Solution: Can not activate the galaxy map in Mass Effect 1

A while a go I was playing Mass Effect 1 and had some problems with the galaxy map when I first got on board the Normandy. I walked around the whole ship but could not figure out how to activate the galaxy map. When I got close to it was indicated on the screen, but the text was grayed out so I couldn’t activate it. Suspecting that my save game was corrupt somehow I restarted the game and played it from the beginning again but had the exact problems the next time.

After googling I found that a lot of other people had similar problems, but they could activate the galaxy map and it was just blank. Also that only happened on pirated games and I had bought my copy.

Finally after a lot of struggling I realized I was trying to activate the galaxy map from the wrong place. To activate it you have to go around the galaxy map and up the ramp on the back, as you can see on this YouTube video. I was running around the ship for almost an hour trying to figure out how to use the map and never saw the ramp. No wonder I couldn’t find any other information on the internet about it.

Workaround: Garmin Forerunner 305 causes blue screen on Windows 7

I have had a Garmin Forerunner 305 for quite a while now and it has worked fine with my old computer that was running Windows XP. But now with my new computer that is running Windows 7 it causes Windows to crash with a blue screen whenever I plug it in. The internet suggests that I should re-install the latest USB drivers in Windows XP compatibility mode, but that does not work for me and it is still crashing if I plug it in while Windows is running.

I have however found two workarounds that work. The first and not so useful one is to start the computer with the device connected. Then everything works fine. The second and more useful workaround is to lock the computer (Win + L) so you display the login screen when you plug in the device. Then Windows doesn’t crash when you plug in the Forerunner and it’s working fine and detecting the device once logged in again.

Sometimes when I try to read data from the watch the process just hangs, but in this case I just try again and it works.

Starting Steam in offline mode doesn’t work

I have recently moved and are without normal internet on my computer now but I can at least get a limited connection by sharing my phone’s internet connection. After setting up the computer I tried to start Steam with the intention to play some games in offline mode. As expected I got a popup that said that Steam couldn’t connect to the network and asked me if I wanted to start it in offline mode.

 I selected to start in offline mode, but was only greeted by two new error popups where one where hidden below the second one. The first, that was hidden, mentioned that “This operation could not be completed when Steam is in Offline Mode” and the second one said that it couldn’t connect to the Steam network.

When closing the second dialog which was active the first one closed as well and Steam then shut down. I retried starting steam and starting a game from a previously created shortcut but this just resulted in the same error messages.

On the internet I found a long thread on the steam forums that’s been discussing this topic for several years and with the latest posts today. In that thread there are a lot of discussions back and forth about different theories and new people joining in without reading any of the previous posts. However somewhere among all these comments there was a link to another post by user X.nano in another similar thread that explains the cause of the problem and some workarounds.

The basic problem for me seems to be that Windows doesn’t close down steam properly when I shut down the computer. As mentioned by X.nano:

Using Process Monitor, I found that the problem cache is steamapps\winui.gcf, a file which is used mainly to store Steam interface resource files. After taking md5 hashes of the file at various points I found that the file is modified when Steam starts in online mode, and changes back when it exits. However, if Steam is not shutdown cleanly then the online version of the file is left there and this one prevents you from getting into offline mode.

So to prevent this problem from happening you have to shut down Steam manually before you close the computer to make sure it’s closed properly. Another solution that helps you to recover from this situation if you forgot to close Steam manually is to create a backup of winui.gcf after you have exited Steam manually and then restore this backup if you run into this problem again.

Since this file holds various settings for Steam you might need to create a new backup whenever Steam is updated, you add/remove friends or do any other changes to your Steam settings. A third option would be to use a hex editor to update the offline mode part of winui.gcf as described by X.nano in a followup post. Since you are modifying a binary file directly with this approach it’s possible that this method will stop working in the future if the format of this file is changed in future versions of Steam.

Summary (TL;DR)

Problem

Not possible to start Steam in offline mode when not connected to the internet.

Cause

OS doesn’t shut down Steam cleanly when turning off the computer

Workarounds / solutions

Choose one of three different workarounds:

1. Exit Steam manually before shutting down computer.
2. Start steam with network connection and shut it down cleanly. Then make a backup of steamapps\winui.gcf. Restore the backup:ed version of this file when Steam fails to start in offline mode the next time.
3. When Steam fails to start in offline mode update steamapps\winui.gcf with a hex editor following these instructions.

How to boot from the DVD on a Dell Dimension 8400

The time has come to throw away my old Dell Dimension 8400, but before that I wanted to wipe the hard drive on it with DBAN so the one who scavenges the computer don’t get hold of whatever data I might have had on it. I burned the iso to a DVD-RW and put it in the old computer and entered bios and set it to boot from the  “Onboard or USB CD-ROM Drive” and completely removed the hard drive from the boot order list.

However when I restarted I just got an error message saying that there is no bootable device available and suggests that I should press F1 to retry or F2 to enter setup. Some googling suggested that many others have had the same problem and that it doesn’t matter if they try to boot from the DVD/RW drive or the CD/RW drive. So buying an empty CD and try to boot from the CD/RW didn’t sound like it would work.

With my setup the DVD/RW drive was the PATA slave and the CD/RW was the PATA master. After some more searching I found a simple solution that worked perfectly for me: Disable the CD/RW drive in bios so that the DVD/RW drive was the only optical unit discovered by the system. After I did this I could boot from the DVD just fine and continue to completely wipe the hard drive.