Blank Lockscreen Image Windows 10 1709

Another strange one today. After upgrading a PC to Windows 10 1709 build 16299 we found that our lockscreen image that had been set via GPO for over 2 years, was no longer showing. It was simply showing a blank assent colour.

After some aggressive Googling i came across someone who had sussed it was to do with a registry key that many of us set many moons ago, when the first versions of Windows 10 were released.

Remove Show People button Windows 10 1709

During testing of the latest Windows 10 Update (its definitely more of an upgrade ...thanks MS) version 1709 build 16299. I found that a little icon had appeared on the bottom tight of the taskbar. Things like this really annoy me so basically its going.




You can remove it by Right Clicking the Taskbar and clicking the button Show People Button. However in a corporate network, getting users to complete to click just isn't going to happen... the lazy gits!

Disabling Proofing Tools and related options Word 2013/ 2016 for an Exam

In this post i am going to be describing an issue that has for a long time not been well documented, by either Microsoft or anyone else. This is the updated post to reflect the changes for 2016.

We had an exam requirement for many years for computer based exams to disable the spell check, thesaurus and grammar check facility and to remove the ability to re-enable it. The requirement was to enable it for certain users only for example those within an OU.

MS in their infinite wisdom created ADMX/ADM templates that give admins the ability to disable some of the proofing tools in a GPO. However this does not disable the ability to re-enable these options from the GUI. Also in the Word 2016 ADMX templates, MS have REMOVED the option to disable Spell Check!

I wrote an article a couple of years ago and figured as i was working on it i would update it..

Disabling Proofing Tools and related options Word 2010 for an Exam

In this post i am going to be describing an issue that has for a long time not been well documented, by either Microsoft or anyone else.

We had an exam requirement for many years for computer based exams to disable the spell check, thesaurus and grammar check facility and to remove the ability to re-enable it.

MS in their infinite wisdom created ADMX/ADM templates that give admins the ability to disable some of the proofing tools in a GPO. However this does not disable the ability to re-enable these options from the GUI. Also in the Word 2010 ADMX templates, MS have REMOVED the option to disable Spell Check!

I found a couple of articles which were very helpful and pretty much gave me the answer i needed. The articles were for Word 2007 so i have ported them to Word 2010.

If you need the 2013/2016 versions then please use the following article.
https://chronicbit.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/disabling-proofing-tools-and-related.html

YouTube - "An Error has occured, please try again later"

I had a very weird issue today, where a member of staff couldn't play a YouTube video. They kept getting the "snowy" background and the error "An Error has occurred, please try again later" after the video played for a second or two. This behavior is exhibited in IE only. Chrome seems to work fine.