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 [...]

WMIC to the Rescue

A recent project had me trying to script the retrieval of the Dell Service Tag. Luckily there’s WMI Command-line to the rescue. From a command line or in a script wmic bios get serialnumber will display or grab the Dell Service Tag. Furthermore, you can use the WMI Command-line to retrieve all kinds of system data and even make [...]

Microsoft offers Security Essentials to (very) Small Businesses

Since Microsoft announced its own anti-malware product, Microsoft Security Essenstials, back in late 2008, the product has been steadily getting better. When asked what I use for anti-virus, I always answer MSE or AVG Free. Both cost my favorite price, free, and are well regarded in the security community. The big news of course, is [...]

Paychex Preview Upgrade to Mapped Drive

This was actually too simple, but unless you speak with support, how is one to know? I was recently tasked with upgrading a server installation of Paychex Preview software, which according to documentation cannot be done on the host server, it has to be upgraded from one of the workstations via mapped drive. It seemed simple [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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