Posted by greg on Jan 27, 2009 in
Microsoft 
If you run into problems with registering MS Project 2008, or for some strange reason it puts you into a product registration loop and you can not actually launch the application, this tip might help you. You will need your serial number ready. First, quit all Microsoft Applications. Then, look for the following file: Applications –> Microsoft Office 2008 –> Office –>Â OfficePID.plist and throw it in the trash. Next Open: Your Home Folder –> Library –> Preferences –> Microsoft and look for the Office 2008 folder. Throw the Office 2008 folder in the trash. Restart Office and you will be prompted to re-enter your registration information. Your all set.
Posted by greg on Apr 25, 2008 in
Microsoft 
Let me give you an example:
I just got home from being out of town all week, its Friday night and the i-phone rings at 7:35 pm, I look at the caller ID and know who it is, and probably know what they want, reluctantly, more out of morbid curiosity, I answer the call. I hear the all to familiar question, “Do you have a minute?” It’s never a minute.
As he begins to explain away his computer problem to me, (knowing he is on a Windows machine) 10 minutes into the conversation I’m asking myself why ever I answered the phone.
It ends up that he bought a new printer and he needed help connecting it up. Ugh. Well, first we physically connect it, and of course Windows needs the drivers, so I use the CD it came with. After a few minutes, it prompts us to insert the Windows XP CD. Of course they do not have it since the $299.00 desktop they bought on sale came pre-installed with Windows and the vendor does not ship a plain ol’ vanilla XP CD. Amazing.
We are at a stopping point until I find a Window’s CD. The only one I have, I loaned to the last guy in which we ran into a similar problem, so I have to track that guy down and then go onsite to assist with the printer install. At this point I was doing this all over the phone with Go To Meeting.
It’s 9:45 pm. We got nothing accomplished. I head over. Re-start the printer install, and again it asks for the Window’s CD. I put it in, and it can’t find the INI file it needed from the i386 directory.
I’m now hitting Google. It’s 11:00 pm, no resolution, a million people have the same problem, no work around. And yes, it was asking for the exact same XP Professional SP2 CD, which I had.
We call tech support, after being on hold for 45 minutes, we get a nice Indian man on the phone who we can barley make out his name, I think it was Paul, but it doesn’t matter, because we got nowhere with him. Its now midnight.
I head out to the printer’s website and download the latest drivers….started to install them, Window’s blue screens. Upon reboot, Windows will not boot up normally.
Remember - were trying to install a printer. Were not trying to configure ESCON on a S/390 Mainframe. Its a printer.
Its now 1:45 am and we’ve been trying to get this piece of crap up for over an hour now. Were in a recovery mode. Of course he does not have any backups of his data. I’m now cracking open this guy’s computer to get the drive out and hook it up to an external USP enclosure, which I connected up to my Macbook Pro. Right away, the Mac was able to detect the drive and I can see his data, I write a rsync script which I kicked off on the Mac and was able to back everything up to my Macbook.
It’s 3:30am, we are now re-installing Windows with the CD I brought over.
It’s 4:15am, Window’s is done installing and we are able to install the printer from the original printer CD that was shipped in the box. Which by the way, between the application and the driver is well over 700 MB. Why ?
Windows was not able to automatically install all the drivers for the video, mouse, network, sound, even the motherboard. I had to go out to the Computer manufactures website and download all these drivers (like 11 of them) to my Macbook and burn to a CD, which we then copied over to the Windows computer.
Its almost 6:00 am the next day, I still have not seen my family, only this piece of junk computer that I just finished installing all the hardware drivers it needed.
I’m restoring data and re-installing Applications. It’s 8:00 am.
Similar story,
I have a friend who bought the same printer, he took it home, hooked it up to his Mac and the Mac set everything up for him automatically. He was printing in just a few minutes.
Posted by admin on Jan 7, 2008 in
Microsoft 
Some of us in the corporate world find ourselves spending a lot of time on conference calls and meetings.
The corporate standard to invite attendees to meetings is to send out a meeting invite, sometimes called an Outlook invite since most of us use Outlook for work email. The process is simple, you open your Outlook calendar create an appointment, then select your contacts you want to invite to this meeting and enter in the dial in information in the body of the email. It will mail a meeting invitation to each of the contacts you selected and they will have the opportunity to either accept, tentatively accept or decline the meeting request. It is as simple as that, and I would say that most people do just that, and only that.
Most of this time this works fine, however I have seen this invite process break. Most people are not in the same time zone as you, and they travel as well. Sometimes, their system clock may not be set to the correct time zone that they just traveled too when they accepted your invite. It can get confusing very fast as to when the meeting time is. Outlook tries to put the meeting in your calendar based upon the meeting request time and adjust it to your time zone. But I have noticed that is is not 100% of the time. I have missed meetings by an hour or have dialed in an hour too early because Outlook decided to update my Calendar based upon a time zone I was in. This is particularly true when users change the time zone on their computers, but do not restart Outlook.
To alleviate confusion, I have a simple solution. In the body of the invite, just provide some additional information, for example:
Meeting: Design Review Meeting
Date: 1/12/08
Time: 9:00am (PST)
Dial In: (888) 555-1212, passcode 223222#
Agenda:
It takes an extra minute to provide this information, but it sure is nice to have.
