Unable to sync Microsoft account

I had this strange problem in that my laptop with Windows 10 Home was unable to sync with my Microsoft account no matter what I tried. The Settings screen under  Accounts / Sync your settings had the message “Some settings are managed by your organisation” in red, right on top of it.

Now, I’m not on any domain, nor part of any organisation so it was confusing to say the least. I searched the internet for quite some time last night but most of the solutions were pointing in a few directions:

  • Edit the Local Group Policy, (gpedit.msc) – which Windows 10 Home doesn’t have
  • Change the Diagnostic and usage data under Privacy to the highest level, and
  • Disable or un-install various anti-virus and anti-malware software,

However,  none of this has helped, so I had to put on my brave hat and dig into the registry. I only had to have a look in a few key areas and it was right there under:

HKLMSOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindowsSettingSync

All you need to do is change DisableSettingSync value from (2) to (0). Reboot the computer and the sync works just fine.

 

Another problem that I managed to address in a similar way was that I was unable to change the Lock Screen picture. The same message Some settings are managed by your organisation was displayed and all options were disabled (greyed-out). 

All I have to do is change the NoChangingLockScreen registry key from (1) to (0) under HKLMSOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindowsSettingSync

Reboot and it’s all good.

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Wacom tablet driver issue

I bought the Wacom Intuos Manga  – Creative Pen & Touch tablet the other day and had quite some fun learning how to use it when editing my photos. However, last week I had to do a complete wipe and reinstall OS on my Mac and couldn’t get the tablet to work no matter what I did.

First of all, why did I reinstall the OSX? The computer I’m using came with OSX10.6, which I eventually upgraded to 10.7,  then to 10.8 and finally to 10.9 as they came out. None of these were clean installs, but rather straight upgrades. Every time it worked perfectly fine, but since upgrading to 10.9 things started slowing down. It came to the point where I had to do something so I did a clean 10.8 install and left it there. No 10.9 for now.

After installing all applications and enjoying my computer flying again, the Wacom tablet driver game me some grief, displaying “A supported tablet was not found on this system” error message when trying to configure it. I searched through number of forums and help files, but the general advice to remove and reinstall the driver, as well as repairing permissions didn’t work.

I’ve basically done all of the following:

  • Removed preferences,
  • Removed driver,
  • Removed Wacom software,
  • Repaired permissions,
  • Installed latest driver,
  • Repaired permissions again,
  • Rebooted after each step…

…but still got the same error message. Argh!

Considering I ‘downgraded’ to 10.8 I thought I’d downgrade the driver, too. I even went one step further (back) and downloaded the driver 6.20-W4, which the site states is for OS-X 10.7 and older, but it worked perfectly fine in my case.

The old driver was downloaded from the Wacom Europe website.

It’s disappointing that one needs to go through this much trouble to get the tablet working, but in the end the result is just sweeeeet.

Oh, by the way, the tablet comes with some software, one of which is Adobe Photoshop Elements 10, so if you are after PSE and were thinking of using the tablet, this might be quite a handy purchase.

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