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 install/remove [...]
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 [...]
Internet Explorer 8 Released
Internet Explorer 8 was released today. I’m sure it’s already been downloaded a billion times already, but you can get it here.
My first impressions have been favorable. I’ve been using Slim Browser for quite some time, but it still uses the IE7 engine and the performance has been lackluster as of late. I’ve stuck with [...]
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 [...]
Emergency Patch Today!
A critical flaw in Internet Explorer (some say Exploder) has been found and patched today.
This is a very critical update due to the fact your system can be affected by just visiting a website.
Go to Windows Update and patch your system!
Windows XP SP3 Causes Windows Update to Fail
I’ve had this happen on a number of systems now, where installing Windows XP SP3 will cause Windows/Microsoft/Automatic Update to fail.
Thanks to Ron Crumbaker, a simple fix is all that is needed. The steps are listed below, the actual commands are in bold.
1. Stop Automatic Updates service – net stop wuauserv
2. Register wups2.dll – regsvr32 [...]
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 [...]
Critical Windows Patch
This doesn’t happen often for Microsoft, a patch outside the usual second Tuesday routine. Apparently a Critical patch for the server service that affects earlier versions of Windows (2000/XP/Server 2003 (they don’t mention the expired NT4)) and an Important fix for the latest versions (Vista/ Server 2008) was needed for this vulnerability that they just couldn’t [...]