I was cleaning up old, unused Group Policy Objects recently and came across two that could not be deleted. They were legacy GPOs from before I started at the organization and were not linked anywhere and had old arbitrary settings. Not wanting to just leave junk laying around, I tried to delete the actual objects not just the links from within the Group Policy Objects area in … [Read more...]
Amazon unveils a new generation of Fire tablets and Fire TV
Amazon has refreshed its Fire Family with updated tablets and a new Fire TV and Fire TV Stick. Amazon's tablet line was updated with four new configurations. The Fire tablet is the lowest costing tablet at $49.99, competing with features from a higher tier competing with the budget tablets from other companies. The new Fire tablet includes a quad-core processor, 7” IPS … [Read more...]
Excel 2013 hangs at ‘Starting…’ but runs with Excel Safe Mode
I ran into an issue with Excel 2013 on a relatively new install. Excel would successfully launch under the Administrator account but not as any other user. It just hung at the Starting... splash screen, even after promoting the standard user to a local Administrator. Only launching Excel with the command, excel.exe /safe would allow the program to finish loading for the … [Read more...]
Hide the taskbar and Start button at Startup
I have been working recently with a client using specialized software that stretches across 4 monitors in a 2x2 grid. The operating system is Windows 7 and the primary monitor needs to be the top-left. The problem is that the Windows Start button and Taskbar floats on top of this software. The 'always on top' nature of the Taskbar was undermining the main software. Taskbar … [Read more...]
Let’s Encrypt is making progress
The free certificate authority sponsored by EFF, Mozilla, and others are continuing to make progress. I first shared about the group Let's Encrypt in November of last year: Through the Internet Security Research Group, Mozilla Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Akamai Technologies, Electronic Frontier Foundation, IdenTrust, Inc., and University of Michigan researchers are … [Read more...]