Archive for Windows 2000

Change Power Save Settings Remotely

Posted by Steve Wiseman on October 23, 2009 with 10 Comments

We have been working hard on Network Administrator 3.

It was just released – You can download it from here:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/NetworkAdministrator.exe

Network Administrator allows you to make tweaks and changes to computers across your network, and in version 3 we have an extensive plugin system that allows us to add functionality quite quickly.

One of the requests we keep getting is a plugin to change power management settings. It turns out that this is actually much harder than it seems. There are different ways in each version of windows – and some of them don’t even work all the time.

We worked around the clock to work around all of the quirks and issues, and finally built a plugin that allows you to change these settings on Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, and Windows 7.

Power Management Plugin

These settings are not even available with group policy, or any specific registry settings – so this is a huge time saver.

The settings for the plugin are packed with power management options:

Power Management Settings

In a few clicks you can change the power management options for multiple computers across your network.

Best of all, Network Administrator is a free tool to use on up to 3 computers at a time.

Give it a spin and let us know what you think.

Need to use Network Administrator 3.0 on more than 3 computers? Get an unlimited copy for only $199 Click here to purchase

Filed Under: Beta, Network Administrator, Tools, Utility, Windows 2000, Windows 2008, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP

Remote Control 4.0 Released

Posted by Steve Wiseman on June 19, 2009 with 0 Comments

This is a quick one – The final version of Remote Control 4.0 has been released. Current customers with an upgrade protection license should receive their email within 24 hours. If you did not, please send an email to support@intelliadmin.com and we will take care of you as soon as possible.

Here are the screenshots:
http://www.intelliadmin.com/RemoteControl4_ScreenShots.htm

And a link to the trial download:
setupex.exe

Filed Under: Remote Control, Windows, Windows 2000, Windows 2008, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP

Remote Control 4.0 Beta

Posted by Steve Wiseman on May 26, 2009 with 17 Comments

We have been working hard on the new version of IntelliAdmin Remote Control.

Some things that will be in the new version:

Screen scaling – The client will automatically shrink the view to fit the screen within the window. With huge resolutions, you no longer are forced to constantly scroll around

Alpha Capture Disable – Applications like Office 2007 need alpha capture turned on, or parts of their windows will not be sent back to the remote client. This was always turned on in 3.x. Once side effect of this setting is the mouse flickers with some video cards. Now you have the option to turn this off and keep the mouse flicker to a minimum – great if you are given the task of watching a user without them knowing.

Screen Shots – You can easily save the current view in the client window to a JPG file. This is good for keeping a visual log of crash events, or activity of users.

Auto-Reconnect – When a connection is lost, it will automatically attempt to re-establish the connection

Computer Lists – We have loaded it up with options for getting lists of computers. You can get them from Windows Networking like you do right now, but in addition you can import them from an XML file, add them manually, or update them in real time from a http URL – this allows you to create a common computer list that all administrators can see and use.

Computer Search – This is the big one. When talking with customers the biggest complaint is finding a single computer among 1000s. When remote control connects to a machine, it will pull username, computername, and operating system info. All of this is stored in a database. When you click on the find button in the client window, you are shown a full listing of computers:

IntelliAdmin 4 Preview

When you start typing in the search box at the top it will narrow down your results immediately. So, if you get a call from a user you can simply start typing their username and their computer will be automatically filtered out – no more digging around for their IP address, or computer name.

Lots of time was spent to make sure this was efficient – we threw the client on an old XP machine and it was able to search 10,000 computer records in less than 1 second.

Everything about the “find computer” section was designed to reduce the time it takes to find and control a computer, and make you more productive.

Why am I teasing you with all of this? Because I want you to join our beta program. To join, simply follow this link:

Make sure you check the 4.0 beta option.

The final release date will be June 27th. If you order Remote Control 3.2 right now the upgrade protection option will allow you to get a free upgrade when it comes out – a good deal since this will give you close to 40% in savings

While we are at it. What do you want to see in 4.5? File Transfers, Chat, or what other wish do you have for the next version. Post in the comments.

Filed Under: Beta, Remote Control, Windows, Windows 2000, Windows 2008, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP

Delete files securely

Posted by Steve Wiseman on May 13, 2009 with 0 Comments

Since 2000 every version of Windows uses object reuse protection. When you create a file, the space on the hard drive for that file will be zeroed out.

Another way of looking at this is when a file is created, Windows will make it impossible to see what was there before.

But what about right after you delete a file? Nothing has been written to that space yet. What is on the physical hard drive? The entire file of course. Not good if the file is highly confidential.

What if you wanted to delete a file securely?

There are plenty of tools out there that can do this, and most of them cost quite a bit of money. But there is a free alternative.

It is called SDelete and it is from Microsoft:

http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/SDelete.zip

How does it work?

Simply download the program and run it from the command line. By default it will only complete 1 pass when erasing a file. I would suggest overriding that with a higher number – the higher the better, but it will be slower.

Lets delete a file with it, using 25 passes:

sdelete.exe -p 25 FileToDelete.zip

This will securely delete FileToDelete.zip

SDelete implements the Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DOD 5220.22-M. This will give you confidence that once deleted with this tool, your file is gone forever. Note that it does delete the file, but the file name is still recoverable from the file system (Make sure the file name itself does not have any revealing information).

The full list of possible commands for SDelete are:

usage: sdelete [-p passes] [-s] [-q]
sdelete [-p passes] [-z|-c] [drive letter]
-c Zero free space (good for virtual disk optimization)
-p passes Specifies number of overwrite passes (default is 1)
-q Don’t print errors (Quiet)
-s Recurse subdirectories
-z Clean free space

It supports wildcards too. So if you wanted to securely delete an entire folder you can call it like this:

C:\>sdelete c:\temp\*.*

SDelete – Secure Delete v1.51
Copyright (C) 1999-2005 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals – www.sysinternals.com

SDelete is set for 1 pass.
c:\temp\Eula.txt…deleted.
c:\temp\Import.csv…deleted.
c:\temp\readme.txt…deleted.
c:\temp\sdelete.exe…deleted.
c:\temp\VCdControlTool.exe…deleted.
c:\temp\VCdRom.sys…deleted.

If you have files that need to remain secure, SDelete is a great way to make sure they are removed from your hard drive.

Filed Under: Command Line, Microsoft, Sysinternals, Tools, Utility, Windows, Windows 2000, Windows 2008, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP

Write script results to the event log

Posted by Steve Wiseman on May 12, 2009 with 0 Comments

I have quite a few scripts that are run by task scheduler on my server.  One of the ways I track the results is by writing to a text file in a common share. After a while this can become a little ridiculous to follow.

Recently I discovered that it is possible to create your own Application, or System events from a script that will show up in the Windows event viewer.

To create your own events, you need to use the “eventcreate” command line argument. This command line program is available in Windows XP, 2003, Vista, and Windows 7 – unfortunately not in Windows 2000.

How can you use it?

Let me take a simple example, and then I will walk you through writing an event to the log. In one of my scripts I have an xcopy that I check for errors:

@echo off

xcopy c:\temp c:\temp2 /y /i /c

if ERRORLEVEL 5 GOTO ERROR
if ERRORLEVEL 4 GOTO ERROR
if ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO ERROR

REM SUCCESS

goto exit

:ERROR

REM FAILURE

:EXIT

The above script looks for the different error codes that XCOPY can return – right now we won’t concentrate on that. What we want to do is add our EventCreate command right around where we have our “REM FAILURE”

There are a few details we need to collect together before we can call our command. First we want to determine which event log we want to write.

For our example I want to pick the “Application” log

Then, we need to determine an event source. The event source specifies the text that will be shown as the source in the log. The trick is you need to pick something unique that won’t have a name conflict with Windows, or other scripts. This means don’t pick DNS, VSS, or W32Time – or any common windows service name. At the same time, no spaces, and keep it short.

I picked XCOPYRESLT

Next we need to pick an event type. Our choices are Information, Warning, or Error. In the case of my example, I am only going to report errors so the obvious pick is “Error”.

What else? Well an event ID is needed. This is an arbitrary number that you may pick to suite your own custom needs. 1000 sounds good to me.

And finally, a description. “Domain Controller XCOPY Failure” seems like an easy description.

Now, lets bring it all together at the command line:

eventcreate /l Application /so XCOPYRESLT /t Error /id 1000 /d “Domain Controller XCOPY Failure”

One run at the prompt:

XCOPY Event Error

Now, if we take a peek at the event log:

Custom Event Log Entry

So there you go. Custom event log items right from your batch file. For more detailed information on the eventcreate command, visit this section on Microsoft Technet.

Filed Under: Command Line, Microsoft, Tools, Utility, Windows, Windows 2000, Windows 2008, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP

Unofficial Windows 2000 Daylight Saving Time Patch

Posted by Steve Wiseman on January 11, 2007 with 6 Comments

We have updated our Network Administrator product – You can use it to deploy the patch, and verify it’s installation on machines across your network. Also we have updated the free patch More info about it here

Update 10/25/2009: We have updated our patch again. Both the patch, and Network Administrator have been updated with the latest

Update 2/12/2007 12:57 AM EST – We created a different patch for Windows 98/ME. Visit here for more information

Update 2/12/2007 12:56 AM EST – We want to also remind you that Outlook, Exchange and Java have their own issues. This patch will not fix that. Please see these links for more info on fixing those issues:

See this article for Exchange, and Outlook
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/timezone/dst2007.mspx

For Java:
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/USDST/

Update for 2009:

We have updated our free DST patch for Windows NT, 2000, 2003 and XP. You don’t need it for Vista, 2008, or Windows 7 since Microsoft still supports those operating systems

For Windows XP, you only need it if you don’t want to be forced to upgrade to the latest service pack, and 2000 and NT, you need it if you want your time to be right. There were a few changes across the world since last year, so we have released an update

DST 2009 Application

You can download the free application from here:

Daylight Saving Fix Download

You can use Network Administrator to deploy it across your network, since it has the updated settings too:

Network Administrator DST Update

You can download it from here:

Network Administrator Download

Post from 2007 Continues below:

You may have forgotten by now, but two years ago the US government changed the dates for daylight saving time. When the law was passed it was set to take effect in 2007.

Well, here we are. It is 2007, and Microsoft has published updates for XP, and 2003. But…No update for 2000 Workstation, or any of the server editions.

This is a huge problem for many organizations. I know some companies that have hundreds of Windows 2000 boxes. The thought that they will need to upgrade to XP or 2003 (Just for this) is a nightmare. Microsoft is providing a hotfix – but only to the companies that have an extended support contract. To their credit, Microsoft does provide a registry workaround for the rest of us.

The workaround that Microsoft provides is not easy to follow. Check out the KB article at Microsoft.

We have created a utility that will update any machine to the new daylight saving format (XP, NT, 2000, 2003, Vista). Obviously you only need it for 2000, or NT since those operating systems have dropped off support.

It updates Daylight Saving Time (Yes it is Saving, not Savings) in these time zones:

-Alaska Standard Time Zone
-Central Standard Time Zone
-Eastern Standard Time Zone
-Mountain Standard Time Zone
-Pacific Standard Time Zone
-Atlantic Standard Time Zone (Canada)
-Newfoundland Standard Time Zone (Canada)

If we are missing another US timezone that supports daylight saving time, please let us know by emailing support@intelliadmin.com

The utility can install, or uninstall the change. It runs without any setup and requires no extra DLLs or runtime. It is less than 1mb, so you can put it on a flash drive:

Daylight Saving Time Fix

It can run silently from the command line if you use these options:

Install:

DaylightSavingFix.exe /qinstall

UnInstall:

DaylightSavingFix.exe /quninstall

Please note that the program must be run as administrator since it access HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

If you want to roll it out to multiple machines we have updated our Network Administrator product to install the patch.

Network Administrator Daylight Saving Time Fix

Both can be downloaded from our downloads section

Check out our Windows Admin Tools
Filed Under: Tools, Utility, Windows, Windows 2000