Nov
02

Slow Remote Desktop Performance in Windows 7 or Vista

Symptom:  When connecting to a server running Terminal Services using the Remote Desktop client in Windows 7 or Vista, the connection is slow and lags despite a fast network connection. Problem:  This is usually, but not always, caused by the way TCP “Auto-tuning” is handled in Windows 7/Vista. Solution:  As stated above there are several …

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Aug
23

Outlook Error: “This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer”

Symptom:  When a user clicks a hyperlink to any internet content from within Outlook, they receive the following message:  “This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer.” Problem:  The registry entries responsible for handling hyperlinks are either missing or corrupted.  This can be caused by several things.  Recently it seems that most …

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Mar
13

Group Policy Not Applied To Remote VPN Users

Problem:  Users logging on to an Active Directory domain across a relatively slow VPN link will unreliably apply group policies.  This article deals with user policies specifically, not computer policies. Solution:  Although the ultimate solution to this problem would be to cure the root cause of the group policies not being applied, my reason for …

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Jan
06

Microsoft Office Asks User to Accept License Agreement Each Time An Office Program Is Launched

Symptom:  On Windows Vista or Windows 7, each time a Microsoft Office program is launched the user is asked to accept the license agreement.  This will typically happen on versions of Office older than 2007. Problem:  Due to the difference in the way that user rights are handled in Windows XP and Windows Vista/7, older …

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Aug
09

How To: Time Sync Across Windows Network

**Note from the Author:  Although this may be helpful for older OS versions, the process below is no longer the correct method. There are many reasons that a network administrator may want to synchronize the clocks on all Windows computers across the Active Directory domain.  The following steps will demonstrate how to easily accomplish that …

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Apr
12

Adding Sites to Internet Security Zones Using Group Policy

Sometimes it is useful to leverage the power of Group Policy in Active Directory to add sites to certain security zones in Internet Explorer.  This can save the network admin the trouble of managing the security zone lists for each computer (or user) separately.  In the following example, each user on the network needs to …

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Jan
18

Outlook 2010 Will Not Open/Close When Using Folder Redirection/Offline Files

Symptoms: Outlook behaves erratically specifically when trying to open or close it. Double clicking it will launch an “OUTLOOK.EXE” process, but not load the GUI. The “OUTLOOK.EXE” process cannot be killed. The machine may hang on shutdown if you try to reboot while Outlook is still stuck. There may be sync conflicts in Sync Center …

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Jan
14

Mounting An ISO Image in Windows Server 2008

…still can’t be done. MagicISO seems to work pretty well though.  As much as I hate installing stuff like that on a server, there seems to be no way around it without actually burning the image to media. It is completely unacceptable that Microsoft continues to leave this feature out of it’s operating systems.  Mac …

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Jan
13

Quicken 2011 Printing Problems on 64bit OS With HP Universal PCL Driver

I was working on a strange problem with Quicken 2011/Windows 7 Professional 64bit/HP Laserjet 4050T. The only driver available is the HP Universal PCL5/PCL6 driver. Everything works great with printing, except when printing from Quicken. Quicken would crash referencing splwow64.exe as the culprit. This is the Thinking Spooler APIS from 32 to 64 Process. As …

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