Synaptic Touchpad - weird video plays after installing drivers...

Synaptics does a nice thing by making an all-inclusive driver package available on their website.  

Using the driver from their website enables a few features not found in the OEM driver, such as Horizontal and Chiral scrolling.  After installation of their driver package, I noticed an odd behavior.  A synaptics demo video would run at random intervals.  I couldn't figure out what triggered it.  

After some digging, I found that there were additional device properties on top of those enumerated in Control Panel > Mouse

How to kill the Batman random video:

1. Navigate to Control Panel > Mouse
2. Under your mouse properties, click on the last tab "Device Settings". 
3. Click "Settings" to pull up the "Synaptics Properties" window. 
4. Select "Tapping" and you will see a Gear symbol and a Question Mark to the right side. 
5. The Gear allows you to go into "Tapping Settings" 
6. If you have Tapping unchecked, you cannot access these settings.  For some odd reason these settings will still be in effect.  Note: This was what was keeping me from finding how to disable the random video.
7. Click into this and you can either uncheck "Enable tapping zones" or change the very last drop down box (with Top Right Action) to "No Zone". 
8. Proceed to back out, uncheck "Tapping" again if you so desire, and compute annoyance free.

~ fin ~

"Local Only" network in Vista 64-bit + 169.254 IP Address = headache

Problem: 169.254 IP address configuration "stuck" on a wired ethernet adapter.


OS:  Vista Ultimate 64-bit


What 169.254.x.x means:  It's an error message configuration of sorts.  The IANA reserved 169.254.0.0-169.254.255.255 for Automatic Private IP Addressing. In this case, if the NIC can't get an IP via DHCP, APIPA provides these addresses that are guaranteed not to conflict with routable addresses on the live network.  Definition ripped off from courtesy of chicagotech.net


Solution that worked:


Start: by typing "Command " in the Start Search block, then right click "Command Prompt" and select "Run as Administrator" - when/if prompted, click [Continue]


Next: Type "netsh [Enter]" then "winsock [Enter]" then "reset [Enter]"


This action resets the Winsock Catalog to a clean state.


Special Ingredient:  You must entirely power off your machine, not just restart the OS.  It may have been a bit overboard...  I went so far as to turn the power off at the Power Supply once the PC had powered off, just to make sure that it was not in a low-power-mode.  For some odd reason this fix doesn't work if you just "restart" the OS, performing a warm-boot.


What did not fix the issue:
"ipconfig /release" - the address remained 169.254.x.x - It would not change/release the offending 169.254.x.x address.