• Stop the annoying “Updating Your Computer is Almost Complete” Message

    The full message is “Updating your computer is almost complete.  You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect”.

     

    There are 2 methods to put a stop to this message.  One will stop it permanently, but depending on your environment (locked down policies at at your company), it may not work.  The other will work until you reboot your computer.

     

    Let’s start with the easy, temporary fix. 

    1. Click the Start button

    2. Choose the Run command

    3. Type in sc stop wuaserv and click ok.

     

    The windows update icon will disappear from your system tray and you’re home free…until you reboot and more updates are installed.

     

    Now for the permanent fix.

    1. Click Start, Run, then type in gpedit.msc

    2. In the application that appears, click on Computer Configuration under Local Computer Policy and then click on the + sign to the left of Administrative Templates.

    3. Click the + sign next to Windows Components, and then click on Windows Update.

    4. On the screen to the right, double-click on Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations.  Cick the Disabled radiobox and then click OK.

    5. Close this application.

    6. Go to Start, Run, then type in gpupdate.exe /force and press enter or click OK.

     

    The last step needs to be done to apply the policy update immediately, but may not work if you are using a work computer and they have the policies locked down.

     

    That’s it.  Comment with questions.

  • ReQlogic Punchout w/ Invalid Characters

    At work, one of the applications I am responsible for is called ReQlogic. It’s a 3rd-party requisitioning product and is integrated with Microsoft Dynamics SL (Solomon). There are about 400+ users of this app here at Life Time Fitness, so it’s an important one!

    We’ve had a lot of random issues with it ever since it was installed, but it also has been a big time-saver as well. The latest issue (resolved) was that we received an error every now & then when attempting to submit a punchout order to Staples.

    After some troubleshooting, I determined the problem to be a pair of invalid characters (“ and ”) within the description field in the cxml. I was able to dynamically replace many other invalid characters by editing the punchoutpo.aspx file on the server, but these just wouldn’t play nice.

    The final solution was to manually edit a sql view called xwv_po_purchord. All that was needed was to alter the code below

    L.TRANDESC AS TRANDESC
    to
    Replace(Replace(L.TRANDESC,'“','"'),'”','"')

    What this code did was just replace the invalid quotes with a pair of valid quotes. Now the cxml submits just fine & dandy.