Windows 8 not showing your content in Music, Photos and Videos Apps

I recently upgraded to Windows 8 and have found it strange to get used to, from the Win + I to bring up options for apps to getting used to not having the start menu. However the biggest problem I had was opening the My Music, Photos and Video apps and it not showing ANY of my content. I'd read other users having this issue, but with NAS and other network shares etc but mine is stored on a separate local SATA drive. My Libraries were set to view this information and selecting my Music Library showed all this music that I couldn't use in the My Music app.

There is however a way to fix this! The Music, Photos and Video apps not only use your Libraries to gather media data, it also uses the Windows indexing tool. Now considering my media was on another drive and a while back (for whatever reason I cannot actually re-call) I had disabled the Windows Indexing from looking at my other drives so when I upgraded from Win7 to Win8 this area had never been indexed. So I went into Control Panel>Indexing Options>clicked on Modify and selected these extra folders. I then went into Advanced and kicked off a rebuild to hurry things along and start fresh.



After a while of indexing I opened my media Apps in Win8 and the content was all there! Now once you open these applications they begin to then load up previews and thumbnails etc so again once you open the application you must wait a little while (my music took an hour to fully sort itself out) however once its all done everything is there in all its glory. No registry hacks or anything like that, just a slight tweak to what you want indexing. I think I still prefer how Zune works to the new My Music app as I can see much more, however I'm sure it (along with Windows 8) will grow on me. Now time for a beer or a lovely little glass of Glayva to celebrate ;)

Find email address in Public Folders

Looking after several thousand mailboxes, public folders and distribution groups can sometimes make it difficult for you to keep track on where certain email aliases are assigned.

Now mailboxes, distribution groups and mail contacts are easy as you can add a filter in the Exchange Management Console to find these, however the same cannot be applied for Public folders.

Once again PowerShell comes to the rescue in the form of the Exchange Management Shell. Running the following command will bring up all the details you need:

Get-MailPublicFolder email@address.com | Get-PublicFolder

output from Get-MailPublicFolder

This command will bring up the name of the public folder along with the parent path so you know exactly where the public folder lives by showing the folder name and the parent path so you can navigate to the folder in question.

Not only do you get to find the public folder you get to learn a little more about Power Shell with the nice "Tip of the day" that appear in the Exchange Management Shell

Now that deserves a beer!

WinSXS taking up space after Service Pack install

I was working on a users desktop the other day who had an SSD installed a while back (back when 128GB were silly prices!) and it could only hold 64GB and it was full (well around 500kb free). This meant her .ost for Outlook couldn’t expand, causing no end of problems for her. Cleaning out temp files and rebuilding the .ost managed to bring back around 2GB which just wasn’t enough really so after hunting around on the drive to find where the rest of the space had gone I found the WinSXS folder. Now this folder was changed from XP to Vista quite a bit from the old .INF files being in there in XP to .mui, .exe’s in Vista and beyond. This folder allows you to run application such as SFC (System File Checker) or when installing additional features and roles in Server 2008 etc. As handy as this is, it can take up a great deal of space, especially when Service Packs are installed (which was the case for this poor user). To help clean this folder up there is a handy tool built into Windows, which can be run from the command prompt (you need to run the command prompt in Elevated Mode to run. To do this, hold down shift and right click on the command prompt icon and select Run as administrator…) which does a nice job of doing it all for you. Please bear in mind after this runs, you won’t be able to roll-back from the Service Packs. The command to run is below:


DISM /online /Cleanup-Image /SpSuperseded
This will take around 20-30minutes to run (depending on the OS and how much space it can reclaim) and can usually bring back around 3-5GB, which is the perfect amount of time to crack open a can of beer 

WinSXS size before command was run

WinSXS size after command was run

Save As PDF not working in Microsoft Office products

Recently I had two issues to sort out in the office. The first was a few users from a group company that were having issues with some powerpoint files that used a truetype font. Powerpoint would get halfway and then crash every singletime. The second issue was in all Microsoft Office products where users would go to create a PDF by using the Save As... feature instead of using the print to option and using cutePDF or the Adobe PDF printers.

Both these faults started happening around the same time (Mid November) but I treated these as seperate issues to start as they came from different companies. I could replicate both errors on my PC and I didn't have any pdf printers installed so it wasn't an issues with either of those products. I decided it might be a Microsoft Office patch and went through each one and still no fix in sight.

I did one last check with another desktop of mine that hadn't had Novembers patches installed and this had no problem at all with either of the reported faults. This gave me somewhere to look, which was in the set of patches released in November and I found the error. MS11-087 was released to fix a zero day fault in Windows that takes advantage of an exploit in the font subsystem (the worm is named Duqu so if you are a creative using TrueType fonts from any site known to Google be careful and make sure your Windows PC is running AV.) What this patch does is change the file permission for a file called t2embed.dll which lives in Windows\system32 (it also lives in the sysWOW64 folder for 64bit systems.)

and for those wanting to know how to how the Duqu worm works:


So to fix this issue you simply have to undo this permission change and give users read access to this file(s if you're on a 64bit system) and the change will kick in straight away. Either that or you can down this .msi from Microsoft that does the exact same thing, just remember to run the command prompt as an administrator and run msiexec to undo the changes, and then relax and have a beer...