A few IT questions

AtomBomb · October 2007

I've got a few questions, but I didn't want to create a bunch of threads to clog up the forum. They're not really related to each other.

1) Can you upgrade (downgrade?) Vista Home Basic to XP Pro? I swear I read a thread about this, but I can't find it. I'm looking for a cheapish desktop to add to our network and I'm finding some good ones that come with Vista. However, I don't want to put Vista on our network yet and I have a few XP Pro upgrades lying around.

2) Any quick and dirty ways to sort a list of email addresses by domain name? I've got a list of 1000+ addresses that I need to add to a white list, but I want to sort them by domain in order to pair it down a bit with wildcards. For example, if I find that I have 30 addresses that end in @somecompany.com I could just have an entry for *@somecompany.com and save 29 listings. I thought of doing a find and replace, replacing "@ with @". This would turn the addresses into 2 words, which I could then sort to see how many people share a particular domain. This doesn't keep the individuals name associated with their domain, which means a bunch of versions of the list, which is a pain in the ass. I feel like I'm overcomplicating it and that's why I'm asking for your help.

3) Any tricks to fixing a printer that prints out pages and pages of garbage? Here is the situation: A person has a one page document that she created in Microsoft Publisher. She is trying to print it to a Xerox Phaser 8550. When she does, it comes out as pages and pages of "code" which I'm assuming is the single page in raw format. I reinstalled the drivers on her machine, but the same thing happened. I sent myself her document and printed it on my Phaser 850 and it came out fine. I printed a document from Word on her computer to the 8550 and it came out fine as well. The only other troubleshooting steps I can think of is to create a new document in Publisher and see if it prints, but since her document printed on mine I don't think it's an issue with the document itself. I could also try to print her document from another computer in her office to see if it's something to do with her settings, but I don't really know where to go from there. I compared her settings to mine and didn't see anything obvious.

Thanks for your help.

brandotheninjamaster · October 2007

about the printer issue: try reinstalling the drivers.

wunderbar · October 2007

#1) no, you cannot use a Win XP upgrade disc on Vista. you need a full version liscence.

#2 made my head hurt

#3) try restarting the print spool service on the server. I've had good success with that when printers go haywire

BlochWave · October 2007

Copy and paste into excel, use @ as the delimiter thing so all the domain names end up in their own column, sort that column alphabetically

Then find the validation option, and using Excel help and the internet because I could do it and remember how to as I did but don't wanna, make a drop down menu consisting of all names before the @ sign(you already have them copied into Excel!)and then put that drop down menu in the column before every domain name, then just go through and delete the repeated domain names and that whole row. Or write a macro to do it if you have too many addresses

Excel is neat if you know all the tricks

PirateJon · October 2007

1) Usually hell no, not the home edition. But I think depends on your license agreement with MS. I'm pretty sure volume and SA gives you downgrade rights (which is what I have so that's where I'm comin from). MS licenseing is weird man. Check with the OEM at order time.

2) Unless I'm missing something, I'd use excel.

3) been outta the desktop support game for a minute, but that sound like a problem i had when the printer wanted a postscript driver and we had installed a PCL driver on the client.

Sporked · October 2007

AtomBomb wrote: »

1) Vista lol.

2) Any quick and dirty ways to sort a list of email addresses by domain name?

3) printers lol

1) nope. I just went through this and the best thing to do is just wipe/reinstall XP.

2) Chop them all off @ the @ (teehee) and just work with the domain names. For purposes of the whitelist, the usernames don't really matter at all as long as you're whitelisting whole domains. (what MTA are you using?)

3) Sounds like a corrupt driver file. Reinstall ze drivers! (check if it's a PCL or PS version and try the other one if reinstalling them doesn't work)

AtomBomb · October 2007

Thanks for the responses everyone.

1) Well that sucks. Our normal XP license lets me install whatever I want (2000, XP or Vista). However, the office I'm getting the new machine for is fairly broke, and I would have to bill them for the license. I was hoping to by a machine that was already licensed to avoid that for them. However, I've found 3 or 4 unopened retail box XP Pro upgrades in a closet and I was thinking that if I could slap that on there I wouldn't have to charge them. Oh well. I'll either find a machine that comes with XP Pro or wipe it and use our standard license and a fresh install.

Crap, meeting. I'll finish this in a little while.

PirateJon · October 2007

if you're buying the PC from an OEM, you get an OEM license, and MS had some drama where they're allowing the OEM to downgrade to XP. talk to the OEM.

OEM.

whuppins · October 2007

#2, Excel can do it. EXCEL CAN DO ANYTHING!

If the list of addresses starts in cell A1, put the following formula in cell B1:

=RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-FIND("@",A1))

Copy it down through the whole list to get a list of domains only in column B.

Put the following formula in cell C1:

=IF(COUNTIF(B$1:B1,B1)=1,"original","dupe")

Copy it down through the whole list. Now each domain will have one (and only one) "original" representative and all others from the same domain will be marked as "dupes". If you want to make the data sortable/otherwise editable, copy it all, right-click, Paste Special, and paste values.

shutz · October 2007

The Excel solution is a bit roundabout if you know a little bit of "real" programming, such as Perl or PHP.

I would write a short PHP script that opens the text file where you list all your email addresses, sort them according to the domain name (by parsing each address) and then have it replace any set of addresses with a wildcard entry if the set has at least X elements in it, and then I would have it output the resulting list.

It would take me less time to get that working than figuring out how the functions and such work in Excel, plus the program I'd write would spit out the exact result you're looking for immediately, instead of having to paste an Excel file's results back into a simple text file.

If you don't know enough about programming to do this, just ask around your office to see if you can find someone who can. You might find a shy intern who knows how to use Perl or PHP (or some other appropriate language) enough to help out.

BlochWave · October 2007

The Excel solution is a bit roundabout if you know a little bit of "real" programming, such as Perl or PHP.

Your solution sounds considerably more roundabout than just doing what the above guy said

whuppins · October 2007

Yeah, seriously. I gave the guy two lines of code to paste into Excel, and you're trying to get him to learn Perl from scratch (also, there's no "figuring out how the functions work"; I just gave him the syntax he'd need, verbatim). Excel can do it much more gracefully, too, but this is the "quick and dirty" solution since this appears to be a one-off thing that isn't going to be a recurring issue.

Although I like your idea of looking around the office for shy interns. That sounds pretty hot, and I'd recommend it in any situation, whether you need to parse text files or not.

AtomBomb · October 2007

That was a long meeting. Thanks for the additional advice. As far as the email thing goes, I think I will use Excel. I like Excel, I don't know perl or php, and I think I'm the most tech savvy person in the office. Although, it's good to know it can be done that way if this ends up being a bigger project than I thought.

Regards to the printer thing: I installed the postscript driver, and it didn't seem to help. I'm going to delete both instances of the printer on her machine and reinstall it to see if that works. I don't think the server does any spooling on this one, or I would check that out. It's installed via tcp/ip, and when you add it you actually choose that it's a "local" printer and choose tcp/ip as the port. I could be totally wrong on that though, but that's how it seems to me. I'm gonna research a bit and see if I can double check that.

Thanks again. I'm sure I'll have more questions as I get into these, but happily it's time to go home.

embrik · November 2007

When you delete the printers, remove the drivers too. Go to Printers & Faxes --> File Menu --> Server Properties. Click the Drivers tab and choose all of the Xerox Phaser drivers and click "Remove". Then add the printer back and get the latest drivers from the web. Try the Postscript (PS) driver first. If that doesn't do it, try the PCL5c (emphasis on the 'c').

A quick glance at the website shows that the PS driver was updated yesterday (amazingly), so give that a shot.

AtomBomb · November 2007

Thanks Embrik, I had no idea about the Server Properties tab.

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