David Vielmetter

Adventures in stupid technology

  • 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…

  • Locate which folder a found email is stored in

    Got a ton of folders/sub-folders in Outlook and want to know which one that email you found is stored in? Here’s how to do it: [step 1] Open the email message by double clicking it in the search result window. [step 2] Click File and note that next to the Move to folder button the…

  • Disable HDMI hot plug detection in Windows 7

    Whether you’re running Windows Media Center or another homebrew HTPC/DVR where Windows 7 is the underlying operating system, you may have noticed that HDMI hot plug detection can be extremely annoying. New receivers that allow you to switch between different HDMI connected entertainment devices, often also register an HDMI hot-plug or auto-detect event in Windows…

  • Outlook 2013 cannot open default OST file

    Microsoft Outlook 2013 can be finicky with add-ins. IMHO it’s more touchy about them than Outlook 2010, but that’s open to debate. Long story short, Outlook 2013 on Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 can run into issues where it doesn’t terminate all processes after a user closes the program. Consequently, the user no longer sees…