Adding Windows XP Media Center to a Domain
During another domain migration yesterday, I came across a Windows XP Media Center PC in the workplace. This is certainly common with small companies, especially when they’re bootstrapping. You buy what you can afford and that usually means Home and Media editions of Windows. Those work great for a small network, but of course can’t be added to [...]
Optimize Windows Settings for SSD
So you got a shiny new SSD for your Windows system. As you may or may not know, there is only a finite number of writes to each sector before it becomes unusable, eventually causing the disk to be unusable. So what can you go to make sure it lasts as long as it can? I’ve [...]
Activate Windows and Office at the Command Line
I was recently looking for a way to activate Windows 7 and Office 2010 at a command prompt; this is what I found… Since the release of Vista, you can use the command line utility slmgr for Windows activation when using a MAK (or Multiple Activation Key). Windows Activation Open a command window (as administrator) And run… slmgr -ipk xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx slmgr [...]
(Not so) New Folder Locations
Since the advent of Windows Vista, the usual folder locations don’t always apply. Take the Quick Launch or All Users Desktop, where did they go? Here’s a short list of what’s been moved around (and yes, I’m writing this as much for me as anyone else)… All Users: All Users Desktop, Favorites, Documents, Downloads, Music, [...]
Symantec AntiVirus Runtime Error!
Earlier this year, a customer kept getting this error when rebooting: Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library Runtime Error! Program: C\Program Files\Symantec AntiVirus\Rtvscan.exe This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application’s support team for more information. Luckily the fix isn’t too painful… Go to a command prompt and run wbemtest [...]
Time Skew and Exchange Services
On a recent Sunday night, I was home watching The Walking Dead, a colleague called to say that our core switch was down in our colo. As he was on vacation, I raced over there, preformed some troubleshooting, finally rebooting our huge Cisco 4510 to bring everything back online, that is except Exchange. The Exchange cluster [...]
Windows 3-Tier Certificate Authority
Many months ago I was tasked with implementing a 3-tier Certificate Authority for a large Windows domain environment. Unfortunately there is surprisingly little information for the nitty-gritty questions one may have. The Microsoft Press book Windows Server® 2008 PKI and Certificate Security (this book seems to have been discontinued, thus outrageous pricing) proved quite useful, but [...]
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