How to adjust your car mirrors to avoid blind spots

For the past few years, various carmakers have been offering blind-spot detection systems for their cars’ side mirrors. Often complex, these systems employ cameras or radar to scan the adjoining lanes for vehicles that may have disappeared from view.

Shipito.com

Many products are much less expensive in the U.S.A. thanks to the weak dollar value and strong competition. Many U.S. sellers do not ship directly to international addresses. Now you can shop online on sites like eBay, Amazon, and BestBuy and we will ship the packages to you. We can also assist with purchases and arrange payment if you do not own a credit card.

Run XP Mode on Windows 7 Machines Without Hardware Virtualization

One of the neatest new features in Windows 7 Professional and above is XP Mode, but not all machines are capable of running it. Today we show you how to use VMware to run XP Mode on machines without Hardware Virtualization.

Bypass Heavy-Handed Web Filters With Your Own Proxy Server

If your workplace or school’s extra-restrictive internet filter has you pulling your hair out during the occasional browsing break, there’s hope! Here’s a quick look at how to get around heavy-handed browser restrictions with the open-source PHProxy.

Easy Poster Printer

Easy Poster Printer enables you easily to print posters of any size (max 20×20 meters). Just drag n drop your picture into the application and click print.

LookInMyPC

LookInMyPC generates a complete, comprehensive system profile that includes information on all installed hardware and software. Additionally it provides system diagnostic information such as details on running processes, installed services, startup programs, Windows updates and hot fixes, active network and Internet connections, TCP/IP port usage, event log detail, and much more. All this is provided in an easy to read, formatted report that you can view and print using your web browser. 

How to adjust your car mirrors to avoid blind spots

For the past few years, various carmakers have been offering blind-spot detection systems for their cars’ side mirrors. Often complex, these systems employ cameras or radar to scan the adjoining lanes for vehicles that may have disappeared from view.

Shipito.com

Many products are much less expensive in the U.S.A. thanks to the weak dollar value and strong competition. Many U.S. sellers do not ship directly to international addresses. Now you can shop online on sites like eBay, Amazon, and BestBuy and we will ship the packages to you. We can also assist with purchases and arrange payment if you do not own a credit card.

Run XP Mode on Windows 7 Machines Without Hardware Virtualization

One of the neatest new features in Windows 7 Professional and above is XP Mode, but not all machines are capable of running it. Today we show you how to use VMware to run XP Mode on machines without Hardware Virtualization.

How to Install GPMC on Server 2008, 2008 R2, and Windows 7 (via RSAT)

Can You See Me – Open Port Check Tool

Is a free utility for remotely verifying a port is open or closed. It will be useful for users who wish to check to see if a server is running or a firewall or ISP is blocking certain ports.

Setting up a Windows 7 Media Center

Windows XP Power Management and Group Policy Preferences

Windows XP only has one active power scheme for the entire computer and that scheme is based on the current or previously logged on user—that is to say Windows XP power schemes are only user-based. This means the power scheme can change as each user logs on. Also, it means that last logged on user’s power settings are the settings that remain once the user logs off. And yes, each user has its own power configuration; however, the entire operating system only has one active power scheme.

PHP and IE8 Web Slices

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) shipped with a new feature for web users called Web Slices. … Essentially it lets you add enhanced links to your favorite bar that allow you to preview snippets of content from websites that you frequently visit without having to open up the page. It’s really useful to do little tasks like check on your web based Inbox, check the weather in cities you live or visit, traffic status, stock tickers, headlines, sports, the list goes on and on and you can check the IE add-on gallery for more examples of useful web slices and for inspiration.

How to customize default user profiles in Windows 7 (KB973289)

To customize a default user profile or a mandatory user profile, you must first customize the default user profile. Then, the default user profile can be copied to the appropriate shared folder to make that user profile either the default user profile or a mandatory user profile.

Dealing with VMs, Snapshots and the dreaded broken security channel

The problem with that perfect world is that you might want to snapshot a single machine to perform a what-if test and then be able to roll back if the idea is a bust. But if you do not snapshot all the VMs at the same instance, you run the risk of one of the machines changing it’s secure channel password during the what-if period. When you revert the changes during that session and you attempt to login, you will get an error message saying that the trust relationship with the domain controller is broken. You only option is to remove and re-add the machine to the domain.

Windows 7 Application Compatibility List for IT Professionals

We released the Windows 7 Compatibility Center a few weeks ago. This lets you look up one application at a time. You can find that at http://windows.com/compatibility.

Today, we have a downloadable list indicating vendor support. If you want to write some automated matching against your list of application, you can use this – it is an Excel download of all known information from vendors. You can find that at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=890e522e-e39e-4278-aebc-186f81e29173&displaylang=en.

Support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 will end on July 13, 2010

How to open a parachute during free-fall: Introducing Quick Security References (QSRs)

A QSR is designed to provide the information necessary to quickly understand and address specific security threats from the perspectives of four IT-focused job roles (business decision makers, architect/program manager, developer, and tester). QSRs will also help establish security practices and provide a framework for addressing future incidents.

Package This

Package This is a GUI tool written in C# for creating help files (.chm and .hxs) from the content obtained from the MSDN Library or the TechNet Library via the MSDN Content Service. You select the content you want from the table of contents, build a help file, and use the content offline. You are making personalized ebooks of MSDN or TechNet content. Both help file formats also give full text search and keyword search.

This collection of (mainly Australian) mobile phone friendly links was something I put together (almost) a year ago.
All the links still work from a mobile phone, which was a surprise that some of them are still around..  Some of the links, such as cricinfo, do not work from a normal web browser.
Do you, dear reader, have any others that you would like to share?

News
ABC Mobile
Google News
News Limited
The Age

News (Sport related)
CricInfo (Cricket)
Fox Sports

Email
Google gmail
Microsoft Mobile Live
Yahoo mail
Yahoo Mobile Solutions

Search engines etc.
Google Mobile
Metlink.Mobi – Melbourne Public Transport finder.
Wikipedia – Mobile Edition
Yellow Pages / Whereis Map / Trading Post

Other
eBay
Telstra collection of mobile friendly links
Weather
Yahoo Mobile

All about InstallShield Command Line Switches

How to open the Seagate FreeAgent Go External Drive

Melbourne Airport Live Flight Radar

Windows Update: Network Policy Settings Prevent You

The name of the actress in the iSelect TV ads is

Get-ComputersNearMe

Today I learned a little bit about how to get to some of the data stored within special shell folders.  You can get a list of all of the easy-to-get-to special folders here.  I noticed one folder in particular that a bunch of systems administrators I know want to read, and that’s the Nearby Computers page.  Here’s a quick 23-line function that will go and get all of the computers from the Nearby Computers page, ping them, and return the Win32_PingStatus objects.

End-to-End WAN Optimization with BranchCache

Expanding a business into new regions of the world with branch offices is a great idea from a business perspective, but it often presents challenges to network architects and implementers. To connect each branch office to a central location requires some sort of physical or logical connection, with bandwidth that is typically orders of magnitude smaller than local area connections. Low bandwidth combined with the trend toward centralizing organization data often yields branch office links that are congested, resulting in poor performance for applications. Moreover, many types of wide area network (WAN) links are expensive and can incur substantial startup and monthly costs.

Understanding DFSR conflict algorithms (and doing something about conflicts)

I’m frequently asked to explain the DFSR conflict algorithm – i.e. what happens when files are created or modified on two servers before replication takes place. What we don’t document well is that there are actually three conflict algorithms and they all behave quite differently. I am breaking these out into scenarios for easier understanding.

The Configuration Manager Service Pack Install Guide

This document was created to help in troubleshooting Configuration Manager Service Pack 2 (SP2) install failures. This document is not entirely specific to Service Pack 2 and can apply to Service Pack 1 installs, upgrades from SMS 2003 to SCCM, and future service pack or Configuration Manager versions that rely on .mof file compilations, SQL SPNS, provider DLLs, etc.

PowerScripting Podcast with Ed Wilson

Some troubleshooting resouces:
serverfault.com
stackoverflow.com

File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) 1.0

New builds of Microsoft Windows are produced almost every day for internal development and testing. In order to detect performance regressions as soon as possible, those builds have to be evaluated and compared to their predecessors as well as previous public releases. A range of performance tests are used for these comparisons, including one called “FSCT” (which stands for File Server Capacity Tool). FSCT was developed by the Windows Server Performance team as a tool capable of simulating multiple concurrent users accessing a file server using CIFS/SMB/SMB2.

Enable HAL detection on a Windows Server 2008 R2 VHD virtual image
… And I (wrongly) thought we were over the whole HAL detection problem.

SCCM: Forcing a Task Sequence to Rerun

There are well known methods to force an advertisement to rerun – including several add-on tools available for the SMS or SCCM console.  To date, however, there are not equivalent methods to force a task sequence to rerun.  Part of this may be because task sequences are typically thought of as focused on Operating System Deployment (OSD) and rerunning these types of distributions are not as common as rerunning advertisements.

Group Policy Settings References for Windows and Windows Server

These spreadsheets list the policy settings for computer and user configurations included in the Administrative template files delivered with the Windows operating systems specified. You can configure these policy settings when you edit Group Policy objects (GPOs).

The Case of the Mysterious Black Box (SAN analysis for beginners)

I haven’t had any performance analysis challenges lately, but there is a lot of confusion as to how to measure SAN performance. To many, a SAN is a proverbial “mysterious black box” that seems to perplex all who try to measure it’s performance with any measure of certainty. This blog entry covers how I measure the performance of SANs and tries to unlock the mysteries of the black box.

William Stanek: Windows 7: Inside Track, Part 6 “Automating Migrations with USMT 4.0”

William here, continuing with my inside track discussions on Windows 7. Last time, I provided step by step options for using Windows Easy Transfer. Now let’s kick it up a notch and look at automating migrations using User State Migration Tool (USMT) Version 4.0.

How do CMW files in Office 2000-2003 work? How to maintenance MSP files work in Office 2007-2010?

Here is a quick walk through showing the keys that are used to control the CMW and custom MSP files to determine what settings will take effect and if they had been run for the current user or not. … For the purpose of this walkthrough I have created this maintenance MSP. To keep it simple I am going to apply the following two changes in this custom .msp.

Desi Dhaba
Authentic Indian restaurant.  One of the blokes at work recommends it.  Will have to give it a try. 134 Flinders Street, Melbourne.
I’ve tried it, curry was good, but I’ve had hotter.  Next time I’ll ask for “Indian Hot”.

Disk2vhd

Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk – Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online.

Free e-books: Windows 7 troubleshooting tips
Mitch Tulloch, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional and lead author of the just-published Windows 7 Resource Kit has created two free books worth grabbing copies of “What You Can Do Before You Call Tech Support.” & Deploying Windows 7.  His website is here.

Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool

The Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool allows you to create a copy of your Windows 7 ISO file on a USB flash drive or a DVD. To create a bootable DVD or USB flash drive, download the ISO file and then run the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool. Once this is done, you can install Windows 7 directly from the USB flash drive or DVD.

Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool Released Under GPLv2
Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool

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Internet Explorer Cannot Download https://something (Eric Law’s IE Internals)

Earlier today, I was asked to troubleshoot a secure site where file downloads were always failing. Having seen this problem many times often over the years, I immediately suspected that the web developer wasn’t aware that

if a user tries to download* a file over a HTTPS connection, any response headers that prevent caching will cause the file download process to fail.

* Note that this applies to “downloaded” files that open in programs other than IE. It does not apply to resources that render inside IE’s HTML rendering engine, like images/script/css/etc.

When Internet Explorer encounters a HTTPS download that will not be cached, the download is aborted with the following dialog box:

Creating a VHD from an Installation CD (Vineet Sarda)

To create a bootable VHD from the Windows 7 install CD, you will need to locate the main WIM file which is in the sources directory of the DVD –> E:\Sources\Install.wim

With this WIM file you will have to use the WIM2VHD utility, which is script file to create the VHD.

From an Administrative command Prompt, The command line will be as follows

CSCRIPT wim2vhd.wsf /WIM:E:\sources\Install.wim /SKU:ULTIMATE

continues at the MSDN Windows 7 and Application Compatibility blog

Native boot from VHD on a Windows XP computer (Mark Wilson blog)

Like almost every other corporate in the world, where Mark and I work there is a standard build deployed to everyone. The default in our particular organisation is a 32-bit Windows XP OS regardless of the capabilities of the laptop or desktop it is deployed to. Over the years, this has caused a number of problems that have required an increasing number of “exemptions” from standard policy to allow people to run a different Windows version or platform.