I got a question from Lewis this week:

“I hope this email finds you well. I have a plotter here at my company, and the driver is really temperamental. At least twice a week the driver crashes, and then all of the jobs get stuck in the spooler. To fix it I need to stop the spooler service, delete all the jobs and start the service again. Is there any easy way to do this remotely with a script? Have a Merry Christmas Steve, and thanks for all the tips”

Good question. A script in this case won’t always work. This is because with Vista, Windows 7, and 2008 the print spooler folder is restricted. Only the system account can access it.

A way around this is to use our Network Administrator tool. It will remotely execute the script in the system account context.

This is how the script would look if we wanted to stop the print spooler, delete the files, and start it again:

net stop spooler
del %systemroot%\System32\spool\printers\*.shd /q
del %systemroot%\System32\spool\printers\*.spl /q
net start spooler


.shd, and .spl files are print job files. If you delete them, it will wipe away any pending jobs.

You could put this into a bat file, and simply use the remote execute option of Network Administrator. To make it a smoother experience, we created a plugin that will handle everything for you:

You can also tell it if you want to delete all the pending jobs:

This can be quite helpful if you have a huge backlog of print jobs:

Using Network Administrator to do this is quicker than manually deleting the jobs since it does not have to talk back and forth with the printer driver to do it.

Get your free copy from our download page:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/downloads/

The free version is free for commercial and personal use. No spyware or adware – only software goodness.

I like to keep my wireless network secure. Too easy for neighbors to pick up my passwords, and info just by connecting to my network. Worse yet, they could download pirated music or cause all kinds of trouble on my Internet connection.

The problem with having a complex password is that it is hard for visitors to enter into their computer. Wife has some friends over, they need to use the Internet.

I am at the office. I get the phone call – “Ok, type 659872323865765798798756. Oh Sorry. It is 6. Then 5. Then 9. Oops lets start over”

Yea, not so fun when it happens a lot.

I found an easy way to share your Wireless settings from Windows 7 (A Windows XP machine can import them).

Start out by clicking on the wireless icon down by the time:

Then click on “Open Network and Sharing Center”

That will open a big ole window:

Find the option that says “Manage Wireless Networks” and click on it.

Now you should see a list of your wireless networks. Right click on the one you want to share and click properties:

Now, another window will pop up. Look for the option that says “Copy this network profile to a USB Flash Drive”

Walk through the wizard that shows up:

Once it is complete, it will place a program on the flash drive:

Now – To add the wireless network to a Windows machine, you just run that application and it connects automatically. From that point on, the wireless key is saved in its settings.

In addition to that, it generates a list of instructions for different versions of Windows.

I posted them here in case you want to print them out.

A few days ago a friend of mine called me. He said he had a small problem with his laptop, and was wondering if I could help him over the phone.

You get the idea. Not an easy problem.

He brought the laptop over, and I determined the cause of the blue screen: it was a corrupted registry hive.

Panic started to set in. He needed some word documents he was working on earlier in the day – and needed them for a class he had that night!

I was pretty sure the data was there, but how could we get to it? If it was a desktop machine I could pull the hard drive, and connect it to my machine.

I pulled out an old favorite of mine, BartPE

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
(Scroll down to the middle of the page for the download link)

What is it? BartPE will create a special boot disk that runs a compact version of Windows XP – without any need for a hard drive.

It is perfect for recovery operations like this.

To get Bart PE to build a disk for you, you will need a copy of Windows XP professional. It needs these files from Microsoft to create your boot disk.

You can burn it right from the app, or create an ISO for later use.

I almost forgot the best part – it is free

I built a boot disk from BartPE, and booted his laptop with it. Within moments I was able to copy his important files to a flash drive.

Even better, I was able to go into the c:\windows\restore folder and copy the corrupted hive over to c:\windows\system32\config

Now his system could boot again. He only had to install a few apps again to get it back to normal (The software hive we recovered was a few months old)

I have been using this utility for years. What type of windows boot disk do you use?

I got a question from Mark last week:

“Steve, I was wondering if you could add a plugin to Network Administrator that would disable control panel access. I know it is not the best way to keep people out, but it would save me a lot of headaches”

Actually, I have gotten a few requests for this. Disabling control panel access is actually quite easy. If you drill down to this registry key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

You just need to add a DWORD value of NoControlPanel, and set it to 1:

Windows 7 handles this smoothly. See my start menu before the change:

After the change, the control panel option is missing:

XP is not as nice, it keeps the icon…but you get a nasty message when clicking on it:

We added a plugin to Network Administrator. That way you can easily make the change without plunking around in the registry, plus you can push it remotely against machines on your network:

You can get your free download from here:

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

Disabling the control panel won’t keep everyone out, but in some situations it can really help.

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!

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

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:

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.

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 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.

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:

: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:

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

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.

The first release candidate of Windows 7 has been dated to release on May 5th. One of the big revelations by Microsoft in recent days is the availability of a Windows XP mode.

This is unlike previous versions of windows that simply had a compatibility check box. This will be a fully functional Virtual machine with XP running inside of it.

This is a brilliant move on Microsoft’s part. This means that with every Windows 7 license you purchase, you get Windows XP along with it. I think most businesses will find justifying the purchase much easier. Why? Because now there will be a significantly lower number of compatibility issues.

From that first screen shot you would think it is simply an included copy of Virtual PC with XP installed. Windows 7 will go way beyond that. The virtual environment will be fully integrated into windows. Take a look at this screen shot of the start menu:

If you notice above, you can see Office 2003. This was not installed directly under Windows 7, but in compatibility mode. Click on the Word 2003 icon, and it is running just like any other application:

This means seamless usage of old apps – something most IT admins will need in their environment. In addition, the Virtual PC environment can be customized to have any special mappings or virtual devices added as you need them:

Can’t wait to see that Release Candidate in May. Still – one last thing I wish Microsoft would do is allow the old start menu to be turned back on (If you didn’t know…that funky new start menu is the only option in Windows 7). I can’t imagine the hell users will raise when they have to make such a huge change.