David Vielmetter

Adventures in stupid technology

  • Office365 planning – don’t change the region

    According to Microsoft customer support, to change regions on a Office365 subscription, you must backup and then destroy the entire subscription and all account data, then recreate it in the region you want to move to. Sound crazy? I thought so. Let’s take this example: You’ve got a large international firm with several offices around…

  • Reinstall Microsoft Office 2010 on a Dell

    If you purchased a Dell with Microsoft Office pre-installed in the past few years, chances are all you got in the box was a Operating System recovery DVD and small paper card with the Microsoft Office product key on it. Should you find yourself in the situation where the systems hard drive has failed and…

  • Restoring a Windows 2008 R2 domain controller from a Windows Server Backup BMR image

    This article is designed to showcase the process of restoring a primary domain controller running Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 server standard. In a previous article I described a cost effective way for small businesses to approach a data loss prevention (DLP) and/or backup disaster recovery (BDR) plan. Implementing any DLP/BDR strategy without testing is risky…

  • Excel 2010 ribbon tab unresponsive when opening spreadsheet

    This is yet another reason file preview should never have been implemented in Windows explorer by Microsoft…though truth be told this bug has been resolved in later version of Office 2010 and Office 2013. Here’s the problem: After opening an xls or xlsx file, the ribbon at the top containing various commands named HOME, INSERT,…

  • Five steps to take for pretty good DL/DR protection

    I see a lot of small businesses unprepared for data loss prevention and disaster recovery. Implementing a DLP/BDR plan can be a daunting task if you start searching for solutions via Google both in terms of scope and finances as well. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. I’m not saying that BDR and…

  • Dllhost has gone haywire because of poweliks

    Dllhost.exe spawning multiple instances may seem suspicious but it is not necessarily a virus. Dllhost.exe is a wrapper application that is part of Windows 7 and can be used to run DLL files as applications and running some DLL’s as threads can be legit windows system activity. Last week, however, I had a workstation exhibiting…

  • VMWare guest time is incorrect

    By default, VMWware ESX/ESXi hosts setup guest virtual machines to sync the time with the host (or hypervisor). This is great if you’ve remembered to set the host up to sync itself with an external Network Time Protocol (NTP) server or NTP pool like pool.ntp.org. If you forgot, however, then you can be in a…

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