Have you ever experienced the contrast/brightness of the screen in Windows 10 change dynamically between applications? Especially switching from high white contrast apps like a web browser to a dark contrast application like VS Code for example? It’s pretty annoying. I have a Surface Pro 6 and its fairly off putting.  It’s different to this setting where it changes the brightness/contrast across the board to the OS level regardless of specific apps: The setting I am talking about where it changes contrast as you change and flick between apps. Solution: From here https://www.windowscentral.com/how-disable-adapative-contrast-surface  Adaptive contrast is very different than auto-brightness (or…

I just got back from ExpertsLive 2017 in Melbourne hosted at the Crown Promenade. It was a great turn out with lots of great presenters including myself – I did a session on Operations Management Suite titled: “OMS is your best friend” and I’ll update this post later which will include a recording of this session. We had a mix of Microsoft Regional Directors, MVPs and Microsoft folk themselves there covering 3 tracks – Cloud Track, Datacenter Track and Enterprise Client Track. I got my presentation out on the first day, which left a free day on Friday for me…

Windows 10 taskbar application preview thumbnails sometimes gets really annoying, if you accidentally put your mouse over the of the opened taskbar apps, the app preview can pop up instantly and the preview thumbnail doesn’t always go away. Run this in PowerShell, it delays the pop up and fixes the accidental event of the cursor going over the top of the taskbar applications. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters. Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters Show…

This used to work with a new Windows 10 device which came pre-installed with Windows 10….. But then I saw a 1511 update that had come through in Windows Updates, so I upgraded Windows to Windows 10 version 1511, this was classed as an upgrade, not just a normal update. I then started to get a bug when trying to run the following PowerShell to add in a scheduled task: The error was….. I looked online and researched, then cam accross this fix – run this below in PowerShell as administrator. Problem solved…. I will report this through to the…

I am writing this blog post because I like many others have had massive problems with the high DPI / high resolution of the Surface Pro 4. The issues were with various external monitors which didn’t have as high as resolution as the Surface. The problems being: Scaling (where it scales programs to various sizes) i.e. automatic scaling as you drag programs from one display to another,  some programs ‘jump’ in size and most of the time the end result is the programs being blurry.   Also some programs like PowerPoint and Skype for Business didn’t auto-scale correctly so would…

Here’s a PowerShell script I put together to import users into AD (Active Directory). You just need to edit the .CSV file to add your users into it, then simply run the script pointing to the .CSV file. This is good for testing purposes. Prior to running the script, ensure that you have added your email domains to AD as UPNs to the domain and also that you have extended the schema for Exchange, to add in the all the Exchange attributes. It also supports multiple email domains, if you don’t have multiple email domain, hash out the third line…

If your Office 365 software (Office 2016 SKU) is stuck on a certain version number and are experiencing an issue where Office 365 doesn’t update or won’t update – like mine was (on two machines), I managed to find a fix. Bearing in mind, this even happened on a brand new machine, an install of Office 365 (Office 2016), the wrong URL was set in the registry to grab updates. Go to the registry (only if you have the Office 2016 version of Office 365) and change the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\Configuration\CDNBaseUrl to http://officecdn.microsoft.com/pr/492350f6-3a01-4f97-b9c0-c7c6ddf67d60 Just in case, back this value up first….

For a customer I setup AD Connect (AD Sync) along with password sync. However the customer needed more visibility and an easy way to be notified when passwords were actually changed in Azure AD (Office 365). Passwords can be changed with on-prem Active Directory (AD), however it’s a slight delay when the password sync actually makes the actual password change in Azure AD – the slight delay being up-to 2 minutes. The scenario being if a user needed their password changed by IT, IT can change the password and simply say to the user “when you get an SMS, you’ll…

My notes of doing a migration from AADSync to AD Connect (AD Sync). In the process I installed AD Connect onto a new server.  AD Connect uses AD Sync as it’s new sync service (which is the third release of the product). We went from DirSync > AADSync > ADSync. Notable changes, to force a sync of the directory, this is done from scheduled tasks. Password sync runs in real time within under 2 minutes with an option to speed this up. There is the immutableID thing which you don’t really need to worry about either as we are syncing…

I used to have this problem “My Surface Pro wakes up from sleep / hibernation in my bag and gets hot and the battery goes flat.” It seems that this is caused by the keyboard and mouse having a Power Management setting “Allow this device to wake up this computer“. Why would you have this option for these peripherals especially with a Surface Pro for example when the keyboard and mouse is a little flexible and can easily be knocked and activated in a bag. I must say that this has worked for me and solved my issue of the random wake ups…