Microsoft Outlook Cannot Add Gmail Account

This is a problem that occurs when you remove a Gmail account from Outlook and then re-add it. Normally when you add a Gmail account, you get a window that asks you to sign in to Gmail. But if you removed your account, then that window might never appear. This is because Outlook did not properly delete some entries in the registry.

I would recommend you remove all email accounts in Outlook using the Mail setting in the Control Panel before this fix.

Open the registry editor and go to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity\Identities

(Note: the number may not be 16.0; it might be higher or lower so be sure to check all similar entries).

Delete any entry with your email address in it. If you removed all email address, delete every entry. After that, re-add your Gmail account as normal.

Although I haven’t tested this, I would think this problem would also appear for Hotmail/Outlook and Yahoo email because these also use the OAuth2 standard.

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0xc0000001 When Booting

There is a common error when booting your Windows computer. The Windows boot files became corrupted and the computer no longer boots. The problem with this error is not all the generic, boilerplate answers Microsoft will give you work. Even worse, all the tools Microsoft provides to fix will not work either. Windows 7 and earlier, this will be in a black screen; Windows 8 and later it will be a blue screen. The error will have the 0xc0000001 code, and sometimes will list the file “\Windows\system32\winload.efi“. Likely, this file itself is not corrupt, but other boot files are. This is because the boot files are usually in a hidden partition of the hard drive.

These are the steps to fix it:

Rollback Microsoft Edge Version

In early September 2022, Microsoft released a bad version of Microsoft Edge, build 105. The solution was to rollback the version. These are the simplified instructions on how you can do that. Microsoft’s rollback instructions are at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-learnmore-rollback.

1. Go to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/business/download and download an older version of Edge. The older versions are below the download buttons at the top. As of the time of this post, the most recent build was 105, so I had to choose a 104 build.
2. After downloading, open a command prompt as an Administrator and then go to the folder where the file was downloaded.
3. Type the following command in the command prompt: msiexec /I MicrosoftEdgeEnterpriseX64.msi /qn ALLOWDOWNGRADE=1
   1. Note that the file name MicrosoftEdgeEnterpriseX64.msi may be different.
4. Wait. There will be no confirmation that it was successful.

UPDATE: The reason why build 105 of Edge stopped working is because of a bug related to an obsolete setting. You need to delete the registry keys HKCU\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge\MetricsReportingEnabled and HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge\MetricsReportingEnabled. Check both places, but it may not exist at one of them.

Visual Voicemail Does Not Work

Here is a problem that seems to affect phones using Verizon’s network. Although it may affect other carriers. I recently switched from AT&T to Visible Wireless — which is a Verizon subsidiary — and I started to have trouble with visual voicemail on my phone. Numerous chats to Visible’s support people didn’t help. I finally figured out it was my VPN causing the problem.

Upcoming Windows 11

For a long time we were told that Windows 10 would the last Windows version ever. That turned out to be a lie. In late June, Microsoft announced there would be a Windows 11.

This post will be updated periodically until Windows 11 becomes mainstream. Eventually, it will be deleted and replaced with a page about Windows 11.

Shrinking a Virtual Hard Drive Image

I have a QNap NAS with a virtual Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials on it. I use this virtual machine only as a backup. Recently I had a need to shrink, or compact, the virtual hard drive image file on it. I found this board post that described a way to do this. But it seemed overly complicated. And for me it would require a hard drive larger than 2 TB to do it. The only hard drive I had that large was in the NAS itself. So I needed a better way. This is the steps I used for my QNap virtual machine, which is based QEMU. The steps should work with any virtual machine, including Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle VirtualBox, and Synology’s virtual machine. These steps should only be used if there is no other easy way to shrink the virtual hard drive image.

Migrating a Server to a NAS

So I decided to migrate a server I built to a NAS. I did this for several reasons. (1) The case I used was not a server case, thus it had no hot-swappable drives. This was a big problem because one of my drives developed bad sectors and needed a warranty replacement. (2) I wanted/needed a device that could also be used for security cameras. Just replacing my case with one that had hot-swap bays would not satisfy that. (3) I wanted something that would make sharing my TV recordings through the network easier, something better than Plex even though I will still be using Plex. (4) And I wanted to learn more about NAS because I want to discourage my customers from using servers when all they are doing is sharing files.

So now that I determined that I needed/wanted a NAS, now I needed to determine which one to get. I still needed to run Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials, which meant I needed a powerful NAS that supports virtual machines. This limited me to NAS that use either Intel or AMD processors. I decided on one with the Ryzen processor because it is just as good as the Intel ones — especially with the Meltdown bug — and because I don’t need to pay extra to get something with Thunberbolt in it, seeing as that standard is about as popular as gangrene. A 6 core Ryzen will outperform a 4 core Intel with the Meltdown fix. This is why I decided on the QNap TS-x77 line of NAS.

This blog post will be a constant work-in-progress with few updates.

Saving Money on Your Cable Bill

This is a question I am asked from time to time: what can I do to save money on my cable television bill? Likely you have noticed your cable or satellite TV bill go up and up. What you may not realize is that the most of the price hikes are not because of the satellite or cable TV provider. Greedy cable TV providers, such as Disney and Viacom, charge a fee to rebroadcast their channel. Even though they keep finding ways to pack more and more commercials per hour, they still charge a fee per channel. This would not be so bad except that these same greedy pigs also require you to purchase their shows in packages. For example, you cannot just get the History channel and nothing else, you also have to get Discovery channel and TLC and so on. If that wasn’t bad enough, local stations that you can get free with an antenna also make the cable provider pay a fee to rebroadcast. And when the greedy pigs want more money, they play the victim and ask you to demand your cable provider to keep the channels even though the channels are going away only because your provider doesn’t want to pay them more money.

Still, despite the deck being stacked against you by channel creators, you can save money. But it does require a little bit of technical know-how. Some much more than others.

Before we begin, I strongly do recommend you get a good universal remote regardless, such as Logitech Harmony remotes. You can program these where you push a button that is labeled, for example, “Watch TV” and it turns everything on and does all the changes needed to your TV or stereo. However you decide, save up some money and get a good universal remote to make life easy.

When a Warranty is not a Warranty

This is a short and sweet blog entry. Last year, I bought an all-in-one for a customer from Dell. It was dead on arrival. Three days later, a person with a Dell technician contract came out and fixed the problem. No cost. My understanding of warranties is that everything should be covered, parts and labor. Apparently, I am wrong. One of my customer’s HP computer had a bad hard drive while under warranty. A new hard drive was free, but the cost to install it was $50+tax. I couldn’t do it myself — that would void the warranty. I could have bought a better hard drive with a 5 year warranty for only $20 more. But that would void the warranty. And I am willing to bet Dell and Lenovo and Acer and … well, everyone would also charge for labor after 30 days.

So my recommendation is the hard drive or memory, don’t tell HP. Buy a better part yourself to solve the problem.

Website Fails to Load

I was trying to diagnose why a certain website failed to load for a customer. It was only a certain few websites. In Internet Explorer, nothing would load but the it acted like it was perpetually trying to load the website. In Mozilla Firefox, I received a message “the connection was reset”. In Google Chrome, the message “the connection was interrupted”.

It turns out to be a driver problem. I switched this computer’s network from the wired connection to the wireless one and the website instantly loaded. I would also recommend using tweaking.com Windows All-in-One repair and choosing every repair related to the network. Also update the problem network driver.