From the monthly archives:
One of the things I hate to see when booting up a system is that a service failed to start. This usually means combing through the event viewer to identify the service that failed. It can be annoying because of the time you need to spend looking through unrelated events. I wanted a way to […]
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From time to time I will come across a machine that has a pirated office serial number. Microsoft checks your serial number before allowing you to download updates for Windows, and Office. The problem is that there is no way within office to just update your serial number (With a legitimate one) without uninstalling, and […]
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Hotfixes are patches Microsoft has released but has not done enough regression testing to make sure they are perfect. Many times you will come across a KB article that describes a bug or problem and find out there is a fix…a Microsoft Hotfix. This means you need to call a 800 number, tell someone the […]
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On occasion I will use the ‘net send’ command to fire off a quick message to anyone working on our servers. Usually in the form of a script that will notify everyone I am about to reboot. I was surprised to find it didn’t work at all when running under Vista (Well not that surprised) […]
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For a while now it has been impossible to receive your free hotmail (Now called live mail) in Microsoft Outlook. They added a restriction that only paid accounts could receive mail this way. It was very annoying since every other free email service provides a way to get mail in Outlook (Usually via POP3). Finally […]
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It has been a long time coming. Finally Microsoft has dusted off the old code for the Mac version of Remote Desktop. I have been suffering with version 1.0 for some time now – and it was severely lacking in features. The new beta is quite stable and includes the following: Universal Binary Runs natively […]
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I have been getting tired of the Name+Icon login style of Vista for some time now. I want to force users to press CTRL-ALT-DEL, then type their username and password. There are a few reasons for this. I have account names that I don’t want others to see. If they know that the username exists, […]
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Microsoft has included file compression with windows since Windows 2000. I am not talking about the built-in zip compression either (That actually started with XP). What I am talking about is the silent folder and file compression that works on the fly with the NTFS file system. If you have never used it…you may have […]
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I helped do some IT work at an Insurance company over the weekend. A friend of mine is an IT manager there. I will take any chance I can to poke around a real life corporate network (Instead of playing around with a farm of Virtual Machines)…so it was worth the extra work. One of […]
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Microsoft has quietly released a beta version of Windows XP SP3 to a small group of testers. Microsoft has acknowledged the release, but will not specify what updates will be included in the final version. Microsoft said it is looking at the first half of next year for the final release, but said this is […]
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