Solved: Unable to load the Intel My WiFi Techology DLL file

I was really excited when I discovered that the Lenovo "Update and Drivers" application offered me to install Intel® Wireless Display (WiDi)  on my Thinkpad X1 laptop. The X1 includes the Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 Wi-FI adapter which includes Wireless Display.

My Sony TV is a few years old and does not support Intel WiDi out of the box. I happily scanned the inventory of local hardware shops in Oslo for a WiDi adapter and found a shop which had one NetGear Push2TV HD-TVadapter in stock.

I really like Netgear equipment, and I'm also using Netgear based wifi/gateway, ethernet over power and NAS.

The PTV2000 is reasonally priced, offers 1080p over HDMI in addition to composite video and analog audio.

I was really excited when I hooked up the equipment and started my Intel WiDi application on my X1. I was equally dismayed when this error message appeared:

"Unable to load The Intel My WiFi Tehcnology DLL file". It seems that a lot of people are getting this error message, not only Lenovo users. I looked quickly over the threads in different forums, but found only advice involving a lot of reinstallation of drivers in different order, and it seemed that those who tried it were not very successful.

For me, the following fixed the problem. The problem was not related directly to the Widi software, but to installation settings for Intel WiFi driver package. It seems that the semi-automatic installation from Lenovo performs a default installation of this package. My Lenovo system was installed with version 14.2.0.10 of the Intel Wifi Driver Update. That version is recommended by Netgear. I downloaded the latest version I could find from Intel and installed it. I chose a custom installation and made sure to include the Intel My WiFi Technology tool.

After a reboot, I also installed the latest version of Intel Wireless Display Utility, and the Intel WiDi widget. Now, the WiDi tool started without the DLL error, and I could easily enable My WiFi support and pair with the PTV2000. After the pairing process, I was also offered to upgrade the firmware of the Netgear device. This process was really user friendly.

The wireless display is quite easy to use. By enabling auto-connect to the adapter, the WiDi widget gets quite useful. It is very easy to activate WiDi and to choose which application to show on the TV, so that the laptop screen is free to use for e-mail and such.

If you are going to use Wireless Display for other purposes than showing movies, I really recommend configuring the screen settings on the TV to use pixel-for-pixel display mode to avoid scaling. The WiDi application allows you to adjust the scaling of the picture so that is suits your TV, but this setting should ALWAYS be set to 15 (no scaling), and your TV should be adjusted to show everything at this setting. Regarding resolution, I had problems running movies smoothly in 1080p, but setting the resolution to 720p worked flawlessly. I will use 1080p for other uses such as web browsing and programming. The only flaw on my Thinkpad X1 is the really low resolution on the built-in display, but now I can enjoy sitting in a comfortable chair, typing on the magnificent X1 keyboard while viewing the Windows desktop in full 1080p glory on my Sony 46". Thank you Intel!

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Using your ReadyNAS for Continuous Integration

Some years ago, I bought the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ for media streaming and general storage. The compact design, 4-disk capacity and file throughput was really compelling at the time. The possibility to easily install plugins through the built in administration web tool was very nice. You could also enable ssh access on the server and install software directly on the Linux running the ReadyNAS. The software performance was less than impressing though. It was easy to see that the hardware for designed for file and network traffic, not general purpose processing. I installed MySQL, PHP and MediaWiki with appalling results. I abandoned the dream of using the NV+ as a multi-purpose home server and used it strictly for file, print, DLNA and as a Squeezebox server.

The Ultra series come in multiple configurations,
both in terms of disk capacity and processing power.

About a year ago, I bought the new x86 incarnation of the NV+, the Netgear Ultra 4. By using an Atom based platform, the server really becomes much more interesting than it's predecessors. Netgear now offer many x86-based devices with capacity of two disks or more.
I wanted to see if the product is ready for more than performing the mundane tasks of serving my media players, printer queues and network storage. I really needed a to have some stable test and development environment for my most Java based projects. I'd like to keep the setup on my laptop as simple as possible.


In a series of posts, I will document how to install and configure a respectable development environment for the dedicated software professional, or even a team of developers, using a reasonably priced Netgear ReadyNAS device.
What really got me going was reading the excellent Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided by Tests. Nat Pryce and Steve Freeman stressed the importance of establishing an infrastructure from the beginning of a project.

I expect to post a series of blog posts covering these topics in the next few days:

• SSH support, PHP, MySQL and MediaWiki
• Java 6 and Maven 2
• Subversion and administration tools
• Jenkins - for continuous integration
• Sonar - for code analysis

It took me a while to find a solution for all the software I needed, so I hope this will be useful for others as well.