Mitch Tulloch, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional and lead author of the just-published (and hot-selling) Windows 7 Resource Kit (Microsoft Press, 2010; ISBN: 9780735627000; 1760 pages), has created a short e-book called “What You Can Do Before You Call Tech Support.” Here are the opening paragraphs:
Your sound card has stopped working, your computer seems sluggish, the network is down, your hard drive is clicking, you can’t view a website, your monitor is hard to read, your new webcam isn’t working, your favorite program won’t run, and a funny burning smell is coming from your computer. What can you do on your own to try to troubleshoot the issue before you pick up the phone to call tech support?
If you’re running Windows 7, quite a lot. Microsoft has included a lot of self-support tools in Windows 7 that you can try using before you seek the help of others, and we’ll examine these in a moment….
You can download the e-book in XPS format here and in PDF format here.
I’ve been trying to schedule a backup of our WSS site using SharePoint SUSHI and had two different problems:
1) After setting required parameters and clicking “Create Scheduled Backup” in the command prompt I was getting the following error: ERROR: Invalid starttime value.
Well, actually the format of the date as it was created was wrong. Possibly just because of the regional Options… The server’s regional options where I run SharePoint site is Italian. So, to go around this I just copied the generated SCHTASK command and modified the time value:
Original command was like this:
D:\>SCHTASKS /create /sc DAILY /mo 1 /tn "Catapult SharePoint Autobackup" /tr "C:\SharePoint Utils\sushi.exe -autostart:Catapult_SharePoint_Autobackup" /s \\WSSSERVERNAME /st 01.00 /F /u DOMAIN\UserName
ERROR: Invalid starttime value. |
I made it look like this in a Notepad:
| SCHTASKS /create /sc DAILY /mo 1 /tn "Catapult SharePoint Autobackup" /tr "C:\SharePoint Utils\sushi.exe -autostart:Catapult_SharePoint_Autobackup" /s \\WSSSERVERNAME /st 18:30 /F /u /RU DOMAIN\UserName /RP password |
After running this command in a command prompt window the tasks was successfully created. However, there I have encountered another problem to resolve as described in point 2.
2) When I tried to Run the scheduled task the I got the following error:
"Catapult SharePoint Autobackup.job" (SharePoint) 2/4/2010 8:48:00 AM ** ERROR **
Unable to start task.
The specific error is:
0×80070005: Access is denied.
Try using the Task page Browse button to locate the application.
Searching Internet led me to Microsoft’s KB article related to this error, however in my case the error was due to the ‘space’ character in the folder path: “D:\SharePoint Utils\sushi.exe“. Simply renaming the folder name and modifying the task with correct path resolved this problem.
Hope this information will help someone who has encountered the same problem.
Anyone ever had difficulties with small font size when browsing some web pages (this happens to me especially when I browse TechNet) with Mozilla FireFox and noticed that some parts of text are extremely small like in the bellow image?
This can be easily fixed in FireFox as follows:
- Select Tools => Options
- Click on ‘Content’ tab => Advanced
- Now change the minimum font size to a desired value.
When you pass to Windows 7 from Windows XP you will notice that the Windows Explorer doesn’t explode by default the folder you’re currently browsing in the left pane.
To bring back this functionality you can do the following:
- Click ALT button on your keyboard to bring the menu.
- Click Tools => Folder options…
- Enable ‘Show all folders’ and ‘Automatically expand to current folder’.
- Enjoy!
When you install XP Mode on Windows 7 by default all the virtual machine files are saved under “%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Virtual PC\Virtual Machines\”. The file that has *.vhd extension is a virtual hard disk file. Recently, I had to move the vhd file to another drive and I accomplished it this way:
1) Run Windows XP Mode virtual machine and go to Tools –> Settings
2) Then select Close and in the right side click “Prompt for action”
3) Click OK and close virtual machine. This time when you close it the following window will appear:
4) Select Shut down and click OK. The virtual machine will shutdown.
5) Now, click Start button, enter the following path:“%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Virtual PC\Virtual Machines\” without quotation marks and hit Enter.
6) This will open the folder where the virtual machine file reside. Move the vhd file to desired location by cutting and pasting.
7) Once done moving the file, open the ‘vmc’ file with Notepad, which is a configuration file of the virtual machine. VMC file is an xml formatted file containing configuration of the virtual machine. Find the line that refers to vhd file location. For example “XP Mode.vhd” with the full path in front of it. Modify the path accordingly to point to a new location:
Now you may start the XP mode virtual machine.
The following T-SQL statements will print the logical name and physical location of system database files:
USE master;
GO
SELECT name, physical_name AS CurrentLocation, state_desc
FROM sys.master_files
WHERE database_id = DB_ID(N'master')
SELECT name, physical_name AS CurrentLocation, state_desc
FROM sys.master_files
WHERE database_id = DB_ID(N'tempdb')
SELECT name, physical_name AS CurrentLocation, state_desc
FROM sys.master_files
WHERE database_id = DB_ID(N'model')
SELECT name, physical_name AS CurrentLocation, state_desc
FROM sys.master_files
WHERE database_id = DB_ID(N'msdb')
Result:
This will get the list of all languages supported by the SQL Server 2008 Full-Text Search:
Code Snippet
- – to determine run_value corresponding to locale [LCID - LoCale IDentifier]
- SELECT lcid, name FROM sys.fulltext_languages
Result:
lcid name
———– ———————————————–
5124 Chinese (Macau SAR)
4100 Chinese (Singapore)
3098 Serbian (Cyrillic)
3082 Spanish
3076 Chinese (Hong Kong SAR, PRC)
2074 Serbian (Latin)
2070 Portuguese
…………….
1036 French
1033 English
1031 German
1028 Traditional Chinese
1027 Catalan
1026 Bulgarian
1025 Arabic
76 76
69 69
25 25
13 13
1 1
0 Neutral
(53 row(s) affected)
The following query will bring the list of system stopwords corresponding to the English locale:
Code Snippet
- – list all stopwords corresponding to 1033 locale [English]
- SELECT * FROM sys.fulltext_system_stopwords
- WHERE language_id = 1033
When this query is run 154 records containing system stopwords will be returned.
Here’s a documentation available from Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A3C9C3E3-11FC-446A-AC12-F6AD0749CB50&displaylang=en
Also, you can download it here:
Business Notification Installation Guide
Describes how to install the Business Notification Client and the Business Notification Server.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 5.0 Security Hardening Guide
Recommends best practices for managing security with a Microsoft Dynamics NAV installation.
Application Designer’s Guide (w1w1adg.pdf)
Provides information about the C/SIDE development environment for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
Installation & System Management: Application Server for Microsoft Dynamics NAV (w1w1atas.pdf)
Read more…
