The Oprintware product O’Print is an excellent Airprint printer server for Windows and is well worth its modest price (under $20 as of this writing.) We have installed it at many locations and it’s reliable and well-liked.

Upon initial installation, it runs in fully-functional trial mode for 30 days after which you must enter an activation key purchased from Oprintware. However, their activation mechanism frequently goes down, sometimes for months at a time.

If you find yourself unable to activate the program because of the activation service being unavailable (usually an error 12029,) you can perform the following procedure to reset the trial period for another 30 days during which their activation machine may be back online.

This is not a “hack” in the sense that you should do this to avoid paying for the product. It is well worth its very modest price and the developer deserves being paid for such an excellent product. But it will get you out of a situation where a needed function isn’t working anymore and you have to get it working again.

1. Quit O’Print
2. Delete the following registry keys and their sub-values:
   HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\OPrint
   HKCU\AppEvents\EventLabels\option
3. Delete the following file if it exists:
   C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\settingenv

Now you can re-open OPrint and the 30-day trial will have been reset.

UPDATE: The problem described below seems to have been limited to Outlook using Exchange accounts located on Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange service. Later in the day, the problem resolved itself probably after Microsoft corrected a bug in their Exchange Server. So we stopped performing this fix on client machines pending any further trouble reports. We’ll leave the earlier description & fix below in case it comes up again.

We received multiple reports of Outlook crashing immediately after opening following the installation of a botched Office update from Microsoft. Resolves by rolling back. In command window:

cd “\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun”

officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.12827.20470

No reboot is required afterward. We have been turning off automatic updating of Office suite after doing this.

A client could not print an image from the Windows 10 Photos app. It displays error about the printer needing configuration with error code 8007007e.

1. Browse to c:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\x64
2. Search here (and subfolders) for printconfig.dll (you may see several)
3. Copy any one of these to c:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\x64\3

No reboot is required. The next time we opened the Photos app, all was well.

When there are two versions of Office installed, such as 2007 and 365, this will sometimes happen: Every time you open Word 2007, it will pause while it goes through its “configuring” step.

In the registry, navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Options

Then add a new DWord called NoReReg and give it a value of 1

YouTube has been rolling out a new design of its home page with large previews and the loss of its familiar and useful layout.

Unfortunately, none of the below works anymore. If something new is discovered, we’ll post it here.

To restore to the old layout, use the F12 key to bring up the PREF cookie and replace its value with this: f5=30&al=en&f1=50000000&f6=8

The above no longer works but this does:

Install a user-agent extension like User-Agent Switcher for Chrome or Firefox

Chrome users:

1. Go to youtube, and on the drop down, you have to hover on “This can read site and change data” when you are on youtube, and select the youtube option. This will make it work just on youtube.
2. On youtube, left click the icon, and go all the way to the bottom, under the ‘Spider / Bot’ options, and there is an option called ‘Googlebot (Google’s Spider)’. Click that and it should work.

Firefox users:

1. Go to youtube and set your user agent to Google Bot
2. Tick ‘Override for Domain’

Windows will try to download the icon for the printer but this often gets stuck because the Microsoft metadata server stops working. You can turn this feature off on the WIndows 10 machine by running the following command in a command window:

Rundll32.exe %SystemRoot%\System32\newdev.dll,DeviceInternetSettingUi

After rebooting, the printer should show fully installed and ready.

There is a bug in some versions of Outlook which will cause it to repeatedly trigger a “Log into GMail” popup when a GMail account is in the profile.

Change imap.gmail.com to imap.googlemail.com

Change smtp.gmail.com to smtp.googlemail.com

Inside a command prompt window:

shutdown /r /t 0

Around 1/9/19, Microsoft pushed a Windows update (KB4480970) that breaks SMB in a way that inhibits network communication with the computer’s shares. This is most often reported as sudden inability to scan to shared folders from a network-connected scanner.

A subsequent patch (KB4487345) was released on 1/11/19 to correct this and it can be found here (choose your platform):

http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=KB4487345

Thanks to the TechVideos channel on YouTube

1. Install RoboMongo (now called Robo 3T) from here.
2. Start the UniFi controller (To be able to access the database with the password, the Unifi controller must be running. )
3. Start Robomongo
4. Create a new connection in Robomongo, leave all settings as it is except the port which needs to be changed to “27117″. (Name can be set to UniFi)
5. Click on save so that the settings are saved.
6. Select the new connection in the list and click on “Connect” Now you are connected to the UniFi database.
7. In the left panel select /expand ‘ace’. Then right click on ‘admin’ and select view document.
8. Go here: https://quickhash.com/ (see * note below)
9. Select “SHA-512 / crypt(3) / $6$” as the Algorithm
10. Put the desired password as your Input Data (see below for “password”)
11. Use “9Ter1EZ9$lSt6″ as the Salt.
12. Hit “Generate (Over Secure Connection)
13. Back in RoboMongo, right-click x_shadow and click Edit Document
14. Replace the “x_shadow” value with the value created at quickhash
15. Click Save and you’re done. You can use your new password now

* If you can’t get to the quickhash site, this is what you can use
for the password “password”:

$6$9Ter1EZ9$lSt6/tkoPguHqsDK0mXmUsZ1WE2qCM4m9AQ.x9/eVNJxws.hAxt2Pe8oA9TFB7LPBgzaHBcAfKFoLpRQlpBiX1