David Vielmetter

Adventures in stupid technology

  • Outlook 2013/2016 stuck on processing splash screen

    Here’s one of the most common complaints of end users running Outlook 2013 or 2016 on Windows 7, 8.1 or 10. Outlook won’t launch and just stays stuck on the blue splash screen with the words starting… or processing… [the problem] Outlook 2013 or Outlook 2016 will not launch and appears to be stuck at the…

  • Removing automapped accounts from Outlook

    Full mailbox access permission and account automapping are a great exchange features. Automapping was introduced in Exchange 2010 and basically uses autodiscover to automatically map all mailboxes in Outlook to which a user has full access permission. Automapping was a boon for Exchange admins who no longer had to walk users through the process of…

  • Switch from compatibility mode or RAID to AHCI in Windows 10

    AHCI stands for Advance Host Controller Interface. It is a newer technology with more features compared to the older “more compatible” Serial ATA standard. Features such as native command queuing (which can offer greater performance by optimizing how controller requests data from the drive) and hot swappable  SATA devices. Most newer systems allow you to…

  • Windows 10 start menu search can’t find applications

    So I got Windows 10 and right out of the box of a fresh Windows 10 install, Cortana would not display any applications in a start menu search. I am able to locate the applications by clicking Start > All apps, but clicking on the start menu and typing say, Calculator, Excel or Outlook yields…

  • Skype for business no audio device?

    You want to use Skype for Business/Lync to just listen to a training session or presentation, but you get an error stating Skype for Business/Lync is unable to connect because no audio device could be found even though your computer may well have working audio and speakers. [the problem] Skype for Business shows the following…

  • The procedure entry point could not be located…

    Recently dealt with an issue where a user received errors when launching a large number of both third party and native Windows 7 applications including notepad.exe. Turns out this started after the user installed an application from the internet that required the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 without having the Visual C++ Redistributable…

  • Find a string and copy its whole line to new file

    The other day I got a zip archive of a hundred xml files. The task was to identify a single key word/phrase (STR_RESTORING_FILE_FAILED) in each xml file that indicated a failure to restore a file (part of a larger job) and create a new file with just line in each xml file that matched the…

  • Quickly deploy Microsoft Office customizations post install

    There are a number of ways to deploy custom Microsoft Office installations using the Office Customization Tool (OCT), but what if Office has already been installed and you need to make some global changes? I’m talking about custom dictionaries, quick access toolbars, save location, backstage, etc. Here’s how to do just that using Group Policy…

  • Deploy Adobe Flash Player using Active Directory GPO

    In this article I’ll be covering how to deploy Adobe Flash Player using a Windows active directory environment. [requirements] Windows Server (2003/2008/2012) Active Directory at functional level 2003 or higher. Windows Professional (XP/VISTA/7/8/8.1) Basic understanding of Group Policy Objects (GPO) and group policy management. Basic understanding of Active Directory, Windows Server and Windows Professional.  …

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