To reset BIOS passwords on Optiplex 780 (small form factor shown here);
Password should now be cleared – check in BIOS settings.
If you need to install Office 365 on a user’s laptop but not activate it (because you can only do it five times yourself), read on…
Get the deployment tool (link for Office 365 2016)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49117
Run the executable – this will extract the setup.exe and configuration.xml files. Put these in a handy directory.
The default configuration.xml should be ok for downloading the installation sources (32-bit Office and Visio). Run setup.exe /download – this will download the office sources to a subdirectory Office\Data (there’s about 1.25 Gb of files). Note there is no progress indicator!
Sometimes Seagate DiscWizard insists on rebooting, even if you’re cloning between two non-system drives. It is worth checking the state of the target drive. I found that even with no partitions, a target drive with a GPT partition table caused this issue. Solved by firing up diskpart:
list disk
select disk {number}
clean
This wipes the partition table (and consequently the disk appears in the Disk Management console as not initialized). DiscWizard should then clone to it without complaints.
If you are using Outlook it’s reasonably straightforward to access additional mailboxes on your Exchange mailserver. Using other clients it’s a bit more obscure. The Glasgow Exchange server can be accessed via IMAP (although it’s best to use the native exchange protocols when you can). To access a mailbox called mail_box use these settings (using Thunderbird as an example):
Note that when using an Apple or Android phone, you can access your primary mailbox using the Exchange protocol (and it’s recommended to do so). However, this is a reduced functionality mobile version which does not give access to additional mailboxes. For these, you have to use an IMAP connection (i.e. set up an additional mail account and use the settings above).
Had a situation that seems to be fairly common – get laptop, uninstall “Get Office” program, install Office 2016 and activate using KMS server, which seems to work fine. Then when you fire up one of the programs you get the “Lets get started” screen. You can close this and it works ok, but it is annoying.
To fix this see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3170450 (deleting a couple of registry keys that make Office think it’s still in OEM mode).
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