Surface Pro (1st gen) not sleeping since Windows 10 upgrade

I started noticing my Surface Pro (1st gen) was not going to sleep since the upgrade to Windows 10 and was draining my battery. I checked many power options, but found the Surface Type Cover Filter Device Driver was missing.

Note: I am using a Surface Type Cover and not a Surface Touch Cover. If you have a Surface Touch Cover and having issues with the device not sleeping, it may be worth trying this, though do so with caution!

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Windows 10 Technical Preview – Upgrading and Start Menu

I decided to be brave and upgrade my Surface Pro to the Windows 10 Technical Preview. Upon successfully installing I immediately clicked on the windows button… only to notice the start screen/metro interface launched instead of the start menu, little confused.

It seems, well in my case you need to turn the start menu on.

Head to the Control Panel and open Taskbar and Navigation, click the Start Menu tab, tick Use Start menu instead of the Start screen.

EnableStartMenu

 

Click ok, you will need to logoff and then log back in for the changes to take effect. Then BOOM clicking the windows button will now bring the start menu up. 🙂

 

2008R2ClearCache

Server 2008 R2 clear DNS cache to get Internet working on clients

First week of new job and going rather good as well as experiencing some strange behaviour… one of our clients had an unusual error with the Internet not working on all client machines. They were attached to the network fine and the server had Internet access.

Seems there may be a bug in Server 2008 R2 which may require the DNS cache to be cleared… and boom the clients had Internet access….

Within DNS Manager, right click “Cached Lookups” and select “Clear Cache”.

2008R2ClearCache

Upon a further inspection it seems this may be related to KB  968372:  Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 DNS Servers may fail to resolve queries for some top-level domains

I haven’t tried the above fix, but will be worth a try if the issue happens again.

Microsoft Access error – You do not have the necessary permissions to use the…

When trying to open an Microsoft Access 2003 database that has security features enabled you may get the following Microsoft Access error displayed “You do not have the necessary permissions” on newer versions of Access:

You do not have the necessary permissions to use the ‘.mdb’ object. Have your system administrator or the person who created this object establish the appropriate permissions for you.

You do not have the necessary permissions

To overcome this slight problem, you need to create a shortcut and link the MDW (Microsoft Access Workgroup information file) with the MDB .

You will need to create a new shortcut Right click New > Shortcut>. When asked type the location of the item. You will need to enter the following, replacing MDB/MDW> to where your files are located and the version of Office you are using. It may be worth opening notepad so you can get the path right and then copy and paste.

* Please note the quotes are required

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\MSACCESS.EXE" ".mdb" /wrkgrp ".mdw" /user

Replace Office14 with your version of Microsoft Office that is installed. To find this, browse to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\ and note the “Office” folder.

You do not have the necessary permissions

So for example, a correct path would look like:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\MSACCESS.EXE" "c:\test.mdb" /wrkgrp "c:\test.mdw" /user

Before creating the shortcut, you can test if this will work by going Start > Run and pasting the path into the run box and clicking ok, if this fails then the shortcut will fail. Check the quotes and path to ensure they’re correct. Once it opens via the run box you can then create the shortcut.

Now when opening the newly created shortcut you should see the database open as normal and presented with a login screen.

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

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.

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

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.