Alan Siu's Blog

Tag: windows

  • Word 2016 in Windows printing embedded images zoomed in and cropped

    One Windows user ran into an issue in which embedded images in a Word document would appear fine in the print preview but then would print zoomed in and cropped. In other words, the area on the printed document where the image should be is the same size as the image should be but only…

  • Selecting a startup disk when you put a firmware password on a Windows single-boot Mac

    Usually, when you put a firmware password on a Mac, you can double-check in System Preferences > Startup Disk to see if the proper startup disk (or any startup disk) is selected. Since the default behavior of the firmware password is you needing to enter the password in order to boot from anything other than…

  • Using DVD Flick to create DVDs from video files

    DVD Flick is an open source Windows program that allows you to burn various video file types to DVD (as an actual DVD, not as a data file). It’s fairly simple to use, but there are a couple of weird nuances: By default, it doesn’t actually burn to disc when you create the DVD. It…

  • Fix Evernote sticky notes for Windows remembering a ton of empty windows

    We have a Windows user who uses Evernote Sticky Notes, and a whole bunch of blank notes would appear (at least 20 of them) every time the application was launched (at login), and they would have to be manually closed. I thought renaming the Evernote folders in C:\Users\username\AppData would fix it, but that did nothing.…

  • Freeing up licenses from deactivated users in CrashPlan

    If you have CrashPlan PROe licensed for a certain number of users at your organization, but then you run out of licenses, you may think you can just deactivate users, and that’s all good, but in Deactivating & Reactivating Users & Devices, Code42 is a little vague on how long it will take for the…

  • Error 0x80070190 when activating Microsoft Office 2010

    Had this happen once on a Windows machine. Microsoft has several solutions outlined at When attempting to activate Office 2010 receive error “An unspecified error has occurred. Your request cannot be processed at this time. Please try again later. (0x80070190)” The one that worked for me was 3. Change the UserOperations key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform to…

  • Windows Explorer and Disk Management reporting different partition sizes

    I ran into an issue with a user running Windows on a Mac. Windows should have taken up the entire drive (which is 250 GB), but Windows Explorer was reporting about 90 GB. The really odd thing is that within Disk Management itself, it reported 90 GB on top (same as Windows Explorer) but then…

  • Prevent a partition from mounting at boot time

    Cheating a bit here, because I’m just linking to an excellent blog post on the procedure: OS X Tip: Prevent a Volume From Mounting at Startup It’s very helpful if you’ve set up a Boot Camp dual-boot with Windows, and you don’t want to have the Windows partition automatically mount when you boot into Mac…

  • Resetting a Windows password with ntpasswd

    Proper Use Case You may encounter situations in which you have forgotten the administrator password on a Windows computer, and you need to reset the password. This tutorial will walk you through how to reset it using an open source tool called ntpasswd. Improper Use Cases If your Windows computer is joined to a domain,…