Loose your Groove

Did I mention how well my laptop has been running since the Vista reinstallation?  Oh yeah, except I still haven’t tackled iTunes again

Here’s one that’s caught me out before .. and, as I didn’t reinstall the applications (hubby did) .. it snuck back in again.  Small business owners in Australia & New Zealand may be familiar with the MYOB suite of accounting/bookkeeping software.  It literally stands for Mind Your Own Business.  Well, Accounting Plus v17.0.0 (and some earlier versions) don’t play well with Microsoft Office 2007.  In particular, when you try to display a payroll advice, MYOB crashes with a “stopped working” error.  Very frustrating when you are trying to process the salary payments.  Even more frustrating when it’s your own salary you are trying to pay. 

The solution? Uninstall the Microsoft Office Groove component (Control Panel > Programs and Features > highlight Office and click Change > add/remove features > click Microsoft Office Groove and select Not Available > click Continue and follow your nose).  This will require a reboot.

Problem experienced with Office Enterprise 2007 on Vista, but may not be isolated to this particular configuration.

So, just when I thought I’d got my Groove back, I had to uninstall it

Save, save, save

Save – of the critial “protect your data” type, not the “look how much money I saved in this sale today type” (though arguably they are just as important as each other).

Normally my favourite rant is regarding backups (and, more importantly, testing your data restorations), especially where small business is concerned. And I’m talking real small business (1 – 20 users). But I’ll save that for another day.

No, today’s rant is about saving your progress as you go. Though the concept was made famous when Microsoft Word crashed during that business report/university paper you had nearly finished .. and hadn’t saved .. and couldn’t be recovered … saving as you go is important for other applications too .. and not just software applications.

When building a standard computer software image (thanks Ghost or Acronis or dare I say it, Microsoft) to be applied to multiple computers with identical hardware, it also pays to save your progress. Most importantly, take a full image of the completed software build BEFORE you sysprep, then you’ll have a fallback if it fails – which it did.

Windows Message:
The system is not fully installed.
Please run setup again.

Microsoft does provide a registry edit to reproduce the problem (why would you want to?), or it can be fixed with a registry edit after a “parallel installation” of Windows (yuck).
In my case, it was far quicker to reapply the completed, working image, then “ensure that the Use Mini-Setup is checked when you use the Reseal option in Sysprep”.

Saving – one of the most simple yet underrated things you can do on your computer.