Software Engineer

Month: March 2011

Mac OS: Airport not connecting automatically to Wi-Fi

A few weeks ago I helped a friend with an issue he had on an iMac with the Wi-Fi. After a while AirPort stopped from connecting automatically to the Wi-Fi. Although this can be caused by various different issues I want to describe the one I found. All the other instructions can be easily found on the web with the search engine of your choice.

The Wi-Fi uses a hidden SSID which can cause problems, not in this case though. Although it doesn’t really increase the security (because there are tools you can use that reveal it) it can help on a social basis when people just shouldn’t see that there is a Wi-Fi.

Anyways. As a side note: There were two iMacs set up the same way. One worked fine but the other didn’t so something must have been different. A lot of advices didn’t help but they could help in your case. In this case the problem was caused by the fact that the SystemPreferences application was moved out of it’s original place. After moving it back to the Application directory (/Applications) and restarting it worked fine again. I am assuming this could cause more problems than the one described here.

Office End-User License Agreement (EULA) has to be accepted every time

Do you have to accept the the End-User License Agreement (EULA) of your Office applications every time you start them even though you’ve accepted them already? This might be because you are using a restricted user account and thus the change can’t be written into the Windows registry.

To solve this log in with an Administrator account and perform the following steps for all Office applications you are using: Open the application, accept the EULA and close the application again.

If you log in with your user account again the EULA should not appear again. If it doesn’t work try to modify the permissions in the registry described in this knowledge base article.

Hide the “Network” icon from Windows 7 Explorer

If you want to hide the “Network” icon from the sidebar of the Windows Explorer in Windows 7 you can do this by modifying the registry. In order to be able to do this you have to be logged in as an Administrator. Despite that you’ll have to give yourself the permissions to change the value. You can remove the permissions after you are done again.

Please be aware that you should back up the registry before making any modifications. At least the key you will modify.

In the registry go to the following key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{F02C1A0D-BE21-4350-88B0-7367FC96EF3C}\ShellFolder\ and change the value of Attributes from b0040064 to b0940064. (Source)

Note: The network environment will still be accessible. It will not restrict access to it using other ways.

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