Helmers Blog

A customer came to me with the question which of the two does a better job for delivering remote assistance to the end-users : the built in remote assistance function of Windows 7 or the (3rd party tool) VNC Viewer. Because I’m a big fan of the Request Remote Assistance function in Live Messenger for supporting friends and family with their computer issues I advised them to use the default remote assistance.

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Microsoft made the beta version of Windows Intune available earlier today. Too bad it’s only available for participants in the USA, Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico. I was curious if you really have to be in one of the countries physically or if a ‘American-oriented Live ID’ will do. (This how-to is still a bit of work in progress)

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Just opened a Excel Sheet (Created with Excel 2003) in my 64-bit version of Excel 2010 (beta) and received the following error : Compile Error : The code in this project must be updated for use on 64-bit systems. Please review and update Declare statements and then mark them with the Ptrsafe attribute. I never received such an error (maybe because Excel 2010 is the first 64-bit Excel?), so I started to feed Google a part of the error message. The first hit brought me the solution.

So I added the PtrSafe attribute to the Declare function which changed the lines in this : Declare PtrSafe Function….. After I saved the sheet, closed it and reopened it again..the error just disappeared!

I’ve been a user of Office 2010 since I received the invitation for the Technical Preview. So when I heard that I could download the Beta version of Office Professional Plus 2010, I checked TechNet right away and downloaded the 64-bits version (I was also using the 64-bit Technical Preview version).

Because I had Outlook configured with Exchange, etc I tried to ‘upgrade’ my Technical Preview version, but that one failed. A message appeared telling me that I had to uninstall all the previous versions of Office 2010 before I could install the beta version. So I did…

Office 2010 Beta was installed in a few minutes, but when I launched Outlook I ran into some issues (probably because of the Technical Preview key that was still in place?) with the product key. The following message appeared :

When I pressed the Change Product Key button to enter the Beta key I received from TechNet nothing happened! I found out that when I start Excel (or maybe any other Office app) and clicked the Change Product Key a change product key screen appeared (see image below) and I was able to activate Office 2010!

  Now I could enter the key and click Continue to apply the changed product key. Strange enough Office 2010 didn’t go online and activate immediately, but when I restarted Outlook the activation wizard appeared and when I tried to activate Office 2010 it just activated fine!

Buy and Download If you want Windows 7 you can not only buy the physical media in the store of your choice, but you can also buy (and download) the ISO files at your online Microsoft Store! In an earlier blogpost I described how you can create a bootable USB stick to install Windows 7 from.

To help everybody out who isn’t technical enough to run diskpart and make a bootable usb stick from the command prompt Microsoft created a tool : Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. With this tool the only thing you have to do is to download the ISO and the tool. With a few mouse clicks you create a bootable USB stick from the downloaded ISO file!

Click Read More to see how the tool works!

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