“Why is the GHOST image ???
Dalebroken up into 670MB chunks”, asked Grasshopper, aka one of our 2nd level support guys. ‘Historical reasons’ was my reply. 9 years ago, when the desktop installation was being created…
Getting a list of users in your AD domain.
Update 12/2015: A Powershell version of this article is here. There are several ways to do this, but the method I prefer to use is GET-QADUser command from the Quest Active…
“I have a user on site that has over 20gig in a CSC folder in windows”
In a Windows 7 Administration course today, I was telling this story, which my fellow students thought was hilarious. Back in early 2007, this email forwarded along to me for…
Time Zones Revisited
As a co-worker pointed out, Microsoft stores time zone information in two places, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones this is where the time zone database is stored. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation this is the current…
How to tell what Microsoft Time Zone Update you have
Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 … Have a registry value you can check to see if a Time Zone update has been applied. Under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones registry…
Another downside of upgrading a Windows 2000 to Windows XP
Each Microsoft operating system installation allows you to do an “in-place” upgrade. aka, The “Do you wish to upgrade this computer to Windows xyz” prompt when you insert a Microsoft…
The Win 16 Subsystem has insufficient resources …
Sometimes, you don't ever expect to ever see a particular error message ever again. It's been over 5 years since the last time I saw this error, quite possibly on…
Detecting broken or not installed SMS/SCCM clients.
You take all your computer accounts in Active Directory, filter out the old records (I use a cut-off of 30 days), and then compare it to your SMS or SCCM…
Detecting inactive computers in your AD domain.
Use the LastLogonTimeStamp or the LastLogin Active Directory attribute. If you are on a Windows 2003 Functional Domain or later, use LastLogonTimeStamp. If you are on a Windows 2000 Functional…
Saving space in a VM with MaxPatchCacheSize
I first read about MaxPatchCacheSize, and how to use it to save space in Virtual Machines, over at Jeremy Jameson's blog. From the Microsoft MSDN Library entry for MaxPatchCacheSize: "The…