Fine Tuning Media Center 7 – Remote Control Interaction

We have used an HTPC for nearly 4 years now – and yes this includes using Vista Media Center. There have been a few revisions – completely open setup to test, ClearQAM\Analog tuners, different video card, ATI DCTs…The biggest, and probably best feature is the ’10 foot’ interface – controlling everything with a remote control. I chose the Antec Veris Fusion silver for the case – it has an iMon VFD\remote eye built in to … Read more…

Citrix Apps slow to launch after home drive move

I recently moved everyone’s U:\ drives from an old crappy ‘NAS’ device…it was setup with 4 disks in RAID5- in the OS…needless to say software RAID5 tends to lead to terrible disk performance…especially when the processor is only a 3.0G P4. The shares are now on a file server VM with TONS of resources, and things are already better. I finally got around to re-configuring the old NAS into something a little more useful – … Read more…

Active Directory: Unable to add user or Change password

This morning I went to create a new user account for someone that started today (uber-last minute request). I log on to the Exchange server (exch 2003- so this is the only place that the exch tools are installed) and try to create the account- only to receive the following error: Active Directory – An error occurred. Contact your system administrator. Wow, that was helpful- thanks for that…I AM the administrator. I then proceed to … Read more…

OWA 2003 P2V Login issues

After attempting to P2V the OWA server, and subsequently failing…I decided it would be FAR better just to migrate and build a new VM from scratch- and not to mention this would allow me to get rid of yet another stupid hostname and use something that makes sense. On top of the hostname was the fact that this server had started life as a 2000 box with Exchange 2000 installed, then was upgraded to server 2003 … Read more…

Imaging an AcerPower 2000

I am quite fond of WDS – especially in 2008 R2- especially since the WIM files can still be used to contain an XP image. While this does work, you cannot do any of the awesome offline servicing that you can on images of newer operating systems. I have only run into one issue with my current WDS deployments – AcerPower 2000 machines. These are very small form factor machines from Acer that are all … Read more…

Office 2007 Customization Tool Settings don’t apply

In building 2 new Citrix servers from scratch over the past week, I’d been having a bit of trouble with the customizations. We already had a customization file for the Citrix farm, but a few new settings needed to be added. The first issue that I ran into was that the new file did not run with the install at all- and gave an error – something like “This update file cannot be applied as … Read more…

Excel opens random files on start

A user had reported a weird issue last week- when she would open Excel (All Citrix Environment- unrelated) Excel would open with a dozen files- they looked like recent documents. She didn’t have time to let me troubleshoot it at the time, so it was put off. Today I was asked to fix the issue- it still existed. The usual questions were asked: “When did this start?” “Did you change anything?” “Did you change anything??” … Read more…

Error removing VHD

After adding the old web server’s VHD to get the web files onto the new web server, I tried to remove the old VHD…only to fail with the following error: Error Removing Hard Drive Failed to remove device ‘Microsoft Synthetic Disk Drive’: Generic failure (0x80041001) Providing no hint at why this happened aside from “cannot be deleted because a logical disk object is still attached to it.” I powered on the VM and offlined the … Read more…