Category: Windows Server

In this video we explore the 10 features in the Microsoft Edge Chrome based browser that you should be using but probably aren’t. We cover: Immersive Mode with Read Outloud PDF Markup Reopen Closed Tabs Home Page Daily News 9 Dot App Selector for Office365 Apps Coupons & Competitor Pricing Changing your search engine to Google or something else Cross platform experience on Mac, iOS, Android, Windows and Linux improves consistency Defender Smart Screen, even…

Unless you are  very new to using Windows, you will know that Microsoft has made enormous strides in driver management over the decades.  The Driver Roll Back feature has saved our butts a few times.  However, there is still one area that is seriously lacking and that is the removal of old or unused drivers. Fortunately someone with the affable moniker LostInTheDark wrote a dandy freeware utility to manage the Windows driver store and posted…

If you are having problems with your printers or queues, there are several steps to take to clear the system and we will go through them in order of easiest to most difficult: 1 – Easy Print Resets Click START and type PRINTERS Click on the printer you want to remove and select REMOVE DEVICE button   2 – Intermediate Print System Resets Remove Windows printing Features: Click START and type FEATURES, then click on…

What is BIOS? BIOS is the acronym for Basic Input Output System.  A BIOS is the firmware (meaning that it is changable code stored in a physical chip) that tells the operating system SOFTware what the physical HARDware is capable of.  Without a UEFI / BIOS, Windows, Linux, Android, MacOS, iOS… would not know if the system needs a keyboard, has a touch screen, has unused memory slots, requires the hard drive to be decrypted…

Since the last Windows 10 upgrade one of our staff noticed that Windows File Explorer did not show their profile path (We are always on beta’s which change every few weeks to there is little point to explaining the build details).  Specifically, the missing user is “Calgary” and so the profile is stored in C:\USERS\CALGA but as you can see in the screen shot below, that user name does not appear. If I manually enter…

We recently tried to connect to the administrative shares (i.e. C$, E$, admin$, …) on a PC that was not part of a Domain using a Microsoft Account that was setup on that remote PC. We were frustrated to find it errored out with “You might not have permission to use this network resource” After a few hours of poking around we found the root cause was in User Access Control (UAC). What is User…

We recently licensed a copy of Windows Server 2016 from a website named Digital Software Planet.  There instructions were to download and install a 180 day evaluation copy of Server 2016 from the Microsoft Evaluation center.  They also provided a standard product license key but when we entered it we were unhappy to see it respond with THIS EDITION CANNOT BE UPGRADED The solution was to remove the evaluation CAB and activate via command line and…

A disk “partition” is just a logical slice of a hard drive.  Logical means that you still only have a single drive but it is virtually cut into pieces so that if one partition has a problem, the whole disk will not fail. Let’s look at each of the different partitions you are likely to see on a hard drive running Windows 10 or Windows Server: 1- What is the RECOVERY Partition? The Recovery Partition…

If you are a system administrator or even a desktop support person, finding out information on a remote users computer is something you need to know how to do.  Fortunately, Microsoft has made quite a number of commands easy to use. Here are some of the remote commands we use frequently.  Just right click on the START button and select POWERSHELL as an Administrator that has permission to the remote computer and try these short…