Ctrl+E (Execute) Not working?

In SQL 2012 Management Studio, my favourite shortcut for running scripts stopped working mysteriously, A message in the bar at the bottom read ...

 (Ctrl+E) was pressed. Waiting for second key of chord...

The reset instructions are shown below the screenshot.

The 'fix' for this, is 

1. Go to Tools > Options
2. Open the 'Environment' section of the tree and select 'Keyboard'
3. On the right you will see a 'Reset' button.
4. Click it and Keyboard shortcuts will be returned to their defaults.

Windows 8.1 : VMConnect Issue and shortcut creation

I recently set up Hyper-V on Windows 8 and was happily using RDP to connect to my VMs to achieve full screen mode via a short-cut.

It wasn't until I was off my local network that I realised that I had been relying on my network router (to resolve the VM names) for Remote Desktop to work in this way. Double clicking on the VM in Hyper-V manager does indeed bring up the VM, but I ideally don't want to launch this first every time.

VMConnect is the tool that lets you access VMs.

At first I had a small issue when I ran VMConnect...

" You do not have the required permission to complete this task. Contact the administrator of the authorization policy for the computer ‘computername’ "

So I followed the advice on Joesph Turley's blog and added myself to the 'Hyper-V Administrators' group, restarted the machine and VMConnect could now see my VMs...

So, returning to my original problem, how do I quickly open a session to my Hyper-V VM without RDP?

The solution is to create a shortcut to VMConnect itself, passing the pc name and vm name as parameters. -

"C:\Windows\System32\vmconnect.exe"    myPCname    myVMname

I managed to make to launch into full screen mode, as the first time you connect you can select the resolution that it will reuse for future connections.

TIWorker.exe

Today I noticed the hard drive light on my laptop furiously flashing away. Given I had not started any applications yet I pulled up Performance Monitor to investigate. The 'Disk' tab shows 'Processes with Disk Activity' and TIWorker.exe was at the top, merrily reading and writing to my drive.

So, what is it?

My limited research (googling - a verb now!) suggests it is a Windows Installer, connected to the Windows Update Service. Even when you are not updating, it may be tidying and compressing old update files in the background!

There are multiple links to problems that used to be present with tiworker.exe, all reportedly resolved by Windows Updates (Guess what I'm doing next...)

Links

• A servicing stack update is available for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012
• Windows 8 update bug clogs CPUs

Cannot set a credential for principal 'sa'

I was setting up a VM for testing purposes today and had cause to change my password on a SQL 2005 instance (admittedly using the 2008R2 tools). A trivial, quick task via management studio, or so I thought. I came up against the following error.

Msg 15535, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 
Cannot set a credential for principal 'sa'.

The 'Credential' tick box was not ticked, in-fact it was greyed out meaning I could not select it either.
The solution was to turn to Tsql.

Run the following against the master database

ALTER LOGIN [sa] WITH PASSWORD=N'n1ncomp00p'

No, that isn't one of my passwords, but I like it...

Links
Cannot set a credential for principal 'sa'. (SQL Server 2005/2008)