UK Government Laptop Sold on eBay, Including a Confidential Disc

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.

Related Posts:

Backup Tape Lost – 650,000 Customers Affected

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

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)

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.

Toshiba Gives Up On HD DVD, Sony’s Blu-ray Wins

It’s finally official, Sony’s Blu-ray wins the HD format war.

From MSNBC: Toshiba announced today that it will no longer make HD DVD players and recorders. Toshiba’s president, Atsutoshi Nishida, said that Warner Bros. Entertainment’s decision last month to release videos in Blu-ray format only had a tremendous impact and they simply had no chance to win.

An estimated 1 million HD DVD players have been sold worldwide and Toshiba promises that it will still continue to provide support for them.

Also see: Is Sony’s Blu-Ray winning?

How to enable Remote Desktop remotely

I had to do this just a few minutes ago and I figured I should probably post it here.

1. Open Registry Editor by going to Start -> Run and typing in regedit.
2. Go to File -> Connect Network Registry… and type in the name of the computer where you want Remote Desktop enabled.  Click OK.
3. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server of that computer.
4. Double-click the DWORD called fDenyTSConnections and set its value to 0.  Click OK.

That’s it! Remote Desktop is now enabled!

Is Sony’s Blu-ray Winning?

It sure sounds like it. According to Reuters, Wal-Mart has decided to abandon Toshiba’s HD DVD format and will only sell Blu-ray players and movies starting in June of this year. Best Buy and Netflix earlier this week have decided to only support the Blu-ray format as well.

Here’s a list of some of the companies currently supporting Blu-ray:

1. Sony Corp (of course)
2. Target
3. Best Buy
4. Wal-Mart
5. Netflix
6. Blockbuster
7. News Corp’s 20th Century Fox
8. Walt Disney Co
9. Lion’s Gate Entertainment Corp
10. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
11. Warner Bros. Entertainment

Even Microsoft (maker of the XBox 360 console, which currently only works with HD DVD) said that it could consider supporting the Blu-ray technology if that’s what the consumers want.

Exchange 2007: Mapi session exceeded the maximum of 32 objects of type “session”

Error Message: “Mapi session “/o=Organization/ou=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)/cn=Recipients/cn=JohnSmith” exceeded the maximum of 32 objects of type “session”".
Source: MSExchangeIS
Event ID: 9646

On the client side, the user is unable to connect to Microsoft Exchange or getting this error:

Unable to open your default e-mail folders. The Microsoft Exchange Server computer is not available. Either there are network problems or the Microsoft Exchange Server is down for maintenance.

This usually happens when the user loses network connectivity while Outlook is still open. The Exchange server wasn’t able to close the sessions properly so they just stayed there even when they are not in use.

By default, Exchange only allows up to 32 MAPI (Outlook) sessions per user. To fix this problem, you must close some of the sessions.

What to do:

1. Download and extract Sysinternals’ TCPView (free) on the Exchange server
2. Open the Exchange Management Shell and type in the following command to get a list of all the opened sessions. Make a note of the IP Addresses:
   Get-LogonStatistics jsmith | Sort-Object clientipaddress | Format-Table username,clientipaddress,logontime
3. Open Tcpview.exe on the server. Sort it by Remote Address, then sort it by Process.
4. Look for the IP Addresses from Step 2 in the Remote Address column (if you only see hostnames, go to Options -> uncheck Resolve Addresses) and close their connections for the store.exe process (right-click and choose Close Connection, you can select multiple connections by holding the Shift or Ctrl key)
5. Run the command from Step 2 again and you will see that the sessions disappeared. The user should now be able to connect to the Exchange server again.

System Administrator Appreciation Day

Don’t forget this very important day! It’s the last Friday of July (July 25 for this year). Mark it on your calendar!

Ok, I have to admit that I actually didn’t know that such a day existed until I found this site, which is the official System Administrator Appreciation Day website.

According to the site, this idea to have a special day for SysAdmins was created by Ted Kekatos, a system administrator in Chicago. He was inspired by a print ad for a Hewlett-Packer laserjet printer showing lines of employees bringing gifts for the IT guy who made the purchase.

The first SysAdmin Appreciation Day was celebrated on July 28, 2000. It has gained support from organizations such as the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA), Friends In Tech (FIT), Sunbelt Software, and “In The Trenches,” a podcast for SysAdmins.

The System Administrator Song

Related articles:

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1460166.stm
• http://mcpmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=367