Thursday 8th November 2007
I do a lot of work remotely, and whilst ctrl+alt+end is a lifesaver when using terminal services / remote desktop, there’s no easy way to send ctrl+alt+del to open Task Manager in the “no-preinstall” remote assistance tool that I use (well, there is a way but it takes longer at the client side, and longer to connect to the desktop so it’s only really useful when I know I need to login as a different user on a remote machine)
Well, today I found the answer, and surprisingly I must have seen it a million times….
Right-click an empty space on the taskbar, or the system clock and Task Manager is available from the pop-up menu!
Saturday 20th October 2007
Recently, a client of mine was plagued by “missing export in msvcrt.dll” error messages, which mostly affected Autocad - of course, being an Architects it was a huge problem for them which otherwise required a reinstall of the machine.
After some research on the newsgroups, I found that the problem seemed to occur after using the SBS 2003 R2 client installer on a windows 2000 machine - not good, especially when adding a new computer using the wizard resulted in a popup on login that would only go away if you gave in and didn’t click postpone!
So, how to fix the dll problem, well, simply copy it back to the system32 folder? Nah, Windows 2000 has Windows File Protection in place, and that coupled with the fact that mscvrt.dll is used quite a lot and is 99.9% likely to be in use makes it a hard problem to fix. Oh, and did I mention that the error message might not relate to msvcrt.dll but in fact to one of the other dll files from the VC Runtime?! Aarghh…
Anyway, long story short I created a batch file that fixes the problem. It contains the important dll files from the last Visual C Redistributable and a couple of batch files. Download, Extract and run FIX.CMD and your error should be gone!
(Please note that I cannot be held responsible for any damage caused by the use of the fix - it has been tested and works with the system I needed it to work with!)
Monday 14th May 2007
This has been a real pain for a while for me: You buy a system with XP Home preinstalled because it’s cheap, and then put XP Pro OEM on… but WAIT!! - you have to do a clean install (which isn’t that difficult) but it means you have to find drivers and stuff when it should be easier…
Well, I think I found a solution - not for production though, as I’m sure it violates Microsofts Windows EULA:
- Boot into Windows
- Start the Upgrade from a RETAIL copy of XP Pro
- When the system restarts, replace the retail cd with the oem cd
And hey presto, an upgraded XP Home OEM
Kind of a moot point really, as XP is going away to the nursing home - ah, how we’ll miss you…
Tuesday 20th March 2007
Pressing the signature button within Outlook 2007 options didn’t cause the signature editor to appear (also the editor options didn’t cause the editor options to appear)
Fix:
I’d noticed earlier in the day that I couldn’t “view source” from
within internet explorer. Deleting the temporary internet files fixed
this, and also fixed the above problem in Outlook 2007.
Update: This seems to only fix the problem a few times, hopefully a Service Pack will be available that will fix this!