There are several different ways to do a clean macOS 10.12 Sierra installation. One of simplest and easiest ways is to install via a USB stick.You don’t need to buy a special USB stick nor do you have to purchase a special program to make an macOS 10.12 Sierra USB Install Stick. Creating a USB…
The HP SoftPaq Download Manager is a very useful update manager for HP’s Z series, EliteBook, and EliteDesk PC computers. I install it on all new HP computers for our clients. It can update HP’s drivers and BIOS version; it also can download or update the bundled third party software. This is very useful if you are using…
Formatting a drive in Windows is normally done through some version of Disk Management. However, sometime you will run into a hard drive or USB stick that has partitions that you cannot delete from the Disk Management tools. To fully format a drive in Windows 7/8/2008/2012, we need to launch the command line Run cmd.exe as an…
For the past 20 years, I used to buy spindles of blank CD-R and DVD-R media in order to create bootable discs. I had nearly stopped burning optical media for the last 5 years, but occasionally I do find an ISO or disk image that could not properly written to a USB stick. My two go to…
If you have a Mac that doesn’t have an optical drive, Apple has modified the Boot Camp Assistant to help create a USB stick that can boot up the Windows 8.1 (or Windows 7) installer. This option is only available on select MacOS X computers– mostly ones without a USB drive; however, you can modify Boot Camp…
When cleaning up older MacOS X computers, I still find myself installing MacOS X 10.8 in special situations. However, most days it’s 10.9 as the normal MacOS X version. To make my life easier I start off with a 16GB USB stick. In order to create a Dual Boot MacOS X Install USB Stick, I partition the USB stick into…
If you are trying to format a FileVault 2 drive, also known as “nuke and pave” on MacOS X 10.9 and you run into a volume that is protected with FileVault 2, you have two choices: turn off the encryption via FileVault and wait for that long process to complete, or use the diskutil command…
For the past few weeks my laptop has been running hot randomly throughout the day. I checked Activity Monitor and noticed that CPU had high percentage usage, with systemstats running at 181%… To fix this, I did some searching (https://discussions.apple.com/message/23570188#23570188) and found that the systemstats database file can become very large over time. So a…
I sometime have to change the Windows 8.1 License Key. Normally you should not have to do this after you have install Windows, but I sometimes get stuck with doing a rush install before the volume licensing keys have arrived. They have been purchased, but the person with the Microsoft Volume Licensing Center login is…
Recently, we had some files on a Windows 2012 server that have file names that are too long. The UNC path length would be okay if the file name was not too long. And as it would happen on this partition we left the short name 8.3 option disabled (as recommended by Microsoft). So, how…
I love USB installers (aka USB install sticks). The are easy to use and carry. You have a dozen OS and appliance installs in your toolkit for less than $100. I like to install pfSense 2.1 from a USB Stick. Most of the time, they are easy to create and to keep up to date. Microsoft…