Windows Server

Are you using the standard DISM command to activate your Windows and finding it is stuck at 10%: Dism /online /Set-Edition:ServerStandard /AcceptEula /ProductKey:12345-12345-12345-12345-12345 Deployment Image Servicing and Management toolVersion: 10.0.14393.0Image Version: 10.0.14393.0Starting to update components…Starting to install product key…Finished installing product key.Removing package Microsoft-Windows-ServerStandardEvalEdition~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.14393.0[=====               Read more…

If you are struggling to activate your Windows Server and see ERROR 0X0C004F074 The Software Licensing Service reported that the computer could not be activatedwe have the answer. What does error is probably trying to tell you is that The server is trying to connect to a key management server Read more…

If you are an administrator, or even just a curious power user, there will come a time when you will want to know who shutdown a computer, or who logged off of a computer last. How To Tell Who Shutdown a Windows Computer If you want to know who logged Read more…

In this short article we are going to explain several things that all tech’s need to understand both the Delivery Optimization service in Windows. 1 – What is the Windows Delivery Optimization Service (WUDO)? The Windows Delivery Optimization Service (aka WUDO) let’s your computer pull parts of updates from computers Read more…

In this video, we’ll show you how to easily find the root cause of a Windows Blue Screen / Green Screen of Death. We’ll show you how to open, read, and analyze mini-dump files from crashes. Whether you’re experiencing a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) or a Green Screen of Read more…

This one has bothered us for a while and tonight I decided to dig in and figure it out. With a number of our clients we have to log into the console to do patching and the only way we could run that in the past was to manually start Read more…

We’ve recently had a situation in which a client could not see a number of files on their C drive even though they had turned on hidden files, as you can see in the see: However if you look at the bottom right corner of that screenshot you will see Read more…

A common question we have receive every year is, What files can be safely deleted from my C drive to free up space? As a result we have written several articles explaining what files and folders can safely be deleted including THIS one from a few months ago, but today Read more…

If you are new to Microsoft Edge as a browser you might be surprised to find that under the hood it’s actually running on Google Chrome which is why so many of the features are so similar. However there is still a pile of new icons and new features in Read more…

What Does CHKDSK /SPOTFIX Do? CHKDSK /SPOTFIX is a new feature of Check Disk that became available with Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 and is exclusive to NTFS partitions. /SPOTFIX scans only the areas that have been detected as problematic by NTFS, instead of the whole drive. As a Read more…

In this short article we are going to provide half a dozen answers to common Local System account questions. What is The Local System Account In Windows? The Local System account is a user account created when the operating system is installed and is used primarily to run Windows Services Read more…

The Virtual Disk Service (VDS) is a dead communications API (application program interface) that was replaced in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 with the new Storage Management API. VDS was a COM service which is a loose way to allow programs communicate. You can think of COM as in Read more…

It is not clear to even most experienced administrators why they might see the error message: even when they are administrators on the local machine or domain administrators which have FULL CONTROL specified in the NTFS security tab. The reason is because the folder in question is missing a critical Read more…

We like and use CCleaner even at our large corporate clients but over the years it has had some serious problems and today we particularly don’t like that it almost surreptitiously wants to run in the background, monitor our staff and chew up resources. CCleaner for Windows Hacked to Spread Read more…