If you’re deploying Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 with a MAK key, and you want to avoid the user seeing the Microsoft Office Activation Wizard when they first start up an Office application, follow these instructions:

1. Run the Office 2010 Customization Tool (OCT)
2. Open up your customised MSP file
3. Go to: Setup > Add installations and run programs > Add…
4. Then enter the information as seen in the image below.
   1. Target: [SystemFolder]\cscript.exe
   2. Arguments: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs” /act
      
5. Don’t forget to save your MSP!

This will activate Office immediately after it is installed, so that it won’t pop up the Activation Wizard when the user first runs Office. Think of this as either a kind of pre-activation or post-activation of Office 2010.

This guide makes the following assumptions:

1. You know how to load OCT (Office Customization Toolkit)
2. You are deploying 32-bit Office onto 64-bit Windows
3. You deploy Office 2010 at Deployment time using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (although, for this to work, you don’t have to).
4. You deploy Office 2010 using a MAK key.
5. You store your MSP file in the \Updates\ within the Office 2010 installation files on the MDT share (again, for this to work, you don’t have to).

I found this info after hopelessly searching around, finally coming across this page on Microsoft Technet.

Can’t find the Customisation Wizard for Adobe Reader 10?

You’ll find it here: ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobat/win/10.x/10.0.0/misc/

Share and enjoy

Want to set an alarm but don’t want the standard (annoying) alarm tones on Android?

Try this:

1. Plug your phone into your computer and mount it as a Disk drive.
2. Once it’s mounted, browse to the SD card on your Laptop (On mine it appears as E:)
3. Browse to E:\Media\audio\
4. Add a new folder called: alarms
5. Add your mp3 or wav files into the alarms folder.
6. Disconnect your phone

You can now choose your custom, personal, alarm sounds when setting an alarm

Yet another “not entirely obvious” VMware thing

If you want to use the VMware vCenter Converter from within the vSphere Client you need to:

1. Install vCenter Converter on the vSphere vCenter Server (It’s an option on the vSphere vCenter installer)
   
2. Now log onto your vSphere Client and go to:
   1. Plugins > Manage Plugins > Install vCenter Converter Client
3. Once installed, right click on any ESX host, or ESX Cluster and choose “Import Machine…” from the bottom of the context menu.
   
4. That’s it. The vCenter Converter wizard will then pop up

Note: This is tested and working on VMware vSphere 4.1. Let us know how you get on with other versions of vSphere!

This guide will run through how to remotely turn on and activate TPM in the BIOS on a Dell PC using the Dell Client Configuration ToolKit

Setup

First we need to install the Dell Client Configuration Toolkit (CCTK) on the target system.

To do this:

1. Log onto the target system via RDP
2. Grab the CCTK MSI file
3. Install the CCTK onto the target system

Making Configuration Changes

On the target system:

1. Log onto the target system via RDP
2. Open up a Command Prompt
3. Navigate to: C:\Program Files\Dell\CCTK\
   1. If you’re running 32-bit OS, go into X86 folder
   2. If you’re running 64-bit OS go into X86_64 folder
   3. From here, run the relevant command…
   4. To enable and activate TPM on the target system:
      1. cctk --tpm=on
      2. cctk --tpmactivation=activate
   5. Reboot, and TPM will be enabled

Bootnote

This process was tested and confirmed working on a Dell Latitude E6410 running Windows 7 32-bit. Let us know in the comments if it works for you too!

More Resources

There’s a page from Dell which covers more background here: http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/Dell+Client+Configuration+Toolkit