Tag: Step by step instructions

Downloading & installing Microsoft Office fonts on Mac

If you’re using a non-Microsoft app on macOS to view or edit documents made in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or other Office apps, you may run into situations where documents are not displayed as expected because you’re missing fonts that are part of Microsoft Office.
These are fonts such as Calibri and Cambria.

Luckily, you can manually download and install these so the fonts will show up in any application that needs them.

Estimated time: 3 minutes

How to download & install Microsoft Office fonts on a Mac:

  1. Navigate HERE in your browser.

  2. Download the .ZIP file

  3. Unzip it

    By default on a Mac you can simply double click the file.

  4. Open the unzipped folder

  5. Select all the .TTF files inside the folder

  6. Right click the selected files and choose Open

  7. Click “Install Font” for each font that appears

Note: Changes to fonts take effect when an application is opened or a user logs in to the account or computer on which the changes occurred, see support.apple.com.

Note 2: To meet legal requirements, you should own a Microsoft app which contains these fonts.

Source: StackExchange

Change ATA/IDE mode to SATA/AHCI on existing Windows installs

Windows 10

Source: lonewolf7 / Tom’s Hardware, 12th September 2015

Change ATA/IDE mode to SATA/AHCI on Windows 10:

  1. Start REGEDIT.

    Press Windows+R on your keyboard, type regedit, press OK and accept the UAC prompt.

  2. Look for this line:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\StartOverride

  3. Change the 0 DWORD value from 3 to 0.

  4. Reboot your PC and enter your BIOS.

  5. Set the SATA mode to AHCI in your BIOS.

  6. Reboot back into Windows.

    If all went well, this will happen without issues!

Windows 8 / 8.1

Source: Sergey Tkachenko / Winaero, 22nd June 2014

Option 1: Safe Mode

  1. Power down or restart the computer and enter the system BIOS.
  2. Change the ATA Drive setting back to ATA Mode, press enter to accept the change and restart the computer.
  3. Click Yes to the Warning about the detected mode change on the embedded ATA controller.
  4. The system will boot normally to the Start screen. NOTE: Be sure you know the Local Admin account and password and are able to boot successfully before proceeding.
  5. Open an elevated command prompt and run the following command to enable Safe Mode boot:bcdedit /set {current} safeboot minimal
  6. Restart the computer and boot to the system BIOS.
  7. Change the ATA Drive setting from ATA/IDE Mode to AHCI Mode, press enter to accept the change.
  8. Click Yes to the Warning about the detected mode change on the embedded ATA controller.
  9. The system will boot normally to the Start screen in Safe Mode.
  10. Open an elevated command prompt and run the following command to remove the Safe Mode boot option:bcdedit /deletevalue {current} safeboot
  11. Restart the computer and boot normally, the system will boot successfully to the Start screen.

Option 2: Registry

  1. Open REGEDIT.
  2. Navigate to the following key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\storahci
  3. Change the Start DWORD value from 3 to 0.
  4. Reboot your PC and set the SATA mode to AHCI.

Windows 7

Source: Sergey Tkachenko / Winaero, 22nd June 2014

  1. Open the Registry editor.
  2. Navigate to the following key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci
  3. Change the Start DWORD value from 3 to 0.
  4. Reboot your PC and set the SATA mode to AHCI.
  5. You are done. Now Windows 7 will boot successfully.

Disable Energy-Efficient Ethernet in Windows

If you use Ethernet for your connection to internet and/or network equipment and you’re experiencing connection dips or disconnections (especially with consistent but low amounts of throughput), it’s worth checking if your network card is running on Energy-Efficient Ethernet. This networking standard aims to save energy, but it’s not always implemented well in network drivers. Therefore, it can sometimes cause imperfections in performance.

If you want to find out if your network card uses Energy-Efficient Ethernet (and if you’d like to turn it off), keep reading.

Prerequisites

This article assumes:

  • your computer is running Windows Vista or newer;
  • the affected connection is a wired Ethernet connection. Therefore, your wifi must be turned off when the problems occur for EEE to be a problem.

Steps to take

Estimated time:  5 minutes

Disabling Energy-Efficient Ethernet in Windows:

  1. Open the Windows Device Manager.

    In Windows 10, you can right-click the Start button and choose it from the list that appears.
    In earlier versions of Windows, you can reach the Device Manager through Control Panel > System.

  2. Find your network card and open its properties.

    Click the arrow at the left of “Network adapters”.
    Right-click your wired network adapter and choose “Properties”.

  3. Click the “Advanced” tab at the top of the window.

    A big list appears with features of your network adapter. Look for options like Energy-Efficient Ethernet, Power Saving Mode, etcetera. Different adapters will have different names for this.

  4. Disable all energy related options you found in step 3.

    Select an option in the list on the left, then choose ‘Disabled’ as the value in the list on the right. Repeat for every option you’d like to modify.

  5. If it exists: go to the “Advanced” tab and disable all energy related options here.

  6. Click OK.

    Your network connection will temporarily disappear, and reconnect about 5-15 seconds later.
    If your NIC’s built-in power saving was indeed the culprit, the problems should now be gone.

Solve Nvidia tearing issues on Linux

If you use an Nvidia video card or chipset with the proprietary Nvidia video drivers on Linux, you might run into awful tearing artifacts while dragging windows, watching video and seeing other on-screen movement. Whatever settings you toggle in system settings and the Nvidia control panels, nothing seems to help.

There is a good solution, provided you are running at least version 364.12 of the Nvidia drivers.

Before you continue

This article assumes:

  • your computer uses GRUB to boot into the Linux install (can be MBR or UEFI, that doesn’t matter)
  • you have version 364.12 or newer of the Nvidia drivers installed and active with default settings
  • you know what the Terminal is and how to run a command with it
  • you have made a backup of your entire system, and know how to restore it in case something goes wrong

Here’s what to do

Alleviating NVIDIA tearing issues on Linux:

  1. Open /etc/default/grub in a text editor with sudo permissions.

    For example: on Linux Mint, you can run sudo xed /etc/default/grub from a Terminal window.

  2. Find this line, fairly at the top of the file:

    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”

  3. Change the entire line to this:

    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash nvidia-drm.modeset=1″

  4. Save & close the document.

  5. Run sudo update-grub in the Terminal.

    This updates your bootmanager so it uses the new settings from the next boot onwards.

  6. Reboot your computer and test if the tearing is gone.

Extra step for Linux Mint + Cinnamon

When using Cinnamon on Linux Mint, you might see that the tearing is now gone but window movement is still a little stuttery. If this is the case, go into System Settings > General and pick ‘Presentation Time’ as the VSync method.
Then reboot, and everything should be buttery smooth.

What does this all do?

nvidia-drm.modeset=1 allows the Nvidia Direct Rendering Manager to load in kernel space and pre-set display settings before the X video server has a chance to take over. I think this makes it possible for the Nvidia driver to use its own VSync instead of whatever X or the window compositor offers, but I don’t know nearly enough about Linux or graphics cards to know if this is true. All I know is: it works, and I hope it helps you too 🙂

Thank you