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Fix for Windows 10 2004 ‘Password Amnesia’ Bug

November 17, 2020 by Mike Ellis Leave a Comment

Outlook 2016
Image ©Office.com

Fix for Windows 10 2004 ‘Password Amnesia’ Bug

In troubleshooting a client’s computer, I ran across a workaround for a specific problem he was having: his computer would continually require him to re-enter his login information in Outlook for his email accounts; his Microsoft OneDrive required re-login daily, and his Adobe Acrobat Pro required him to re-login daily. No amount of troubleshooting seemed to make a bit of difference. For the record, here are some of the things I tried:

  1. Check for updates and apply patches on all platforms.
  2. Look for driver updates using manufacturing software programs.
  3. Opened a ticket with the hardware manufacturer.
  4. Performed a Windows 10 reset, while keeping his data. That of course required me to re-install his applications.
  5. Performed a Windows 10 reset and wiped his data. We had backups, of course, and all of his critical data was in the cloud so all was good with restoring his data.
  6. And on and on and on.

It got to the point where I was just about to throw in the towel, which is not something I like to do. But I didn’t; I kept looking, and finally, I found this blog post from ZDNet: Windows 10 Password Problems. As I read through the article, I was seeing the same problems that my client was having. Finally! An answer to the problem. Right now, the answer is a workaround, but this is what I did, per their instructions:

  1. Until Microsoft delivers a fix, its recommended workaround involves right-clicking the Windows 10 Start Button and selecting Windows PowerShell (Admin).
  2. Copy and paste the command below into Windows PowerShell and press Enter.
  3. Get-ScheduledTask | foreach { If (([xml](Export-ScheduledTask -TaskName $_.TaskName -TaskPath $_.TaskPath)).GetElementsByTagName(“LogonType”).’#text’ -eq “S4U”) { $_.TaskName } }
  4. If you see any Tasks listed from the PowerShell output, make a note of them.

Next, go to Windows Task Scheduler and disable any tasks you found from the above command.  Follow these steps:

  1. In the Windows 10 Search box, type Task Scheduler and then open the Task Scheduler app.
  2. Locate the task in the Window (HP Customer participation), or other task from the Windows PowerShell output.
  3. Right-click the task and choose Disable.
  4. After you disable the task, restart Windows.

After the reboot, I did have to provide login credentials again for all of the affected services, but so far, just the one time. I’m continuing tomorrow to see if it’s still fixed. The task that was the problem for me was the same HP Customer Participation that was mentioned over at ZDnet.

Fingers crossed!

Filed Under: Knowledgebase, Security, Tech Solutions, Technology Tagged With: Password, Password Amnesia bug, Task Scheduler, Windows 10, Windows 10 2004, Workaround, zdnet

Laptop Battery Replacement

November 28, 2019 by Mike Ellis Leave a Comment

Not All Laptops are the same

Laptop Battery
Dell Precision 7710

When it comes to laptops, certainly not all of them are the same. Pretty obvious, right? You’ve got different sizes, speeds, capacity requirements, and the list goes on and on. The same is true when you look at your laptop battery.

One thing that is often overlooked, though, when selecting a laptop is the battery. Does your laptop have an easily removable battery, like the Dell Precision 7710 shown above? If so, it’s very easy to purchase a replacement and perform that work on your own. Just take out your old battery and put in the new one.

However, there are cases where a battery is contained inside the laptop, and can not be replaced so easily. One example is my Macbook Pro. The battery is inside the guts of the laptop, which makes replacing the battery more of a chore to accomplish. It is certainly doable if you have the right tools and equipment and patience and care, but these sorts of repairs are often worth having a tech person help out with.

laptop battery

The battery shown above is for an HP laptop. As you can see, this battery will require opening up the laptop to remove the old battery and installing the new. In cases like this, it makes sense to at least talk with an IT service technician to make sure you understand all of the details, and that you get the right battery to begin with also!

Do you have a technology question for me? With my years of experience, I can be of help to you in your technology needs. It can be about today’s post, or any technology related question at all. If so, you can email me at mike@techsolutionsnc.com, or submit your question on our contact form and that will email me directly! Thanks for stopping by, I look forward to hearing from you!

Filed Under: Knowledgebase, Tech Solutions, Technology Tagged With: Battery, Battery Replacement, IT, Laptop, Tech Solutions NC, Technology

Outlook: Max Message Store Errors

October 25, 2019 by Mike Ellis Leave a Comment

Outlook 2016
Image ©Office.com

Microsoft Outlook: Dealing with Maximum Message Store errors

UPDATE: A recent update to Microsoft Outlook appears to have changed these instructions some. Look below for updated information.

Upon occassion, I run into errors with some of my clients with regards to their Microsoft Outlook message store. The Outlook message store is a size limit on how big your .pst or .ost file can get in Microsoft. Once it hits that limit, you will receive errors and be unable to retrieve new mail.

Fortunately, though, the limit of the message store is pretty big, so it isn’t a common issue. Here’s a list of the message store defaults for various versions of Outlook:

Outlook 2003 and 2007

Outlook 2010 and later

20 GB

50GB

The good news is that if you have a client that is pushing the envelope with regards to the size of their message store, you can increase these levels using the Windows Registry Editor.

Windows Registry Editor

  • Search for regedit.msc; this is the application that loads the Registry Editor.
  • Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\xx.0\Outlook\PST (the xx will be a numerical representation depending on the version of Outlook you are running. For Outlook 2016, it will be 16.0)
  • UPDATE: The registry key location is now “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\xx.0\Outlook\PST” – the same numerical representation applies (xx will be replaced with the version of Outlook, so for this example, it would be 16.0)
  • Look for MaxFileSize and WarnMaxFileSize in registry entries. If you don’t see them, make new D-Word entries and name them the names listed. No spaces, make sure capitalization is correct.
  • UPDATE: The Key entries have changed as well. Instead of MaxFileSize and WarnMaxFileSize, they are now MaxLargeFileSize and WarnLargeFileSize.
  • Once you make them, double-click on the MaxLargeFileSize to open up the window to modify it. Click on Decimal, and type 102400 (to set the message store to 100GB). Then click OK
  • For WarnLargeFileSize, do the same thing but set it to something like 97280, then click OK. The 97280 number represents 95% of the MaxLargeFileSize amount.

Once you have done these things, close out Registry Editor and load up Outlook to see if it takes care of it for you.

Filed Under: Knowledgebase, Tech Solutions, Technology Tagged With: Message Store, Outlook, Registry Editor, Windows

Changing Permalinks in WordPress

April 29, 2019 by Mike Ellis Leave a Comment

Permalinks

Changing your Permalink Structure

For many bloggers just starting out, when we first setup our blogs, we may select to include the year and month (and sometimes even day) in the title of your blog posts. So, for example, on my site “My Dreams of Disney”, I have a blog post that is this permalink: https://mydreamsofdisney.com/2017/12/looking-for-a-disney-getaway/

The format for that link tells me that the permalink is set for “Month and name” format. You can see that after the domain name, the year 2017, followed by the 2 digit month 12, tells me that the post “Looking for a Disney Getaway” was written in December, 2017.

Some bloggers even go with the “Day and name” format; if that were the case on My Dreams of Disney, then the link would be something like this: https://mydreamsofdisney.com/2017/12/18/looking-for-a-disney-getaway/, which tells me that in this example, the post Looking for a Disney Getaway was written on December 18, 2017.

For most people, setting month and name is perfectly okay, and for many bloggers, they may never need to change that format. Some bloggers, though, as their site gains traction, may find that some of their early writing is needing to be updated with new content. Over time, that can cause headaches. For example, what do you do if you update a post from 2012 with new content? Do you republish it with a new post so that it has 2019 in the year? If you do that, what affect does that have on your Google SEO rankings? If the posts are nearly identical, it may very well cause you to be penalized in your SEO scores because of the nearly duplicate content. So what are you to do?

If you find yourself in this predicament, there are some easy solutions to your problem. I know this because I have recently explored the problem and solved it for one of my major clients and her website. The rest of this post will go into detail how you can make the change so that your site can be updated as well and still function.

Changing the WordPress Permalinks structure

If you are in your WordPress dashboard, go to settings, and select Permalinks from the menu. This will allow you to see and configure your Permalinks structure.

As you can see in that screenshot, the common settings are Plain, Day and name, Month and name, Numeric, Post name, and a Custom Structure. For My Dreams of Disney, I have selected Post name, although last week I was running it as Day and name.

Changing the structure is as simple as selecting the setting you prefer and then clicking save at the bottom of the page. As soon as you do that, your site permalinks will change. What was once https://mydreamsofdisney.com/2017/12/looking-for-a-disney-getaway/ will automatically become https://mydreamsofdisney.com/looking-for-a-disney-getaway/. It’s as simple as that.

However, there is another step that needs to be taken because if you don’t implement the second step, people that click on any links that exist out in the internet, either on Facebook, or Pinterest, or Twitter, or any other social media locations, will receive a 404 error telling them that the post can’t be found.

I struggled with this for far too long, worried that I was going to mess it up for my client. I looked at all sorts of plugins that would take care of it for me. I pondered whether to use the Redirection plugin, or the 301 Redirects plugin, or any number of a hundred plugins that handle redirects on WordPress sites.

However, I learned a really neat way to handle redirects using the .htaccess file in your website. The key component, though, is that your website needs to be running Apache and not Nginx. Also, there are multiple .htaccess files in your file structure, the one you want to modify is the file that lives in the root of your WordPress installation. For me and most users, that location is in your “public_html” folder on your host. Special shoutout to David Hayes with wpshout.com for writing the post that I learned from! Here’s his direct link if you wish to just go there: https://wpshout.com/quick-guides/remove-date-from-wordpress-post-url/

The code listed below is when you have the “Day and name” convention for your permalinks. I’ll also post code that will work when you have the “Month and name” convention.

## To change example.com/2019/01/01/post-slug to example.com/post-slug
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ /$4 [R=301,NC,L]
</IfModule>

This code is for the “Month and name” convention for your permalinks.

## To change example.com/2019/01/post-slug to example.com/post-slug
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ /$3 [R=301,NC,L]
</IfModule>

To summarize what that code means, in the “RewriteRule” linke, the first set of ([0-9]+) is the year, the second set of ([0-9]+) is the month, and if you have the day also, then the third set of ([0-9]+) is the day. So, what that rule is telling Apache to do is to look at either the 4th set or the 3rd set (depending on which rule you are using) and just keep that with a 301 Redirect (that’s what the R=301 is about, a 301 (permanent) redirect. The NC is shortcode for no case, meaning that Apache doesn’t care if any of the URL has upper or lower case. Lastly, the L simply tells the mod_rewrite.c program to stop processing if the rule matches. Since this is the only RewriteRule in this string, though, that’s mostly irrelevant.

Summary

To summarize, your changing your WordPress permalinks structure is super easy, but there are two steps you need to take care of for established sites.

  1. Change the permalinks structure in your WordPress settings on your Dashboard.
  2. Write a RewriteRule into your .htaccess file that will tell links to strip out the year and month (and day, if necessary) so that WordPress knows what to do with an old link.

Thank you so much for stopping by, and special thanks to WPShout.com for teaching me about this! If you need any help that you aren’t finding, reach out and I’ll be happy to attempt to help. Thanks, have a great week!

Filed Under: Knowledgebase, Tech Solutions, Technology

Tackling IT Administration from a MacBook Pro

August 4, 2017 by Mike Ellis Leave a Comment

Recently, I was given the opportunity here at Tech Solutions NC to try out a brand new MacBook Pro as part of a focus group.  This is something that really intrigued me, so I signed up for it.  Last week, I received the MacBook Pro, and am now in the process of testing it out.

First, a little background information.  The computer is a Mid 2015 MacBook Pro, with a 15″ screen, Retina display, 2.5 GHZ Intel i7 Processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD.

For the computer itself, it is incredibly responsive, quick, and does just about everything I could ask of it.

Well, that was a short post, wasn’t it?  Well, I’m not quite done yet.

Using a MacBook Pro in a Windows Environment

There are a few things related to the environment that I am in that do make things a bit problematic for the MacBook Pro.  Most of these are common sense things, but still, if you are considering making the switch from a Windows system to a Mac system, and you manage any sort of IT environment, these are things you’ll probably want to consider.

Remote Administration

Like you would expect, on a Mac OS X system, the options for connecting to a remote system are suited primarily for connecting to other Mac systems.  Fortunately, though, the Microsoft Remote Desktop app is available, it’s free, and it makes connecting to a Windows system pretty seamless.  Search in the App Store for Microsoft Remote Desktop or click the link.

Office 365 Apps

For many businesses, Office 365 by Microsoft is the tool of choice for productivity software.  Unfortunately, though, while Microsoft has released 2016 versions of their software through Office 365 for the Mac environment, not all the apps are created equally.

The biggest issues I’ve had with this new laptop is related to how Outlook 2016 for Windows works verses how Outlook 2016 for Mac works.  There are some significant differences that I’ve documented here.

  • The CRM I use for my business is from Hubspot.  I came across them over the Internet, and knew them from other stuff, but had never used their CRM.  The good news with Hubspot is that they have a plugin that you can install in your Outlook 2016 for Windows program that will log the emails you send to your clients to the client account you have setup in your CRM.  The bad news, though, is that, due to limitations with Outlook 2016 for Mac, such a plugin does not exist, so you can’t seamlessly log those emails to your clients.
  • One workaround for this problem is to just BCC the address that logs the email in your CRM.  Doing so is fine, and is what I do right now, but I’d prefer a simpler way to do that rather than type it each time.  Of course, I can set a rule that automatically BCCs the correct address, and I may do just that, but I’d rather not have to do that.
  • The only other thing with Outlook 2016 that isn’t quite up to my standards is the calendaring portion.  Since my mail is driven through GSuite, my calendar is also, and the calendar for Outlook (either version, really) just doesn’t handle Google’s email very well.  This is definitely something that Microsoft and Google should work on.  The good news, though, is the the built in Calendar app for Mac OS X works all of my email and calendars really well, and I’ve not had any issues with using that.

Having just started working on this MacBook Pro, there are other things that I’m sure are not as good from an IT perspective as they are on the Windows platform, but I haven’t run across them yet.  The great news is that, by and large, operationally, there has been very little I have had to do to utilize my MacBook Pro in a Windows environment, and still be able to perform the IT tasks that I need to do day in and day out.  That, my friends, makes this testing a win in my book.

What do you all think? Are you able to perform IT administration work on a MacBook Pro or other Mac system?  Let me know your thoughts on what works well and doesn’t work well, and thanks for reading!

Filed Under: Tech Solutions, Technology Tagged With: Adobe Photoshop, AGCO, Amazoncom, Google Chrome, Google+, IOS, Mac OS, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, OS X

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