Sys Admin Tales » XP

Adding Windows XP Media Center to a Domain

Tom Thrush — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:53:26 +0000

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 a domain, at least Home can’t. Luckily Windows XP Media Center can be hacked into joining a domain, because unlike XP Home Edition, it won’t upgrade to XP Professional.

So here’s the hack:

If you haven’t already, install the Windows Recovery Console (you’ll need your Windows XP disk for this)
Boot into the Microsoft Windows Recovery Console when prompted
1. Select the proper OS (usually 1) and enter the Administrator password (if prompted)
Copy the SYSTEM registry hive to C:\ copy c:\windows\system32\config\SYSTEM c:\
Type exit and boot into your Windows XP Media Center system as an administrator
Open Registry Editor (Start > Run… type regedit, click OK
1. Highlight HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
2. Click File > Load Hive…
3. Browse and select C:\SYSTEM
4. Enter your PC-name or anything really
5. Drill down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\PC-name\WPA\MedCtrUpg
6. Change the IsLegacyMCE key in the right pane to the number 1 (default is 0)
7. Highlight the PC-name under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and click File > Unload Hive…, click Yes
Reboot into the Microsoft Windows Recovery Console as in step 2
1. Copy the SYSTEM registry hive back copy c:\SYSTEM c:\winsows\system32\config\system enter Y to overwrite
2. Rename the old SYSTEM hive on C:\ ren c:\SYSTEM SYSTEM_old
3. Type exit and reboot back into your Windows XP Media Center system as an administrator
Now you should be able to add the system to the domain
Optional: delete c:\SYSTEM_old and change the boot selection time from 30 seconds to 2 or 3 (now that the Recovery Console has been added)

Thanks to Aaron Tiensivu, who’s article helped me yesterday. I decided to make an abridged post here since I’m getting annoyed at having to find this hack every time.

Optimize Windows Settings for SSD

Tom Thrush — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:03:26 +0000

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 gathered a few tips from around the web to help.

Go without a pagefile (if you have at least 2GB of RAM)
Disable automatic disk defragmentation (only Vista and Win 7)
Turn off hibernation
Put a halt to prefetching
If this is a system with two drives move the location of your Temp directory path (and move the pagefile rather than disabling it as above).

Versions after Windows XP actually do make some changes to optimize, but it doesn’t hurt to check. And have fun with your new found (or bought) speed!

WMIC to the Rescue

Tom Thrush — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 21:21:14 +0000

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 configuration changes. Rob van der Woude‘s great site on scripting has a great primer and examples on using WMIC. TechNet Magazine also has a very useful article on gathering system data using WMIC in your environment.

Finally, checkout the WMI Admin Tools pack. It contains more than I want to type about here, but it gives you the ability to browse the various objects, classes and properties, plus a custom event viewer and much more. Check it out and make your (administrative) life better.

Microsoft offers Security Essentials to (very) Small Businesses

Tom Thrush — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 21:45:00 +0000

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 that MSE is now free to small businesses with 10 or less PCs. I’ve actually been recommending it to smaller businesses for a while and now they’ll be in compliance. (Now if only it was okay for servers…)

Paychex Preview Upgrade to Mapped Drive

Tom Thrush — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 18:14:43 +0000

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 enough, until the point of the install “wizard” where it prompts for installation directory. It listed C:\RAPID, and had a dropdown menu so I could choose one of the mapped drives; but instead of listing mapped drives it only offered the local C:\ drive. No problem, the instructions on the screen said reboot if it doesn’t list your mapped drive. Wait a few minutes for the reboot… and no good, just C:\RAPID again; time to call support.

After starting a WebEx session, so the tech could see what I was saying was true, we copied the RAPID directory from the mapped drive to C:\, then ran the Paychex Preview software upgrade on C:\RAPID. When the upgrade was complete, it was just a copy and replace over the RAPID directory on the mapped drive and the deed was done. Oh yeah, don’t forget to run WS_Setup.exe from each workstation to create appropriate shortcuts to the mapped drive.

Network Printer Offline

Tom Thrush — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 06:10:18 +0000

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 to see that it was low on cyan.

After chewing on this for quite a while, I found the issue: a checkbox on the Ports tab “SNMP Status Enabled”, which when checked (along with SNMP turned off on the print device) will result in the printer being listed as Offline. Once the box was unchecked, it was back online and the customer was back to printing once again.

Control Panel Applets from Command Line

Tom Thrush — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:51:44 +0000

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 software on someones PC without logging them out of the system, in which case I will go to %windir%\system32, shift+right-click CMD.exe and choose Run As…

Once I’ve opened a Command window with an account in the administrators group, I can start the Services MMC (services.msc), Device Manager (devmgmt.msc) or Computer Manager (compmgmt.msc), plus many more useful consoles from the command line. Often times I need to remove software or make a change to network settings which involves Control Panel Applets. These also can be run at the command-line (or Run… prompt if you’re already logged in as an administrator), some of my favs are listed below.

Appwiz.cpl – Add/Remove Programs (or Programs and Features in Vista or Windows 7)
Ncpa.cpl – Network Connections (for changing IPs and DNS)
Powercfg.cpl – Power Options (perhaps for turning off Standby or enabling the Performance setting)
Sysdm.cpl – System Properties (lots to find here: Remote Desktop, Pagefile, System Restore settings, etc.)
Wscui.cpl – Security Center (change Automatic Updating, the Firewall and Malware monitoring)

Want more? Check out the Wiki page.

Three Free Utilities

Tom Thrush — Wed, 20 May 2009 00:02:29 +0000

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 or serial number. And it’s really annoying to open a box only to find the memory is without a label.

Magic Jelly Bean – This little gem has been in my toolbox for a long time. It grabs the key codes for popular software installed on a system (Adobe, VMWare, Office) including the OS. This is very useful if you have a disk, but lost your installation key or have lots of keys and don’t know which ones were used on a particular system.

Wireless Key View - And finally, this tool grabs the WPA/WEP wireless key(s) from a Windows system (must be using the built-in Windows wireless utility) when you can’t see the actual text or log into your wireless router.

And while you’re visiting these sites, check out the other free software they have. You’ll have your 32GB thumb drive filled up in no time ;)

Internet Explorer 8 Released

Tom Thrush — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:52:42 +0000

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 Slim Browser over the last couple of years due to features like double-clicking tabs to close sites and not having multiple browser windows open when going from an internal to external site. These items seem to have been addressed in IE8 and so far I’m impressed with speed and functionality. Try it out (Windows users) it’s free.

Lose the Shutdown Event Tracker

Tom Thrush — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 08:01:56 +0000

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 setting go to Start > Run…, type gpedit.msc and press OK.

Drill down: Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates and highlight System. In the right pane, double-click the “Display Shutdown Event Tracker” and choose Disabled.

You’re done, no more need for a reason to shutdown the system. (BTW, this tip works with Windows Server 2003 and you can even enable the Shutdown Event Tracker for Windows 7, Vista and XP.)