I always keep remote desktop enabled at home. The reason for this is that any time my wife is having a pc issue, instead of trying to talk her through it on the phone, I just remote in and fix it. I Recently tried to do this, and to my dismay I found that my internet provider has blocked port 3389. Here is a quick post on how to change the default port in windows.

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I had a customers computer in the store today which was a simple windows XP home edition desktop and they wanted to restore the PC to a earlier time. This is normally a simple task however when I went to system restore I recieved the error “System Restore Disabled by Group policy”. Since this was just a normal persons desktop I found this very odd. Next I tried to edit the policy values via the registry and was greeted by another error saying ” Registry Editing has been Disabled by Group policy”. This was starting to get a little annoying so I decided to document my steps to fix this issue.  Now before I get a hundred comments with people saying there is a better way remember there is more than one way to do things and this is just my way.

Below I document the few simple steps to fix this error.

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I am always annoyed by the caps lock on a laptop. I seem to hit it about 100 times a day while typing. It is especially annoying when writing code. I decided to peek into the registry and map the key from its key number to zero which effectively disables it. After disabling it via the registry I found a .reg file online which someone made to map the caps lock key to the control key. This didn’t really interest me so I modified it to map to nothing.

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Today I had a computer brought in where some basement Craigs list technician  had installed a hacked version of Microsoft Office on a womans computer and she was getting a error message saying it was not genuine. She brought it in to me along with a fresh new copy she had purchased and asked me to install it.  I tried to install it over the hacked copy but I kept getting all kinds of install errors in Spanish or Portuguese or some thing. I then tried to remove the hacked copy and got the same errors along with some that said “Your computer does not support the language of the uninstaller”. After a frustrated morning I found a tool which removes all traces of Office 2007 from the registry and makes it possible to delete the folder afterwards or use a 3rd party uninstaller program.

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An issue I had with a clients laptop after reinstalling Windows XP was the CD/DVD drive was not displaying underneath My Computer. When inserting a CD into the drive you could hear the drive spin up but the drive never displayed underneath Windows XP My Computer window. Initially I thought the issue could be resolved with a file available from the Sony support web site but it did not fix the CD/DVD drive issue. Finally after some research I located a registry edit that did resolve the problem so below I describe how to resolve the issue.

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