Category: Windows Server 2008 R2

Mac OS X Mavericks Breaks SMB Network Shares

Well, my wife and I had a rude surprise today when her MacBook Air would no longer connect to our Windows Home Server. The operating system on the MacBook Air had been upgraded to Mac OS X 10.9 (AKA Mavericks) a while ago but this problem seemed to only manifest itself earlier this week. The …

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Scheduled Tasks and Windows Account Lock Outs

Just sharing a rather frustrating experience of mine from the last few days. As is the case with many large companies, the fleet of computers is managed via Active Directory and one or more domains. Users main interaction with AD would be in the form of authentication with a username and password but also for …

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How to get the Fitbit Base Station Working with Windows Server

Admittedly, this is perhaps a narrow topic but something I would share given power saving efforts at home. Given that I don’t want to leave a desktop and/or a laptop computer on for the off chance that I might walk past wearing my Fitbit I thought it’d be best to piggyback off the home server …

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64-Bit Windows and ODBC Drivers

A slightly more technical article for today but something worth mentioning. At work, I am attempting to get a direct connection between MS SQL Server 2008 and an Oracle database. Some might say that such connectivity would bring about the end of the world or a hole might open in the ground and swallow me …

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Learning About Application Compatibility Mode in Windows

Application Properties (Compatibility Tab - Dropdown List)

Yesterday, I wrote about an old game that was a favourite of mine back in school, WinTrek as well as some nostalgia from that time of my life. Anyway, with games written for really old operating systems like Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 you might need to tweak things a little bit to get these …

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Reclaim Space by Emptying the Recycling Bin or Trash

Here’s a quick tip. While some of us may think this is a very obvious tip others may not have any idea about the concept of the Recycle Bin (or simply “Trash” in Mac OS X) and the fact that stuff that’s in there still chews up hard drive space. Sure, these days with drive …

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Diagnose Dataflow Problems: The Traceroute

Traceroute with Unresponsive Hop

Leading on from yesterday’s post about how to do a ping test we move on to another test which might uncover more information about where dataflow problems may be occurring. In a nutshell, a traceroute shows you all of the various entities (also known as “hops”) on the Internet that sit between you and a …

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Open a Command Prompt Quickly in Windows 7

Windows 7 - Open a command prompt from Windows Explorer

Particularly for those of us who work a bit with a command line it can often be a pain to manually change directories if you want to wade more than about four folders deep. Luckily, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 contain a handy little feature to get to a folder quickly. Simply hold …

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Reclaim Space – Remove Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Backup Files

Removing backup files created during service pack installation

One of the hot topics today is the general release of Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 to the public. Whilst it isn’t a ground breaking update in terms of adding new features to Windows 7 (a lot more of the action is related to Windows Server 2008 R2) it does contain a few important …

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Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 Release Imminent

Just a quick update for this evening. The rumour mills are in full swing with reports of the first service pack for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be released very soon. Furthermore, there have been leaked copies of pre-release builds of the unified service pack floating around on the web. As a …

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