UK Government Laptop Sold on eBay, Including a Confidential Disc

Posted on February 28th, 2008 webmaster No comments          Print

More of these news about confidential data getting lost…

A local PC repair firm found the disc under the the laptop’s keyboard when the laptop was put in for repair.   The disc had the words “Home Office” and “Confidential” written on it.

The good news is, at least this time both the laptop and the disc have been encrypted.

Read the full article here.

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Laptop with Data on  600,000 People Stolen

Excel 2007: When trying to open Office Excel (.xls) file, worksheet does not open until you click the minimize or maximize button

Posted on February 21st, 2008 webmaster No comments          Print

Update: Two more users reported the same problem and it looks like it’s actually the Adobe PDF add-in causing the problem! I noticed that all 3 users have this add-in. I didn’t uninstall it because they’re using it, but what I did to fix this problem was I installed and enabled one of the add-ins that is part of Office 2007 and all their Excel files started loading fast again .

Original Post:

You may also see the error message below:

Cannot find the file ‘PathToFile‘ (or one of its components). Make sure the path and filename are correct and that all required libraries are available.

One of our users who we just upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007 had this problem this morning. When she double-clicks on an Excel file, the Excel program opens but the file itself doesn’t open until she clicks the minimize or maximize buttons.

The problem seems to have something to do with DDE.

To fix this problem, do the following:

1. Open Windows Explorer.
2. Go to Tools -> Folder Options -> File Types tab. Select XLS then click the Advanced button.
3. Select Open, then click the Edit button.
4. Under Application used to perform function: make sure there’s a quotation mark before and after %1 just like the picture below:
   



5. Uncheck Use DDE.

Credit goes to the posts from this site.

WMI: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80070005)

Posted on February 19th, 2008 webmaster 5 comments          Print

We have one computer at work that I couldn’t send a Remote Assistance request to and whenever I try to query it using WMI and PowerShell I get the following error message:

Get-WmiObject : Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))

The problem turned out to be DCOM. For some reason it got disabled.

To change its settings, do the following:

1. Go to Start -> Run, type in dcomcnfg.
2. Go to Component Services -> Computers.
3. Right-click on My Computer and select Properties.
4. Go to the Default Properties tab.
5. Make sure that Enable Distributed COM on this computer is checked.
6. Compare the settings to a computer that is working properly and make the necessary changes. Compare the settings for the COM Security tab as well.
7. Reboot the computer and try it again.

Credit goes to this website where I found this solution.