Once Bitten

VMware vCenter and "No guest OS heartbeats" error

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 04:13:00 GMT

When trying to vMotion a virtual machine (VM), VMware vCenter may incorrectly report "No guest OS heartbeats are being received" error even when the VMware Tools service is correctly installed and is running on the guest VM. Fortunately there is a really simple fix.

Windows 7 incorrectly reports "No Internet Access"

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:42:00 GMT

Windows 7 (and Vista) are notorious for incorrectly reporting "No Internet Access" even though the user can clearly access the Internet just fine.

Missing receive connectors in Exchange Management Console

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 22:03:00 GMT

I run the Exchange 2007 Remote Server Management Tools on my laptop. All the Receive Connectors in Exchange Management Console went missing yesterday and I was getting an obscure error "Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Web.Administration' ...

Turning on old menus in IE9

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 07:33:00 GMT

After installing Internet Explorer 9 Beta my old IE menus had disappeared, meaning that the Favorites menu was gone and I was stuck with the Favorites "bar" or the "pane", neither of which work anywhere near as well as the menu did!

Cisco SG100-24 switch auto-uplink problem

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 03:06:00 GMT

Problems with a Cisco SG100-24 unmanaged switch which would not auto-uplink (caused by a physical cabling fault)

Microsoft Outlook 2007 indexing problem

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 04:43:00 GMT

Microsoft Outlook 2007 had stopped indexing content in my Inbox and in my archive .PST files.

Dell Studio 1747 Laptop wouldn't play CDs

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:52:00 GMT

Had a problem with my Dell Studio 1747 laptop today ... it wouldn't play audio CDs ... and fixed it by reflashing the CD/DVD firmware.

Point and Print Restrictions and Windows 7 Printer GPPs

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 01:43:00 GMT

When deploying printers using Group Policy Preferences (GPPs) some Windows 7 (and Vista, and Server 2008?) clients may fail with result: Failure (Error Code: 0x80070bcb) due to Point and Print Restrictions.

Partition Alignment, Cluster Size and SQL Performance

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:33:00 GMT

By properly aligning the disk partition and setting the cluster size to 64KB on a production SQL Server I was able to improve raw disk performance by 14% and SQL performance by a whopping 36%

Microsoft's Annoying Favorites

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 23:57:00 GMT

Explains an easy way to permanently remove those annoying Microsoft Favorites menu items: Microsoft Websites, MSN Websites, Windows Live and Favorites (aka the Links menu)