Category: Windows

Integrate / slipstream Office 2010 with Service Pack 1 (SP1)

If you have to install Office 2010 on number of machines, you may want to slipstream SP1 so you don’ have to install it on every machine manually (or rely on Windows Updates). Slipstreaming process for Office 2010 is really simple. All you need to do is copy extracted SP1 files to the Updates folder…
Windows Picture and Fax Viewer freezes opening a picture

A user came to me complaining that it takes 10-20 second for Windows Picture and Fax Viewer to display a picture from a desktop on his Windows XP machine. During this time Picture Viewer freezes; at the same time some other opened applications including Windows Explorer hang as well. A quick investigation revealed that issue…
Windows 8 (Developer Preview) Metro Tile Apps don’t open

If your Windows 8 dev preview Metro apps refuse to open the most likely reason is that your screen resolution is lower than 1024 x 768. Annoyingly there is no error or warning message.Try switching to Windows Desktop App and increase resolution as you would do on any Windows 7 machine. If you can’t increase…
Speed up your PC – Disable unwanted startup items in Windows 7

One of the most common reason why Windows computer with time gets slower and slower is the increasing number of unnecessary startup items. Large number of installed software try to add themselves to the Windows startup list so it starts automatically with Windows. Some just add a small software utility which checks for updates for…
Two windows XP entries during startup

In certain conditions after Windows XP installation your may end up with two Windows XP entries in boot.ini file.During Start-Up this will appear as a following screen, asking you to select which Operating System you want to run. This OS selection screen is only useful if you genuinely have two or more Windows installations on…
VMware vSphere Client error – Error parsing the se…

If you are trying to run older version of VMware vSphere Client on Windows 7, or fully updated Windows XP you may get following errors: VMware vSphere Client error – Error parsing the server “[server]” “clients.xml” file The type initializer for VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy’ threw an exception. These errors are caused by an updated Microsoft .NET version.…
Google Adsense account page blank in Firefox

A user reported after logging-in into Google Adsense account a blank page is displayed. This only happened in Firefox. Google Chrome and IE worked fine. First step was to disable all Firefox add-ons which immediately fixed the problem. Actual offending add-on was AddBlock Plus. AdBlock Plus (ADP) can be quite useful add-on, so instead of…
Logon Failure: The target account name is incorrect

Background Windows Server 2003 domainWindows XP SP3 clients Problem Domain administrator is trying to access remote computer’s file system via UNC administrative share e.g \\computer01\c$Operation fails with error:\\computer01\c$ not accessible you might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions.Logon failure:…
Group policy software installation not applied due to a network adaptor issue

Background: DELL Optiplex 780 workstation with new Windows XP SP3 installation Windows Small Business 2008 domain Problem: After adding the computer to the SBS domain I noticed that group policy software deployment is not processed.Quick check in the event logs revealed following errors on startup:Event ID: 5719Type: ErrorSource: NETLOGONDescription:No Domain Controller is available for domain…
Emails get stuck in outbox and are lost when Outlook crashes

After upgrading to MS Outlook 2010 some users started reporting an intermittent issue:Occasionally messages get stuck in outbox even if Outlook is connected to the Exchange Server and shows that all folders are up to date. When a user clicks on Send Receive, Outlook hangs or crashes. After Outlook is restarted all messages from outbox are…
Message after log-on “The total hard drive capacity in your system has decreased…”

On a DELL computer after logging on you get a warning message:The total hard drive capacity in your system has decreased. This typically does NOT indicate a hardware failure. Contact your Help Desk if you did not personally change your system’s hard-drive configuration or disable devices in System Setup. In Addition following event is logged…
Message rejected as spam by Content Filtering

Background: Windows Small Business Server 2008 with built in Exchange 2007 SP1External email screening service (anti-spam and antivirus) Problem: Users complaining that some emails from external senders are randomly bouncing back with NDR 550 error. Investigation: Searched external email filtering service logs for a particular bounced back email. Error found:2011-08-12 18:33:55 Recipient Disposition: [250 Backend;…