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The End of Life for the Windows Server 2003 was on July 14, 2015.  It was reported that as many as 8 million licenses were still active at the time of the expiration for support. All support for Windows Server 2003 including R2 have ceased unless special paid support has been arranged with Microsoft.  Now is a good time to begin making plans to upgrade your old servers that may be running Windows Server 2003 and the applications you have running on them.

Not sure how this will impact your business? Then let us help you review your current install base and provide you with the man options available. This might be a great opportunity migrate applications to one of our Cloud Services like Microsoft Exchange, Nebula Data Online Backup, or VMware Cloud Air.

After spending years supporting the Microsoft platform you find those special tools that help you overcome specific situations that seem monumental at first because you have to manually work your way through it. If you are lucky you will find some administration tool that eases that pain because someone before you had it to and had the skill to develop a tool to make it easier.

The purpose of this page is to help point others to some great web sites that offer free tools for administrating a Microsoft environment. Since we are unaffiliated with any of these sites, use these tools with caution. We don't advocate piracy so if there is a licensing fee, please pay up. The only things free are viruses and malware - and eventually you will pay the cost for that too.

You may be wondering why your cursor keys along with  your Home and End keys are not working properly. When you attempt to move your cursor from one cell to another using the cursor keys, the entire spreadsheet moves in that direction. Also the Home and End keys only take you to the far left or right of that row that is currently visible instead of taking you to the beginning or end of that row.

The simple solution might be that you accidently turned on your Scroll Lock. This is a special key that is seldom used today and exists near that upper right of the keyboard between two other keys rarely used, Print Screen/ System Request key and the Pause / Break key. Check your keyboard and see if the light for the Scroll Lock is on, if so that is likely the cause of your issue. Simply press the Scroll Lock key once to turn it off; you should notice the indicator light goes off as well.

When attempting to connect a vCenter server to Active Directory I got an error that I had to enter a fully qualified domain name in the Domain field, which I had done. So why the error. I started checking the following areas.

Domain Resolution - does the domain resolve back to one of the domain controllers. In my case I could ping and perform an nslookup on the domain and it resolved fine.

Have you had the need to test an outgoing port through a firewall to verify that the port was open for outbound traffic? There is a great tool called Outgoing Port Tester that will test any TCP port using a variety of methods. You can use your browser to test most ports using the following URL.

http://portquiz.net/

Many of the new Dell professional displays don't have the audio feature but when connected to a computer using the HDMI cable the computer will attempt to default the audio playback through the HDMI connection anyway. This is why you may not have audio on your computer, even if you have built-in audio on your laptop or desktop computer.

To resolve this issue you will need to change your default audio device to one that does have audio functionality. Here are some steps that might help.

We seem to have a great need for training our clients on removing garbageware or other unwanted applications. So in order to provide that training and have it as a future reference for when they forget how they performed the task at a previous time, we are making this How To training public for reference.

This process, although written with Windows 7 in mind, will basically work as well with the other versions of Windows with some minor changes.

A client gave us a MacBook Pro Mid 2009 that had some issues booting. The MacBook had El Capitan installed but it would not reinstall. After backing up the user files we then attempted to perform a recovery which attempted to restore the system to Yosemite, but that failed as well. Out of a last resort we had a copy of Snow Leopard v10.6.0 that we were able to use to reformat the drive and then install the OS. Here are the remaining steps we took to get the system retored to El Capitan.
It is important to remember that when installing any Mac OS that you don’t have any non-Apple peripherals connected such as a mouse or keyboard as these will often cause the install to fail.

1. Upgrade from v10.6.0 to v10.6.8 this is the base version needed prior to installing El Capitan.
2. Update the v10.6.8 which will then install the App Store tool.
3. Go to the Apple web site to “Get El Capitan from the App Store”
   https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206886
4. Scroll down the page to find the link “Get OS X El Capitan”. You can try this direct link.
   https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/os-x-el-capitan/
5. Click the Get button in the upper left of the page.
6. You will now need to enter your Apple ID and password to continue.
7. The install will begin, it is about 6.21 GB and may take an hour or more to complete depending on your Internet connection speed.
8. Once the install completes and the computer reboots, the system should now have El Capitan.

 We hope that this information is helpful. Please let us know how this has helped you or if you have additional questions. As always Firestone Technical Resources, Inc. is here to help with your computer support issues - "Providing personal service for your impersonal technology."

One of the first signs that you have malware on your computer is that Internet Explorer begins to have performance issues or stops working all together. We highly recommend to our clients to only use Internet Explorer, although the version may vary depending on how they are using it. For most, the latest version should be used as this will provide the best security.

If you suspect your computer is infected with malware, open your Control Panel and select the Uninstall a Program option. Review the applications that are installed and see if any of them are on our Garbageware list. This is the low hanging fruit of normal computer clean up that will help with your computer stability and performance.

Symantec has officially pulled the plug on their Backup Exec.cloud solution, and support will end in January 2015, leaving organizations in search of a solution to safeguard their data easily and affordably.   Firestone Technical Resources, Inc. has partnered with several industry leading backup providers giving our clients just the product and service they need. We’ve already put in service with clients these cloud backup options and know that they work. We hope this comprehensive replacement guide will help you determine the right product solution and value that fits your organization.

You probably also know that Symantec’s Backup Exec.Cloud was competitively priced, but was little more than a simple file backup solution. It lacked many business-grade features such as agentless environment backups, business continuity, and full servers, workstations,  Exchange, SharePoint, SQL, VMware, and Hyper V support.

This article is currently in progress in relation to a problem we have seen with configuring Outlook 2016 with Exchange 2013. This issue has a number of posts in general on the various support forums on the Internet but no definitive solution. As we find the solution to this we will post it here.

If you want to test the autodiscover for your Exchange server, use Microsoft Connectivity Analysis tool.

If your computer updated in January 2019 with updates KB4481480, KB4480970 and KB890830 then your remote access to file shares on other systems may be restricted. When attempting to connect you may get one of the following error: An authentication error has occurred.The Local Security Authority cannot be contactedRemote computer xxx.xxx.xx.xxx...

With many computers needing to be upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10, the need for clear consistent instructions are needed. The instructions listed are for Dell computers but could be easily adapted for other makes. Install Windows 10 from Dell Recovery DVD  Download the Dell Windows 10 Recovery ISO image for your system at this Dell ...

Older versions of Windows 10 have issues with connecting to a L2TP or IPsec VPN connection. If you are unable to update your computer to the latest version 1909 or later, you may want to try this registry fix. To add a necessary registry setting:1. Press the Windows Key and R at the same time to bring up the Run box.2. Type in: regedit and click OK...

It is not a matter of if you will be a victim or target of a cyber attack but a matter of when. In some cases your information may be gathered to be used against someone else, which may give the appearance that you were the victim when you are not. If you suspect that your email, website, identity or any other personal aspect of who you are or the ...

After reading a recent TechRepublic article about security mistakes that often made in enterprise organizations, I thought I would share some of my own. So this will be an ongoing post.

But before I get started, I would like to lead with the one from TechRepublic that started this.

On occasions a client's network is missing the server or one or more workstations when browsing the network. Typically this is noticed when our tech company takes over support from another MSP. This is frustrating to both an IT tech that is not familiar enough with the environment and the end users that may need to access the server directly. The l...

After exporting an old IMAP account for a client to a PST file so that the client could continue to view the messages the email messages would not appear, just a message indicating that the was nothing to display. This has never been an issue in the past however in this case, and after some research, appears that it may be related to newer versions...

Occasionally we get a computer that needs a reinstallation, but they don't have the original media because they didn't create it before the computer crashed. If you have a computer with pre-installed Windows 7 or Vista, most likely you’ll notice the manufacturer’s support information when you look in the system properties window. However once the computer has been restored to working condition with OEM media, there is no logo. We often want to change the OEM logo in the computer properties dialog box so that it reflects the original installation and makes the customer feel like they got there computer back just like they bought it.

How to Customize the OEM Logo

After joining a Dell Latitude 5520 Windows 10 system to Azure AD and then rebooting the system, the boot process fails to complete. Every attempt made to resolve the issue failed. We were unable to boot the system in to Safe mode. The Azure AD information indicated that the system was successfully joined. The system would not complete the boot proc...