Sending Eshots Through Exchange Server

February 8th, 2011

There are several main considerations you need to think about and the main one is how long do you want to give your mail server indigestion for? A small eshot might be completed in several hours but a larger one can go on for days, during this time you will probably find other business emails are being delayed going out.

• Your Exchange Server will not get indigestion
• Your IP won’t run the risk of getting blacklisted
• You can upload your mailing / contact list
• You can test your email to see if will get caught in SPAM systems before you send it
• You can see who has opened your email and clicked on links
• You can easily manage unsubscribers

Century IT Services – Getting IT Right
Providing Computer Support & Network Support to businesses in Hampshire, Dorset, Surrey, Wiltshire, Sussex & Berkshire

Sophos – Cant change expired trial login to purchased licence

October 11th, 2010

 If you have downloaded yourself of Sophos Secuity Suite SBE and have found every time you input your ‘purchased licence’ details from the Sophos PDF you get a ‘Timed Out’ error message and the new licence details are not saved, here is the fix for this problem:-

1) Firstly, please could you make an exception for the following, so they are not blocked, in your firewall and Internet proxy server:
*.sophosupd.com
*.sophosupd.net

This is the main reason why SUM updating fails. To test the exceptions, try downloading the following – they should both work, creating
files that are about 24 KB in size:

http://d1.sophosupd.com/update/736ed2bae19829f6cedf64f194fa1730x000.dat
http://d1.sophosupd.net/update/736ed2bae19829f6cedf64f194fa1730x000.dat

2) After ensuring the above, please could you stop the SUM services as follows:

Start > Run > Services.msc

�
Stop the Sophos Update Manager service.
Stop the Sophos Agent service
Leave services open for now.

In Task Manager, please stop any SophosUpdateManager.exe, SUMService.exe and ManagementAgentNT processes that are running.

3) Start > Run > \\[your_server_name]\sophosupdate

Clear the contents of this ”sophosupdate” share.
Leave the window open for now.

4) Start > Run > explorer

Browse to C:\Program Files\Sophos\SCC\SUM
Delete the file ”specialactions.xml”, ”specialactions.xml~” and ”sum_status.xml”

5) Back in Services.msc, start the Sophos Update Manager service once again. Then start the Sophos Agent service.

6) In Sophos Control Centre, Change your updating Credentials from configure updating click ‘Update Now’ in the top-left.

At this point, it may take a while to start downloading. Please leave it a good 15 minutes.

Century IT Services – Getting IT Right
Providing Computer Support & Network Support to businesses in Hampshire, Dorset, Surrey, Wiltshire, Sussex & Berkshire

Microsoft Office 2010 – Remove Formatting Marks

September 20th, 2010

If you are finding that there are some strange formatting marks in your Microsoft Word document that you haven’t seen before you may have inadvertently turned on the option in Microsoft Word to ‘Show/Hide Formatting Marks’

It should be easy to turn off the Formatting Marks option in Word – See Below

Otherwise follow this link to the relevant Microsoft Article

 Microsoft Show or Hide Formatting Marks

Century IT Services – Getting IT Right

Providing Computer Support & Network Support to businesses in Hampshire, Dorset, Surrey, Wiltshire, Sussex & Berkshire

You are attempting to open a file that was created in an earlier version of Microsoft Office. This file type is blocked from opening in this version by your registry policy setting

March 7th, 2009

We have noticed problems with Microsoft Office 2003 after applying Office 2003 SP3 updates.

Files created with earlier versions of Microsoft Office 2003 would not open and came up with an error message saying that registry policy would not allow the open of files from earlier versions of Word!

It seems that this block of older word files is a feature of Office 2003 SP3… It use is supposed to block some older Office document files which were created in earlier versions of Office. These earlier document versions could be opened in pre-SP3 version but are now considered possibly unsafe.

To re-enable functionality of opening previous versions of Office documents you will need to follw a Microsoft support document which will involve the editing of your registry.

 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941636/

 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938810/

Microsoft Outlook – Email Hyperlink Problems

February 26th, 2009

When you click a hyperlink in Microsoft Outlook email an error is displayed saying :-

“This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.”

This is caused by a registry corruption after you have upgraded to Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or 7

You should be able to repair this problem by reseting the Internet Explorer Web Settings.

For more information refer to the Microsoft support article

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310049

Century IT Services – Getting IT Right
Providing Computer Support & Network Support to businesses in Hampshire, Dorset, Surrey, Wiltshire, Sussex & Berkshire

Outlook “Cannot create file” error when opening attachments

November 1st, 2008

Outlook 2007 displays an error message when opening an Excel attachment

“Cannot create file:” error

This can be caused by deleting the complete contents of your “Temporary Internet Files” folder. When you open an attachment in Outlook 2007, it uses a folder in the “Temporary Internet Files” folder as a temporary store for  the file attachment in Outlook.

To solve this problem, you will need to edit the registry, see below:-

Locate and click the following key in the registry using regedt32:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Outlook\Security\OutlookSecureTTempFolder

1) Make sure the path exists

2) Set the key to read-only for the user

Century IT Services – Getting IT Right
Providing Computer Support & Network Support to businesses in Hampshire, Dorset, Surrey, Wiltshire, Sussex & Berkshire

Printers that use ports that do not begin with COM, LPT, or USB are not redirected in a remote desktop or a terminal services session

October 12th, 2008

When you use remote desktop to connect to a terminal server, certain types of printers are not automatically connected to the terminal server session.

Follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following key in the registry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Default\AddIns\RDPDR
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type FilterQueueType, and then press ENTER.
5. On the Edit menu, click Modify.
6. Type FFFFFFFF, and then click OK.
7. Close the Registry Editor.
8. Restart your computer.

This enables all ports on the client to be redirected.

For more information, refer to the following Microsoft support article:-

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302361#LetMeFixItMyselfAlways

Century IT Services – Getting IT Right
Providing Computer Support & Network Support to businesses in Hampshire, Dorset, Surrey, Wiltshire, Sussex & Berkshire

Disable Active Desktop in Windows XP

February 21st, 2008

How to disable Active Desktop in Windows XP

1) Open the registry editor -  go to “Start, Run”, and type regedit and hit “ok”

2) Locate the following Registry Key

“HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer”

3) Create the DWORD values ForceActiveDesktopOn and NoActiveDesktop

(Right-click into the right-hand window and select “New, DWORD”)

4) Change the value of the registry key called “ForceActiveDesktopOn” to 0 and that of “NoActiveDesktop” to 1

5) Important – Make sure you exit from Regedit and shutdown/restart your computer.

Century IT Services – Getting IT Right

Providing Computer Support & Network Support to businesses in Hampshire, Dorset, Surrey, Wiltshire, Sussex & Berkshire