Wednesday, November 16, 2016

iPhone missed calls showing on second iPhone

If you're sharing an Apple ID across multiple iPhones, you have likely ran into an issue at some point with one phone having something from the other phone. For this post we're talking specifically about missed call history.

If you have missed calls for one phone showing up on another phone, turn off iCloud Drive. You can do so by going into Settings->iCloud, then toggle the iCloud Drive setting to off. Make sure to verify it is off too. I've seen it take a couple tries to get it to actually go to off.

Once it's turned off the missed call history will no longer be getting synchronized, and won't show up on other phones signed into the same Apple ID

Monday, September 12, 2016

Windows 7 stuck searching for updates forever

If you've had to reinstall Windows 7, depending on how old your install media is you may run into this problem. Once Windows is installed and ready for updates, you tell it to search and it keeps searching, and searching, and searching... until you finally reboot or shutdown because it's been 5 hours and still nothing. I've ran into this a few times myself, and luckily I think I finally found a fix.

First, download and save Microsoft KB 3138612, which is an update to the Windows Update client. Apparently you now need this update to get the update process to work, but if the process is already broken then you can't get the new client through normal means and need to use the standalone installer. In my case, trying to install from the standalone left it searching forever for installed updates too, so just save this for now. You're going to need this in a minute.

Now, open up a command prompt and run it under the administrator context. The easiest way to do this would be click the Start button, type cmd, then right-click and select Run as Administrator on the Command Prompt or cmd.exe result you should see.

Once Command Prompt opens, type (without the quotes) "net start appidsvc" and press Enter. This should make sure the appid service is running.

Now that the service is running you can go ahead and install KB3138612 from the download you saved earlier. It should only take a couple of minutes to do this. If it gets stuck on searching for installed updates for more than 5 minutes, you may need to find another method. Once the KB is installed, reboot the computer.

Once the PC is on again, repeat opening the command prompt in the administrator context and starting appidsvc. After you've done that, type (without the quotes) "wuauclt.exe /detectnow" and press Enter. That should force the Windows Update client to search for updates and show you results once done.

In my case, it still took a while for it to search for updates because when it came back I had over 200 of them waiting to be installed. However, that was at most an hour. Prior to that I had left the machine searching for updates as long as 48 hrs and it never moved past that status. Once the updated client is installed, and you get past the initial round of updates that will likely be faily large, you should be fine from there to update normally in the future.


Monday, June 20, 2016

iPhone showing an unread text message but you can't find it

Ever see the notification on your Messages app, but have no luck finding it? Use Siri. Activate Siri, and then say "Read me my unread messages". Siri should then locate and read the unread message, after which the notification will go away.

I had a user that this happened to today. The odd thing was the message in question had been read and deleted already, but somehow hadn't been marked read so the notification kept coming back no matter how many times the user went into that particular message thread. Using Siri took care of it.

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

OS X Application Window not showing or visible

I recently had a user trying to open Acrobat Pro DC on a Mac laptop. The user would get the menu bar across the top, but could not see the application window on the screen to actually do anything. The trick was to go to Window->Zoom, which brought the app window back to normal on the screen. Either it has been zoomed out so much it was too small to see, or it had somehow gotten moved off the screen to where it was open but not in an area the user could see it.