Archives for Tech Tips

Even More Fun with Virtual Machines

The Internet is getting pretty dangerous, especially for anyone running a Windows 2000/XP machine.  Wouldn’t it be nice to surf the web from your Windows box using a Linux browser?  You can, using Virtualbox + UBuntu + Seamless Mode. You can see this in action: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/virtualboxs-seamless-mode-combine-operating-systems-desktop/ The process is very simple: Install Virtualbox into your Windows [...]

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Data Recovery Fun

I recently had a D630 laptop hard drive go bad.  Of course, there had to be 18GB of user data on it.  Windows wouldn’t boot in normal or safe mode.  Upon booting the laptop with WinPE, I could see all of the data was still intact.  I attempted to copy the data through Windows’ XCOPY [...]

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Technet Gets Cheaper

Microsoft recently rolled out a new tier of Technet called Technet Standard and what was Technet Plus is now Technet Professional. Microsoft has also released a nifty spreadsheet showing the difference between Standard and Professional. Standard seems to have most of what Professional has, sans the Enterprise versions for $100 less. – Soli Deo Gloria

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Monitor Problem from Hell

You probably heard of “DLL Hell”, but I recently experienced “monitor hell”. We had a 30inch Dell WFP3007 attached to a Dell Precision T3400. We shipped the PC offsite and attached the monitor to another Dell T3400. A few weeks went by when the user who has this monitor noted that he could not set [...]

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Sysinternals Tools Updated

Some interesting enhancements to some of Sysinternals tools: Autoruns v10: This major update to Autoruns introduces the ability to scan offline Windows installations, adds.exe and .cmd extension handlers, defaults to hiding Windows entries to reduce noise in the common use case, and includes bug fixes. Process Explorer v12.04: This Process Explorer release adds the ability [...]

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The GPO That Couldn’t

After many sweet years, we finally bid farewell to Internet Explorer 6.  We planned to deploy Internet Explorer 7 via a Software Installation GPO.  After making the IE 7 MSI with the IEAK, we assigned it as a GPO.  As soon as the computer would reboot, the MSI would be assigned, install and restart the [...]

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Paragon Virtualization Manager 9.5 for Free (until May 24th)

Free until May 24th: http://dottech.org/freebies/16479 These are the major features as per the developer: Migrate a Windows-based computer to a virtual environment (P2V) Migrate from a virtual environment to physical (V2P) Virtualize system from its backup image (P2V) Migrate from one virtual environment to another (V2V) Recover the OS startup ability after system migration to [...]

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Lock Down Adobe Reader 9

Want to lock down Adobe Reader 9 in your environment?  Prevent updates, get rid of the splash screen and the option to buy Adobe Acrobat with the following script.  Just place the following commands in a .BAT file and then run it after you install or upgrade Adobe Reader on a user’s computer (stolen from appdeploy.com).  [...]

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A Very Fast Search Utility for Windows

I use Agent Ransack at home and at work for searching for files, but just recently I found Ultrasearch made by the guys that created Treesize.  The file search works by searching the MFT of NTFS directly instead of drilling down into the file system itself or an index.  The nice thing is that not only [...]

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SIW Pro for free today at Giveaway of the Day

For 24 hours only: http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/siw/ I went to look where it hides the license, but it appears to be embedded within the EXE itself.  I copied the EXE to another box and it was still registered to Giveawayoftheday.  There is an update check feature in the program, so you might be able to continually keep it update with [...]

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