My posts on Microsoft Windows

CrashPlan and Filebot, beware of extended metadata/attributes!

Recently I decided to rename some of my media collection with Filebot, which is great tool for batch renaming media content. I also use CrashPlan on my main file server that backs up my data to the CrashPlan cloud (CrashPlan Central). An interesting issue occurred recently where CrashPlan started getting stuck in a weird cycle and keep disconnecting from the backup destination regularly after the renaming of some files was performed. I was slightly puzzled by this as a rename of files shouldn’t cause any issues, thanks to CrashPlan’s data deduplication processes, CrashPlan will only send the changed data blocks to the cloud rather than the whole file. After some troubleshooting I found the root cause and its all to do with metadata!

(more…)

Windows 10 Outlook Mail gets updated with email rendering “improvements”

Last week the all things Microsoft and Windows news site Windows Central reported an update to the Outlook Mail app which supposedly fixed the way emails were being rendered on Windows 10. Excited (because I’m that kind of nerd), I hammered the check updates button on the Windows Store with my Lumia 950 XL in hand to take a look at this new update. Find out more on what I found in the new update.

(more…)

Dovecot and IMAP issues on Windows 10 Mobile

Lately Outlook Mail on my Lumia 950 XL which runs Windows 10 Mobile has been throwing lots of notifications regarding my personal IMAP mailbox account having out of date settings. This has been occurring sporadically and becoming quite a pain. Sometimes up to 7 or 8 notifications are generated in the Action Centre within short periods of time. Interestingly my mail account settings are correct and the mailbox is syncing email with no problems. After doing some investigation on the server side I believe I’ve found the cause of the issue and its related to the maximum number of IP connections available to the Dovecot daemon. Read more to find out how I fixed it.

(more…)

Skype Video app setup error 0xA1080001 on Windows 10

Ever since the new ~~Skype integration~~ two separate Skype apps in Windows 10 arrived, I’ve never been able to actually the Skype Video Windows 10 app properly. I always get an error when trying to run the Skype Setup option in the Messages app. This error has been happening since I was running Windows 10 Mobile build 10581 in November and now more recently I upgraded my Dell XPS 9530 to Windows 10 Pro (Build 10586) and the same error followed me onto the PC. This leads me to think its a Microsoft related issue, but getting it acknowledged is proving to be difficult. I eventually got tired of waiting for Microsoft and decided to investigate to try and find out what’s going on.

(more…)

HTML email in Outlook Mail on Windows 10, a total mess

Outlook Mail is the new “Universal App” and default email client on Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile. It shares a somewhat familiar Microsoft Word engine core similar to its desktop predecessors. Earlier on in the year I wrote about the Outlook Mail app when it arrived in preview form via the Windows Insider programme. What I found was a very different email experience to what was previous seen on Windows 8/8.1 and Windows Phone 8/8.1. Months later and with Windows 10 (PC) officially released, new Windows 10 Mobile devices now in the market and with pre-existing Windows Phone 8.1 devices being prepared to receive the upgrade very soon, how have things changed? In this article I’ll cover the problems with Outlook Mail and what I think Microsoft need to do to fix it.

(more…)