Category: Software

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I was cleaning up a 10-year old HP envy m6 laptop that had Microsoft Windows 10 and Office 2013 on it. In the end, I decided to wipe it clean with a fresh instance of Windows 10. I happened to have an ISO, so I burnt a DVD and started the installation. The machine asked whether I had the product key or whether it was a digital delivery. I chose the latter copy because it was one of those “free” upgrades from Windows 7 or 8, and I thought nothing more of it. (Old laptops cannot take Windows 11, so that was not an option.)

Windows Lied

After the latest copy of Windows 10 was downloaded, the installation dialogue asked for the product key! Nothing I tried would let me bypass it. I changed the BIOS setting to first boot from the DVD drive, but it did not work (I have heard from another HP user that I’m not the first to report this.) I wanted to install Windows 7, for which I have a key, then do the Windows 10 upgrade. That DVD would not boot either.

I also found that my valid Windows 7 and 8.1 keys were not accepted because I had neglected to deactivate the key before disposing of the machines where I had installed them. What can you if the machine dies before you can deactivate?

Bootable Windows Drive

My next approach was to make a bootable USB drive with a copy of Windows 10 on it. I obtained it from Microsoft (two options):

This is the process for creating such a bootable USB drive. You can instead make a bootable DVD.

Choose the first option

Select language, architecture, and edition

I chose English (UK), Windows 10 Pro and Windows 64.

Choose the type of drive

Select the drive letter

Start downloading

That should be all. The tool disappears when the task is completed. Use it to install Windows 10 from the USB drive. You will still need a product key.

My Outcome

I had read a couple of news items:

The trick of going to Microsoft’s Accessibility page to get a free Windows 10 upgrade no longer works, as Microsoft removed that offer three years after its official end date.
You could enter a valid Windows 7 or 8 product key when the Windows 10 installation process, except in my case I had forgotten to deactivate mine long ago.

In the end, I purchased a fresh ptoduct key from one of the third-party sellers, not Microsoft.

How to Sync Outlook Calendar and Contacts to iPhone [SOLVED] 2023

13 December 2022

Ash Nallawalla

Reading Time: 2 minutes

For some years, Apple has disabled sync between Microsoft Windows Outlook’s Calendar, Notes and Contacts and iPhone/iPad etc. It took me a long time to realise this, as I would save new contacts on either platform, amend outdated into and then wonder why the other device had not synced. I would ask in Apple communities, and the advice never made sense to me, and I would forget it for a while. I coped by repeating data entry in both devices, but it was getting ridiculous.

The Issues

For reasons I don’t know or care, Apple and Microsoft products stopped cooperating some years ago; I believe it was after iOS 9. We are presently at iOS16! Whenever I asked for help in the Microsoft Outlook and Apple iPhone forums, the responses were not helpful.

This image illustrates what I wanted:

I do not use Office 365 or the Outlook app on my phone. I don’t use Microsoft Exchange. I just use IMAP and POP3 to fetch and send email from my own hosted domain. No Gmail. I just wanted to use the Apple apps that could once be synced with iTunes. The helpers in the forums could not understand what I thought was a simple question.

Here is the Solution

Forget iTunes. It’s not even useful in Windows to manage the placement of your app icons and certainly irrelevant for syncing your iPhone with Outlook. I found a paid program AkrutoSync, which has a free, 7-day trial. I went for the Basic option of a single PC and unlimited devices for US$39.95, a one-time payment. You can get it from Akruto here: https://www.akruto.com/ (no affiliate link there)

Screenshot of successful transfer of my desktop data to my iPhone. — Successful transfer of my desktop data to my iPhone.

Configuring AkrutoSync might seem weird if you are like me and only use POP3 or IMAP to fetch email. It requires you to add a dummy Microsoft Exchange account on your phone if you choose syncing at home via Wi-Fi. Follow the instructions carefully and you’ll be syncing automatically in both directions all the time. It is instant – I added a calendar entry on my desktop and it was already on my phone by the time I looked it up.

Losing a Corrupted Word 2021 Document

2 April 2022

Ash Nallawalla

Windows 10 2 Comments

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I suffered a major setback by way of a book manuscript I was writing. It is lost beyond repair. I know what I should have done, but I am documenting this to help others. I use an offline copy of Word 2021, not the online Office 365.

Possible Causes of Word Doc Corruption

The book manuscript was about 283 pages from memory and I had not backed it up for over a month, and the backup copy was 30 pages shorter. I was finding that Word and Excel documents were taking longer than usual to open and I wondered if my hard drive was on its way out. I decided to back up the folder to my backup drive (a separate physical drive) and that was a clue that something was wrong, as the copy failed.

I used O&O Software Disk Defragmenter to defrag my data drive D but it was taking very long, so I thought I should stop it.

I tried to open the manuscript to add some content and found that it would not open. I had last used it last night, so I was puzzled. I remembered that I had done an online repair of Office and wondered if I had installed the 32-bit version of Office instead of the 64-bit version. I had an ISO of the original download, so I reinstalled Office, but it made no improvement. The Word doc refused to open.

Things Tried on the File

chkdsk /f reported no errors.

Error checking via File Manager > Properties showed no file errors. (image above)

Open and Repair did not work.

Text recovery tool did not recover any text.

Recover Text from Any File did not work.

Opening in Notepad is a crazy suggestion, as seen in some articles. The contents are not plain text – other than some file names. See below the older, working copy and the corrupted file below.

Corrupt and clean versions viewed in Notepad.

There are no previous versions or unsaved versions.

Importing into Google Docs did not work.

Inserting into an empty document as an object did not work. “Word has encountered a problem.”

The recovery tips in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/word/damaged-documents-in-word were tried but none worked.

Trying to link the corrupt file to a clean doc did not work.

Tools Used

There are many articles with suggestions, but they are rehashes of the things I tried above and sometimes have affiliate links to tools.

Libre Office could not open it.

LibreOffice failed to open it. — LibreOffice could not open the corrupt file.

OpenOffice also failed to load it. Its help text says “The most recent versions of OpenOffice can load, but not save, the Microsoft Office Open XML document formats with the extensions docx, xlsx, and pptx.” Note: Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice did open the working copy – but not this corrupt copy.

Stellar Repair for Word crashed on the file.

Stellar Data Recovery was useful to undelete an earlier version, but 30 pages shorter.

GetData Word Repair couldn’t open it.

Remo Repair announced that it had recovered it, but the file vanished

https://word.recoverytoolbox.com/online/

https://onlinefile.repair/rtf

https://online.officerecovery.com/word/ took ages to upload, but at least it was uploading.

Conclusion (See update)

At the moment I am stumped. The disk and data are fine. The file is difficult to select – clicking it sends File Explorer into a long delay before I can get control, but the file just does not open. Sending it to an online service times out for this reason and downloaded trial tools cannot process it.

If you have any suggestions and have personally solved this problem, please leave a comment. (Comments are moderated)

Update

I managed to open the copy with a paid version of the file recovery tool – Remo Repair Word – but it turned out to be an older version too. In the end, I used a recent PDF copy and exported it to RTF. This has some scrambled tables and some missing images, but it will get me back to sanity, with fewer than 10 lost pages. Many of the lost pages have images, which are safe, so the lost text won’t be too hard to re-create.

Installing a Clean Copy of Windows 10