Windows

Anything concerning Windows be it Windows client operating system, Windows Server operating system, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone and more.

In Your Face Out of Office in Outlook 2010 Technical Preview

Richard Green on

As most people will know from various sources, I’m Out of the Office from work at the moment on paternity leave with our new baby Layla.

As an obvious result, I’ve got Automatic Replies enabled in Outlook to warn people I am Out of Office. I have Outlook open all of the time as I check my POP3 email accounts in it, but today I saw a menu appear in Outlook to warn about the Out of Office for the first time.

Outlook2010OutofOffice

This is a great step on from previous implementations of the Out of Office namely because (having fallen victim myself once or twice) it’s fairly easy to leave it on when you get back into the office and forget about it.

OneNote Mobile 2010

Richard Green on

I’ve been a OneNote user for some time and namely with OneNote 2007 and it’s lack of Ribbon UI.
When I originally got my old O2 XDA Orbit (HTC Artemis) it came with OneNote Mobile as part of the office applications, however I was not a user at this point in time.

As time moved on and I began to use OneNote, I had upgraded the ROM on my phone which meant I no longer had OneNote.

I was left in the same situation with my Touch HD as the Windows Mobile 6.5 ROM I am using doesn’t include OneNote, however when I attached my phone via USB today so that I could flash the Radio and the ROM with fewer builds, I noticed a popup from Office 2010 which 2007 never showed.

(I have attached the phone via USB before, but it’s always been with Office 2007 installed not 2010 like now)

OneNoteMobile1

Read more…

Strikethrough Button in OneNote 2010 Ribbon

Richard Green on

Strikethrough is something which I never used to use until I started using OneNote some time ago.

Strikethrough in OneNote is good because it means you can make lists and cross things out as you go. The trouble in OneNote 2007 was that settings and options for Font appeared in a menu on the right which wasn’t static – It would come and go as you did other things in OneNote.

Now in OneNote 2010 however, with the new Ribbon interface, Strikethrough has rightfully earnt a button on the toolbar.

Memory Usage in Outlook 2010 Technical Preview

Richard Green on

It’s been about a day now since installing Office 2010, and this is one thing I noticed earlier today which is excellent.

In Outlook, I have two email accounts: An Exchange account connected with RPC over HTTPS and a POP3 account. I’ve got one OST file for the Exchange mailbox, one PST file where all the POP3 email goes and a PST for backing up old emails to.

Outlook 2007 used to run in the region 0f 100,000 KB to 150,000 KB according to what I was doing that day. As you will see from the screenshot below, Outlook 2010 is running as a measly 47,736 KB. That’s less than one of my Internet Explorer tabs.

Outlook2010-Memory

Excellent work Office team.

Office 2010 Technical Preview

Richard Green on

Office 2010 Technical Preview is the latest version of the Office suite. Currently in Technical Preview and scheduled for a public Beta release in July, some sneaky people have posted some builds of it to a torrent site in particular.

 I’m not going to name the site, but most people will be able to work out from the screenshot the site I’m talking about. There are various different torrents for it on the site, however some of them have comments to suggest that there is malicious content included, as described by Microsoft themselves here:

http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/archive/2009/05/19/leaked-build-and-staying-safe.aspxRead more…

The Case of the Failed SQL Login

Richard Green on

I was asked to investigate a problem with SQL Server 2005, whereby Administrators logging on to the SQL Server couldn’t login to the SQL Server Management Studio. An attempt to login to the Management Studio (or connect by SQLCMD for that matter) would get an Error 4064: Cannot Open Default User Database.

I Bing Searched the Error 4064 and found lots of information on it, but nothing really pointed to a cause or resolution to the problem, however I knew that the problem was related to the master system database.

The vast majority of sites suggested things but none of these worked for me. Being that my skill with SQLCMD is somewhat slim, I decided to aim for the Management Studio.

I knew that there was a problem with the master system database, and being that the master database is the database used to generate user connections, I thought I would try to login with a different database.

SQLLogin1

As per the image above, expanding the available options in SQL Server 2005 gives you the Connect to Database option. I set this to model being that I knew the system database model would exist and I didn’t know the names of any other databases on the server.

Excellent, it got me in. So the first place I looked was to make sure that the the master database was present. I figured it would be pretty difficult for SQL to start without a master database attached but anything is possible I guess.

Sure enough the database was there, but upon trying to view it’s properties, I got the same Error 4064.

I then tried to take a look at the server properties and I got the same Error 4064 again.

So I was poking around MSDN when I found the sp_defaultdb command, and I ran the following:

use master
go
sp_defaultdb [DOMAINUSER], master
go

 

I logged out of the Management Studio and back in, but this time without the Connect to Database statement selected. I was able to login correctly to he normal master database because I had set my own.

This works for one user, but you don’t want to be going around setting the master as the default database for every user in the company otherwise your going to end up with a very long and complicated SQL configuration on your hands.

With the master database now correctly loaded for my user, I was able to view the server and database properties. First up was the master database and everything here looked good, so I moved on to the server. Whilst browsing through the server permissions, I saw this:

SQLLogin2

Notice how the default database location fields are blank? This is all under the Configured Values mode, so I switched to Running Values and they where blank too.

I entered the correct values into these paths (the SQL Server defaults in this case) and it’s working perfectly – Users are able to login (permission granted of course) without needing to specify a default database.

And that closes the case of the failed SQL Server login.

Windows Server Becomes iSCSI

Richard Green on

iSCSI is kind of the holy grail is storage these days.

Everyone wants it, a lot of people can’t afford it and then there’s also a lot of people who want it, can afford it but don’t understand it, and then lastly there’s cool people who give you it for nothing.

So whilst aboard the USS Richard Green on it’s travels across the Internet, I discovered this site:
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/free

Their current software, StarWind Free 4.1 for Windows allows you to take any box running Windows and turn it into an iSCSI Software Target and for free.

It’s not without it’s limitations I may add. You are limited to 2TB of data storage, but that’s it.

Whilst you may not want to run this in a live environment, for lab and testing environments it’s great because it means you don’t need to go out and buy dedicated hardware for running iSCSI.

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Dates

Richard Green on

So it’s all official now, as Microsoft have confirmed 22nd October 2009 as the Release to Market date for both Windows 7 Client and Windows 7 Server (Windows Server 2008 R2).

If your thinking of a Vista deployment, I’d hold off. As if features like the new taskbar, touch support, new usability control features, Problem Steps Recorder, DirectAccess and more weren’t enough to tempt you.

BackInfo over BGInfo for Your Servers Wallpaper

Richard Green on

I see a lot of posts about BGInfo from SysInternals and using it on your servers to make them easily identifiable.

Although BGInfo can show you a wealth of information, it’s not the most beautiful of wallpapers, and yes I know you can spend a day or two using the GUI tool to customize the way it looks, but it’s just too much effort for something that is supposed to just be telling you what server you are logged on to.

For this reason, I always use BackInfo on any server I touch. BackInfo came out of the Resource Kit Tools for either Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003, I can’t remember which. For this, you get two files: backinfo.exe and backinfo.ini.

For the simplest installation running out of the box, do the following:

  1. Copy the two files to inDir/li>
  2. Open a Command Prompt
  3. Type inDir0ackinfo.exe to launch it for the first time
  4. Type reg add HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun /v BackInfo /t REG_SZ /d inDirbackinfo.exe to add BackInnfo to the registry so that it runs for everyone at logon.

A nice idea for someone wanting to enforce this background across a corporate environment would be to create a logon script in a Group Policy Object at the parent OU which holds all your servers. In the logon script, push the two files and the registry setting down to the servers. Then, just as the little cherry on top, to stop people trying to get away from BackInfo, you could assign a User Configuration policy which enforces the background wallpaper as backinfo.bmp, which is the file produced by BackInfo.

If you like to see other information, you want to change the font or anything like that, you can just edit the backinfo.ini file you copied over to do all sorts of things. The file is really well commented which makes it easy to do also.