This is an “interesting” one- particularly if you manage a lot of windows pcs in a domain, so you have domain users and local users on your pc… I started getting complaints from people that the spell-checker in word didn’t work. What they meant was that the spelling and grammar options simply weren’t available to them. I checked that the language was set, and found that it wasn’t, and not only that, but it didn’t seem to persist if I did set it, even if I set it as the default.

Well, there was I just working away in the office, on my super-cool portable GIS setup, doing some work on a postgresql-driven database all working nicely on the USB stick. I should say that this has been working just fine in both my home (Vista) and office (XP) environment for months now. Time came to head off home, so I stopped everything, ejected the stick nicely, took it home and went to start working on it again… only for postgresql to refuse to work.

Welcome to the first Tip Day of 2008! Problem: You may occasionally find a microsoft word document that claims to have no spelling mistakes in it regardless of the fact that you know darn well that it has. You may check the language settings and find that it is set to the correct language and uses the correct dictionary, and you may reset the spell-check and ask it to recheck the document.

PostgreSQL from 8.2 onwards can be run easily from the command line in windows, without setting up as a service. Go to your postgresql/bin folder and at a command line type: pg_ctl start -D location\of\your\data\folder (as specified in initdb) -l logfile This should output a notice telling you whether the server has started up correctly. It also saves output to a logfile in the bin folder. If the server starts without incident, open another command window at the same location and type: