Welshio's Blog

My iPhone headphones/hands-free went a bit funny the other week, left/right audio was still working fine but the mic wasn’t and I couldn’t skip tracks using the button on the headset. I did a full restore with no success and then took myself off down to the Apple Store on Regent Street in London to talk to a genius.

It turns out that my iPhone was 46 days out of warranty and that they are able to flex the deadline by up to 30 days and no further. The only option that the ‘genius’ suggested was to pay £139 for a refurbished replacement phone, needless to say that being 6 weeks out of warranty I wasn’t impressed.

So today just before sucking it up and ordering a replacement headphone jack off the net and putting myself through the hell that fitting it looks like it would have been I decided to get a torch and take a look inside the headphone socket, using a paper clip I pulled out a big piece of lint from the bottom where the tip of the jack that carries the mic and control signals makes contact. On switching the phone back on it’s now working perfectly

I am very disappointed in Apple and the genius I saw for not recommending this, the guy that I saw even examined inside the socket in front of me in the store and didn’t suggest anything, he more or less just went straight to the £139 replacement option. Looking online this seems to be quite a common problem and I’m surprised that this isn’t something Apple check as part of the diagnosis process.

This is handy if you need to tweak a registry setting to be applied to all users that logon for the first time to your terminal server (this only applies if you use local/non-roaming profiles).

The default user profile is not HKU\.Default as you might expect but rather you need to open the registry hive located at C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\NTUSER.DAT.

Make your changes in here and they will be used whenever the system needs to create a new user profile from the template.
P.S. The HKU\.Default key is actually used for the system logon environment used to provide the logon GINA, changes you make in here affect this environment.