How to get rid of the + symbol when printing in Adobe

Sometimes when printing a form from Adobe that has drop down options and you get a little “+” symbol to show that there are options, unfortunately those “+” symbols show up in the print! Not cool Adobe, not cool…

Go to Edit > Preferences > Forms > Uncheck the “Show text field overflow indicator”.

That’ll do…

Missing Characters when printing from Office apps

OK, considering I can’t sleep right now, I figured I’d post this and make my insomnia useful…

Strange issue occurred where printing from Outlook, Excel or Word would result in characters missing from the print out. In the print preview it looks just fine but printing would result in random characters disappearing.

The fix is here;

Office apps missing characters when printing

To work around this issue, install the Complex Script support files. To do this, follow these steps:
1. Click Start, and then click Run
2. Type intl.cpl, and then click OK.
3. Click the Languages tab.
4. Under Supplemental language support, click to select the Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages (including Thai) check box.
5. When you receive the following message, click OK to close the message:
You chose to install the Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Indic, Thai and Vietnamese language files. This will require 10 MB or more of available disk space. The files will be installed after you click OK or Apply on the Regional and Language Options dialog box.
6. Click OK to close the Regional and Language Options dialog box.

From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/960985

Adobe + sign prints on documents

So an annoying problem – on a drop down field when you print the pdf it shows the + symbol next to the field. Obviously this is undesirable.
Fix:
Edit > Preferences > Forms >Uncheck “Show test field overflow indicator”
Voila

moving PST file to Thunderbird

Had a client that wanted to move his Exchange emails into a format that didn’t involve spending money.
In other words move the emails from Exchange to Thunderbird.
So first step was to download the emails into Outlook and then copy them to a PST.
Once there, I installed Thunderbird, and followed these instructions;

1. Install Thunderbird on another PC that has a compatible version of Outlook.
2. Make Outlook the default email client.
3. Copy the outlook.pst file to that PC and configure Outlook to use it. (may need to be in the default location)
4. Compact the .pst file using Outlooks File -> Data File Management commands to permanently get rid of any deleted messages. Don’t confuse this with compressing or zipping a file.
5. Import the messages using Tools -> Import -> Mail. You can use Tools -> Import to also import the settings and address books.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 as necessary for any other .pst files.
7. Backup the Thunderbird profile. Mozbackup is a useful tool to do that.
8. Restore the Thunderbird profile on your PC.
9. Cleanup. (Uninstall Thunderbird on the PC with Outlook etc.)

Courtesy of http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_.pst_files

Windows profile migration

http://www.forensit.com/domain-migration.html

Awesome tool to migrate a local profile to a domain profile. Man that saves a lot of time!

password reset tool for Windows

http://www.pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

I can’t believe I haven’t add this to Tipst3r’s pages yet! I have used this tool sooooo many times that when someone asked me about it I quickly jumped on here and searched but didn’t find it.
It’s a great tool and works for almost all versions of windows including 7. Woot.

change font size in outlook

•Select View | Current View | Customize Current View… from the menu in Outlook.
•In Outlook 2003, choose View | Arrange By | Current View | Customize Current View….
•Click Other Settings….
•Click on Row Font….
•Choose the desired font, font style and size.
•Click OK.
•Optionally, change the font for the column headings as well by clicking Column Font….
•Click OK again.
•Click OK once more.

Cached user details for shares

Had a problem with a small client that was using a Windows XP machine as their server and Windows 7 client machines.
All shares had “everyone,full permissions” and they wanted something a little less… easy going.
Once I got all the share and user permissions sorted out I got to their machines and found that they all had cached user credentials for the shares and there wasn’t an obvious way to clear them.

Hence the research and now hence the tip…

Start > Run > rundll32.exe keymgr.dll KRShowKeyMgr

This will bring up a cached login credential for each network resource and you can clear or edit the entry.

Just the trick.

Virtual machine start failure

On a Windows 2008 standard edition server base server, with a Windows 2008 virtual server that had Exchange 2007 installed, we installed some routine Microsoft security updates on both the base system and the virtual machine. After rebooting the base system the virtual machine would not start. We just kept getting event ID 3030 and 3040 and it would not even attempt to start the VM. We uninstalled all the updates, but that had no effect. Finally, we deleted an old snapshot of the VM, one that was 5 months old. It was the only snapshot on the server. As soon as we did that the VM started right up as if there was never a problem. There is almost no information on the Internet on Event ID 3030. I opened a case with Microsoft and even they could not explain what happened.

VPN Router connection issue resolved

I was trying to get the VPN server working on a Windows 2008 R2 server and was stumped as to why it would not work from outside the LAN. It was working inside the LAN but not from outside. I had opened the correct ports on the router but it still was not working. It was a Comcast modem/router I was working with and it turned out to be that the Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) protocol was not enabled on the router. Once I had enabled that everything started working. For VPN the protocol number is 47. On this router there was not way to specify the protocol number. It was just GRE is enabled or not.