Received an old DELL Latitude C400 Windows XP laptop with not working sound. Quick look into device manager revealed the first problem problem: Crystal WDM Audio Codecs device was listed with exclamation mark and Device Status in Properties was “This device cannot start. (Code 10)“.First off all tried to update sound drivers to the latest…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Update This issue has been resolved in Skype release 5.5.0.119—————————————————————————————————————————————————– Since version 5.5 Skype introduced a new “feature”. If “Compact View” is enabled, every time Skype starts, a second Window called “Skype Home” is displayed. For many people this is a completely useless addition, especially since the whole purpose of Compact View is to have…

If your favourites in MS Outlook keeps disappearing you can try resetting the Navigation Pane. Simply close MS Outlook, the run Outlook with /resetnavpane switch.Start > Run > OUTLOOK.EXE /resetnavpane This will clear and regenerate the Navigation Pane.

If none of your third party browser extensions (toolbars, etc) work open Internet Explorer > Tools > Internet Options > Advanced and check “Enable Third Party Browser Extensions“.If this option is grayed out it probably means this setting is managed by group policy. To enable it permanently you obviously need to change group policyComputer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows…

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.       Subject:    Test      Sent: 08/08/2011 10:00 The following recipient(s) cannot be reached:       ‘test@test.com’ on 08/08/2011 10:00              None of your e-mail accounts could send to this recipient. This error often occurs when user tries to send an email after copying recipient address from…