MS09-055 (KB973525) breaks MS Office Visio Viewer

October 29, 2009

Having been very busy recently deploying a record number of Microsoft security patches this month, one of the few problems has been MS09-055 (KB973525) which is a cumulative update of ActiveX killbits. But this does seem to kill a legitimate ActiveX control used by Microsoft Office Visio Viewer which opens[...]

ITMU Scan component failing – SMS 2003

February 9, 2009

After deploying the last round of Microsoft patches using Systems Management Server 2003 with the ITMU scan tool I noticed lots of the same error: Scan component failed(type= Microsoft Update); Error while trying to execute SmsWsusHandler.exe along with other related errors in the SMS Client logs. Running the scan on[...]

Windows Server 2003 showing blank windows

January 18, 2009

I’ve had a Window Server 2003 machine that has been running brilliantly for ages apart from one little niggle; many windows would open blank, such as the “Manage Your Server”. Not a problem and not worth really looking into until I had to actually do something with it! I noticed[...]

Windows 7

October 29, 2008

Well, Microsoft have officially released screen shots and and developer release version of Vista 2.0, er sorry, Windows 7. Here is an post from a guy lucky enough to have a play. I won’t bore you with the same list of features he describes, so read his version. I will[...]

What is Moe.exe? and Vista Resource Monitor

October 23, 2008

Whilst trying to fix my crashing home PC I noticed a process running called Moe.exe that was connected to an internet IP address. Kill, kill, kill!!, was my first thought but then calmed down and discovered it was the client application for Windows Live Mesh that I have signed up[...]

Engineering Windows 7: Boot performance

September 7, 2008

As you may or may not know, Windows 7 is currently in development with versions being delivered to developers at the moment. It seems with this blog post from the engineering team, they are deadly serious about improving startup time with apparently the ideal time is “under 15 seconds”. Personally[...]

Vista Tips

November 18, 2007

Like anything there are always little things that become inconveniences or annoyances with Vista, and of course these can be overcome. My top two (for the moment) are: – the UAC and – the start menu power button To turn off UAC, perfectly acceptable if you trust yourself not to[...]

Microsoft Stats

November 16, 2007

Check out these pretty substantially amazing stats: Microsoft internal IT:  600k connected devices10,000 Servers3 Datacenters 1 operations center11% is virtualized in Microsoft Datacenters330 of 385 servers run Windows Server 2008 (RC0) plus all 85 Microsoft.com servers11 clustered systems30,000 users in redmond domain (50,000 with vendors)NAP reporting 140K clients, 90 clients deferred[...]

Windows desktop icons the default image?

October 29, 2007

If you have the problem under XP of all your desktop icons reverting back to the default icon then try this: Type in the Run box and hit return:gsvr32 shell32.dll Now reboot. Or if worst comes to the worst try moving this file to a temporary location and restarting: C:Documents[...]

Windows Vista lovers and haters

October 26, 2007

It seems to me that Microsoft is facing an uphill battle convincing users about the plus sides of Windows Vista purely due to people’s closed mindedness (is that a word?!). I am of the opinion that this is a fantastic operating system, yeah I have a problem with the 25[...]