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Today I was troubleshooting a couple of network printers. One of them, I believed, had an incompatibility with “Standard TCP/IP” printing, via RAW communications. I tired other printer port options, including the HP TCP/IP port. I found out later on that the printer itself (a multifunction copier actually) did not have printing capability enabled. In [...]

Recently at work, we’ve been being "audited" by a firm to help us determine the cost of operations in our department, and how we measure up to other organizations of similar structure and size. One of the comments that came back to us is that we could potentially be saving on cost of ownership if [...]

If you ever run into this error when trying to export data from UPS WorldShip:

ODBC ERROR: State = 22005 Error = [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Invalid character value for cast specification
…here’s the solution. The "defout.mdb" file that exists on your source installation is corrupt. I’m assuming this, as what proceeds seems to solve the issue. In [...]

Just quick post to help those of you out there who seem to be having problems finding the Shutdown Event Tracker setting in gpedit (as I did). To disable the shutdown event tracker, you need to add/edit these two keys:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Reliability]
"ShutdownReasonUI"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Reliability]
"ShutdownReasonOn"=dword:00000000
Or, if you prefer, here’s a ready-to-use regedit file.

I thought I’d take a note of this just in case it comes in handy to anyone else out there.
A couple of weeks ago I installed PCAnywhere 10 on my laptop and when it asked me to reboot, I declined. The next day, after rebooting my computer, I noticed my resolutions were all messed up. [...]

I’ve been looking for a good text editor for a few years now. Yeah, I wasn’t looking really hard, but I had tried a couple of the usual suspects, TextEdit and UltraEdit-32. Both seemed good if not great, but the nag screen thing bugged me. I also didn’t like the idea of paying $30-40 for [...]

One of the things I miss from using Linux on a daily basis is the ability to have my windows snap to the frame of other windows and the desktop itself. It helps to keep things organized and better utilize space.
I’ve found a tool that help you do this. allSnap. You should download it right [...]

Did I mention I hate Microsoft. Hate is a strong word, I know. That’s why I use it in this situation.
Today is the first day of my Memorial weekend vacation. I drove 6 hours to arrive at my destination at 3:00AM and went directly to bed. At 7:15, I get a call from work. "The [...]

At work we use Symantec Ghost to keep time re-installing user computers to a minimum. Part of achieving that goal is trying to reduce the number of unique images we have to keep up to date. For instance, we currently have 2 images for 7 different models of computers. One image in particular is set [...]

Have you ever changed the logon password for your SQL service account and found that the service no longer starts up after a reboot on it’s own? You look through the event log and you see the error:
The service did not start due to a logon failure.
OR

The MSSQLSERVER service failed to start due to the [...]

This morning at work, shortly after an AVG virus scan had completed, one of our users got an error when opening nearly any application that the dynamically linked library otdll.dlo could not be found in the path. After futzing with it for 15 minutes, I was at a loss and decided to reboot. The graceful [...]

Today Microsoft came out with patches for 7 bugs. I promptly applied them as usual, and got the usual nag screen afterwards…

And of course, 10 minutes later, the same message. If you look up “restart now restart later” on Google, you’ll get lots of frustrated people talking about bad design in software, and how this [...]

About a year ago I had pretty time-consuming battle with spyware, and from the spyware, viruses. I don’t know if the version of Symantec AV was out of date or what (the updates still kept coming in, but so did the infections). And AdAware just wasn’t cutting it with the free edition. I’ll admit [...]

Today I noticed that I could no longer print in Outlook 2003. It would keep coming up the with the error:
Line: 1343
Error: Unspecified Error
To resolve the problem, I had to run this:
Regsvr32.exe %Windir%System32Ole32.dll
If you run in to this, give that a shot and see if it fixes your issue. Props to Zaphood2003 for the solution.

Today I needed to change a user’s username (not the displayed name) from “Owner” to first initial and last name concatenated (flastname). The normal WinXP Home control panel tools (at least the ones you can see) do not show this option, whereas XP Pro does. To change the account names, you must go to Start [...]

Every few reboots of a server at work, I get this error and the only way I seem to be able to resolve it is to re-install .NET Framework…

“aspnet_wp.exe could not be started. The error code for the failure is 80070545. This error can be caused when the worker process account has insufficient rights to [...]

Microsoft is infalliable in their wisdom of proper software design. They know better than you how a program should be designed. At least that’s the impression I get from the Windows Search tool. Yesterday, I spent at least an hour increasing my productivity by unsuccessfully attempting to find files that contained the string “email”. I [...]