The acrodrome (yes, I just made that up, although I wasn’t sure if palinym was a better choice – decided on acrodome because I wasn’t as afraid of Tea Party snipers coming to murder me as I would have been if I used palinym) APIPA stands for Automatic Private IP Addressing. APIPA is in every version of Windows since NT and all versions of Mac OS X. APIPA is a dhpc mechanism that provides dhcp clients with self-assigned IP addresses when DHCP servers are not available. When there isn’t a DHCP server available, APIPA assigns IPs from 169.254.0.1 to 169.254.255.254 with a default mask of 255.255.0.0. Clients leverage arp to…
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Making Windows 7 Icons Transparent
I have to take a lot of screen shots. Therefore, most of my computers tend to have a white background (they used to be the xman the machine was named after but alas, I’m older and now they computers are all named after Backyardigans;). Sometimes it’s hard to see your icons in Windows 7 on a white background though. If you grapple with this too then consider doing what I did and making the icons transparent. To do so, locate the HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced registry key and make a dword key called ListviewShadow with a value of 00000001. Or: [HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced] “ListviewShadow”=dword:00000001 To set it back, make that 1 into a 0. As…
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Bubble Alerts w/ Silent Installs
When you push software to a Windows computer there’s an annoying little alert that pops up to tell the user that new software was installed. In one organization I was recently at this accounted for approximately 20 calls to the help desk every time they pushed out an update (patch Tuesday for them is one week after patch Tuesday for Microsoft). To turn off the bubbles in your image, right-click on the start button and click on properties. Then click on the Customize button. Click Advanced and uncheck the box for Highlight newly installed programs. Not too bad. But don’t want to touch all of the existing machines. Open HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced…
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Enable Fast User Switching for Windows (Command Line)
Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWinlogon in the registry and then change the value of the AllowMultipleTSSessions key to REG_DWORD of 1 (or back to 0 to disable). Very similar to how it works in Mac OS X. If you want to script this (eg – for a login script) then you can use the reg command, for example: reg add “hklmSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWinlogon /v AllowMultipleTSSessions /t REG_DWORD /d “1” /f
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Config AutoPlay (GUI & Registry) for Windows
When you insert a drive into a Windows, by default it’s gonna’ likely mount the drive (and run the autorun.inf if there is one or AutoPlay to play the music if it’s an audio disc). When you insert a disk or drive into a Windows computer you can hold down the Shift key and it will disable the auto-run and AutoPlay functionality of the system. But you can also control that functionality at a pretty granular level. The most common way to do so is likely using the Global Policy Editor. To do so, open gpedit.msc, click on Computer Configuration and then Administrative Templates, then System and select the option…