Workaround: ThinkPad docking station USB ports fail after dock

My current work PC is a Lenovo ThinkPad T530 running Windows 7.  I’m using it with a Lenovo ThinkPad docking station, the “Thinkpad Mini Dock Plus Series 3 with USB 3.0”. 

Occasionally, when I re-dock the PC, some or all of the USB 2.0 ports in the docking station do not “turn on” and work properly.   This most obviously manifests in my USB keyboard and/or mouse plugged into the docking station not working.  The keyboard’s indicator lights (Num Lock / Caps Lock / Scroll Lock) won’t turn on, and the red laser light on the underside of the mouse doesn’t come on.

Removing and re-inserting the keyboard and mouse USB cables into the docking station does not fix the issue.

The workaround that I found that does work (under Windows 7) is as follows:

1. Open Device Manager.  (From the Start menu’s Run field, type “device manager” and press Enter.  Obviously, use the laptop’s onboard keyboard and mouse if the external keyboard and mouse aren’t working.)
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the Device Manager window, and click on “Universal Serial Bus Controllers” to expand it.
3. Right-click on the first entry in the expanded list named “USB Root Hub,” and select Disable from the context menu.
4. Right-click once again on that same “USB Root Hub” entry, and select Enable from the context menu.

If it works, the list of items under “Universal Serial Bus controllers” should refresh, and you should see some additional items in the list.  The USB ports on the docking station and devices connected to them should be working once again.

I’ve never had the single USB 3.0 port on the docking station fail to work in this way, so another workaround might be to attach an external USB hub to that port, and plug all external USB devices into the hub.

I did try replacing the docking station with another copy of the same model, but the intermittent issue persisted, so the issue appears to be with the PC software or hardware itself, not with the docking station alone.

This workaround is inconvenient, but it beats rebooting!  Let me know if you know of a better workaround or a fix.

Workaround: Wireless connection fails on “Waiting for Association” on Thinkpad T520 laptop

My work PC, a Lenovo Thinkpad T520 laptop running Windows 7, normally seamlessly switches between the wired network connection when docked, and the wireless network when undocked.

A few days ago, though, the laptop (without me having made any relevant changes to the machine’s hardware/software configuration) started failing at the “Waiting for Association” step when connecting to the wireless network after undocking.

Rebooting (while undocked) would work to resolve the problem, but taking multiple minutes to reboot the machine and reopen all of the programs/documents that I had been working with prior to the reboot was obviously a significant hassle.

This morning, I found a better workaround: In Device Manager, if I disable and then re-enable the wireless network adapter (“Intel(R) Centrino(R) Advanced-N 6205”), and then re-attempt the wireless connection via the Thinkvantage Access Connections system tray icon, the wireless does connect successfully.

I’ll update this post and/or make a new post on this blog if I discover a full fix.

Firefox: The case of the corrupted cursor

At work, I recently had the chance to upgrade to a new development laptop PC, a Thinkpad T520 running Windows 7.  The machine is excellent, with one weird exception: In Firefox (and only in Firefox), when keying in text into a text entry field in a web page or into the browser address bar, the caret (i.e. the text entry cursor) would sometimes appear to be “distorted” or “corrupted” – that is, some “garbage” pixels would appear around the caret whenever I moved it (either by typing in a character, or by using the arrow keys). 

Problem Details

The problem is hard to explain, so here’s a screen capture of a particularly severe example that occurred when I was entering text into a textarea.  The caret in this cropped screen shot is between the “2” and “5” in “8/25/2011”; note all the other weird stray black and white marks in the text.  (I added the red oval to the screen capture to show the area in which the “corruption” was appearing.

After waiting a little less than a second without moving the caret, the problem would go away – the “corruption” would disappear from the display.  However, the problem would come right back upon moving the caret again.

The caret itself would also sometimes not appear until the “corruption” went away, which made text editing surprisingly difficult – a frustrating problem.

Investigation

The problem would only occur in Firefox, not in other browsers such as Internet Explorer 9, or in any other applications I tried (such as Eclipse, Word, and Notepad).

Experimenting, I found that the problem would not occur when Firefox was started in Safe Mode (via Firefox menu | Help menu | Restart with Add-ons Disabled).  However, I tried running Firefox in normal mode with all extensions and add-ons manually disabled, and that didn’t help.  I tried setting up a new Firefox user profile, and that didn’t help either.

I also noticed that beyond the issues with the caret, the actual rendering/shape of letter character glyphs being typed into Firefox was affected.  The  characters themselves appeared “wrong” when Firefox was running in normal mode, but they appeared normally with Firefox in safe mode.  Here are two cropped screen shots I took of a bunch of “f” characters being entered in to the address bar, the first in normal mode, the latter in safe mode:

Here’s a zoomed-in view (again, normal mode first, then safe mode):

Note that in the former image (Firefox normal mode), the “f” glyphs do not appear the same as one another and have some faint red/yellow/blue/green aliasing (blurring), whereas in the latter screen capture (Firefox safe mode) each “f” glyph is identical and has no aliasing (look at the unzoomed image).

At this point I was suspicious of some kind of issue with my video card.  The normal first course of action with a suspected video card behavior issue would be to update video card drivers.  When I checked, though, I found that I was already running the latest drivers for my video card (an NVidia NVS 4200M).

Google was initially no help; all the searches that I tried for terms like “firefox cursor corruption” or “firefox caret appearance” resulted in pages talking about the Firefox caret navigation feature (F7 key), which was not the issue here.

Solution

I hit upon the solution when I changed angles of attack and Googled for “firefox safe mode”.  The first result was a Firefox help article describing safe mode, which linked to a Mozillazine knowledge base article with more details on Firefox safe mode. That article in turn had a list of about a dozen bug repots related to safe mode, one of which was Bug 591139 - Disable hardware acceleration in safe mode. Aha – that sounded like a video-related issue!  Reading through that ticket, I learned that starting in Firefox 4, a feature called “hardware acceleration” (with which I was previously unfamiliar) is disabled when Firefox is in safe mode.

Hitting up Google once more, this time for “firefox disable hardware acceleration,” I was led to a setting in the Firefox options menu: Firefox menu | Options | Advanced | General tab | Use hardware acceleration when available. 

I unchecked that setting, restarted Firefox, and that did it – the problems with the caret corruption/garbage and the malformed character glyphs no longer occurred!

So apparently Firefox has an on-by-default feature where it uses hardware acceleration, presumably from the local PC’s video card, further presumably to improve its performance and/or ease load on the primary CPU.  However, having disabled this setting, I haven’t noticed any appreciable difference in performance.

I don’t know who is to blame for this issue – bad video driver, bad video hardware, Firefox itself, some combination of those, or something else entirely – but for the time being, I’m just satisfied that the issue is resolved for me!

I hope this saves some frustration and/or troubleshooting time for anyone else experiencing this odd issue!

Workaround: Blank screen upon lid open (Lenovo ThinkPad laptop)

Occasionally when I open the lid of my Lenovo ThinkPad T500 laptop, I get a blank screen – nothing at all is visible on the laptop’s display, even though the machine is powered on.  In particular, this tends to happen after I undock the computer from the docking station, close the lid, wait a short time (i.e. carry the laptop with the lid closed into another room), and then open the lid again.

I’m not sure what the root cause of this issue is.  However, I’ve found a workaround to get the display to come back on after I’ve opened the lid and the display is blank: Press Fn+F7.  (This is the same keystroke that switches display modes when multiple monitors, or a projector, are connected to the PC.)

(Note: I don’t have the Lenovo Presentation Director application installed on my machine, because it doesn’t seem to work very well with the 3-monitor configuration I have at my desk.  Presentation Director overrides the Fn+F7 keystroke; thus, I’m not sure whether this workaround would work on machines with Presentation Director installed.)

Fix: Thinkpad using Wireless LAN even when connected via wire

This morning, I noticed that my work laptop, a Thinkpad T60 running Windows XP, was using its wireless network connection, even though the machine was docked and plugged in to the wired LAN.  In Control Panel | Network Connections, the “Wireless Network Connection” showed “Connected,” but the “Primary Network Connection” showed “Disabled.”

Right-clicking the “Primary Network Connection” and selecting “Enable” from the context menu resulted in a “Connection Failed!” message in a popup window, with no further details on the problem.

I’m not sure how my “Primary Network Connection” became disabled in the first place, but I was able to re-enable it as follows:

• In Control Panel |  Network Connections, right-click on “Primary Network Connection” and choose “Properties”
• In the “Primary Network Connection Properties” dialog that appears, click the Configure button (near the top of the dialog).
• In the dialog that appears, if a message appears stating that the device is currently disabled, click the “Enable Device” button.

That fixed the problem for me.  The wired connection started successfully, and the wireless connection disconnected automatically (as it normally does when the wired connection is active).

Adding a 3rd Monitor to a Laptop

Back in September, I set up about researching how I might be able to add a 3rd monitor to my laptop PC at work, a Lenovo (IBM) ThinkPad T60.

The built-in video card on the laptop PC, an ATI Mobility Radeon X1300, supports only dual monitors.  The card can run the built-in laptop LCD display plus one external monitor, or two external monitors (via the additional DVI port on the machine's docking station), but not two external monitors and the built-in LCD at the same time.

Since simply opening up the case and popping an additional video card into a free PCI-e or PCI slot isn't an option with this laptop machine like it would be with a desktop machine, I considered several alternative solutions:

Docking Station PCI Card

I first considered purchasing a new docking station, the Thinkpad Advanced Dock, which supports adding a standard PCI-e card directly to the dock; then plugging a PCI-e video card into the dock, and running the 3rd monitor off of that. 

However, this solution was cost-prohibitive (around US $380 for the dock -- not including the cost of a PCI-e video card).  I also ran across multiple reports from Thinkpad owners trying and failing to get this solution working on the official Lenovo forums (particularly in this thread).

PCMCIA Video Card

Next, I looked into the possibility of getting a PCMCIA video card for my laptop's free PCMCIA slot, such as the VillageTronic VTBook. 

However, I was somewhat concerned that the card might "stick out" of the side of my laptop, making the laptop a hassle to carry around with the card installed.  I was also concerned about potential difficulties with docking/undocking the machine (which I do a few times a week) while using the card.  Finally, the VTBook solution was also somewhat cost-prohibitive (around US $250).

My solution: USB Video Card

The solution that I finally settled on was to purchase a USB 2.0 video card.  This is a self-enclosed video card with a USB connection on one end to connect to the PC, and a DVI port on the other for connecting a monitor.  The specific model I picked up was an IOGEAR model GUC2020DW6 external video card.  The price was right (particularly compared to the other available laptop multiple-monitor solutions I considered): the IOGEAR card was on sale for about US $80 when I purchased it back in early October 2008 (and it's even lower now, down to US $68 on Amazon, as I write this post). 

I've had the card for just about two months now, and it's been working great -- better than I expected!  I had been concerned that there might be noticeable display "lag" on the monitor connected by the USB video card, but in practice, there's no noticeable difference when working on the USB-connected monitor or working with one of the others.  The only time that I notice the difference is when dragging a window around on the USB-connected monitor; there is just a bit of "lag" as the window moves around the screen.

Here's the card, connected, behind my PC, along with a penny to help show the size of the device (apologies for the low quality cellphone-cam photo):

And here's the 3-monitor setup at my desk at work, using the external USB video card to drive one of the external monitors:

USB video cards do have known limitations with displaying very rapidly-updating content (e.g. movies, 3D games) due to the limited throughput of USB 2.0, so I wouldn't purchase one of these cards to use on a gaming machine.  However, I knew that I'd only be using this monitor for business use: Writing code, viewing documents, doing email, surfing the web; that type of thing.  Also, in the event that I do want to view some rapidly-changing content that the adapter can't handle well, I can always just put that content on one of my other monitors.

Footnote

I got some great help in my research on this issue by posing the question of ways to add a 3rd monitor to a laptop over on StackOverflow, a fairly new community-run site for asking and answering programming and programming-related questions.

Fix: After undock, ThinkPad wireless connection doesn't work

For most of the time I've had my ThinkPad T60 laptop (running Windows XP SP2) and Advanced Mini-Dock, when I would undock the laptop from the docking station, the ThinkVantage Access Connections application would automatically and successfully enable the machine's wireless radio and connect me to the local wireless network. 

However, following a recent (May 2008) round of system software updates installed via ThinkVantage System Update, this no longer worked.  After undocking, the wireless connection would not automatically be made, and when I tried to manually connect using ThinkVantage Access Connections, the attempt would fail on the first step of the process, "Applying wireless settings."

After encountering this failure, I would be able to get the wireless to work correctly once again by rebooting the machine.  (Needless to say, I wasn't happy with this workaround, due to the delay involved in rebooting, and the need to close all open applications.)

The Fix - Executive Summary

I was able to fix the issue on my machine by reverting from ThinkVantage Access Connections version 4.52 to version 4.42.

The Fix - Long Version / Investigation

On one recent occasion where I undocked and subsequently encountered the issue, the ThinkVantage Access Connections service process, AcSvc.exe, crashed (with the typical Windows XP "This application has encountered a problem and needs to close" crash dialog).  I restarted the process (via the ThinkVantage Access Connections application shortcut on the Start menu), and after doing that, the wireless started working again, with no reboot involved.  This led me to believe that the issue was with the Access Connections software.

I reproduced the undock issue again, and this time manually killed the AcSvc.exe process (via Windows Task Manager), and restarted it, and that once again got the wireless networking to work.  So at that point I at least had a better workaround than needing to reboot. 

I continued to investigate the issue, and found a post on the Lenovo Support Forums indicating that another ThinkPad owner was having an apparently unrelated problem with AcSvc.exe, but that he was running Access Connections version 4.52, and that he had been able to resolve the issue by reverting to version 4.42.  I checked my ThinkVantage System Update log, and noticed that an upgrade to Access Connections 4.52 had been among the changes in the recent round of updates I had installed.  A co-worker who also had a T60 and was having no wireless issues also reported that he was running Access Connections 4.42.  Armed with all of this information, I decided to try reverting to Access Connections 4.42 to see if that would resolve the issue. 

I was somewhat nervous about doing this, since if the Access Connections installer didn't do a good job of handling the case of installing an older version of the software on top of a newer one, I could conceivably left in a broken state where my network connectivity (both wired and wireless) might not work at all.  To try and mitigate this risk, I backed up the registry entries and program files for Access Connection 4.52 before proceeding.

Fortunately, the Access Connections 4.42 installer had good handling for installing over a newer version: it recognized that I had a newer Access Connections version installed, and (with my approval) uninstalled the existing version before installing the 4.42 version.

Following a reboot, with Access Connections 4.42 installed, the laptop now once again automatically and successfully connections to the wireless network following an undock!

There was one remaining minor issue, though.  With Access Connections 4.42 reinstalled, I started seeing a new issue where upon an undock, I would get an error dialog with caption "netsh.exe - Unable to Locate Component", and dialog text "This application has failed to start because framedyn.dll was not found.  Re-installing the application may fix this problem."

Fortunately (and unlike for the original "Applying wireless settings" failure issue), help was readily available via a Google search for this issue.  Per a suggestion given in several of the search results, I copied the file framedyn.dll from my C:\Windows\system32\wbem folder to the C:\Windows\system32 folder; with this done, the error dialog now no longer appears.

Control Windows Media Player with the ThinkPad Play/Pause Keys

Quick tip for ThinkPad owners: the media control keyboard keys located on the arrow keys at the bottom-right corner of the keyboard can be used to control music or other media playing in Windows Media Player (WMP) even when WMP isn't the foreground application! 

To use these keys, hold down the blue "Fn" key at the bottom-left corner of the keyboard, and press the appropriate arrow key.

With these keys, I can have music playing in Windows Media Player in the background (or in a minimized window), and be working in other applications in the foreground.  Then, when I get interrupted and want to pause my music (when the phone rings, or when a visitor arrives at my desk), instead of having to open the WMP window and click on the Pause button, I can just quickly push Fn + Play/Pause (the down arrow key), and my music is paused.  Another press of Fn + Play/Pause, and my music starts playing again.  Quite handy!

Fix: "Bluetooth device not found" on Thinkpad T60

I recently picked up a Bluetooth-enabled camera phone, and so I became interested for the first time in getting the Bluetooth functionality on my work laptop (a Thinkpad T60 running Windows XP) working to allow me to easily download pictures from the phone.

However, when I launched the Bluetooth Configuration applet from the Control Panel, it would hang for 5 or 10 seconds, and then show an error: "Bluetooth device not found. Please verify that your Bluetooth device is properly connected and turned on." In the Device Manager, under "Bluetooth Devices", only "Bluetooth Bus Enumerator" was listed, but no other specific Bluetooth device.

At this point, I was wondering if I didn't actually have Bluetooth hardware installed (despite the presence of a Bluetooth usage indicator icon on the machine); when I first got this machine, the internal wireless card wasn't yet installed, and I needed to take the machine down to the IT department to have them pop it in. However, one of the IT folks I talked to confirmed that the Bluetooth capability should be present in the existing wireless card.

The solution turned out to be that Bluetooth was disabled in the BIOS. In the BIOS, in the Network section, there is a setting named Internal Bluetooth Device; the value was set to "Hidden." I changed this to "Enabled," saved, and rebooted, and now the Bluetooth card does show up properly in Device Manager and in the Bluetooth Configuration applet.

So, I can now successfully pull photos directly off my camera phone to my PC, without having to individually email them to myself from the phone as picture messages (and pay my wireless provider for the privilege)!

Workaround: Thinkpad gets into "always scroll down" state

Two or three times over the past six months or so of daily usage of my Lenovo (IBM) Thinkpad T60 laptop, I've encountered an issue where the system seems to get stuck in a "always scrolling down" state: in the active/foreground application, if the application has a vertical scroll bar, the document automatically scrolls to the bottom, even though I'm not touching the mouse wheel or otherwise doing anything that would cause the document to scroll. If I manually scroll the document up by dragging the vertical scrollbar up with the mouse, the document scrolls back down again as soon as I release the mouse button to drop the scrollbar.

The issue has always seemed to occur when I'm sitting at my desk at work and the Thinkpad is in its docking station, and I'm working with the external USB mouse. The operating system I'm running is Windows XP Pro SP2.

The workaround/solution for this issue that I've found is to just press the middle trackpoint button on the laptop once. This is the button located between the left and right mouse buttons, just below the spacebar and just above the touch pad.

I'm not very happy that I don't know what exactly causes my system to get into this "always scrolling down state", or why clicking the center trackpoint button gets the system out of this state, but having this workaround is a lot better than nothing!

I hope this is helpful to anyone arriving at this post from a search engine query who may be experiencing a similar issue!

Workaround: Mouse Sensitivity Settings Lost after Laptop Re-dock

Issue: After undocking and then re-docking my Thinkpad T60 laptop (running Windows XP), my custom sensitivity settings for my external Logitech mouse (an MX500) are lost; in particular, the mouse cursor acceleration effect is gone, and the base speed of the movement of the mouse cursor increases significantly.

(Since I run dual high-resolution monitors, I find it very useful and comfortable to set the base mouse cursor speed to a low setting to allow easy precision pointing, and to also enable fairly high acceleration to allow me to move the mouse cursor long distances on my large screen area without having to move the physical mouse a correspondingly long distance on my desk. Moving the mouse on my machine and expecting to have the cursor respond according to these settings, but instead getting high-speed, no-acceleration cursor movement, feels very jarring.)

Also, after re-docking, the custom Logitech-provided mouse controls (the "Logitech MouseWare Control Center") in the Mouse applet in the Windows XP Control Panel are gone. Instead, running the Mouse applet just brings up the basic Windows mouse applet.

Workaround: Running the program logi_mwx.exe (which I found located on my local machine at C:\Windows, and, per msconfig.exe, runs at system startup time) restores the custom Logitech mouse control panel applet and my custom mouse speed and acceleration settings.

Of course, rebooting the machine is also an effective workaround! (The drawback to rebooting, of course, being the necessity of waiting for the reboot, and then re-opening any applications and documents that were in use prior to the reboot.)

As an aside, the same symptoms occur whenever the Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 Console is the active (foreground) application on my machine, even when no virtual PC image is actually running. If anyone knows a better workaround for this issue than "keep Virtual PC as the foreground app as little as possible", please comment! :-)

Thinkpad Rescue & Recovery, and free disk space

While researching a "Rescue and Recovery does not have enough disk space to perform the requested operation" error message that has been unexpectedly popping up on my Lenovo Thinkpad T60 from time to time, I found that on at least some Thinkpad laptops, 20 GB or more of “unaccounted for” of hard disk space – space that is reported as “in use” by the Windows, but which apparently no files are actually using -- can be reclaimed by deleting backups made by the Thinkpad “Rescue & Recovery” utility, or by uninstalling the utility altogether. Information on this is available in a post on Charles J. Keeme's blog (which incidentally, as of this morning, was somewhat surprisingly the only Google result for that error message).

Disclaimer: Make sure you have a sound alternative backup strategy in place before you fiddle with the Rescue & Recovery utility! You may also first want to make a set of OS recovery CDs if you haven’t already and you don’t have other means to restore your machine to its factory default state, as the restore data for some Thinkpads is apparently stored as part of the Rescue & Recovery backup data, not on CDs that came with the machine.

The ability to reclaim this disk space that was being used by Rescue & Recovery was a pretty big deal to me, as my current work machine is a Thinkpad T60 that came with only a 50.7 GB hard drive. This morning, despite having relatively few applications installed and very little in the way of multimedia files (music/photos) on the machine, I had only 9.57GB of free space. After uninstalling the Rescue & Recovery utility, I’m up to 29.9 GB of space – Rescue & Recovery was consuming fully 40% of the capacity of my limited hard disk storage!

(In my case, my Thinkpad is my work machine, and my setup is such that my code and work data are backed up on the corporate LAN, and I can rely on the corporate IT department to help me out should the machine experience some kind of hardware failure that would require me to need to reinstall Windows, so I was happy make the tradeoff of tripling my available free disk space in exchange for the (for me) mostly-redundant backup capability that Rescue & Recovery afforded.)