It’s amazing the amount of stuff on a hard drive that can be overlooked, until you run out of space. The Disk Cleanup tool that is built into Windows can help keep your machine extra tidy, but can also be a powerful tool when you’re in a space crunch. Think of the Disk Cleanup tool’s basic functionality as a “squeegee”. But it has a mode that deals with system level files and more important stuff;
Continue readingUpgrading a Dell Venue 8 Pro to Windows 10
If you’re unable to get the automatic upgrade for Windows 10 to work with your Dell Venue 8 Pro, try using the Microsoft media creation tool to get there. Depending on how much free space you have, an SD card may be required for the download to be stored. The media creation tool will prompt you if you’re short on space for this operation. For my upgrade, I opted to have the media creation tool and Windows
Continue readingLife with Azure: the realization
Background As part of being a technologist in real life, I’ve always felt that one of the important things that I did was that I brought my work home with me, and actually enjoyed it. What I mean by that is, the long days that I spent with Windows Server, Exchange, and other things in the Microsoft ecosystem, always followed me home in the evenings and on the weekends. I seemed to have enjoyed the work
Continue readingUseful Excel Functions: YEARFRAC
I was looking for a way to compare the total years between two dates in decimal format. My brain immediately goes to the process of how I would do that calculation if I am were writing it in a programming language, but Excel VBA and Excel formulas are a different beast. In Excel, do you use DATEDIF, “sum’ing” with TODAY() or NOW(), or something else? Excel has lots of little functions that do simple date operations
Continue readingWhat to do when SkyDrive takes a faceplant
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
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