Activate Office 2010 manually

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To force Microsoft Office 2010 to activate manually open a command prompt (I assume with elevated privileges):

For 32bit:

cscript “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs” /act

For 64bit:

cscript “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs” /act

This is assuming that you’ve given Office a product key.  I also think this will work for Office 2013 by changing the Office14 to Office15 because that same ospp.vbs script is present in my copy of Office 2013.  I’m not sure if this works for retail versions of Office.  I only deal with volume licenses in my environment.

Add “Run as Different User” to right click of icon on Windows 8 start screen

By default right clicking on an icon on the Windows 8 start screen gives you the option to run an app as administrator but that just runs the app as the logged in user with elevated privileges.

What if you want to run the app as a totally different user?  You have to tweak a local group policy to add it.

Press the Windows key and R to get the Run dialogue box.

Type:  gpedit.msc

Navigate to User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Start Menu and Taskbar

In the right Window pane look for: Show “Run as different user” command on Start
If you click the Setting column it’ll sort the settings alphabetically.

Click Enabled then Ok.

To force the change to take effect press the Windows key and R again.

Type:  gpupdate /force

RunAsDiffUser

Now you should see Run as Different User when you right click an icon on the start screen.

RunAsDiffUser2

 

Remove “Test Mode” from desktop of Windows 8.1

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Windows 8.1 released today.  I’ve been using it since they released it to Technet and MSDN subscribers last month.  It’s had an annoying “Test Mode Windows 8.1 Pro Build 9600” message on the desktop since I installed it.  I finally took time today to find out how to get rid of it.

Launch a command prompt as Administrator.

Type:  bcdedit -set TESTSIGNING OFF

Reboot.

No more Test Mode message.

Windows81TestMode

Update (10/20/2013):  I’ve had one commenter say this doesn’t work for non-Pro versions of Windows 8.1.  I haven’t verified this.

Internet Explorer Maintenance settings within Group Policy not getting applied for Internet Explorer 10

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I’m a big fan of Microsoft.  I prefer nearly all of their products to the competitors.  Windows RT?  Love it.  Windows Phone?  Love it.  Microsoft Office?  Mostly love it.  Hotmail, SQL Server, Windows Server, Windows 7 and 8, Exchange Server and more I use and like a lot.  Sometimes though I have to scratch my head and wonder what someone at Microsoft was thinking.  Exchange 2013 brought a lot of good improvements.  The web interface for managing it is great.  There’s several things they changed that I’m still scratching my head about (mailbox delegation, anti-spam functionality and a few others).

Today I’m scratching my head about changes to Group Policy regarding Internet Explorer 10.  I have a handful of generic domain accounts that I don’t want on the internet.  They can access a few internet sites but mostly just intranet sites are allowed.  Up to this point I use Group Policy – Internet Explorer Maintenance settings to control that stuff.    You can enforce proxy settings and exceptions.  So, I make these generic users have a proxy address of 127.0.0.1 for all internet traffic and I feed it a list of exceptions I want to allow.  It’s not full proof, I know.  A slightly savvy user could get around these restrictions a few different ways but I’m not concerned with that.  I just want to make sure I’m doing something to block the normal user.

Here’s another head scratcher.  Why are there all kinds of Internet Explorer settings under the Administrative Templates/Windows Components/Internet Explorer and yet no connection settings there?  Why not just put the connection settings there and be done with it?  There’s probably a perfectly good explanation for that, surely.

Anyways, I’ve been loading several new Windows 7 machines and I noticed they were able to access the internet after running all of the Windows updates.  What’s up with that?  Well after much head scratching and running gpresult and web searches I finally find a document about how the Internet Explorer Maintenance settings were deprecated in favor of the Group Policy preferences.  Here is a document about the replacements as well.

Ok, I’m used to change.  I try new phones and tablets and devices all the time.  I can adapt.  I poke around and try to setup a set of preferences for IE 10.  You have to create the preferences in the Internet Settings of your group policy.  It’s a little funky.  You have to right click and select new.  Well I do that and there’s two items “Internet Explorer 5 and 6” and “Internet Explorer 7.”  Huh?  I’m doing the group policy editing on a Server 2008 machine with Service Pack 2 installed.  There’s no option for IE 8,9 or 10 (Oh, and what happens when 11,12 and 13 come out?).  Sheesh.  (What’s the gorilla have to do with this post?  Nothing.  His look is how I’m feeling at this point.)

More head scratching, more web searches and finally I find someone that says you can only make Internet Explorer 10 preference settings on a machine with Group Policy editor  running Windows 8 or Server 2012.  I haven’t deployed Windows 8 just yet but my workstation is running it.  So, I install the Remote Server Administration Tool for Windows 8.1.  This give me the Group Policy editor, I launch it using a Domain Admin account and now I can see a set Preference settings for “Internet Explorer 8 and 9”  and “Internet Explorer 10.”  Sweet!  I’m almost there right?  Nope.

Next I go through and create a set of preferences for Internet Explorer 10 and I set the home page and the proxy settings and the exclusions.  Go back to the Windows 7 machine I started with and run gpupdate /force.  Open Internet Explorer and……only a few of the preferences I configured are set.  The proxy address isn’t and the exclusions aren’t.  Seriously?  I’m getting tired and irritated by now.

More head scratching, more web searches and I run across a forum post where someone explains the green lines and the red dashed lines that are on the settings screen.  I saw them but didn’t really take notice of them.  Well the red dashed lines means that setting “may” getting applied and the green line means that setting will always get applied.   There’s nothing on the screen that indicates this nor is there anything that says that you can change it from red dashed to green.  You have to hit F6 on the setting to change it from red dashed to green.  You can hit F7 to change it from green to red dashed.

IE10GroupPolicySettings

After changing those things and running gpupdate /force on my Windows 7 machine the settings are applied and all is well.  Until someone at Microsoft decides to change it to something else.  Or IE 11 comes out.  Or the moon becomes full.

How to launch XBMC on startup in Windows 8

I’ve yet to find a device or software that I like as much as XBMC for streaming videos from a local network on a TV.
My Roku tends to get used mostly for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Pandora.  There still not a good local network streaming app on the Roku that doesn’t rely on transcoding.  I like the pure experience of viewing a video file, no matter the type (avi,mpg,mp4,mkv,etc.)   XBMC does this and gives my videos a good looking interface.  For this reason I use a small PC (Intel NUC with Core i3, model DC3217IYE) for streaming videos from my local network.

I recently upgraded my HTPC to Windows 8 which like a lot.  The problem is the Windows Start Screen gets in the way and doesn’t easily let a desktop app run full screen at start up.  I poked around the web and found a few methods for getting it running but didn’t really like any of them too well.  Putting a shortcut in the start up folder doesn’t necessarily work.  There’s a group policy you can change that sets XBMC to be the default interface but then you can’t easily get back to the desktop when you want to.  Then I found XBMC launcher and it took care of my whole setup with minimum configuration.

The application is perfect and super easy to use.  It even adds some power icons to the desktop and or start screen.

Because of the nature of the internet and how things tend to disappear sometimes I have a copy of the current install (version 4.0) on my site here.  You should try to get it from the XBMC site itself though to make sure you have the most recent version.

Outlook won’t open Internet links – Operation cancelled due to restrictions…

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Microsoft Outlook started displaying the following error message when clicking on links within emails on one of my PCs.

restrictions-error

“This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.”

So I get “contacted” but have no idea why it’s doing that!  So a Bing search later and I find a registry fix.
It has something to do with Google Chrome being uninstalled from a PC and it doesn’t set the links back to the right defaults.

The following instructions (found here) fixed the issue for me:

If you received this error after uninstalling any application that takes over the HTML open command (including, but not limited to, Chrome & Firefox browsers) you may also need to change the HTM/HTML association in the registry.

  1. Start, click Run, type Regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
  2. Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.html
  3. Right click the value for the .html key and select Modify…
  4. Change the value from “ChromeHTML” to “htmlfile” (or from FireFoxHTML to htmlfile)
  5. Repeat for .htm, shtml, .xht, .xhtml, .xhtm keys

Error trying to create virtual machine on Windows 8 – Failed to add device Microsoft Synthetic Ethernet port

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I received the following error message trying to create a Windows 7 virtual machine on Windows 8:
Failed to add device ‘Microsoft Synthetic Ethernet port’

I found people saying to disable your anti-virus which I did and still received the error.
On a whim I renamed the title of the Windows 7 virtual machine from Windows 7 to Windows7 with no space.
For some reason that fixed it and it created the virtual machine.  Weird, but easy fix.

Turn off Defender on Windows RT

Windows RT Logo

The Surface tablet includes Windows Defender as a service which causes a slight performance hit.  Not major but it’s something that doesn’t need to be running (in my opinion).

To turn it off:

1. Open regedit. Find HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Defender
2. Take ownership of the key and add write permissions to yourself (Right click Windows Defender key, click Permissions, click Additional settings, click Owner, type your username and accept. Now on the Permissions window click Add, type your username and check Full Access and click OK)
3. Change the value of DisableAntispyware to 1
4. Reboot

 

Force Windows Update check from command line

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Here are a few commands for running the Windows Update Agent from a command line:

Force detection of updates:
wuauclt /detectnow

Force reporting status to an Windows Update Server:
wuauclt /r /ReportNow

Stop and start the automatic updates service:
net stop wuauserv
net start wuauserv

To help troubleshooting here’s where the log is normally.
%systemroot%\WindowsUpdate.log

Some more documentation on Microsoft’s Technet site.