Monthly Archives: October 2022

All in 1 Mini Card Reader Manufacturing Flaw (Bad USB connector)

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Recently, I’ve bought this CF card reader on eBay but it doesn’t detect at all.

Picture 4 of 7

I looked closely into the connector with a loupe and realized that the mini USB conductor was molded incorrectly. The center middle pin was pushed down because extra plastic was deposited above it:

The seller refunded in full but I figured that if the connector is malformed at the molding stage, buying it from another seller is not going to make it work, and the other form factors/connector configurations are inconvenient, so I tried my luck and see if there are exact matches for the connector they’ve used. Turns out it’s a 56 cents connector (price for 1 piece) available in Mouser (UJ2-MBH-1-SMT-TR):

In bulk, this connector can be bought for $0.22. For something that’s selling for $5/pc, the Red Chinese manufacturing had to go cheap to shave a few cents that ended up turning finished products into total trash. Most people are not electronics/troubleshooting savvy enough to figure out this shit, and the labor cracking the piece up and the SMD rework can easily buy 20pcs new. I just happened to have the tools (Metcal hot tweezers) so I can desolder the bad connector in seconds, but average users do not have that luxury so the neutered USB card readers go straight into trash.

We need more products NOT made in China!

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Getting Quickbooks Pro 2019 to work on Windows 10 21H2

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Turns out there’s two hurdles to launching Quickbooks as they used some old Windows dependencies

  1. Internet Explorer needed for DLL/ActiveX/DCOM
  2. XPS Writer needed for PDF libraries

In later versions of Windows 10, IE11 was turned off by default, and 21H2 made it difficult to re-enable it by hiding it from Windows’s (optional) features checkboxes, so it needs to be enabled through command line.

If you do not enable Microsoft’s XPS Writer feature, you’ll get this error message about PDF on start, though XPS is Microsoft challenger to PDF so they are not the same thing

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Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10 21H2

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Microsoft has disabled Internet Explorer on later versions of Windows 10 as they really want people to use Microsoft Edge. However, disabling Internet Explorer 11 might break some software such as Quickbooks 2019, which relied on old fashioned DLLs.

Since 21H2, Microsoft went the extra mile preventing users from re-enabling Internet Explorer 11 by hiding it from GUI ways to turn Windows features on or off (whether you use the app mode interface or the classic optionalfeature.exe interface launchable from control panel’s “Programs and Features”). Instead this needs to be enabled from the command line

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/developer/browsers/installation/disable-internet-explorer-windows

dism /online /Add-Capability /CapabilityName:Browser.InternetExplorer~~~~0.0.11.0.

or

dism /online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:Internet-Explorer-Optional-amd64.

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