Category: Windows

Unable to kill Outlook.exe process in Windows 7

Recently upgraded some machines from Windows XP SP3 to Windows 7 SP1 (fresh install). Couple of users started experiencing serious issues with their Outlook 2010. Soon after starting Outlook would hang and then crash. Outlook.exe process, however, would stay in the task manager and nothing would kill it. New Outlook instance would refuse to start…
Force Applications to be re-installed by Group Policy

Group Policy Manager allows to re-deploy applications globally, but doesn’t provide ability to do it for individual machines. This may be required if an application got corrupted, or somebody removed it using Add/Remove Programs on a client PC. That’s right, removing program locally via Control Panel will not force re-installation via group policy.
Internet search from Windows 7 Start Menu

Windows 7 Start Menu Search feature helps you to find data on your computer, but it’s easy enough to make search the web as well. All is needed a little registry change: Open registry editor – just type regedit in the start menu search bar and click on regedit.exe) Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\ExplorerIf Explorer or other…
Disable Junk Mail in Outlook 2010

By default Outlook will try to filter the most obvious junk e-mail and move it to the Junk-E-mail folder. Unfortunately Outlook SPAM filter is not the most sophisticated and quite often legitimate messages get marked as Junk mail. You can choose to disable Outlook Junk-mail filter completely, especially if your company or email provider already…
Google Earth Street View missing in version 5.2

This morning (16.01.2012) a user complained to me that he can’t find Street View in Google Earth anymore. Street View layer simply disappeared. The user was on version 5.2.The reason I left some users users on old 5.2 version, was Google Earth 6.0 memory leak issue in which badly affected some of Windows XP machines.…
Auto Login in Poderosa Terminal Emulator

Poderosa is an open source terminal emulator. It is a popular alternative to puTTY because of additional features, such as tabbed style interface. Another useful feature is auto-login. It is disabled by default and for a good reason – password are stored in plain text which is obviously not secure. If this doesn’t worry you…
This copy of windows must be activated before you can log on

There may be number of reasons why you could bump into such error. In my particular situation this happened after moving physical Windows XP machine to a virtual VMware host. Other reasons could be – upgrading computer hardware, not activating Windows within permitted 30 days period, etc. Annoyingly you are not even allowed to login…
Manage Active Directory and Windows Servers from Windows 7 workstation

Download Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 from Microsoft Download Centre. Choose 32 or 64 bit version depending on you Operating System Install downloaded file (KB958830). It installs as a Windows Update
Print spooling takes very long time

Having problems with print spooling? There is a chance that you have some orphaned files in print spool directory. There should not be any permanent files in this directory. This helped me to resolve some spooling problems on Windows XP and Windows 7 machines (such as print spooling takes very long time, print spooler service…
Skype not responding on shutdown

On Windows XP computers Skype often doesn’t close properly on shutdown prompting “Ending Program… Please wait” dialog.
Wait in a batch file

There maybe number of reasons why you may want to “sleep” in a batch file. Depending on your Operating System there a couple of ways to achieve this. timeout – Windows Vista and Windows 7 In Windows Vista and Windows 7 simply use a buit-in command timeout. For example timeout /T 10 will wait 10…
Change TCP / IP settings using command prompt or .bat script

If you change your network settings quite often, you can save yourself quite a bit of time by creating a simple .bat scripts which allow to set predefined TCP/IP setting with a single click. To change your IP settings via command prompt you can use netsh command.You can run netsh either directly in the command…