Quick Fix: Office 2013 Activation Failure

December 11, 2013 by 7 Comments

microsoft_office_2013I have had several occurrences now of Office 2013 failing to activate. This is on brand new PCs with a trial of 2013 installed, or partially installed and after i have registered the key with a Live ID.

I read on a forum that one possible solution to the failure to activate was to go into an Office application, go to File, then Account and use the change license button to enter a new key. The problem was, it didn’t have that option listed. Read more of this post

Filed under General, PowerShell, Tips & Tricks Tagged with ,

Windows Server 2012 R2–November Update Rollup

November 13, 2013 by Leave a comment

Logo1Another quick announcement – November UR for 2012 R2, Windows RT 8.1 & Windows 8.1 includes no fewer than 15 fixes for issues that will also affect Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2887595

The most interesting fix to those deploying Essentials R2 may be:

KB 2898803 All client backup settings are removed after you start the Windows Server Essentials Management Service in Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials

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Updates for Colorado based OS– Home Server 2011 & SBS Essentials

November 13, 2013 by Leave a comment

sbse-conA busy week for Updates for the Colorado product line, which is made up of SBS 2011 Essentials, Windows Home Server 2011 and Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials.

KBs 2885313, 314 and 315 respectively fix issues around IE 11 and 404 Directory not found issues.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2885313 – SBS 2011 Essentials

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2885314 – Windows Home Server 2011

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2885315 – Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials

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Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials –You do not have permission to open the dashboard.

November 11, 2013 by 5 Comments

A question came up in the Essentials Forum recently which prompted me to build quite a large lab, and not even manage to repro the issue. The issue affects both the Essentials Role and the SKU., but it does not appear to affect R1.

The symptoms were, that a user of the Domain Admins was unable to open the Dashboard, being greeted instead with this error..

You do not have permission to open the dashboard

Read more of this post

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Unknown Device–Find a driver?

October 25, 2013 by Leave a comment

DriverHave you ever needed to find a driver for something, when you have not actually known what the device is?

It sounds silly i know, but if you ever reinstall a PC you may end up with a tonne of ‘unknown’ devices in Device Manager and having exhausted the available drivers on the manufacturers website, may be scratching your head as to what the device even is, let alone what driver to try. Read more of this post

Filed under General, Quick Fix, Tips & Tricks

Quick Fix: x64 printing on an x86 (32bit) PC NTPrint.inf

October 1, 2013 by 5 Comments

Just a very quick post, i was installing a new x64 Windows 7 machine today, and needed to install a shared printer from an x86 Windows 7 pc. I could only download a generic x64 bit driver for the printer which we will get to in a moment, but first let’s remember that we need to install the x64 driver, on the 32bit pc first.

I am going to use x86 or 32bit interchangeably, so try to keep up!

I found the relevant driver from the manufacturer website, and downloaded it. When adding that as an additional driver, through Devices and Printers (print server properties), it was asking me to locate ‘ntprint.inf’ from the Windows x64 media. Read more of this post

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Essentials 2012 R2 – The Role & Licensing

September 17, 2013 by 45 Comments

explodinghead2In conversation with some Microsoft folks recently we found out about some, what ill call, small print, in the EULA of Essentials and Essentials R2.

If you had previously purchased Server 2012 Standard, and exercised down grade rights to install a copy of Essentials, you may be surprised to learn that ‘to the letter of the law’ you would therefore be required to purchase Server CALs and more expensively RDS CALs if you intended to use the RWA feature to remote access client computers.

Read more of this post

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