December 2009 Entries

Activation errors when installing Office 2010 Beta

I decided to replace my Office 2010 Technical Preview with the Beta, which was released in November and I ran into an error with activation. Since I didn’t see this really documented on the net (it probably is, but I couldn’t find it), I decided to write up my experience. When I first tried to install the beta, I got an error saying that I had to first uninstall the technical preview. Ok, no problem. After uninstalling the tech preview, I installed the beta. It never prompted me for a license key ......

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Posted On Tuesday, December 22, 2009 6:17 PM | Comments (1)

Virtual PC in Windows 7 – fonts look bad?

After installing Windows 7 and learning how to use the new Virtual PC, I noticed something odd with the way fonts were occasionally displayed in Visual Studio. It took some testing, but I figured out that if I ‘Enabled Integration Features’ with VPC, then ClearType wouldn’t be enabled. It would look like this: With integration features disabled, it looked like this: These screen shots don’t show how different the two look when you’re actually using it. The most noticeable piece is the ‘W’ in the ......

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Posted On Tuesday, December 15, 2009 7:41 PM | Comments (0)

SharePoint 2007: The template you have chosen is invalid or cannot be found

I ran into an error at work recently when I went to deploy my new SharePoint site, which was a site definition inside a SharePoint solution file. I was deploying the site to our build server. I added the WSP to the farm, deployed it to the web app, and then went to create the new site based on my template. However, I got an error almost immediately, after clicking create. The error was “The template you have chosen is invalid or cannot be found”. I check to make sure that the solution had been deployed ......

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Posted On Friday, December 11, 2009 12:12 PM | Comments (0)

Simplifying your tech life, step 1: declutter your computer

I’ve been building my own machines for a while now and I’ve gotten into a routine of installing certain apps when I do I rebuild. I’ll not only grab the latest Microsoft updates, plus Office, but I’ll also install a whole list of utilities. This list keeps growing and was often something like the following: PDF reader (I go back and forth between FoxIt Reader and Adobe) FireFox and Chrome Instant messengers (MSN, GoogleTalk, Skype) Tweetdeck Live Mesh Some kind of free antivirus (Microsoft’s Security ......

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Posted On Sunday, December 6, 2009 9:40 PM | Comments (2)

Cloud backup saves the day

I’ve had a rash of hard drive failures at home recently. In one case, having a backup of the files in the cloud, saved me from losing 40 gigs of data. The first hard drive that went bad was one that I was using with my Media Center PC. I had repurposed an internal drive from my server by putting it into a USB drive enclosure. Media Center was using it to store the recorded TV video files. Since these files weren’t that critical, I wasn’t worried about backing them up. When this drive failed, Media ......