year old Unicomp buckling spring — the original IBM keyswitch design. I’ve been using them since my mainframe days and continuously since the PC first came out. I can’t type on anything else! I am sending it back to Unicomp, pckeyboard.com, in Lexington KY where they will rebuild it for a flat fee of $50. I am trying to type on a new gaming keyboard but I can’t get used to it.

Thanks for asking. I can’t figure out why the keyboard failed exactly when I updated windows. Just dumb luck, I guess.

Paul in NY

I solved the problem. It was the keyboard. It decided to fail just when Woody told me to update windows. Thanks anyway.

Paul in NY

2 users thanked author for this post.

Elly, b

The windows troubleshooter found nothing wrong.

Dell had me install their SupportAssist program. It reported that I have the latest drivers and gave me a list of the drivers installed which include Realtek audio, system bios, Intel management 1, Intel management 2, Intel chipset, Intel network diagnostics, Intel ethernet controller, Intel rapid storage mgmt, Dell command update for Win32, and Intel HD graphics. There is no driver separately identified as a keyboard driver.

Paul in NY

1 user thanked author for this post.

b

The only driver update was done on 7/18/19 from Realtek Semiconductor. There were 16 “quality” updates from 8/28/19 to 4/14/20, and feature updates on 8/28/19, a failure on 12/25/19, 1/2/20 and 1/4/20. Hitting the END key and getting a “b” is particularly annoying.

Paul in NY.

CadLogic requested that I uninstall and reinstall the program from a freshly downloaded installation executable. It worked! DraftIt is back in operation.

Paul_T and PKCano – thanks for your attention. I am going to download the Siemens CAD program and see what it looks like.

Paul_L

@PKCano — Thanks for the reference to DraftSight. As far as I can see the free version is just a trial. The regular program is a rental for $99 per year. I’m retired. I can’t justify that expense.

However, I will check to see if it will read .DFT files, but I don’t think so based on the information in their website.

There are many other free 2D CAD offerings around but I haven’t found one that will read .DFT files. My assessment of the field in 2012 was that the DraftIt Plus version is remarkably cheap for a CAD program with unlimited layers and unlimited drawing size. That hasn’t changed.

Paul_L

In connection with this problem the initial error reported was:

System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly ‘{c026cc44-ed75-41e8-8af9-d3e92d437ce6}, PublicKeyToken=3e56350693f7355e’ or one of its dependencies. Invalid pointer (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004003 (E_POINTER))

I have heard that extensive changes have been made to NET in the last few months. Could this failure to load the file listed be a result of any recent changes to NET???

Paul_L.

Hi Paul_T, this is Paul_L,

Are there too many Pauls hanging around here??? Thanks for digging that out of the CadLogic site for me, however I had seen it before.

I installed DraftIt on a previous I3 machine in 2012 under Win 7. I upgraded that I3 to Win 10 and it worked well until windows updates destroyed the machine when updated display drivers became unavailable. I purchased this refurbished Dell I5 from Dell in 2017 with Win10Pro already installed. I was never able to install and activate Visual Studio on the new I5 machine but I succeeded in moving and activating DraftIt on it in 2017. DraftIt was working properly in August 2019.

In other words this is not a case of upgrading from Win 7 to Win 10 on this I5. I have checked for newer graphic drivers for my present display drivers and found none. I have also asked CadLogic if any changes have been made to DraftIt since my version was installed. They have not responded. I suspect that CadLogic is a very small company and is somewhat inactive.

I am reluctant to replace the display driver for the graphics adapter since the present one is working well under all other programs. I am also reluctant to re-install DraftIt from newly downloaded files since I have not been told how to reactivate it after re-installation. In 2017 they gave me a special activation code for the new machine.

I intend to make a Macrium image of the disk and then try to replace the drivers and re-install DraftIt. If that screws something up I can then restore the disk to the present state.

Can you tell me a sure fire way to determine if my present set of drivers are the most recent ones available???

I am up a stump with this because DraftIt saves it’s data in files with a .DFT extension which are not convertible to .DWG or some other more common format. I am 80 years old and have been retired for a quarter century. In the last 8 years I have designed a complicated Geothermal Heat Pump installation for my home using DraftIt. I am currently developing an intelligent microprocessor based controller for this system. Over 300 files about this system are stored in .DFT format and I have no way to read them.

I’ll post back here and let you know what happens.

Paul_L.

 

Hi everybody,

nothing has changed in the last week. Using the mail applet I created numerous new Outlook profiles, marked each one in turn as the default profile, and then tried to delete the original profile which Outlook had created. I still can’t get Outlook to run.

I wonder if this could just be bugs in the Outlook 2013. It is very new and still has not been released to the public. Would you suggest that I now remove the entire Office 2013 and go back to 2007?

I am still forced to read my e-mail on my ISP’s website and it’s getting tiresome. Help!

Paul Lepkowski in Fishkill Plains, NY

Hi everybody,

As mentioned in my above reply to Michael the symptoms have changed.

I was used the control panel > mail utility to insert a new profile pointing to the desired data directory (D:Outlook) and added my email ISP stuff to that profile. Something had originally created a profile pointing to Bill Gate’s choice of data directory. I marked the new profile as default and then tried to remove Bill’s profile. Windows refused to remove it saying that email accounts were associated with it.
I double checked and found no email accounts in that profile.

Then I tried to start Outlook2013 and it failed to start. It said it had stopped working and I would be notified if any solution was found. I repeatedly removed and added the desired profile. I repeatedly tried to remove the original default profile.

Outlook 2013 will not start! Any ideas?

Hi Michael,

So you were with I’veBeenMoved. What are you doing in Portland … Maine or Oregon? Wappingers Falls for seniors is now Geezer! I’m 5 miles from the microprocessor fab in East Fishkill and 7 miles from the mainframe plant in Poughkeepsie. I didn’t work for big blue, I was the VP Engineering for PanAm when they shut down. Since then I’ve been rebuilding tugboats in Texas, doing database programming for charities, singing bass in the Camerata Chorale, and annoying other geezers around here.

I thought the donation of Office 2013 to one of my charities was going to be a big help, but it’s turned out to be nothing but a time waster. I can’t get Outlook to even start. It has something to do with the profiles you enter from control panel. I have one profile I can’t remove. It says there are email hooks associated with it, but there are none. The other profiles point the data directory to d:outlookoutlook.pst. Outlook will not start.

Word and Excel 2013 are no improvement over 2000. Word still messes up complicated formatting and is unusable for columnar newsletters. I have been using WordPerfect with good results for mail merge stuff. Both Excel 2000 and 2013 do all I need with spreadsheets.

I, like you, learned to use the keyboard with no mouse on terminals. PanAm had a 3090-200 in Rockleigh, NJ, and used Collins communication to get 750 Mbps throughput via Echo Star all the way to Bangkok and New Delhi, and that was in 1976! We never did move to emulators. We had 4000 terminals in NY and and additional 7400 terminals around the world. Taking my hands off the keyboard to wiggle my rodent is just a waste of time. I’m glad to hear that Word 2013 will use the legacy keystrokes, but I doubt that I will use it. (I bought a keyboard that clicks and doesn’t have the windows key. It is made by the contractor that made the IBM keyboards back in the 1990s.)

If I can’t get Outlook 2013 working I will install Outlook 2000 on my wife’s Vista laptop, then use that to export the data files to Thunderbird. I hope all my contacts and messages survive the transition. I have the old pst files since they were on drives D: and E: on the dead machine. Alternatively, I could switch to a newer Office. Do you know which Outlook versions will live under Windows 7? I know that 2000 will not. That’s what got me into this mess in the first place.

For crying out loud …. chopsticks on a steel drum …. LOL! That sounds like the jokes that GM executives used to make about re-installing the engine if you change the shoes you’re wearing when you drive your car, or the tendency to steer suddenly off the road every 500 miles! PanAm used the MVS/VM 3.0 OS and we set a record with it …. it was up from December 1977 until December 1991 with a total of 17 seconds of unscheduled down time!!!

Paul Lepkowski in Fishkill Plains, NY