Category: From the Help Desk

If you didn’t build a recovery image before you had problems with your Microsoft Surface device, good news! Microsoft will allow you to enter your serial number and download a recovery image!

Instructions and downloads are available directly from Microsoft!

The background:
Our office recently picked up some new computers, both Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Some of these computers, upon reboot, are unable to connect to the internet. The Wi-Fi icon in the system tray has an exclamation mark, when you hover over it, it says: “Unidentified network (no internet access) – when you click on it, it does say that it’s “connected” to the proper network, but that it is “Limited.”

The temporary work-around:
The quick work around I’ve found is to simply put the laptop in Airplane mode, and then immediately take it out of Airplane mode. This will allow the laptop to connect to your wireless network.

But you shouldn’t have to do that! Continue reading “FIXED: Windows 8 / 10 computers won’t automatically connect to wifi”

I can’t believe I never put this article on my site before, it’s an ancient tip, and still useful for the “average” home user. Do you have a home computer and you don’t want to be pestered for a password every time it starts up? The following steps should be all you need Enjoy!

1. Open the Run Menu (Either by clicking Start then Run – or – simply be holding Windows Logo Key and pressing R on your keyboard).
2. Type: control userpasswords2 (leave the 2 off for older versions of Windows like XP and 2000) and hit enter or click OK.
3. Click the user in the list you want to be automatically logged in so that they are highlighted:

4. Uncheck the box at the top of the window that says “Users must enter a username and password…”
5. Click OK then enter your password (twice, to confirm you typed it correctly) – if you do not normally enter a password, just click “OK” leaving the two password lines blank – then click OK.

I believe the prompt may disappear even if you typed the incorrect password, so the only way to be sure it worked is to restart your computer. If all went well, the next time you start up, you should not be prompted for a password and be logged directly in to your desktop! Try it out! If you see the user logon screen or are asked for a password, you probably just missed the password in step 5. Pay close attention to what you type (or don’t type) at the logon screen, then try it again.

LibreOffice (and it’s grand daddy, OpenOffice) are excellent programs with a long history in the Open Source community. The projects provide a wonderful inexpensive or even completely free alternative to the power house, Microsoft Office.

I’m often asked if there’s a way to open your Word, Excel, even PowerPoint files with LibreOffice. The good news is that once you install LibreOffice, it can automatically take over file associations, meaning that when you double click a .DOC (Word ’97-2003) or .DOCX (Word 2007-2016) file, it will open right up in the LibreOffice “Writer” module, just as if it were opening in Word.

But what about Saving files? By default, LibreOffice uses an ‘Open Document Format’ or ODF Text (.odt) file format to save documents. Although these should open in Microsoft Word, sometimes you send these files to colleagues, friends, or teachers, and the document won’t open on their end, and you catch heat. So the easiest thing to do is to make sure you’re saving all of your files in a compatible Microsoft Word format. Same goes for other document types. I’ll show you how to change the DEFAULT SAVE-AS FILE TYPE in LibreOffice to Microsoft compatible documents (I will provide examples of “Word” and “Excel” compatible files, once you have this down, you will be able to do other formats as well).

1. With LibreOffice installed (for this example I’m using version 5.0.1.2, September 2015), just click the “LibreOffice” icon on the desktop or in the Start Menu, then click “Writer Document” on the left, to create a new Writer document.
2. Click Tools from the Menu Bar across the top, then Options at the bottom of the Tools menu.

3. In the Options Menu, click the “+” sign beside “Load/Save” then click on General underneath that.
4. At the bottom right, you’ll see an option that says “ODF Text Document.” Click that Drop Down and change it to Microsoft Word 2007-2013 XML (to save as .DOCX), or Microsoft Word 97-2003 (to save as .DOC).

5. Next, click the drop down box above that, which simply says “Text document” and change it to “Spreadsheet.”
6. Now change the bottom box from “ODF Spreadsheet” to Microsoft Excel 2007-2013 XML (for saving as .XLSX files), or Excel 97-2003 (to save as .XLS files).

7. Click OK.

You can also change “Presentations” to PowerPoint compatible files (.pptx/,ppt). Important when choosing a Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint format, make sure you do not choose “TEMPLATE” by mistake. You do not want to save your every-day documents as TEMPLATES (an option you can see in some of the drop down list screen shots above), or that will cause issues for the people opening them.

That should do the trick, though! You now have a fully functional free alternative to Microsoft Office! Enjoy!