I have a number of machines that synchronize with SkyDrive.  Last week, things went sideways and one of my machines was reporting errors and quit synchronizing.  After the next reboot (which naturally fixes most issues), the SkyDrive application would initialize, trying to start processing the changes, and then do a faceplant in the form of a crash and generating an event in the event log like this: This looks and sounds bad.  I wasn’t sure how to resolve it, but it’s actually pretty simple.  There is a catalog or index of everything that is synched and it is stored on each machine in a hidden location.  You need to delete that file and restart SkyDrive. After doing some searching, I found a thread on the Microsoft Help forums.  It’s as simple as deleting %localappdata%\Microsoft\SkyDrive\settings\3e2972b1aa909a0c.dat.  After you delete that, restart the SkyDrive client and you should be back in business.

Quite honestly, having been in the TAP for Windows 8 and having logged a lot of time using the product, I was frustrated because I felt lost when it came to finding something or executing a task. I shy away from the “Start” screen, the screen you see after you’re logged in to Windows 8.  As with a lot of people who have used the product, I saw this screen as something only useful to those who were running a tablet, and I found myself never leaving the “Desktop”, and trying to run Windows as I always had since the beginning. I’m trying to get better at it, after all, I still use it everyday.  What I maybe find the most frustrating still, is the feeling of “who moved my cheese.”  It’s interesting I felt that way, cause at first, Scott Hanselman felt the same way.  Scott has a huge…

I ran into a scenario last week where we had loaded the Compellent Storage Center Command Set for Windows PowerShell on a server. When we launched the shell shortcut, the window opened but took a long time to get to a PowerShell command prompt. So, what causes slow start-up when loading PowerShell? The most common reason seems to be that machines experiencing this slowness are not connected to the Internet. What? Well, when Since PowerShell is loading the Compellent Command Set DLL externally, .NET has a security feature to check Microsoft’s CRL, or Certificate Revocation List. This process verifies the authenticity and validity of the software publisher’s certificate. If this check can’t reach the Internet, the process will time out after several minutes. Now, this doesn’t prevent anything from loading (which seems odd), but it takes a couple minutes for a process that should take only a couple of seconds.…

I came across this one this week.  Did you know there are a few hidden themes built-in to Windows 7?  They’re in a hidden directory, so you’ll have to type their path directly or use search with the option to location hidden files or folders. If you navigate to C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT you’ll find several different directories.  Inside of each of those folders is a directory called “Theme”.  If you open that folder, you’ll see a .theme file which you can double-click to activate the theme.  My favorite is the UK theme.

If you haven’t checked it out, do it now.  The Web Platform Installer makes your life a lot easier, especially when it comes to installing and configuring applications like WordPress on your own server. I provisioned a new Windows 2008 R2 Web Server and needed to move my websites off of an old 2003 server and on to this new box.  In the past, installing mySQL, PHP, and other required components to get WordPress to work properly on a Windows server was a huge pain, that is, until the Web Platform Installer came along. A number of applications have decided to use the WPI.  Applications like WordPress , DasBlog, Visual Studio Express products, and even SQL 2008.  You click through an interface, select the stuff you want to install, enter the requested config info, and the WPI takes care of the rest.  I actually used it to install WordPress flawlessly…