Network Printer Offline

Yesterday I was at a client site where everyone prints directly to the printers, rather than sharing via a print server. One of the PCs kept showing a printer as offline, even though everyone else was printing to it. From the PC you could ping the printer and even browse to the builtin web server [...]

God Mode in Windows Vista or 7

Following Paul Thurrott’s blog such as I do, today’s post listed a way to see a hidden GUI. There is quite a list, some of which are not normally exposed but via the Registry.
This is really a pretty simple hack:
Create a New Folder, rename it GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
You can actually name it whatever you want before the [...]

It’s Windows 7! The savior of the computing world!!!

Okay not really, but everyone else is making claims and spreading exaggerated news. Why not a catchy headline for me too?
Windows 7 has been unleashed upon the world today; enjoy!
PS. For those of us who have TechNet or MSDN, we’ve had the official release version for many weeks. Next time be one of the first with [...]

Control Panel Applets from Command Line

One of my customers doesn’t allow user accounts to be in the local Administrators group,  something I wish more companies would do. In fact over 90% of infections could be stopped by not logging in as an administrator; but I’ll save that “soapbox” topic for another post.
Many times I need to change settings or install/remove [...]

Windows 7 RTM Released to TechNet and MSDN

I’ve been watching everyday and was pleasantly surprised to see Windows 7 in all its many versions released to TechNet and MSDN.
Get it while it’s hot!

Windows 7 Beta to RC Upgrade

Thanks to the MakeTechEasier blog for this tip which saves a full reinstall when upgrading from Windows 7 Beta to the latest RC. This is unsupported by Microsoft, but since it is a release candidate I think you can fudge on the need fom a fresh install. I’ve already installed quite a bit of software [...]

Three Free Utilities

Everyone carries around a USB drive these days with a variety of utilities, these three have been very useful in the recent past.
CPU-Z – A great utility to find out what kind of memory is installed in a system. This is especially useful when a system is a plain box with out a service tag [...]

Lose the Shutdown Event Tracker

This tip has been around for a while, but I think it’s still worth sharing due to its possibly high annoyance factor.
On a production machine, I consider the Shutdown Event Tracker worthwhile, especially in environments with multiple administrators. When in a lab situation or testing environment, this prompt before shutdown gets old quickly. 
To change the [...]

Windows 7

Some people think it’s too soon for Windows 7, if that’s what they’re really going to call it. But having been released to manufacturing in November of 2006, it’ll be almost three years by the time Windows 7 is relased (and that’s if it’s on time).
Looking at Apple’s OS X delivery model, not to mention [...]