Adventures in stupid technology
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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…
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Downloads folder is slow to list items
To me, there are few things worse than an intermittent computer problem…yea I know that’s a first world problem, but the occasional listing delay on the Download folder in Windows 7 definitely qualifies as one of those annoyances for me. I’ve just never had enough time to really analyze the problem and figure out what’s…
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Screenr – a tool for error reporting
UPDATE: Screenr has closed. Screencast-o-matic is my preferred replacement: http://screencast-o-matic.com With ever more complex business process software, the bugs are often deeply embedded within a process or sequence of steps. Unless you perform the sequence precisely, chances of reproducing the error, bug or crash are slim to none. This makes it difficult for developers and support…
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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…
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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…
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Redirected folders and offline files
In a Windows 2003 Active Directory forest with group policies disabling offline files, Windows 7 systems can have issues if you’ve redirected folders via GPO. In my experience new Windows 7 systems joined to the AD domain would automatically start syncing re-directed folders such as My Documents and Desktop as if they were made available…
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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…
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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.…
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PresentationFontCache.exe hogging 50% CPU
Ran into an issue where in Windows 7 x64 the PresentationFontCache.exe process was taking an excessive amount of CPU resources and would not stop even after a clean boot. Here are the steps I took to resolve this: [step 1] Click start and type services.msc into the search bar. Now find the Windows Presentation Foundation…