Windows 8 Printing Two Separator Pages

It has been a long time since I have posted but came across an issue I wanted to put out there.  I have been working on deploying Windows 8.1 at a client.  They print to printers shared from a Server 2012 virtual machine and the printer on the server has a the default windows PCL separator page file in use (C:\Windows\System32\PCL.sep).  When Windows 8 machines print to this share, the job would generate two separator pages before printing the actual file but Windows 7 machines would only generate one separator like it is supposed to.  I found a post online about it but it did not have a resolution.  In my own testing, I found that the two separator pages would show different Job Ids so I took the text of the default separator file (pcl.sep), removed "\U\LJob : \I" and saved under a new file since I could not edit the original (new file.sep or whatever you want to call it).  I pointed the server's instance of the printer to use this new file and now clients connected to this printer print one separator instead of two.

The text of the PCL.sep file:

\
\H1B\L%-12345X@PJL ENTER LANGUAGE=PCL
\H1B\L&l1T\0
\U\LUsername: \J\L\\\N
\B\S\J\U
\B\S\N\U
\0
\U\LJob : \I
\U\LDate: \D
\U\LTime: \T
\E

The text of my file fixed for Windows 8 usage:

\
\H1B\L%-12345X@PJL ENTER LANGUAGE=PCL
\H1B\L&l1T\0
\U\LUsername: \J\L\\\N
\B\S\J\U
\B\S\N\U
\0
\U\LDate: \D
\U\LTime: \T
\E


Hope this is helpful!

Cannot Maxmize Quickbooks 2013 Window

I had a customer who had recently upgraded to Quickbooks Pro 2013 and could not maxmize the Quickbooks window.  He used a laptop with windows 7 and an external monitor, with the monitor having a higher resolution than the laptop monitor.  When he would maximize on the external monitor, it would leave about a 2 in gap at the top of the screen and if he maximized on the laptop screen, it would maximize with the same gap but the window would extend below the taskbar.  On a hunch, I checked the Windows screen resolution settings.  He had the monitors aligned so the bottom of the screens was matching but the tops were offset a bit.  I matched the tops of the monitors and applied the change and was then able to maximize the window on either screen.  You can get to screen resolution settings by right clicking on the desktop and choosing screen resolution from the popup menu.  From there, drag your monitors so the top of them are lined up and the bottoms are offset (one monitor will go lower than the other) and hit apply.  This should resolve the issue.

Cannot Use Word 2003 As Editor In Outlook When ACT! Addin Is Installed

I recently had a customer who uses Office 2003 and ACT!.  He had the ACT! Outlook addin installed and would get an error that would popup behind the email saying:

ACT!
Word cannot write to file.

If you stopped Outlook from using Word as the editor for emails, he could send emails fine but the Outlook 2003 email editor does not include spell check for HTML, only plain text.  After researching, I found if you added the user as a local administrator (pretty much all our supported users are local admins so it was unusual he was not) you could set Word back as the editor in Outlook and the errors stopped.

An Introduction...

My name is Keith, I work as a computer technician in Chicago and I am really tall (6'7" and no, I do not play basketball!).  I come across a wide range of technical issues in my day to day work and spend a lot of my time online looking for solutions to issues from other sites and knowledge bases.  A former company I worked with required us to write blog articles every so often for their website based on our experiences and I found it to come pretty easy (I always was good at writing in school).  I know I appreciate others sharing their tech experiences and fixes online so I thought I could do the same in this blog.  Enjoy!