Tips
The problem
I have a few Windows 7 Home Premium machines at home which I network together. I don’t use HomeGroups yet, and may not in the near future but I do keep some resources on the network that each machine has to access. Windows 7 Home Premium (and lower) does not remember credentials for other Windows machines (if you click the “Remember this password” checkbox in many authentication dialogs, Windows will not remember them and re-use them on next logon) so this becomes a problem when you are using service accounts to access shared media across machines (I...
Today I encountered a weird issue with a new machine I was setting up. The NIC on the machine worked to PXE boot and install Windows XP off the WDS server at work, however once I installed the drivers for the NIC on Windows XP and obtained an IP address from DHCP I couldn’t reach anything.
I couldn’t ping my default gateway, any DNS servers, couldn’t ARP an IP address, nothing. I tried to release and renew the IP address, ran diagnostics (which all passed except the connection diagnostic) and I was getting an IP address on the correct subnet and...
I just recently migrated my data to another machine (to use as a file server) since it has a Sans Digital NAS attached to it. Normally working with files across the network (I now map a shared drive to the share on the server) is perfectly acceptable – however, there are some operations better left on the remote machine, for instance: extracting or compressing [rar/zip] archives. Ideally, I’d prefer to have a solution where I can (in this case) right click on an item on my machine and run a command on the remote machine, and with...
I recently came across an issue where an administrative assistant needed to search her boss’s huge mailbox while it was attached in Online mode to her Outlook profile. Normally, Outlook search will work for certain folders (like Calendar and Contacts) because it caches those folders from attached mailboxes so that they can be indexed; however in this case the amount of items in each of those folders was either too large or something else was going on and search just wasn’t working.
After searching online, I was able to find out about the CacheOthersMail registry value which can be set in...
I am sure this has happened to more people than would care to admit it: Your clients’ (or your employer’s) backups are running smooth and you correct any hiccup right away but you are lazy about your own backups. So I start my (somewhat shameful) and hopefully eye opening post. A few days ago I saw a Windows Delay Write Failed notification in my taskbar. I think most of us know it, this notification usually means a write operation failed, and if your [external] hard drive is plugged in, on, and should be working fine, you start to suspect...
I was going to write an article about authoring your own MMC consoles and I may still do that, however the main reason why I would want to create my own MMC console and lock it down is if I were delegating certain tasks to a junior administrator (like user management in Active Directory).
It turns out that Daniel Petri has already written an excellent article which shows how an administrator can create a “Taskpad” which is essentially a custom MMC console which is locked down to a set of specific administrative tasks. This taskpad can then be used by a...
Postscript vs. PCL1 is not something I’d like to discuss on this blog, however I will admit that there are instances when the PCL drivers won’t get the job done, specially with PDF files (granted, a PDF file is essentially a postscript file, but that’s a discussion for another day). On more than one occasion I have come up across a few files some Excel, some PDF that for whatever reason won’t print flawlessly when spooled to a printer that is using a PCL driver on the print server but when I create another printer on the print server...
Remember: If only some of your Domain Controllers are Global Catalogs make sure that the domain controller that holds your Infrastructure FSMO role1 is not a Global Catalog. The reason for this is that a global catalog that holds the infrastructure master role will stop looking for and removing phantom objects in your directory since it will have no phantom objects (we all know global catalogs hold partial information on every object in the directory) because it knows about every object in the directory if even a little. However, if all your domain controllers are global catalogs, then it...
A quick tip for anyone who is experiencing issues searching their mailbox on Outlook 2003 (with or without Windows Search) and Outlook 2007 (preferably with Windows Search enabled on non-Vista/7 machines). If the mailbox mode is in Online mode, that is, it is not in Cached Exchange Mode, you might want/have to enable Cached Exchange Mode for Outlook 2003 in order for your searches to work properly. Now I have found that for Outlook 2007 search to work (though I have to admit, I have only verified these findings when Windows Search was installed), you...
I have two HTPCs at home, one in my bedroom and one in my living room (*cough*, the living room HTPC is coming soon), as well as another notebook that my lady uses. These machines are a perfect candidate for the Windows 7 family pack that Microsoft is offering for $150, which is good news for me as far as licensing goes.
Since these machines will are simply for entertainment purposes, and web browsing, they don’t need any features other than the ones offered by Home Premium, unfortunately, the RDP host is not available for Home Premium, so I will likely...
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