Installing Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 from USB Drive

One configuration that I’ve recently ran into is installing it into a machine with no CD drive of any means. I know I could carry around a USB-based DVD drive but instead, I wanted to have a USB drive to install it from. After some research, I found that it was relatively easy to create such a tool! Either mount … Read More

Resetting a Polycom Phone to Factory Defaults

Sometimes when you get a used Polycom phone to save a few bucks you need to reset it to the factory defaults.   You can try to format the phone to see if that helps clear out any old settings. Press the phone’s Menu button. Select Settings. Select Advanced. Type in the password 456 and press Enter. Select Admin Settings. … Read More

Adobe Distiller/Acrobat Issue – Cambria not found, using Courier.

Ran into a weird issue printing emails today to PDF format.  Once the PDF was created it was actually just a text file that has some text that looked like this: Cambria not found, using Courier. %%[ Error: invalidfont; OffendingCommand: xshow ]%% Turns out this is a fairly well known issue and one workaround that enabled us to print was … Read More

32-bit Adobe with 64-bit Outlook

Trying to use the Send Email… option in Adobe Reader or Acrobat but you have 64-bit Microsoft Office installed?  After dealing with this issue for many months I finally got tired of it and found a solution.  It involves editing the registry so you have to be careful, but once you are done it will work like you think it … Read More

Quick way to generate a partially random string in T-SQL

Had a need to generate a partially random string in a SQL proc today.  Came up with the following that is pretty short and sweet: CAST(CAST(newid() as varchar(40)) as varchar(8)) Idea was originally inspired from this link: http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=59194 and the post by robvolk…

Active Directory domain controllers out of sync

We ran into a problem with one of our domain controllers that was not connected for an extended period of time where it could not sync changes properly when available again.  There is a solution from Microsoft to resolve this issue. We have repeated the knowledge base article here just in case it is not available on Microsoft’s site.  The … Read More

Fix Outlook Web Access (OWA) on Windows 7 and Vista

There is an issue using OWA on Windows 7 and Windows Vista which makes Outlook Web Access (OWA) unusable.  To fix this requires a hotfix to be installed on the Exchange Server.  The details of this hotfix can be found at the below link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911829

Interesting feature within Windows 7

Windows users are excited over the discovery of a hidden “GodMode” feature that lets users access all of the operating system’s control panels from within a single folder.  In order to enable this feature all you need to do is to create a new folder and then rename the folder to the following: GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} Once that is done, the folder’s … Read More

Mail Merge from Microsoft Outlook

Created a short video about how to do a Mail Merge from Microsoft Outlook using the Categories option for Contacts. See all the details here