Microsoft

It seems that the weird and strange issues always find their way into my system builds. Recently, a Windows Server build was recognizing my SSD drive as a standard hard disk drive. For some, this may not be an issue as the read/write performance is still there. However, for those that dig a little deeper, Windows will try to use the standard "Optimize" for the drive on a regular basis, something you should not do to an SSD.

There are a lot of things Windows Server does well. However, coming off of the NAS environment, there are a lot of things that it doesn't. One of these is a simple method for web access to various files and folders, along with the ability to share them via user login or simple url. Until recently, there had been only one real player in this space, OwnCloud. I had fiddled with the product for some time, but features were slow to show and it just didn't work the way I had been hoping it would.

Having my latest server build running on the Windows Server platform, there are a number of things that I have found to become a bit more difficult than I am used to. Not only have I switched to Windows as the platform, I am using Storage Spaces. This in itself is a departure from my comfort zone and has presented some scenarios that I wasn't quite prepared for. Like trying to remove a disk that Windows, for some reason, wants to keep.

With the recent migration to Windows 10, there have been a lot of little things that people either can't find or can't seem to figure out. With my recent transition to Windows 10 on all computers in the COD household, these little annoyances keep popping up. The first one that popped up was on my Home Theater PC. The system had previously been running Windows Media Center on Windows 7 and now runs Kodi exclusively on Windows 10. With that said, having Kodi startup automatically under Windows 7 was easy. All I had to do was copy a shortcut to the startup folder and force it to delay so Kodi wouldn't start before networking did.

Nothing has bothered me more about Windows 10 than when I come back to my laptop from the gym to find all the tabs I had open lost to a reboot. Out of the box, Windows 10 will reboot once an update is installed... this leads to me having to scan my browsing history trying to find all the tabs I had open or have Microsoft Office prompt me to restore a file I had open and not saved recently.

While conducting the overview of Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Essentials, I ran into a few errors while configuring the "Set up Client Restore Service". It seems that no matter what I did, I couldn't get the service to start. Then, a little digging, a quick copy & paste; all was resolved.

Windows Storage Server is an exciting development in the storage platform. It can run on nearly any spec'd hardware and allows for simple management of storage appliances across a wide variety of manufacturers. Unlike customized NAS OS from other platforms, you get similar features and functions across an array of manufacturers. It is offered in two flavors, provides simple management, and runs like a champ. Additionally, having familiarity with Windows Server operating systems allows administrators to dive right in.

Ok, we all know that a lot of things have changed in Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 from the “Good Ol’e days”.  While poking around pointlessly this morning, I started to wonder where the Startup folder had gone… and is it still used at all.

If you have ever struggled with deleting a PivotTable in Excel, then you have come to the right place. We use Excel for all kinds of things. Once in a while, we like to do a bit of house cleaning. We recently published an article on how to export all of your worksheets within an Excel Workbook to CSV. Well, in order for that to be useful, you can't have a bunch of extraneous information running around your worksheets, like PivotTables.

Microsoft is getting ready for their latest round of patches.