Can't remove printer drivers in Windows 7 - The Specified Printer Driver is Currently in Use
Recently had to delete some network printers drivers on couple of Windows 7 machines.
As usual went to Print Server > [computer] > Drivers > [driver] > Remove Driver Package
After confirming removal by clicking Delete was presented with an error message:
Failed to remove driver [driver name]. The specified printer driver is currently in use.
In Windows XP these kind of issues would be normally resolved by deleting printer and restarting Print Spooler service. Unfortunately in this case it didn’t work.
A quick search online revealed that often recommended solution is to delete printer from every single user profile who was ever logged on this machine. I had over 10 user profiles on this machine so wasn’t very keen to try it.
I found another, quicker way to achieve the same result. The trick is to delete the driver immediately after restarting print spooler service.
Install any version of Windows 7 using any version of Windows 7 DVD
All Windows 7 DVDs contain all versions of Windows 7 (Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional to Ultimate edition), however they are normally restricted to install only single version.
This done by a file ei.cfg located in /sources folder inside installation DVD. If you open this file in a text editor you will find text similar to this:
[EditionID]
Ultimate
[Channel]
Retail
[VL]
0
An example above will force Windows 7 Ultimate installation.
If you simply delete this file from your installation DVD, Windows 7 Setup will prompt you which version you want to install.
You can use your favourite DVD / ISO burring software to remove this file from the installation DVD. This can take some time as you will have to re-burn DVD/ISO.
Alternately, you can use this small utility to remove ei.cfg from Windows 7 .iso file.
Simply extract the file, run eicfg_remover.exe and point it to your Windows 7 .iso file. Removal process is instant because this utility doesn't have to re-save the iso file. It simply marks ei.cfg as deleted in the UDF file system table.
Firefox 8 crashes on every startup (after upgrade from v7)
This morning Firefox on one my Windows XP SP3 machines decided to upgrade itself to the latest 8.0 version. All well and good, but after the upgrade Firefox worked for couple of minutes and then crashed. Every subsequent attempt to open Firefox resulted in immediate crash. First tried couple of obvious things:
- Start Firefox in Safe Mode
- Restart PC
- Reinstall Firefox
Read more: Firefox 8 crashes on every startup (after upgrade from v7)
Disable "Scanning for Viruses" in Firefox download manager
This behaviours seems strange and unnecessary – Firefox doesntt have any buit-in antivirus, so it's not going to find anything if there is no antivirus software on your computer (even then Firefox will misleadingly display "Scanning for Viruses"). And if you have antivirus, real-time scanner will scan downloaded files anyway.
To disable this feature perform following:
- Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar
- Find entry browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone and change its value to false
- Crystal WDM Audio Codec driver fails to load after reboot – This device cannot start (Code 10)
- Integrate / slipstream Office 2010 with Service Pack 1 (SP1)
- Windows Picture and Fax Viewer freezes opening a picture
- Windows 8 (Developer Preview) Metro Tile Apps don't open
- Two windows XP entries during startup
- Google Adsense account page blank in Firefox
- Emails get stuck in outbox and are lost when Outlook crashes
- Message after log-on "The total hard drive capacity in your system has decreased..."
- Disable Skype 5.5 Home Screen auto pop-up
- Outlook favorites disappear