by File in: How-To
As an IT administrator for the last several years, there are some occasions where I go a little overboard with security and do things to lock myself out of a computer. One example is to set a BIOS or CMOS password that I will never remember. If you can’t remember a BIOS or CMOS password, […]
by File in: How-To
Have you ever gotten a computer second-hand? Maybe from a company that was shutting down or from someone who no longer needed theirs? Ideally, you would want to simply reformat the computer and start from scratch, right? However, that’s not always the case. Let’s say you get a computer that has Windows already installed, but […]
One common task I have to perform in Active Directory very often is forcing replication between two domain controllers. By default, replication occurs automatically between the designated bridgehead servers at each site. This time interval can vary depending on the number of sites, how the sites are linked, connection speed between sites, etc. and can […]
Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) is a service built into Windows that transfers files in the background using idle network bandwidth. It basically acts as a download manager for Windows Update and other services by being able to resume from broken or partial downloads. If you are having problems with downloading Windows updates because BITS […]
If you’ve recently upgraded to Exchange 2007, you may have noticed that two really useful columns in Exchange 2003, Size and Total Items, are missing! Personally, I found this very annoying because it was a great way to quickly see which Exchange users were taking up the most space on the server. The worst thing […]
I’ve already written about many strange and hard to pin down error messages in Windows, so here’s another problem that I recently ran into on a client machine running Windows: Host Process Rundll32 has stopped working This message kept popping up whenever the user tried to open the Windows Security Center. It would pop up […]
As an IT support specialist, I love dealing with obscure Windows errors that sound absolutely ridiculous and make little to no sense. The great thing is most of the time you really don’t have to know what the exact problem is in order to fix the problem. Take, for example, the following strange error that […]
Recently, a friend of mine tried to install a program on his Windows machine and the computer gave the blue screen of death error. After he restarted his computer, he tried to run a different program and he got the following message: The Windows Installer service could not be accessed. This can occur if the […]
One thing I’ve always enjoyed about working in IT over the last 8 years is trying to successfully find a solution to tough Windows error messages. I’ve written about many before, such as The Device Cannot Start, Stop: 0x00000F4 error blue screen, etc. Another one I came across recently was the following: Microsoft (C) Register Server […]
by File in: How-To
I have Windows Vista installed on a virtual PC and recently I’ve not been able to install any Windows updates because I keep getting an error saying that the update failed. Taking a look at the error, it says the following: Failed error code 8E5E03FA Not very helpful! The event viewer does not show anything […]
