laptop fine when not docked, slows down when docked (Dell)

Using a Dell Precision M4800 on the domain was fine when not on the Dell PR02X E-port plus docking station. As soon as put on the dock, the laptop became sluggish and laggy.

Turns out it’s a power issue. If the dock and laptop aren’t getting enough power, the laptop will be clocked down to run at a lower speed. Confirmed this by unplugging the power to the dock while the laptop was on it (obviously simulates not being on the dock any more but still).

Anyway. Put a big brick Dell power supply on, and works fine.

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

This link helped

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/579771-laptop-runs-slow-when-docked

 

Unable to connect to vcenter (setup at home)

ESXi is up, attempt to login to vcenter and the web client appears to login but has a message displayed at top that it can’t connect to vcenter. Even using vsphere it just won’t login to vcenter.

Access the VMware vCenter Server Appliance from the web client and you get in fine.

Once in, in Summary you’ll see

vCenter
Server:  STOPPED

Start it and it starts fine but still can’t login.

FIX

Go to Setup Wizard and Launch to re-setup the vcenter seems to fix it. Just use default config.
Before you start that you’ll want to stop the Server and Inventory Service. Also stop Log Browser and vsphere Auto Deploy. It could be just Server and Inventory Service that needs to be stopped. Anyway. If you don’t, the wizard eventually fails (as I found out) with the error:

Failed to execute ‘/usr/sbin/vpxd_servicecfg ‘service’ ‘start”:VC_CFG_RESULT=101(Error: vCenter Server failed to start.)

Anypassword stuck minimized and unable to resize

http://www.anypassword.com/pro/

Run regedit as the user it’s installed as. Then go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Any Password Pro

Image and video hosting by TinyPic
This is where you can control it’s display. Make a note of the value in Alpha (it will show it in HEX but the value in brackets is in decimal).

Change the decimal to 255

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

Load AnyPassWord Pro and it should be back to normal.

Working values below (ignore the English missing a bit of the E. That was from rubbing out the key.)

Image and video hosting by TinyPic