Microsoft Support For Windows XP & Office 2003 Ends Today

Excerpts from an article on-line.

Microsoft will end support for the persistently popular Windows XP today (Tuesday, 8th April 2014), and the move could put everything from the operations of heavy industry to the identities of everyday people in danger.

An estimated 30% of computers being used by businesses and consumers around the world are still running the 12-year-old operating system. Microsoft has released a handful of Windows operating systems since 2001, but XP's popularity and the durability of the computers it was installed on kept it around longer than expected. Analysts say that if a PC is more than five years old, chances are it's running XP.

While users can still run XP after Tuesday, Microsoft says it will no longer provide security updates, issue fixes to non-security related problems or offer online technical content updates. The company is discontinuing XP to focus on maintaining its newer operating systems, the core programs that run personal computers.

It means you should take action. After April 8, 2014, Microsoft will no longer provide security updates or technical support for Windows XP. Security updates patch vulnerabilities that may be exploited by malware and help keep users and their data safer. PCs running Windows XP after April 8, 2014, should not be considered to be protected, and it is important that you migrate to a current supported operating system – such as Windows 8.1 – so you can receive regular security updates to protect their computer from malicious attacks.

Change Comment's Default Formatting

You can insert comments to a cell in Excel. If you don’t like the format of it, you can change it by selecting the comment and right click, choose Format Comment option. But if you want to change the default format of the comment so that you need not change the format every time you insert a comment, follow the steps below.

Excel's comment uses Windows ToolTip settings for its own formatting. So, you have to change the ToolTip settings in order to set comment's default format. This is the sequence in my Windows XP. Similar commands should be available in other OS as well. Try any one of them.

Start > Control Panel > Appearance and Themes > Display (in category view)

Start > Control Panel > double click Display (in classic view)
Right click in any empty space on desktop > Properties

In the Display Properties dialogue box, click on Appearance tab and click Advanced button! In Advanced Appearance dialogue box, under Item dropdown, select Tooltip, adjust the background color, font color, font size, Italic, Bold properties etc here.

Changing Windows ToolTip format will effect all other Windows based programs too.
You may want to read how to insert picture background in comments. 

Bored With Default Blue Colour??

Microsoft Office programs have a default colour scheme, Blue. Appearance of ribbons and menus will depend on this scheme. If you are bored with this colour, Office programs provide additional colours to play with. It’s often refreshing to see a different colour, you can check out below pictures to see how Excel looks under each colour.

Default Blue scheme

 Silver Scheme

Black Scheme

How to Change the Interface Colour Scheme

Excel 2007:

Click the Microsoft Office button > Excel Options > Popular tab > Top options for working with Excel segment > In Color Scheme drop down, select the colour you want from available options i.e. Blue, Silver & Blac.> click OK.

Excel 2010 and later:

File tab > Options > General > User Interface options segment > In Color Scheme drop down, select the colour you want from available options i.e. Blue, Silver & Black > click OK.

Excel 2003 menu colours depend on desktop theme. Read below to know how to change it.

How to Change the Windows Desktop Colour Scheme

Microsoft Windows theme determines the colour and appearance of Excel 2003 interface. Even in later versions of Excel, dialogue boxes use Windows theme settings. So even if you change interface colour scheme as above, you still have to match desktop colour scheme if you want a perfect sync look.

Right click in any empty space of desktop > Properties > Appearance tab > Under Windows and buttons, select Windows XP Style > Under Color Scheme drop down, select one of the available options i.e. Blue, Olive Green & Silver > click OK. Note that this will change the theme of desktop. You may also want to try other options available in these two drop down lists.

Note

Same Interface colour is used by all the Office programs (Except InfoPath 2007, OneNote 2007, Project 2007, Publisher 2007 and Visio 2007). Changing colour in one Office program will change the interface of all other Office programs.

Resize Scrollbars

Excel’s scrollbars size is not adjustable. By some reason if you want to increase or decrease these scrollbar size, your only hope is to change the scrollbar size settings at operating system level. Read on if you still want to go ahead as following steps will change scrollbar setting across all the programs.

This is the sequence in my Windows XP. Similar commands should be available in other OS as well.

Start > Control Panel > Appearance and Themes > Display (in category view)

Start > Control Panel > double click Display (in classic view)

In the Display Properties dialogue box, click on Appearance tab and click Advanced button! In Advanced Appearance dialogue box, under Item drop-down, select Scrollbar, adjust the size as per your needs to click OK in all open dialogue boxes.

Active Desktop Recovery

Guess I am giving my computer too much stress to cope with. It does give me trouble sometimes but thankfully, they are not so serious and I solve them myself. Recently it shown an error 'Active Desktop Recovery'. Thought these workarounds could be material for a new post. So here we go!!

My computer shows a weird white screen in place of my beautiful desktop image (or company logo in office system). It looks like below in Windows XP.

Clicking on Restore my Active Desktop button doesn't solve the problem (if it does, we are good) but would throw up another window as below.

Clicking Yes or No buttons as above would make the pop up screen disappear but does nothing to the original error. If this is your problem, read further to see how to solve this issue.

What Causes It

Microsoft says that Internet Explorer 7 has been causing some errors with the Active Desktop, if you have Internet Explorer 7 on your computer read this article for the solution to fix the problem. This could also be caused by a corrupted user profile.

Solutions

There are below known solutions to this problem. Try one after another to check your luck.

Solution 1

1. Right click on a blank area of the desktop and select Properties.
2. Select Desktop Tab and press Customize Desktop button. (If you use office laptop, your admin can restrict this view, then try next solution).
3. In General Tab, make a change to the Desktop Icons section by selecting or deselect one of them and press OK.

Your active desktop should be back by now. If it doesn't, try your luck in the next solution.

Solution 2

1. Right click on a blank area of the desktop and select Properties.
2. Select Settings Tab and change Screen resolution. (you can obviously change it back, so no worries)
3. Right click on the desktop and choose Refresh

No luck yet? Go to the next solution.

Solution 3

'Desktop.htt' file controls the size and position of your desktop and the wallpaper you have on it, plus it includes a little activeX control to allow you to reshape it. IE7 is a little bit incompatible with the old profile you may have had already. Since this file is automatically generated by windows, the best fix is to delete the old one[s] and let windows create a new one. 

1. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\<your username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer
2. Select Desktop.htt and delete (it is a hidden file so you will need to change the view first. Click View - Folder Options - View)
3. Close Explorer
4. Right click on the desktop and choose Refresh

Got it now? 

Solution 4: (You should have access to registry editor to try this fix)

1. Go to Run and type regedit in Open and click OK.
2. Now navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Desktop\SafeMode\Components
3. Find a key named DeskHtmlVersion on right side.
4. Right click the key and select Modify
5. Under the label Base, select the radio button Decimal
6. Change Value data from 272 to 0
7. Click OK

This should do the trick. If the error screen doesn't go, then try restarting your PC for the changes to take effect.

Solution 5: (You need to have access to run vbs files)

1. Copy the below text into a notepad 

2. HKEY_CURRENT_USER = &H80000001

   strComputer = "."
   
   

   Set objReg = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\default:StdRegProv")

   strKeyPath = "Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Desktop\SafeMode\Components" 

   strValue = "0" 

   ValueName = "DeskHtmlVersion" 

   objReg.SetDWORDValue HKEY_CURRENT_USER, strKeyPath, ValueName, strValue

3. Save the notepad as activedesktop.vbs 
4. Run the file (if required, as administrator)
5. Logoff and Login again

Solution 6:

Active desktop recovery error may appear because of corrupted user profile. So try creating a new profile.

1. Log on as the Administrator or as a user with administrator credentials.
2. Click Start, and then click Control Panel
3. Click User Accounts
4. Click the Advanced tab, and then click Advanced
5. In the left pane, click the Users folder
6. On the Action menu, click New User
7. Enter the appropriate user information, and then click Create

When you create a new user profile, you need to copy the existing user profile related files and settings to new profile. Otherwise new profile is just like you are starting a brand new system. So follow these steps to copy your files.

1. Log on as a user other than the user whose profile you are copying files to or from
2. In Windows Explorer, click Tools, click Folder Options, click the View tab, click Show hidden files and folders, click to clear the Hide protected operating system files check box, and then click OK
3. Locate the C:\Documents and Settings\Old_Username folder, where C is the drive on which Windows XP is installed, and Old_Username is the name of the profile you want to copy user data from
4. Press and hold down the CTRL key while you click each file and subfolder in this folder, except the following files:
• Ntuser.dat
• Ntuser.dat.log
• Ntuser.ini
5. On the Edit menu, click Copy
6. Locate the C:\Documents and Settings\New_Username folder, where C is the drive on which Windows XP is installed, and New_Username is the name of the user profile that you created in the "Create a New User Profile" section
7. On the Edit menu, click Paste
8. Log off the computer, and then log on as the new user

Solution 7:

You can try doing a 'repair install' of operating system. You need Windows OS CD.

You reached end of all the solutions. If none of the above did the trick for you, take a deep breathe and call your service provider / IT team / log a ticket. Good Luck!!