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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.

On a number of occasions I have attempted to import an exported MySQL database file and received the following message.

/* SQL Error (1064): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '?# -------------------------------------------------------- # Host:     ' at line 1 */
/* Error with snippets directory: The specified path was not found */

# --------------------------------------------------------
# Host:                         127.0.0.1
# Server version:               5.5.40 - MySQL Community Server (GPL)
# Server OS:                    Win32
# HeidiSQL version:             7.0.0.4053
# Date/time:                    2014-01-20 09:48:36
# --------------------------------------------------------

While attempting to push an install of Kaspersky Endpoint Security to a client's laptop the installation would fail with an unknown error. After checking the laptop's Application event log I found the following message "Kaspersky Security Center Network Agent - Error 25002. Error while installing: The system cannot find the path specified."

This system was fairly clean and had been check for viruses, so I knew that was not the problem. But someone else provided support and so anything could have been done by the previous admin that could have caused the issue. After researching various installation failures I found that someone had an issue with the junction points not being created correctly in the C:\ProgramData folder, which is a hidden folder for those that don't already know.

The Kyocera KM-5035 and Copystar CS-5035 both have a separate scanner controller with its own network connection. Once this card has been connected to the network and configured with an IP address at the main control panel, you can then remotely access the configuration using your web browser.

You will also need the Kyocera File Utility application in order to complete the network scanning configuration. This utility provide a data transfer connect between the PC workstation and the scanner. Be sure to download and install this utility on any computer you wish to scan to.

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.

After upgrading a Windows 2003 Server to Windows 2012 Server for a client, the Canon iR C2550 would not scan to the new folder which was configured in the same way as the original server. Now the server name was different and so that should have been the only change needed. So why didn't it work. So this is what we did to troubleshoot the issue.

1. DNS - In this case we had to go back to the original DNS configuration and update the DNS to point to the new server since its IP address had changed.

After reinstalling Windows 7 and then setting up Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO) again, the game would no longer allow the option for choosing which version of DirectX to use. This system was a high end laptop running Windows 7 with an NVidia graphics card that supported DirectX 11.

DirectX 11 is native to the Windows 7 installation and you can verify this by running the command dxdiag from the Start menu. The diagnostics will likely indicate that you have DirectX 11 compatibility but the game will still not detect it correctly.

One of the most common questions we get regarding mobile devices is how to setup an Apple iPhone with access to a corporate Microsoft Exchange mail system. This doesn't have to be a local system, it could be a hosted cloud Exchange server as well. Many people often will use a POP connection but this really doesn't allow the mobile device to exploit the full capabilities of the Microsoft Exchange services such as synchronizing contacts and calendars. So, get the full benefit of Microsoft Exchange by using the Exchange mail connector on the mobile device.

There are a couple of pre-configuration steps that you may want to take, especially if you have moved your Exchange service to a different hosting provider.

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.

After completing several updates on Exchange 2013 due to another issue, we found that e-mail messages were going to the Drafts folder instead of the Sent Items folder. In addition the server was not receiving any messages either.

After further investigation we found that the Mail Transport service was failing, not immediately, which was why we didn't notice it after it was started. In this particular case the client had a secondary SMTP port configured for relay messages but that port was setup on both the Exchange 2013 CAS and Database servers but only one of the CAS server actually had the IP address assigned on the NIC. Once the relay SMTP port configuration was removed from the Database server the Mail Transport service ran fine and mail flowed through the system correctly.

Ads by BlockandSurf are typically a sign of severe trouble with your computer. Past releases of this malware could be removed easily by uninstalling the software and sometimes removing some registry settings. However the lastest infection we found on a Windows 8 system was unresolved except by reinstalling the system to the factory default installation.

Signs of Infection

The Ads by BlockandSurf appear as popup ads in the lower left of the browser, on the left as sidebar ads, and in some cases will appear as a floating web dialog box over the main web page. In all cases there is some indication that the popup is being presented by "Ads by BlockandSurf". One of the signs that this is not the easy to remove version of this infection is that clicking on a link on what appears to be a clean web page results in the destination page appearing with the ads and one or more addition tabs or browser windows that appear attempting to display web sites that have malicious content that attempts to install on your computer.

One of our QuickBooks Enterprise users started to get an error whenever they would run payroll and create checks. The process would complete and checks would be created but QuickBooks would display an error message "An unexpected error has occurred in 'Intuit QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions: Professional Services 14.0' and then the application would close.

It is suspected that there was an update applied that changed the security settings in the application that caused this issue because when another user that was an administrator of QuickBooks ran payroll the problem didn't occur. In addition the error message in the Windows Application Event log indicated that the failure was related to access to the employee template file, "Failed adding medicare tax item to employee template - Permission error".

The Windows 7 update "System Update Readiness Tool for Windows 7 (KB947821) [May 2014]" will appear hung or stuck during the update process. It will get to about 80 to 90% and just the hard drive activity is all that will indicate that it is still working on the update process. Many have noted it to take several hours. In our own install of this for a client it took almost 6 hours to complete on a system that failed the SFC scan test.

If you are installing the System Update Readiness Tool for Windows 7 (KB947821) besure to allow for a long period of time to install. Do not stop this install or you may corrupt the system to a point where it will not boot and you will be required to reload Windows from scratch.

After working several days of cleaning up a system that was infected by the Zbot trojan and others, I found that the client's computer would start the Windows Security Center or display the dependancies for any of the services. The message that would be displayed in the Service Dependencies dialog box was "Win32: The specified service does not exist as an installed service." Microsoft knowledge base had no answers so I started comparing the registry of a working Windows 7 system to the one that was failing.

I found that the Windows Management Instrumentation service (Winmgmt) was a dependancy of the Security Center service, but the Winmgmt was not starting because some of the information in its registry keys was missing. Below is what the registry key should have contained.

The Microsoft Surface RT runs a special version of Windows called Windows RT. The Surface RT has an ARM based microprocessor instead of the traditional Intel/x86 compatible processor used with most other Windows based systems. This different processor requires an operating system that is compatible, hence the Windows RT operating system.

One unique aspect to the Windows RT operating system is that malware written for the standard versions of Windows will not run and therfore won't infect a Surface RT device. In addtion, all apps that are capable of being installed on the Surface RT must be downloaded from the Microsoft App store and contain a digital signature that allows them to run. This is another way in which viruses and malware are prevented from running on the Surface RT. This doesn't mean that the Surface RT is immune to viruses, it just means that a virus would have to be crafted specifically for use with Windows RT.

When performing test on a Microsoft Exchange server, some tests will return a transaction time warning. For the most part this is not an issue and nothing needs to be done. This delay is intentional on the part of Microsoft Exchange to help prevent spam. The warnings are typically given when it takes more than 1 second for the SMTP connector to respond to the request. This process of delaying multiple mail requests is called tarpitting.

If this warning bothers you, there is a change that you can make that will fix the Transaction time warnings for Exchange 2007 and 2010.

While cleaning up a client computer I found an issue with Internet Explorer where the proxy seeting could not be changed with out it automatically reverting back to its original setting. This persistant issue seemed related to a typical group policy setting but this was not possible because the system was running Windows 7 Home. Many others on the Internet had reported the issue with only one resolution, editing the registry.

The registry changes didn't seem to be long lasting until I found an article by Philip Turner that provided some additional registry keys that I was missing in my search.

There will come a time when the Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) database gets very large and you will want to reclaim the space. Hopefully you have already relocated your WSUS update files to another drive on your server using the SBS Console wizard. If not, you may want to visit the TechNet site for an easy to follow process to complete that.

This process will take an extended amount of time, maybe 24+ hours. One of our clients had only 19 GB of update content and a 14 GB database to clean up and the process ran well over 2 hours. So we recommend you schedule this process to be performed after hours and when no other significant server task might take place, such as backup.

One of our users mistakenly installed Google Chrome when installing an Adobe update and then uninstalled it. However the uninstall did not restore all of the Internet Explorer setting causing multiple problems. One issue was that the user could not use Windows Explorer to view an ftp site.

When the user logged into an ftp site and went to "View" and then "Open ftp site in Windows Explorer" nothing would happen. After searching for this issue we found others had a similar problem and were able to export the registry key [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ftp] and then import it into the computer that was having issues. In our case the [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ftp] registry key was missing entirely from the user's computer and needed to be recreated.

Many small businesses spend big money on getting themselves noticed on the web with very little results. Often with a little effort of someone who has some basic computer skills can improve a company's presence with many of the free tools that are available.

Yext has one of those tools and they will allow you to use it for free, but like everything that is free there is still a price to be paid. If you use Yext's web listing tool to just get a report of where your business is listed it won't cost you anything but a couple of phone calls from their sales team trying to get you to use there service.