Month: August 2016

Internet Explorer reset fixes Microsoft Edge, Skype connection problems

Last week, my Windows 10 work laptop started having issues. First I noticed that Microsoft Edge was unable to load any websites. Then it was Internet Explorer. Then Skype reported its homepage was unavailable. As you might imagine, this caused my antennae to go up in a hurry.

A reboot did not help, and neither did a suggestion I found from a Microsoft representative to run System File Checker (sfc.exe). I did that over the weekend, but it found no problems at all. That was nice, particularly considering that I’ve been using this machine for less than a month.

The solution to the problem in my case, at least, was simpler than I expected. I searched for the Internet Options item from the Control Panel, navigated to the Advanced tab, and clicked Reset. I checked the Delete personal settings checkbox—that may not have been necessary, but I figured I might as well burn it all—and clicked Reset, confirmed that I wanted a clean slate, and then rebooted again, and voila! Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, and Skype all went back to working as expected.

I find it interesting that something out of kilter in Internet Explorer could affect Edge and Skype, too. IE may officially be on the way out the door, but its tendrils are apparently still wrapped around some fairly important bits of the Windows operating system.

How to adjust the size of your Hyper-V virtual machine’s window

I recently started a new job, and due to the need to make VPN connections, I’ve been getting familiar with Hyper-V Manager. I’m using a laptop, so one of the first things I wondered was how I could fix the size of my virtual machine’s window so that I don’t have to do a lot of scrolling. Unlike with Remote Desktop Connection, where you can specify the size of the window before connecting, Hyper-V Manager did not appear to have such a configuration option.

It turns out the answer to my question is very simple: for a Windows 7 virtual machine, at least, all you have to do is change the screen resolution on the VM itself. To do that, right-click on the VM’s desktop and choose Screen Resolution (for Windows 7) or Display settings > Advanced display settings (for Windows 10) and choose a resolution small enough to fit on your physical computer’s display.

After you adjust your VM’s resolution, the window in which the VM is running resizes itself automatically, and you’re good to go.

SQL query for finding column in database

Last week, one of my coworkers was trying to figure out which tables in a database contained a particular column name. That’s something I’ve had to do in the past, and although I didn’t remember the exact details, a quick search turned up this gem from a Stack Overflow thread:

SELECT column_name, table_name FROM information_schema.columns WHERE column_name like '%{column name}%'

This query returns a list of all tables and views in the database that have column names containing the name for which you are searching.

If you know the exact name of the column, you can change the where clause to WHERE column_name = '{column name}'.