Archive for Windows Vista

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

Windows 7 – “Identifying Network” (Resolved)

Posted by Steve Wiseman on October 7, 2009 with 8 Comments

I was at a friends house last weekend. I found a very interesting problem with Windows 7. They had a laptop they just purchased in Taiwan, and no matter how they tried to connect it to their network, it would always say “Identifying Network”:

Now, in the screen shot it is the wireless network, but this was happening with a direct connection to the router as well.

After some digging and poking at the machine I determined that it was not picking up an IP address from DHCP. It turns out that this is actually an issue in Vista too.

Microsoft has a soloution: KB928233. In short the fix is to set a registry key. There are actually two different registry keys.

One of them allows you to try the current method (But broken with older routers), and if it fails it will try the old way:

DhcpConnEnableBcastFlagToggle

The other key allows you to bypass this entirely and totally switch back to the old XP way:

DhcpConnForceBroadcastFlag

Both of them are under the GUID of the network card in this registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\{GUID}

Neither of them solved my problem. I tried for quite some time different tricks to get Windows 7 to pickup an IP address from this old router with no success.

The final solution was to give the laptop a static IP address. Not the best, but at least he could get on the net.

The question is, have you ever seen this problem with Windows 7, or Vista? If so, how did you finally get it to work?

Filed Under: Windows 7, Windows Vista

Windows XP vs Windows 7 – Who Won?

Posted by Steve Wiseman on September 10, 2009 with 11 Comments

I installed Windows 7 on my ASUS Atom N270

Before I did that, I recorded how long it took to do a few things:

-Copying a 45 MB file over the network
-Boot Time
-Shutdown Time
-Memory used at idle, after startup
-IE Launch time

Then, after I installed Windows 7, I did the same, and recorded how long it took. I was curious to see if Windows 7 was faster or slower than XP.

Keep in mind this is not scientific, but just a simple test I did on my own computer.

Here is what I found:

Boot time under Windows 7 was 22 seconds faster:

Shutdown time under Windows 7 was 20% faster:

What about the time it takes for Internet Explorer to Launch?

Windows 7 was faster there too:

Amazingly the memory usage at idle was less in Windows 7, than in Windows XP. I should do this article again with Vista. I am sure that number in Vista is over 1GB

Another test I did was copying a 45 MB file over my wireless network.

Look at the difference:

This was an amazing result. I had to try it a few times to make sure it was not a mistake. It took Windows XP almost a minute longer to transfer that same file.

Amazing. Windows 7 is faster on all of my tests.  Not only has it won this little test, but instead of wanting to remove it after 2 weeks (Like with Vista)…I want to install it on all of my computers!

Filed Under: IE, 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

Clean boot into Windows 2008, and Vista

Posted by Steve Wiseman on June 1, 2009 with 5 Comments

I was troubleshooting a server yesterday and a came across an easy way to clean boot into Vista, or 2008. When I say clean boot I mean that Windows starts without any 3rd party services running.

To do it, startup MSCONFIG, (Start then run…type msconfig.exe)

Once it launches, move over to the services tab:

Windows 2008 Clean Boot Services

Then move down, and hide Microsoft services (We don’t want to disable those)

Windows 2008 Clean Boot Hide Microsoft

After you do that, click the “Disable Services” button on the right:

Windows 2008 Clean Boot Disable

Now click OK, and reboot. When Windows restarts, no 3rd party services will be running.

Once you have completed your troubleshooting you can reverse the process to turn them back on.

Filed Under: Boot, Windows, Windows 2008, Windows Vista

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

Prevent users from clearing history in IE 7

Posted by Steve Wiseman on December 18, 2008 with 7 Comments

This tip is only for Vista….so I apologize in advance to those of you still using XP. In Vista you can easily clear your browsing history by going into the options of Internet Explorer. I have helped a few organizations that use this information after a spyware incident to determine where the problem came from.

Users may notice that something happened, and call the IT department for help. Before they do that they clear their history so they don’t get in trouble. This vital information is now lost, and a potentially bad site could cause the problem again.

So how could you prevent this? Easy, use group policy. You can do this locally, or on your domain controller if you want to apply the changes across your network.

To change the policy on your Vista machine, click on the start button, and type gpedit.msc – then press enter.

 

GPEDIT.MSC

Then the local policy window will be displayed. You will need to drill down to:

Computer Configuration->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Internet Explorer\

Once you are in that section, scroll down and you will see three items:

“Turn off ‘Delete Browsing History’ functionality”
“Turn off ‘Delete Passwords’ functionality”
“Turn off ‘Delete forms’ functionality” 

Only the first one is necessary for what we are trying to accomplish, but the other two are related and you may want to use them.
 

Gpedit Disable Clear Cookies

I am not a big fan of how many policy items are worded. It forces you to enable them when you want something disabled. So if you want to disable them, then use the enable option. Now, if you go into internet explorer, and try to clear the history, you will notice that the button is disabled:
 

Disable Clear History

This same tip could be used on a domain controller. If you have 2008 it will already be available. On some versions of 2003, you will need to get the updated administrative template for Internet Explorer.

Filed Under: Group Policy, IE, Microsoft, Windows, Windows 2008, Windows Vista

Enabling File and Printer Sharing – FPEnabler.exe

Posted by Steve Wiseman on December 11, 2008 with 0 Comments

We started out this week thinking that we would update FPEnabler.exe. We released this free program about a year ago, but we had to pull it from our website because it was breaking every few months with new patches released by Microsoft. FPEnabler simplified the process of adding a file and printer sharing exception to the firewall. What do you need it for? Well, lots of tools use the file and printer sharing mechanism to install patches, run reports, remotely reboot, etc. And of course, many of our tools use this to do their magic.

Part of the problem is that we used an undocumented, and unsupported method of updating the registry to add this exception. So I thought that if we used the public firewall APIs it would be simpler, but after some deeper research into the issue we have decided against continuing this command line program.

A few reasons for this:

1. Different versions of XP have different ways of reading these registry keys. For example XP Pro is different than XP Media center, and if we set the wrong keys it had the potential of breaking file sharing all together in Windows.

2. Vista has a completely different way of enabling this exception, so we would need to create custom code to detect between Vista and XP.

3. With the new UAC model in Vista, this methodology for changing the firewall settings does not work with UAC enabled…or for users without administrative rights over their PC. So the necessity and effectiveness of an enabler program are in question.

So what to do? Well, if you have lots of machines the answer is group policy. If you have a few machines, you can make these changes by hand.

I have 3 articles for each method that I have written for those of you that need to get this done.

Enabling File And Printer Sharing in XP

Enabling File And Printer Sharing in Vista

Enabling File And Printer Sharing using Group Policy

Filed Under: File and Printer Sharing, Windows, Windows Vista, Windows XP
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