Don’t know about you, but I have a few programs that I use through the day that require administrator access. This means every time I launch, I get the annoying UAC prompt: There is a simple trick to create a shortuct that will launch with no prompts. You can do it by creating a task [...]
I got a question from Tracy this week: “Hi Steve. Love all the tools and tips you keep sending our way. Got a question. Is there any easy way to logoff a user when they are not active for say, 15 Minutes?” I spoke with Tracy further to explain that forcing a logoff could cause [...]
If you spend any amount of time working with Unix, you will come across Cron and the CronTab file. What is it? Cron allows you to schedule programs to run at specified intervals, like every Sunday at 1AM. Now I can already hear it…”Steve, that is what the task scheduler is for in Windows” While [...]
A few weeks back I wrote about deleting files that are in use What about copying them so you can back them up? I found a tool that will do just that. It is called hobocopy. Not to be confused with robocopy, hobocopy takes advantage of a system within windows called Volume Shadow Copy. This [...]
If you have been using Windows 7 (Or even Vista) for a while, you might have noticed something really annoying. When you have drives mapped in explorer: They don’t show up in a command prompt if it is elevated with administrator permissions: There is a simple reason for this – The feature known as User [...]
I have been testing parts of our software lately (Alpha stuff that will be released in a few months). One problem I keep running into, is I collect up a large number of mapped drives that are unavailable: This is because the machine is powered off, or is a virtual machine that I deleted. I [...]
My friend Mike emailed me: “Hey Steve, I thought I might pass along another tool from Nirsoft. I just used it to solve a random crash issue I had with one of our remote servers. It would crash intermittently, and I could never get the staff to look at the machine before they cycled the [...]
This week I received a question from Scott: “Hi Steve, Management at my company wants to block AIM (AOL Messenger) on all computers. Because some of the machines are not joined to the domain I want a way to do this from a script. The port is 4099 TCP btw. Thanks!” I spoke with Scott, [...]
Got a question from Brett this week: “Hi Steve. I have a tough one for you. I want to determine from a VBScript if a program is using too much CPU time. Specifically, I want to know when the spooler service goes over 50% CPU utilization. All the scripts I see don’t seem to work [...]
A few weeks back I wrote about a way to delete or move a file on reboot. Why would you want to do that? It is probably in use by an application or service that you can’t seem to find (Usually maleware or a virus). Many readers were kind enough to point me to a [...]