Category: Microsoft

Outlook.com Android configuration (Exchange)

Chris Stark Leave a comment

Since the new Outlook.com has been launched, though still in beta. I have been considering moving from Google Apps to this. Mean reason being, I have a 25GB SkyDrive limit which I’m fully using and seem to prefer SkyDrive to Google Documents and I really like the new Outlook.com interface.

You can configure Outlook.com as an Exchange mail account on Android. To do this fire up the mail app and add a new account.

Enter in your full outlook.com email “user@outook.com” or if you’re using a personal domain via outlook use “user@domain.com” and your password. When asked what type of account this is, choose Exchange.

For domain/username enter in your full email address, enter in your password and for server change from Outlook.com to snt-m.hotmail.com and click next and follow the remaining steps (naming account etc).

So that’s emails via outlook.com delivered to your phone and contacts should also appear in the contacts app via Android.

To export emails if you’re using Google Apps, I found using Thunderbird with IMAP to grab the emails and easy way to do so.

To recap:

Domain/user: user@outlook.com or user@domain.com
Password: “Your password”
Server: snt-m.hotmail.com

Microsoft Office 2010 – Activation, Allow non-admin user to activate manually

Chris Stark 1 Comment

If you’re having trouble trying to get Microsoft Office 2010 to activate over a proxy because it times out too quickly and there’s no easy way to get around this, you can grant the user the ability to activate Office 2010 manually which should resolve the issue. By default a user with admin rights will be able to activate office.

The following is displayed when a non-admin user tries to activate Office 2010:

“This action requires Administrator privileges. Please contact a system administrator for future assistance”

To overcome this, you can change a simple registry key:

Start > Run > Notepad

Paste the following:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform]
"UserOperations"=dword:00000001

File > Save As > Office2010Activation.reg – Save as type: All Files.

This will allow this to be automated via GroupPolicy/ZENworks or something similar.

Updated: Windows 8 Customer Preview – “This app can’t open”

Chris Stark 9 Comments

So I had a Acer netbook 10.1 lying around and thought I would attempt to install Windows 8 so I could get a true experience (minus the touchscreen) of the operating system.

All went well during the installation, until I decided to open up the Store and download some apps only to be greeted with “This app can’t open, The screen resolution is too low for this app to run, change your screen resolution” This occurred for any of the built in apps as well.

Easy to resolve I thought, I’ll just change my screen resolution, except it was already set at the maximum resolution of 800×600.

Windows 8 even states on the screen resolution page that screen resolutions lower than 1024×768 that the apps may not open.

So to conclude Windows 8 seems like it doesn’t like devices with screen resolutions lower than 1024×768 to work properly. Not a big issue, I can still continue to test on VMware Workstation 8. If anyone does know a workaround please let me know (I haven’t done a lot of research for a solution).

Update:

It would seem there’s a way to change the resolution via the registry.

Change the “Display1_DownScalingSupported” setting

I would recommend backing up the registry first, and being careful… but seeing as your probably testing Windows 8 like me… you may just want to take the risk!

To do this, fire up the registry via Windows Key + R to get to the run box, type regedit and click ok.

Then CTRL + F to open the find box and type “Display1_DownScalingSupported” – click Find Next.

Once found you will need to change the value from 0 to 1. There may be more than one “Display1_DownScalingSupported” in the registry, so hit F3 (find next) and change all the values from 0 to 1. On my netbook there was only one option. Others have reported more than one.

Once the values have been changed, restart the netbook and you should be able to change the resolution to a higher value.

Now the apps within Windows 8 should open! 🙂

Windows update broken on XP – Install latest Windows Update Agent 3.0

Chris Stark Leave a comment

Today one of my colleagues was trying to create an image of one of our new Dell machines whilst in the process he tried to use Windows Update and was instead redirected to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2497281. Frustrated, we tried a different proxy server and at first thought it was WSUS causing the issue. Windows Update worked on other PCs no problems.

So we did some research on the Interweb and noticed a few posts by similiar people having the same issue. Seems to have happened over the last week by the sounds of it, have Microsoft broke something?

The fix is to either reinstall Service Pack 3 which is time consuming or obtain the latest Windows Update Agent 3.0 from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949104 which will resolve the issue.