Having difficulties finding menu and toolbar commands in Office 2010? Here’s a nice tool called the Interactive menu to ribbon guide. You can either download the offline versions here or access the guide directly from the web here.

As written in my previous post, I have just finished installing a Server 2008 R2 to conduct a proof of concept. I have also some PDF documents that I will use for reference. So I was just about to install some PDF reader software, but then I thought, hey why “install” software, there must be something small out there that allows me reading a PDF file without having to install anything on my fresh installed server.

I’ve come across various portable applications, but at the end I found a really cool one called Cool PDF Reader, well neat would actually be the better word, as the executable only uses 651KB and does not require an install.

Cool PDF Reader is FREE and can be downloaded from here.

Refreshing my knowledge a bit on Time Synchronization, NTP etc. and came across this utility. It’s FREE and doesn’t require installation.

The Domain Time LMCheck test tool lets you assess the current time of all the Windows machines on your network quickly and easily. It uses the built-in LAN Manager NetRemote TOD (Time of Day) function to check the time on all the machines in the browse list.

LMCheck can be downloaded from here

How long does it take to copy 1 GB over a slow network connection? How fast does my virtual application start? Today I came across a nice FREE utility called Network Delay Simulator.

Network Simulator tool allows you to perform network bandwidth and delay simulation (simulate slow/congested links between nodes) on any connection from your computer to any remote node (on the local LAN or remote over Internet).

More information and download links can be found here

Here I simulate a slow connection to a remote server.

Here I simulate a slow connection to the internet

Today’s ToolTip is about a utility called checksum and guess what, it can create and verify checksums. But beside all the other checksum utilities i came across so far this one has some nice features that make it worth mentioning it.

First it’s fast. I created a checksum for the Windows 7 x64 ISO file and it was about 15 to 20 seconds faster than other checksum utilities. Another feature that I like is that it can not only create checksums for individual files, but also for folders and it’s entire content. Checksum fully integrates into the Windows Explorer context menu but can also be launched from the command line.

More details and download information can be found here

Issues with installing Windows Updates? Then have a look at the following Microsoft Support Articles:

KB971058 How do I reset Windows Update components?

KB947821 Description of the System Update Readiness Tool for Windows Vista, for Windows Server 2008, for Windows 7, and for Windows Server 2008 R2

I have seen many FREE Screen Capture tools, but this one beats them all. Screenpresso is a small FREE Screen Capture utility that comes with a lot of nice features and doesn’t require an install.

Screenpresso can capture windows, regions, context menus and objects within dialog boxes. Furthermore the tool includes an integrated image editor that allows you to apply various effects such as adding Text, draw a rectangle, blur a selected region and add reflection.

You can download Screenpresso from here

If you get tasked to do some system troubleshooting and you just want to get as many information possible from a client, then have a look at the Microsoft Product Support Report Tool and the Product Support Reports Viewer.

The Microsoft Product Support Reports Viewer 2.0 can be downloaded from here and the Microsoft Product Support Reports from here

First launch the Microsoft Product Support Tool, which is a self-extracting executable (no installation needed). Once launched you can select the diagnostics you want to execute, then select Next to get the Diagnostic (Data Collection) started. Note that depending on the diagnostics selected, this process can take a while (up to 25 minutes).

Once the Diagnostic process has completed you can browse, e-mail or save the results. When saving the results, all data is stored in a single CAB file.

The Microsoft Product Support Report Viewer provides an interface to view the collected diagnostic data, which consists of several individual XML files.

While the diagnostic tool was running on my client, I copied the content of the temporary folder that the tool creates within the users TEMP folder into another folder. (if you have many folders in your TEMP folder just sort by date, and open the one with the newest date).

Within that folder you will find a Tools folder which contains all the executables and scripts used by the Diagnosis Tool.

So next time you get one of these famous calls to help solving a system problem, consider using this tool to gather detailed system information data.

Back in 2008 I wrote about Extending User Information in AD. Today I came across a blog post mentioning that there is now an unsupported 64 bit version available. More details and download here

Just learned about these SuperFlows, although some of them were already released a while ago, for some reason I missed that one, well you can’t keep up with everything. Just installed 3 of them, really cool stuff. If you’re dealing with SCCM or App-V, give it a try.

The SuperFlow interactive content model provides a structured and interactive interface for viewing documentation. Read more (SCCM) here and (App-V) here

Available SuperFlows
System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Software Updates Synchronization SuperFlow
Software Updates Synchronization SuperFlow
Software Update Deployment SuperFlow
SuperFlow for Operating System Deployment via PXE
Application Virtualization Sequencing SuperFlow

XP-More is a tool that helps manage Windows 7 Virtual Machines (XP Mode and any other). Specifically, it makes duplication of VMs a no brainer – no more raw XML editing and manually duplicating files.

More Information and download details can be found on the CodePlex XP-More project page

Reading my e-mails near the end of my vacation I received a link to this great web based GPO Search Tool. The tool is quite self explaining, so if you’re dealing with Group Policies have a look here

Here’s another nice utility I found today called Hard Link Scanner. Hard Link scanner is a command line tool that scans directories for hard linked files.

Download Hard Link Scanner from here

Earlier this week I wrote about using Hard Links. By doing my research on this subject I came across the Link Shell Extension utility. As the name says the utility extends the shell with additional options to create hard and symbolic links. So if you don’t want to type commands at the command prompt to create a hard link, this utility is just right for you.

Additional very detailed documentation and utility download links can be found here. Also look at the History of the utility, the first version was released in 1999 but the most recent version dates from February 2010.

Today’s ToolTip is about SoftPerfect Connection Emulator SCE. As the name says the software allows you to emulate different connection types. Unfortunately the tool is not for free, but I found the software nice enough to give it a try and eventually buy it especially since I haven’t been able to find a free alternative yet.

SCE allows you to simulate different network speeds such as modem, ISDN or DSL. You can either choose one of the predefined speed settings or configure your own. Furthermore you can configure the Latency and Packet loss rates. I tested SCE by configuring various network speeds and then used Speedtest.net to check the results and they were very accurate.

A fully functional trial version with a 30 seconds session limit can be downloaded from here