Anything about IT

Whitepaper from Intel about PC Refresh Cycles. “Pilot Study Optimum Refresh Cycle and Method for Desktop Outsourcing”.

Just came across this website where it’s all about 64 bit. If you’re interested in 64 bit related topics or maybe even already running a 64 bit operating system, you definitely want to visit this site.

Most of us desktop management consultants focus on the Windows Operating System, so I thought it’s about time to see how things work with other operating systems. I kind of know in theory how a LINUX installation works but Mac computers thus far has been unknown land for me. During my journey of collecting information I came across this video which demonstrates how to re-image a MAC computer.

Another great information source I found is the Mac Admin Corner blog.

Ruben Spruijt has released an update of the Application Virtualization Solutions Overview and Feature Compare matrix whitepaper. Read more

Here’s a video that explains how to embed a YouTube video into a PowerPoint slide.

If you are running a Hyper-V server, this is something you want to look at. The VHDShellExt.VBS extends the explorer context menu for VHD files with the following functions.

Download the script from MSDN Code Gallery and run cscript.exe VHDShellExt.vbs /action:setup for installation. More documentation can be found on Ravikanth’s site.

Today one of my colleagues ran into an issue after having slipstreamed Service Pack 3 into Windows XP. During the Windows XP unattended installation process the provided product key within the unattend.txt file was not accepted, which caused the system to prompt for the product key.

This turned out to be a known issue as documented within the following Microsoft support article. After you create Windows XP Service Pack 3 slipstreamed media, your product key is not accepted.

Bottom line, don’t run the slipstream command on a Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 system.

Just came across this video where people are being asked to explain what a Browser is. Its funny most people use it every day, but obviously don’t pay much attention how they get on to the internet. It’s just a matter of clicking that blue E.

Microsoft has released the Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V version 1) Planning, Deployment and Operations Guide. The document can be found here

Just took a look on CodePlex to see if there’s any new interesting projects and came across the Windows4all.com project. Windows4all.com is a silverlight based website simulating an operating system inside your web browser.

By the way, if you’re interested in these type of solutions, there’s also Wiki-OS or continue reading the WEB OS article on Mashable.

Most Windows Operating System and Application settings are stored within the Windows Registry, so if you want to create a script that automates customized settings, but don’t know the exact registry key location or value, you usually end up creating a so-called registry snapshot that records the changes made to the Windows registry when applying a system or application change.

Creating registry snapshots can be done with almost every application packaging software like InstallShield, or Wise Package Studio, but requires that you have that software available and installed, which may not be always the case. Furthermore when creating an entire system snapshot you usually still end up with searching through the recorded changes to identify the changed registry key.

I actually wanted to find out where Windows7 stores the “use small icons” configuration for the Windows Taskbar.

After some web searches, I came across a utility called RegFromApp from NirSoft. This utility does not require an installation process and is FREE.

Like the tool name says it allows you to track changes made to the windows registry per running process. Since we know that Windows Start Menu and Taskbar runs within the explorer process, we select the explorer.exe and start manually applying the system changes.

As we make the configuration change, the RegFromApp utility starts capturing the changes made to the Windows Registry. To keep the content of tracked changes as short as possible, we stop recording right after having applied the configuration change.

Finally after browsing through the tracked changes, we identify the registry key that handles the “use small icons” setting.

Read about what’s new in USMT (User State Migration Tool), download the whitepaper here

Learn more about Windows Server 2008 R2. All documents can be downloaded from here

When creating objects in Active Directory you can set a flag that prevents accidental deletion of an object.

While this setting is visible in the UI by default when creating an Organizational Unit, for other objects like Users, Groups and Computers, this flag is not set by default and can only be set if the Advanced Features are enabled within the Active Directory Users and Computers Console.

So assume you would create some important user accounts that are used for critical back-end systems, you should consider enabling the “Protect object for accidental deletion” flag.

Once you have this flag set, anyone who would try to delete the user account would receive a message as shown below.

Most companies put storage limits on their users mailboxes. To avoid full mailboxes, some periodic housekeeping is required. This can be done by either using the archiving function or by deleting content manually.

To identify calendar entries with large attachments, select your calendar, select View, then Current View, then Outlook Data files. Then click on the “size” column to sort the calendar entries by size.

You should now see the calendar entries sorted by its size and start deleting those items that are not needed anymore.