Category: Windows
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Moving a micro-business to Office 365
I am presently freelancing again (call me on +447989381331) if you need an experienced Project Manager) and I am tidying up my own IT system. I strongly believe that Office 365 is the future of IT for all sizes of business. It is still very painful at the bleeding edge but core activities such as…
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Cloning or Restoring a drive also restores bad block list!
When you clone or restore a drive, for example when replacing an HDD with and SSD or doing a restore from a Veeam backup you also copy over the list of bad blocks from the old drive. Chkdsk will report no errors but Veeam (or other backup software might). To fix this run, chkdsk /b…
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Microsoft breaks Outlook.com for users with two email addresses
Microsoft’s forced migration of users from the old Outlook.com infrastructure based on Hotmail to the new one based on Exchange hit me today. I can no longer send emails from my business address and Outlook 2016 desktop is broken. This is partly because because the new system is unreliable and partly because Microsoft is going…
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(Fixed) Remote desktops are tiny on hdpi screens
The Microsoft Surface 4 Pro has a very high dpi screen (hdpi) this results in remote computers having tiny unreadable screens when you connect with Microsoft’s built in RDP client. You can zoom but this breaks the windowing. After some testing I found an autoscaling client that works well. http://www.mremoteng.org/download
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Powershell on Linux
In a previous post I compared Powershell with Bash. With recent announcements that Bash is supported on Windows and Powershell on Linux system admins have more freedom than ever. This matters to me as an occasional system admin. I find it very difficult to remember how to administer both systems at the command prompt. It…
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Laptops and 2 in 1 for use with a pen
I am doing work in a school and we are developing our mobile device strategy carefully. At present we believe that devices with touch screens that support pen input may be very useful. We have several teachers who find that pen input on the Microsoft Surface range transforms the way that they work and want…
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[Fixed] Windows 10 roaming profiles break Edge and other packaged applications
— Update 2017-12-15 — I think Roaming Profiles are now deprecated. I will be moving all my users to Local Profiles supplemented by User Experience Virtualisation (UE-V) over the next 12 months. See comments below. — I have recently been imaging Microsoft Surface 3 computers for use by staff in a school. All our staff…
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Edge and packaged apps won’t launch in Windows 10
We have a Windows 7 domain and don’t use any packaged applications. These were introduced with Windows 8 and allow the secure distribution and installation of apps from an app store. Windows 8 and Windows 10 both give access to the Windows Store and it is (or will be) possible to have a Company Store…
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A WMI filter to target Windows 10 computers
We have a domain with over 900 Windows 7 computers and we are starting to test Windows 10. It is useful to be able to target Group Policies at just Windows 10 devices and to do this we can use a WMI filter. Now we are introducing Windows 10 computers to our domain we need…
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How to restore a Surface image
Regular readers of this blog will know that I have recently published a definitive guide to backing up your home computer in which I say that home users should not rely on System Images for system backup because restoring them is so unreliable. This does not apply to corporate users who often purchase large numbers…
Dr James Bayley 