Windows XP is a 7 year old operating system. Microsoft ads on TV tell us that we should move to Vista. They put a deadline in place. According to Devil Mountain Software and a few others, more than one third of Windows systems are still being downgraded to XP though. What more can Microsoft do? Well, the deadline of January 31st to stop allowing OEM manufacturers to sell XP has been extended. You will now be able to purchase Vista and then have a downgrade option through to July of 2009, at which point XP will be well over 8 years old. Pundits say Vista sales are up, but really…
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Windows Server 2008: Expanding a Volume
You may find that a disk in Windows Server simply isn’t big enough for your greedy applications. But never fear, the good folks at Microsoft have given us the ability to expand that volume on the fly, as needed by adding other pools of storage or single disks to it. However, it’s important to keep in mind that if you have a highly available volume (let’s just say a RAID6) and you add a single disk to it then you have just effectively lost the high availability for the data stored on the extended portion of the volume. So make sure that the new storage you are adding matches up…
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Google Chrome…
So there are tons of posts out there on the ‘ole interweb about Google Chrome. It’s cool, it’s fun but I’m not going to write the same thing you can read by googling for it. Instead, I just want to point out that no one seems to be asking, why in tarnation are they developing their own browser. I have my own ideas, but that’s just me. Who knows… But it’s a clean, nice browser and introduces some really nice new features that will likely be copied by Firefox, Safari and of course IE. Still waiting for the Mac port thought. Once that comes out I’ll do a write-up…
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Mac OS X Server: Cached Logon and Windows PDC Clients
When using Mac OS X Server as a PDC you may find that you need to tell a Windows system to cache login (aka logon) information for longer than the Windows system allows by default. In an Active Directory environment it is fairly straight forward to deploy this type of setting through a GPO; however, the policy settings for an NT4 style PDC environment (aka – via SMB) won’t necessarily allow you to perform this task. To do so you might need to fire up the registry (or script an event in the login script to do so) and edit the following key with a Value (in terms of login…
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Windows: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Released
This article is a description of the new features available in Internet Explorer 8 beta 2
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New BlackBerry Web Desktop Manager Release
The new BlackBerry Web Desktop Manager v1.0.1 is now available at: http://na.blackberry.com/eng/support/downloads/#tab_tab_web_desktop
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Windows XP: Deploying Policies for Microsoft Office
You can set various policies for Microsoft Office. When you install the Office Resource Kit (orktools.exe) you will be able to go into the Start->Programs->Microsoft Office Tools-> Microsoft Office Resource Kit -> System Policy Editor to do so.
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Windows XP: Managing Policies for a Single Workstation
Not all environments are Active Directory. If you have a smaller Mac OS X Open Directory environment with a PDC you may want to leverage policies if you don’t have the more complicated needs of AD. This can be setup in your image and then pushed out from there, but will not update dynamically as is otherwise possible when using a netlogon share and adm files. From Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP there are two utilities that can be used to create policy lists. The first is Group Policy Object Editor, gpedit.msc. The second is secpol.msc. For the purposes of this document we will use gpedit.msc as it…
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Windows XP: AutoLogon
Recently we did a deploy of some Windows stations. Well, they were kinda’ Windows stations, but really Macs running Parallels and Boot Camp. At first things seemed great. Then we realized the deployed VMs and Boot Camp images were automatically logging in. So looking into it, it turned out that there was a few keys we needed to remove the contents of registry keys in the following location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWinlogon Keys we blanked out included DefaultUserName, AutoAdminLogon and DefaultPassowrd. The most alarming thing was that DefaultPassword showed the local admin password used during the installation process. As a temporary workaround until we could get this fixed we had the users…
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Windows System Explorer
If you’re done with Task Manager then check out SystemExplorer at http://systemexplorer.mistergroup.org. SystemExplorer is a free utility that will help you search through those processes for the ones that are virus laden, leaking memory or just plain not supposed to be there and therefore wasting your valuable system resources. SystemExplorer can show file paths, parent processes, process publishers, action histories and let you search for details against a database. In short, there have been great replacements for Windows’ Task Manager for years but this one might just be one of the better ones we’ve tried.