Wednesday, February 22, 2012

MS: Determine which version of Office installed

How to determine which version of an Office 2010 product is installed
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2121559

How to determine which version of a 2007 Office product is installed
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928116

How to check the version of Office 2003 products
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/821549

How to check the version of Office XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291331

How to determine the version of your Office 2000 program
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255275

Monday, February 13, 2012

MS: Hyper-v R2 VM failed to start - Unable to allocate Ram: insufficient system resources - Error 0x800705AA

The Problem:

I have been running lot of VMs on the same Windows 2008 R2 server with Hyper-V role installed since November 2010. I updated server to SP1 a long time ago and keep server updated. No antivirus installed, because this is standalone training server. No Active Directory. Intel Core i7 with 6GB RAM.

On Thursday, I tried to start 4 VMs (usuallyI ran 5 to 7 simultaneous VMs) and when I tried VM #3 I got the following error:

MachineName failed to start
Unable to allocate xxx MB of Ram: insufficient system resources exist to complete the request service (0x800705AA)




So I spent last 4 days going through different tests:
  • Remove video card driver.
  • Disabled all software running on the server (this software was running before)
  • Uninstall all software I can.
  • Check online for similar issues.
  • Modified the cached physical memory reservation (using the registry key), to increase free physical memory.
  • Change memory assignment on VM to dynamic.
  • Applied few hotfixes (KB983289 and KB979149)
  • Check the event viewer for more info
  • Verify I have enough space on all disk partitions
  • Reinstall Hyper-V

Usually I ran for VMs ( 2 x 512MB of RAM + 2 x 768 RAM) and again I was doing this since November 2010.As you can see below there are plenty of memory available.


Solution:

After 4 days and running out of ideas I posted this issue on the Hyper-V forum and minutes later, Bob Comer a Microsoft MVP Virtual Machine posted that issue was caused by a Google application called GooglecrashHandler.exe

* Open Task Manager and found two process called GooglecrashHandler, killed them and using Autoruns I found they in Task Scheduler. Remove all entries.

* Delete directory D:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Update

* Delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\gupdate registry key

* Delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\gupdatem registry key

After that I was able to start all VMs. Thanks Bob!

Final Questions:

  • So the first question is how a 64k crap process created by Google can cause a problem like this?
  • Why this crap is installed on my system when I never installed any Google application?
  • And why the damn applications is not show in the Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel?
  • Why developers at Google are so BAD creating programs?
  • And finally: this issue was caused because Google developers are really f****** i***** or this is intentional?
  • Why this process is not considered a spyware or virus for antivirus companies?