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When working with Microsoft Outlook 9 times out of 10 everything will work relatively smoothly. That 10th time, however, can cause Helpdesk and Windows Administrators headaches. One such headache occures when emails get stuck in the Outlook outbox. This is especially prevalent when dealing with secondary attached group mailboxes. Users will only become aware of this problem when they stop receiving responses to messages, meeting requests, or task requests. Often times they will also see the error "There are still e-mail messages in your Outbox. Would you like to exit anyway." when trying to exit Outlook.

When working at my last job we had a strange reoccuring issue with several of our users. When the user would exit their browser and reopen it, they would find their compatibility view options had been reset or cleared out. Our users would then have to re-add websites back into compatibility view in order to continue working on certain sites. While this issue was eventually side stepped with the implementation of group policy we still needed to find a solution for the short term. So to prevent this issue from happening entirely we made some very basic setting changes:

During a recent installation I ran across a strange error: Key not valid for use in specified state. After much searching on the almighty Google I found that this issue can be caused by a corrupt Microsoft Crypto Folder. In order to correct this issue the folder must be renamed and then the software can be successfully installed:

I like to keep up to date with the latest Microsoft technologies and generally have a number of test environments running on my home computer. These test environments grant me the ability to create different "virtual" machines each with their own unique Operating Systems and programs without effecting my main computer. Recently, I had the opportunity to sit through a Window Server 2016 preview and thought I might like to get my hands on the new fledgling OS to see what I could glean from it. This is the second part of a multi part series running through the setup of a virtual environment on Windows 10 and the installation of Windows Server 2016 Essentials Tech Preview 3 on the newly established Hyper-V environment.

As flawless as Windows Server is and as stable as IIS can be (no heavy sarcasm here - ed.) every once and a great while IIS applications will freeze, hang or become all around unresponsive. In order to correct many of these issues a simple IIS application restart can be done.

One thing that I've learned working with Windows Servers is that Microsoft likes to hide files that you need...a lot. Now there is rationale for this, the files I need are generally not the kind of files that you want the average person to have access to. Still it can be a pain when you need access to these paths daily and they seemingly don't exist. In order to see these files there are a couple of simple settings that can be changed:

In order to view hidden files, folders and drives, as well as hidden file types, first open up a Windows explorer window.

Next, click tools in the upper left hand corner of the window and select folder options.

When the next window is displayed click on the view tab at the top.

You will now be presented with a window with an "Advanced Settings" section. We are after three options here; "Show hidden files, folders and drives", "Hide empty drives in the Computer folder" and "Hide extensions for known file types". Make sure "Show hidden files, folders and drives" radial button is selected. Also, verify that the check boxes are not marked next to Hide empty drives in the Computer folder" and "Hide extensions for known file types". Once this is complete click OK.

These changes will allow you to see hidden folders such as AppData and several other temporary paths that you might need in your every day to day. This change will also allow you to relabel file types with a simple rename which can be very helpful for scripting (building a .txt script file and then modifying the name to a .bat).

Prior to Windows Server 2012 I had used all manners of NIC teaming software in order to properly team my adapters. Each vendor seemed to have their own method and installer. I had seen options from broadcom, HP, Dell and all of them seemed to have their flaws. With the introduction of Windows Server 2012, however, Microsoft took it upon themselves to simplify the teaming process and I 100% approve of their decision:

Being the type of person who constantly likes to install, uninstall and otherwise mess with my computers basic functionality I run across a ton of really awesome issues. One such issue occurred a few months ago when i lost my optical drive. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, most everything I own is in the cloud, but I was burning music from my last few remaining CDs and felt like this might be an issue for me. (NOTE: one of the reasons this probably occured was due to the installation and uninstallation of CD burner software - ed.). So I went digging and found a fix for my most recent of problems:

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