Sep
07
2015
Dell | Windows | Windows 10

Upgrading 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 10 setup wipe everything so I could start fresh. Since all of my important files, pictures, etc. are sync’d online, I wasn’t concerned about the loss of any local content. This is probably not the case for most people, so back up your files before you start. Note that although this was written with the Dell Venue 8 Pro in mind, this process works on an activated Windows 8.1 setup as well. The…

May
28
2015
Azure | Technology

Life 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 enough where I really wanted to use my extra time to play with it at home too, which helped me to really build my skills. I’ve done this for the last 20 years. My home network didn’t need to be overly complex, but it was. Learning these things in my off-work time made me more efficient in my “real” job. An issue I would encounter at work would follow me to the home lab.

Feb
13
2015
General

Useful 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 (and lots of other stuff too). In my searches, I came across something called YEARFRAC. It’s very simple to use, and takes three parameters: a start date, end date, and an optional setting for controlling the number of calendar days you’re working with for the locale and calendar you’re using (I used Option 1). Quite simply, you supply those three parameters and Excel will return a number in the form of a decimal that…

Jun
18
2013
Windows

What 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 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.

Nov
27
2012
Windows 8

A few quick pointers on Windows 8 System Recovery

If you’ve used the “Create System Image” functionality available in Windows 7, you’ll be surprised to see that its missing in Windows 8. Well, it’s not actually missing, but the functionality is hidden in the Control Panel and is now called “Windows 7 File Recovery”. Once you locate it in the Control Panel, the options to “Create a system image” and “Create a system repair disc” on still in the left pane of the window. An important note … From what I have experienced, you cannot use a “Windows 7 Repair Disc” to load and recover a Windows 8 system image, so if you create a system image of your Windows 8 desktop, be sure to also create a system repair disc when it prompts you to after the system image capture.