The Windows 10 2004 update broke Photoshop 6.0 and it’s still broken in 21H2. As Photoshop starts, it shows, “Unable to continue because of a hardware or system error. Sorry, but this error is unrecoverable.” Running it in Windows 98/ME compatibility mode is a workaround, but it’s not ideal as…
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Switch a LastChanged datetime to datetime2
For years I’ve been using a datetime column as a “row version” or “time stamp” for most of my SQL tables. The column definition in SQL looks like this: LastChanged datetime NOT NULL DEFAULT (GetDate()) A trigger updates the LastChanged: IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.triggers WHERE object_id = OBJECT_ID(N’dbo.OnExampleChanged’))…
Switch a database to unicode
So, you have a database with a few hundred char and varchar (ASCII) columns and you want to take the plunge and convert them all to their nchar and nvarchar unicode equivalents. Start with the following SQL script in SQL Server Management Studio: SELECT t.name AS TableName ,c.name AS…
Back to the future, part 8.1
I’ve spent the last two days setting up my main workstation with Windows 8.1 Pro. I’m on holidays, which shows how much I detested Windows 10. I used it for five months. Some things were an improvement, but even more things were worse. Let me count the ways: The start…
Office 2016 custom installations
2015 is almost over. I installed Office Professional Plus 2016 for the first time today. And guess what? You can’t choose what to install or where. If you want to leave out Access, Lync or Publisher, you need to make your own deployment using the Office 2016 Deployment Tool. That…
Windows 10 won’t show Start menu
Microsoft made a bit of noise about the “new and improved” Start menu, which is basically a hybrid of Windows 7 and 8. Well, yesterday my Start menu stopped working. It wouldn’t display by clicking the Start button or by pressing the Win key. It turns out this is quite…
Windows 10 Print to PDF
One thing that I do like about Windows 10 is the built in Print to PDF printer driver. XPS (and OXPS) was supposed to be the alternative to PDF, but let’s face it, most people just don’t know what to do with an XPS file. And the XPS viewers in…
Windows 10 title bar colour
Seriously, having every window the same colour, whether in focus or not, is a Really Dumb Decision. When you have multiple monitors, it’s very difficult to quickly see which window has focus. With seven monitors it’s nearly impossible; the black-text-vs-grey-text is woefully inadequate. I know applications can now choose their…
The Windows 10 calculator
OK, so I’ve decided the new calculator is a step or three backwards. It’s so slow to start that I often start typing numbers before it’s ready to accept them. So I’ve installed the Windows 7 and 8 calculator.
Windows Update descriptions
Is it really so hard to provide a description for an Update? And how about giving me an estimate of how much data is going to be downloaded? Click on Details and you’re presented with this gem:
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