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Any Video Convertor – Free Edition
This is what I use for converting .AVI to DVD playable discs.

CIFS and SMB Timeouts in Windows
This blog post gives a consolidated overview of the most common SMB timeouts in Windows and their behaviors. Some of these legacy timeouts or timers are optional, implementation specific, not defined or not required by the protocol specifications. Let’s recall that MS-CIFS documents the protocol implemented in Windows NT and Windows 98, whereas MS-SMB describes the extensions added in Windows 2000 and beyond.
(I wish I had this information when I looked at an SMB timeout in: NTLMSSP was returning the error “STATUS_MORE_PROCESSING_REQUIRED”)

Certain Administrative Templates from the Windows XP Security Guide may prevent you from starting the Windows Firewall service in Windows XP Service Pack 2
Actually saw this particular issue last week on an old PC.

Captured Discipline Time Lock Safe
Or you could just buy a cheap electronic safe, reset the password and post the combination to yourself.

Acrobat and Microsoft Office 2010 Compatibility
”Adobe Acrobat X is the first version of Acrobat to support Microsoft Office 2010”

Dennis Higton – An untold story of testing Britain’s first jet plane

Strategies to Mitigate Targeted Cyber Intrusions
At least 85% of the targeted cyber intrusions that Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) responds to could be prevented by following the first four mitigation strategies listed in our Strategies to Mitigate Targeted Cyber Intrusions:

• use application whitelisting to help prevent malicious software and other unapproved programs from running
• patch applications such as PDF readers, Microsoft Office, Java, Flash Player and web browsers
• patch operating system vulnerabilities
• minimise the number of users with administrative privileges.

The Green Bean Weight Loss Diet for Dogs

Did your WordPress site get hacked?

How To Completely Clean Your Hacked WordPress Installation

Removing Malware from a WordPress blog – Case Study

Root Causes for Slow Boots and Logons (sbsl)
“There is no shortage of root causes for boot and logon delays. Some delays are caused by code-defects in the OS or applications on the computer experiencing slow boot or logon. Other root causes lie with the underlying network, remote servers, or Administrator misconfiguration.
Don’t worry about tracking the QFEs for Windows. We’ll be publishing a list of recommended fixes the near future.”
It’s no surprise to me that McAfee features in the list.

Your access to network resources is slower in Windows XP than in earlier versions of Windows
”This problem occurs if the network-based files use the long file-name syntax instead of the 8.3 short file-name syntax. Specifically, the Windows XP Server Message Block (SMB) redirector component does not cache path information from long file names. In this scenario, Windows XP sends two SMB packets for every GetFileAttributes function call.”
After you apply the patch, you then need to set a registry key.

MVPs.Org
This is your jumping off point to a number of interesting offerings being provided for you by a few folks associated with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program. Plan to check this page every so often as new subwebs and subdomains are bound to show up from time to time. This home page has been somewhat organized to categorize our offerings, in the hope of narrowing down your quest for information. The sites that are described below are those hosted by this domain. The MVP Links page points to all known MVP sites.

Encyclopaedia Of Windows Privilege Escalation – Presentation

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) Wizard Editor
The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MTD) Wizard Editor is a simple .NET 2.0 application designed to assist with the process of editing the wizard XML manifest files used by the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. While it does not presently help much with the authoring of each wizard pane’s content, it does simplify the more tedious parts of editing the XML manifest and the HTML embedded within each wizard pane.

Consuming RSS feeds from your application using System.Net.WebRequest

How to add a script to a ConfigMgr 2007 Boot Image
… Out of the box, it is not very straightforward to add such customizations to your boot images, so the purpose of this article is to provide information on how to add a batch file or command so that it is executed when your boot image starts …

SYDI – Network Documentation Made Easy.
At the most basic level SYDI consists of a collection of scripts which collects information from your servers and networks, then writes the data to a report.

While looking for some aircraft photos, saw the picture right, with the title
“Pushing a pair of jeans to the absolute limits.”

Using the FireFox TinEye Plugin, I found out that the lady in the jeans is Ines Sainz.  Judging by her Wikipedia entry, one clever lady at that.

TinEye?  TinEye is a search engine for images.  By right-clicking on a image, and selecting “Search Image on TinEye”, it’ll search TinEye.

Automatically increasing the system font size in Windows 7

… That year, the top-of-the-range machines we were giving out to these undeserving gits weren’t coming with 1024×768 screens any more; they had nice, crisp, state-of-the-art 1400×1050 screens. While I thought they were gorgeous, not everyone agreed, insisting that the higher resolution made the fonts too small to read. This complaint was most prominent among the middle-aged salesmen who I quickly worked out were too vain to admit they were now of an age at which they needed reading glasses …

Creating a SteadyState like Windows 7 Environment

Windows SteadyState does not support Windows 7. However, many of its features can be replicated by using native Windows 7 features and free tools from Microsoft. This document is intended primarily for IT pros who configure shared-computer access in business environments, but partners who support shared-computer access in schools, libraries, and Internet cafes will also find the information useful.

Faronics Deep Freeze is a commercial alternative to Windows SteadyState.

Repair Windows Installer Errors

I ran into a problem recently where I tried to install a program on my Windows XP machine and I got an error related to the Windows Installer service, namely
The Windows Installer Service Could Not Be Accessed
After trying  many solutions, I finally got the program to install and fixed the Windows Installer error. Depending on your OS, the solution could be different. In this article, I will go through all the solutions I tried and hopefully one of them will work!

Windows 7 & Location Awareness

Location became ubiquitous!

It’s almost two years now since people have heard about new revolution in building context-aware applications – Windows 7 & it’s context-aware APIs.

As you know, in Windows 7 Microsoft shipped a platform known as “Windows 7 Sensor Platform” and set of APIs for location awareness. Together the platform is known as “Windows 7 Sensor & Location Platform”. You can read more about the platform, progress of work on it in team’s blog here:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sensorslocation/

Location remains one of the most critical assets of context-aware computing area for next decades. The biggest problem of location is that until it’ll become ubiquitous and cheap it can’t be a game changer and bring context-aware computing vision to live.

Suggested reading from the Microsoft Directory Services team.
Lots of good entry level reading here to help you brush up your Active Directory skills.

Troubleshooting, Known Issues and General Resources
When you’re troubleshooting a problem with Systems Management Server or Configuration Manager 2007, chances are you’re not the first person to encounter your particular issue. With that in mind, the first thing you’ll want to do is a quick search of our Knowledge Base, our blog sites and our forums to see if anyone has already posted the resolution: …

Data collection for Configuration Manager 2007 and SMS 2003
Log files you should collect before you raise a Microsoft support call, for SMS 2003 and SCCM 2007.
”For System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (ConfigMgr 2007) and Systems Management Server 2003 (SMS 2003), the first thing you’ll probably want to do in preparation for your callback is gather up any relevant information and log files so that you’ll have them handy when you speak with a Support Engineer. The exact data we’ll want to review can vary significantly depending on the issue so for the sake of this document we’ll err on the side of gathering too much data rather than too little.”

Use A Ram Disk To Reduce Writes On Solid State Drives

Make Outlook assign you random To-Do items

Sometimes, you have time to check something off your to-do list, but no one task is particularly pressing. Lifehacker Reader Ricardo shows us how to make Outlook pick a random one for you, so you can skip the decision-making and get to work.

Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool

Ever have a performance problem, but don’t know what performance counters to collect or how to analyze them? The PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool is a new and powerful tool that reads in a performance monitor counter log (any known format) and analyzes it using complex, but known thresholds (provided). The tool generates an HTML based report which graphically charts important performance counters and throws alerts when thresholds are exceeded. The thresholds are originally based on thresholds defined by the Microsoft product teams and members of Microsoft support, but continue to be expanded by this ongoing project. This tool is not a replacement of traditional performance analysis, but it automates the analysis of performance counter logs enough to save you time. This is a VBScript and requires Microsoft LogParser (free download).

Save Significant Disk Space by Setting MaxPatchCacheSize to 0

A little over two years ago, I wrote a post about installing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, in which I mentioned setting the MaxPatchCacheSize registry setting to 0 (in order to save some significant disk space while installing the service pack). [Note that the credit for this trick really goes to Heath Stewart -- as I mentioned in my original post.]

I’ve also mentioned in various posts that I make heavy use of virtualization in the "Jameson Datacenter" (a.k.a. my home lab) and that I prefer to keep my VHDs reasonably small. This is especially valuable when, for example, I need to copy a VM from one of my home servers and take it "on the road" with me to a customer site.

System Center Configuration Manager and Duplicate GUID’s

One of the most common (and painful) issues in SMS/SCCM is the presence of duplicate guids. Each and every SMS/SCCM client generates a unique identifier upon installation known as a GUID or Globally Unique Identifier. This is completely different than the SID of the machine in Active Directory and is used only by SMS/SCCM for managing clients. If two machines are reporting into the server with the same GUID, the server is no longer able to accurately target or report on these machines. As such, getting this issue resolved is critical to the successful operation of your environment.

Save a Failed Hard Drive in Your Freezer, Redux

Years ago we suggested sticking a borked hard drive in your freezer for a chance at recovering your data before the drive goes completely kaput. Developer site Server Zone highlights the same tip, with more detailed instructions for saving your freezer drive.

Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2: Print Driver Isolation

So what is Print Driver Isolation?  As the name implies, this feature allows some of the print driver components to be executed in a process (or processes) separate from the print spooler.  By doing this, any problems associated with faulty drivers are isolated from the print spooler service and will not cause it to fail.  For those of you that have been around since the Windows NT days, I’m sure you remember how a bad print driver could bugcheck the system.  Back then it was because print drivers were kernel-mode (Version 2) drivers.  With the move to user-mode (Version 3) drivers, bad print drivers only affected the spooler, and didn’t bring down the whole system.  With PDI, we’re taking this a step further – the isolated print drivers that are faulty affect … well, themselves.

Photo Magician

If you’re not about to manually convert that pile of images in front of you but you’ve found the batch converters you’ve tried to be lacking, free and portable Photo Magician offers both fine tweaking and drag and drop simplicity. (via LifeHacker)

Chris Jackson: It’s Not Your To-Do List: Using Application Compatibility Tools to Diagnose Problems, Not Surface Them

No app compat tool is going to provide you with a to-do list of all the things you must fix in order to make your application compatible.

This is true for a couple of reasons. On one hand, it’s going to be impossible to find every possible bug, so this list is necessarily incomplete (Type II errors). On the other hand, not all of the tests we do can say definitively if the behavior we observed will create an application compatibility bug for you or not (Type I errors). In some cases, the behavior is actually wrong, but the application has handled the error gracefully. In other cases, the “test” has to use heuristics, so a negative outcome on the test doesn’t necessarily mean that the application is negatively impacted (even if it doesn’t handle errors), just that it might be.

Using Alternate Credentials with WMI and PowerShell

The other day I was reading a post on Tore Lervik’s site and noticed that he had written some PowerShell scripts that would allow you to connect to a remote server using different user credentials than the ones you are logged in with.  This is something that I need to do quite often – and I have been doing it by just starting PowerShell using “runas” – but this approach is a heck of a lot more elegant.

Search for PowerShell cmdlets with Microsoft Bing

Online dating: Brilliant or Embarrassing?

Recently I came across an article by Siarhei Karotki called ‘It’s time to take online dating seriously’, claiming that in the US, online dating is ‘booming and might even be bigger than porn’.

Any claim that uses the word ‘might’ suggests it doesn’t really hold any water, but since I met my husband on match.com it sparked my interest.

I had mixed feelings when I started online dating. I didn’t like the idea of selling myself online (self promotion doesn’t come naturally to me), but on the other hand my friends who were on sites like dating direct were having great fun and had such entertaining stories it made sense to be proactive about it.

How To Read Your Camera’s Histogram And Take Perfectly Balanced Images

Furthermore, sometimes viewing photos on the camera’s LCD screen might not show a loss of detail in the shadows or dark areas of an image, nor in the white or bright areas. When we’re really concerned about getting the best exposure for our photos, we might use the camera’s zoom-in feature to assess exposure and sharpness of our images. Additionally, we could use the Histogram tool of both our digital camera and image editor to see how well exposed our images are.

Why does a High DPI Setting Make My Application Look Fuzzy and Have Clipped Text?

If you increase your DPI setting in Windows 7 (or Vista), you may notice your application doesn’t look the way you intended.

Microsoft Fix-It Center Online

Microsoft Fix it Center makes getting support easier than ever, with tools that help solve the issues you have now and prevent new ones.

Extra Settings for the RDP file – Enables Glass!

University of Illinois – Stain Solutions

PHP on Windows Training Kit Support for Windows 7 Released