Category: Tricks

  • Clone Mac with Boot Camp to a new Hard Drive

    My MacBook Pro has been running out of hard disk space for some time. I’m down to less than 1GB of free space on both my Macintosh HD and the Boot Camp Windows 7 partition. So I hopped on NewEgg and got a WD Black 500GB notebook hard drive and 8GB’s of RAM for $150.…

  • HTML Tidy broken in Notepad++

    If you’re running Notepad++ on Windows 7 x64 like me, you’ll notice that after a clean install of v6.1.1 you can no longer use HTML Tidy. This plugin is very useful if you spend lots of time looking at or cleaning up other people’s HTML code. I don’t know where I’d be without HTML Tidy.…

  • WSUS won’t uninstall or re-install

    I don’t like Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), but it’s the free alternative many companies select over the higher cost alternatives like Intune or Systems Center. So, today I had to repair a damaged WSUS installation. Turns out someone uninstalled SQL Server 2005 Express not realizing WSUS was using it. Now firing up the WSUS…

  • All Windows drivers suddenly appear unsigned

    So I saw a strange one today and got to exercise my noodle. An XP SP3 system where all windows drivers including mass (USBSTOR.SYS) suddenly appear unsigned. So, install a printer or pop in a thumb drive, and you get to click “Continue” a gazillion times. As if XP on a production Dell Optiplex 330…

  • QuickBooks license error

    Many software vendors use random pieces of information about your system’s hardware to create a license file. Intuit does this to create a file called EntitlementDataStore.ecml that is used by QuickBooks to determine if you are the rightful owner of QuickBooks. Make a change to your system, however, and you could find yourself getting a…

  • Virtualize an aging server

    If you’re like most businesses, you’ve got a few aging servers in your infrastructure. They are probably running legacy applications you can’t afford to upgrade right now and as long as things still work, you’ve taken the “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” approach to them. Problem is that the hardware these servers are…

  • Print dialog is slow to come up

    So I ran into an issue the other day where a system would take up to 30 seconds to display a print dialog on any installed printer. Almost as if the system was encountering some kind of timeout when trying to render the print dialog. Turns out the problem manifested itself only in applications like…

  • Dell Latitude E6400 Bluetooth woes

    So apparently Dell’s new Latitude E6400 series notebooks come with optional built-in Dell Wireless® 375 Bluetooth (BT) Modules. Unfortunately when the notebook arrives from the factory, the generic Windows BT driver is installed. Although everything looks clean in the device manager, the generic Windows driver is incompatible and you’ll notice this when you try to pair…

  • Merge duplicate Outlook contacts

    So you’ve got a bunch of duplicate contacts in outlook, huh? I know how it happens…you’re out and about and quickly added a contact to your synced iPhone/Blackberry not realizing that he/she already existed. Now you’ve got two of ’em one with an address and one with a couple of phone numbers and an email.…

  • Export iCloud contacts to Outlook

    How to export icloud contacts to outlook