Stop network adapter going to sleep on Windows 10

We were experiencing issues with the wireless network adapter going to sleep when not in use, and wanted to make sure it stays awake all the time.

There is a tickbox on the network adapter that needed to be unticked on the wireless card and also the network port on the laptop. The setting is Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power. Rather than doing this manually every time a laptop is rebuilt I found a powershell script and modified it to suit our needs.

This is the original script that disables power saving on all Intel network cards.

$nics = Get-WmiObject Win32_NetworkAdapter | where {$_.Name.Contains('Intel')}

foreach ($nic in $nics)
{
    $powerMgmt = Get-WmiObject MSPower_DeviceEnable -Namespace root\wmi | where {$_.InstanceName.Contains($nic.PNPDeviceID)}
    $powerMgmt.Enable = $False
    $powerMgmt.psbase.Put()
}

 

I altered it to suit our needs and now the powershell script runs and outputs a log file.  It searches for all 4 of the network adapters we want to change, makes sure it can disable Power Management on that network adapter, then checks if power management is enabled and if it is then it disables it.

$file = "C:\NICpowerChange.log"
"Searching for AX88772A / Thinkpad / Lenovo / Intel" | Add-Content -Path $file

#find relevant network adapters
$nics = Get-WmiObject Win32_NetworkAdapter | where {$_.Name.Contains('AX88772A') -or $_.Name.Contains('Thinkpad') -or $_.Name.Contains('Lenovo') -or $_.Name.Contains('Intel')}

$nicsFound = $nics.Count
"number of network adapters found: ", $nicsFound | Add-Content -Path $file

foreach ($nic in $nics)
{
   $powerMgmt = Get-WmiObject MSPower_DeviceEnable -Namespace root\wmi | where {$_.InstanceName -match [regex]::Escape($nic.PNPDeviceID)}
 
   # check to see if power management can be turned off
   if(Get-Member -inputobject $powerMgmt -name "Enable" -Membertype Properties){

     # check if powermanagement is enabled
     if ($powerMgmt.Enable -eq $True){
       $nic.Name, "----- Enabled method exists. PowerSaving is set to enabled, disabling..." | Add-Content -Path $file
       $powerMgmt.Enable = $False
       $powerMgmt.psbase.Put()
     }
     else
     {
       $nic.Name, "----- Enabled method exists. PowerSaving is already set to disabled. skipping..." | Add-Content -Path $file
     }
   }
   else
   {
     $nic.Name, "----- Enabled method doesnt exist, so PowerSaving cannot be set" | Add-Content -Path $file 
   }
}

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Error installing OneDrive for Business Next Generation Sync Client

We wanted to install the latest and greatest OneDrive for Business Next Generation Sync Client in the hope it will fix the numerous support calls we receive about syncing issues from our staff.
We have the Office 2013 365 OneDrive for Business already installed but ran into a lot of trouble trying to the Next Gen client installed. We saw the following errors (amongst others) in the logs

!ERROR! (0x80070005) (fsmanagerimpl.cpp:470) ERROR: “” failed with 0x80070005 in .

LogsUploader: Unable to resolve upload host: 11001

ERROR: “” failed with 0x80040b01 in
After some searching around it seems a group policy was stopping it install. The group policy stops the personal version of OneDrive in our corporate environment but it seems this
was stopping the Next Generation client installing.

The policy is
Computer Configuration – Polices – Administrative Templates – Windows Components – OneDrive
“Prevent usage of onedrive for file storage” = Disabled

This was set to Enabled and was causing our errors.

To quickly prove this we tweaked the corresponding registry key located here: HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\OneDrive – DisableFileSyncNGSC and set it to the value 0 (zero)

We also came across some registry settings that we used to customise the user experience of the new client.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\OneDrive

Create a DWORD key with value name “DefaultToBusiness” with value data 1
Create a DWORD key with value name “EnableAddAccounts” with value data 1
Create a DWORD key with value name “DisablePersonalSync” with value data 1

 

Office 2003 .xml files – blank/white/missing icons

We’ve been having a lot of issues recently with legacy Office 2003 files saved as .xml on our new laptops running Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 with Office 2013 (365).  The issue has been that the icons for these files have all been blank/white icons instead of Excel/Word icons etc.

The files themselves are a mixture of Word, Excel and InfoPath files and although they open correctly when double clicked, its confusing a lot of our staff who are frequently calling for support. The incorrect icons we see are these below

After a lot of investigation I have found that the Office365 version of the Office2013 installer has some registry keys missing.  Creating these keys and waiting 10-20 minutes brings the icons back to normal.  This was the case on our domain machines and on a newly built Windows non-domain machine with Office 2013 installed and up to date.

The registry keys to add are below. Save the text below* as a text file with .reg as the file extension and import into the registry.  *You may need to replace the quotation marks with normal ones in Notepad.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared\XML]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared\XML\ProgIds]
“Word.Document”=””
“Excel.Sheet”=””
“PowerPoint.Show”=””
“InfoPath.Document”=””

Correct Icons

All is now working after importing the keys and waiting a while for windows to update the icon cache.  Even after manually clearing the icon cache the icons didn’t resolve themselves, just leave the machine turned on for 20 minutes and it worked seemed to figure it out in due course.