Anything about IT

Just found these two blog posts that describe some Registry and Services optimizations when running Windows 7 as a virtual client.

Windows 7 Registry Optimizations for Virtual Desktops

Windows 7 Optimization – Disable Services

Thanks to Daniel Feller for sharing this

When opening the “Change Desktop Background” Control Panel Windows by default uses the “Windows Desktop Backgrounds” picture location which is the content stored under C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper

In addition to the Windows Desktop Backgrounds location Windows also let you choose a Wallpaper from other locations such as the Picture Library, Top Rated Photos, Solid Colors or you can simply browse and select a Wallpaper that is stored anywhere on your computer.

But there is another option, that I figured out today and wanted to share with you. To demonstrate this I have created the following folders and copied a wallpaper file in each of the folders.

C:\Users\Alex\Documents\Wallpapers\Snowboard
C:\DATA\Wallpapers\The Netherlands\Amsterdam

Now we have to tell Windows that we want to include these 2 folders into the “Windows Desktop Backgrounds” listing. To do that, we have to modify the Windows Registry. Open the Registry Editor (Regedit.exe) and navigate to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Wallpapers\
KnownFolders\0\Windows Wallpapers\MergeFolders

Now create a new String or Multi String value for each folders that you want to include. Note that if you use variables in the folder name, you must create a Multi String Value (REG_EXPAND_SZ) otherwise a String Value (REG_SZ) is enough.

The Result. When opening the “Change Desktop Background” Control Panel the Wallpapers from all the 3 different Wallpaper folders are being displayed.

The Application Paths Editor allows you to add, edit and remove Application Paths. Setting an application path for your favorite application or script allows you to run the application directly from the “Run” dialog at the Start Menu.

So assume you have a script called “HelloApp.vbs” which is stored under C:\Program Files\HelloApp without having set an Application Path, you would have to navigate to the scripts folder or type the full path to launch the script. But once you have set an Application Path, you can launch it directly form the run dialog at the Start Menu.

Application Paths are stored in the Windows Registry, so if you are familiar with editing the Registry, you can of course also add Application Paths directly there.

  The Application Paths Editor can be downloaded from here

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.

Microsoft has updated the TCP/IP Registry Values for Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 whitepaper that describes how to modify the TCP/IP behavior by making registry edits.

The document can be downloaded from here

Those of you who are familiar with desktop engineering know the pain of scripting Windows configuration settings. While in general many settings can be configured by adding or changing a specific registry key value, there are still many things within the OS where Microsoft did not make our life as easy and provides a single registry key that can be tweaked.

Yesterday I worked on setting the Windows XP Windows Explorer View to “Details” by default for all users. The typical approach in identifying registry changes is to create a snapshot before and after manally applying the system configuration change, then in most cases the necessary registry keys are found and can be scripted. But unfortunately that wasn’t the case when changing the Windows Explorer View to Details.

It’s a long time ago I had the last request to apply this configuration to build, and back in 2004 I wasn’t able to find a nice solution, so i ended up importing a couple of registry strings that did the thing, but I wasn’t happy about as it was a huge REG_BINARY string that could contain more than just the Details View Setting.

So I made a new attempt in searching for a good solution, others might have found to configure this setting, and I found one that works great on: http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.general/msg/1327cd4eb34fc050

I have embedded the described registry keys within the following REG ADD commands, so that i can be used within an automated scripted client build process.

REG ADD “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags\AllFolders\Shell” /v WFlags /t REG_DWORD /d 00000000 /f

REG ADD “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags\AllFolders\Shell” /v Status /t REG_DWORD /d 00000000 /f

REG ADD “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags\AllFolders\Shell” /v Vid /t REG_SZ /d “{137E7700-3573-11CF-AE69-08002B2E1262}” /f

REG ADD “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags\AllFolders\Shell” /v Mode /t REG_DWORD /d 00000004 /f

Saturday morning, before going out with my family on a shopping tour I started a large FTP download and assumed it would have completed upon my return…. a few hours later, I found my system at the logon prompt, as it had rebooted itself automatically and of course the FTP download was not completed.

What happened ? Very simple, Windows Update had automatically rebooted the system, probably after having displayed a message as shown in the screen shot below.

Was it really Windows Update ? Yes, i compared the time the FTP transfer had stopped with the Event log entries and the time period seemed to match.

To prevent Windows Update from automatically rebooting in the future, I applied the following Windows registry keys::

Today some e-mails where exchanged on how to best script registry permissions.

Depending on what you want to achieve here’s a couple of tools that can be of help.

SetACL.exe

http://www.helge.mynetcologne.de/setacl/index.htm
http://setacl.sourceforge.net/

SubinACL.exe

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=E8BA3E56-D8FE-4A91-93CF-ED6985E3927B&displaylang=en

Regini.exe

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/237607

When launching Windows Explorer, by default the driver letters are being displayed behind the volume / share name.

Some people, like myself don’t find this very convenient and want to see the drive letters in front of the volume / share description.  This can be customized by applying the following registry key:

Reg ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer /v ShowDriveLettersFirst /t REG_DWORD /d 0×4 /f

I posted this a couple of years ago into the MyITforum site and received plenty of replies on this, as at that stage it was an unknown trick. Below the trick how to enable the Windows XP quicklaunch bar by using a registry hack.

copy the reg key
“HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop\Default Taskbar”
to:
“HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop\Taskbar”
(for XP RTM)
“HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop\TaskbarWinXP”
(for XP SP1) (to be safe copy it to both locations)