Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Stand-up Desk Setup

Inspired by this great post and decided to set up my own Stand-Up Desk.

Materials

  • Existing IKEA LACK TV unit from living room
  • IKEA Galant adjustable A-Legs x4 and 62" base frame
  • 4" bolts, nuts and washers x6 from Lowes.com
Old desk Setup

Old Desk Setup
 New Stand-up desk Setup
New Stand-Up Desk (Did not bother to remove the legs from  the TV unit)
Tips: drill the holes for base frame, install the A-legs on frame, then bolt the frame to TV unit.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Missing Start Menu and all desktop item on Vista

Symptom:

  • On impacted Vista machine, after logged in, the desktop is black, all desktop items, Windows Start button and tool bar are missing. Only Windows Explorer is open on the screen, and drives and others like control panel were accessible.

  • Tried to launch Explorer.exe from Task Manager, but got "C:\windows\explorer.exe application not found" error. Same to all other programs such as regedit.exe or msconfig.exe. Please see this article to get rid of this error.


However, the fix did not bring the missing items back.

  • Some have suggest to Kill Explorer.exe and create a new task, Explorer.exe in Task Manager. It did not work for me and it would only bring up another Windows Explorer on the screen.

  • At least now I could get into the registry. Google said to check the SHELL, then I went to "HKEY_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\ and Click on Winlogon, on the right pane, found out the value of SHELL was C:\PROGRA~3\dsgsdgdsidgw.bat" which obviously a virus or non sense. I changed it to "explorer.exe" and restart. The desktop came back right away.

  • Some other clean-ups needed to be done though.

Azure MFA NPS extension stopped working due to expired certification

 Users complained they were unable to log in VMware Horizon Client portal and the logon stuck at "Authenticating...." screen. So I...