Redhat Enterprise Series Functionality for Free: Gentoo Linux Wednesday, February 18 2004 @ 07:59 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy A key feature of Redhat's subscription based ES and AS releases is automatic updates for security patches. Gentoo has a whole new distribution and packaging system oriented around providing this functionality for free. read more Create Folder Context Menu Monday, February 9 2004 @ 04:33 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy I must have right clicked a folder and looked for a "New Folder" item 100,000 times since Windows 95 introduced the right click context menu. For some odd reason you must always open the folder to create a sub-folder in it - not any more. read more Virtual PC 2004 Released Monday, December 29 2003 @ 01:58 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Microsoft has released Virtual PC under the Microsoft banner. The price is $129 and there are some exciting new features. read more FREE: Full Function Text / Programmer's Editor Wednesday, December 24 2003 @ 07:44 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Crimson Editor is small and easy to use - but also packed with advanced features like macros, customizable syntax highlighting and FTP open and save. read more Microsoft Action Packs Strike Again Wednesday, December 24 2003 @ 07:36 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Wow the latest Action Pack updates just came out - Office Professional Edition 2003 (incl. Publisher), Frontpage 2003, Mappoint 2004, Visio 2003, Project 2003 Professional Edition, Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and Small Business Server 2003. And renewal fees were $200 again this year! read more FREE: Bart's PE Builder (WinPE Clone) Wednesday, November 5 2003 @ 10:32 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy You've heard of WinPE - Microsoft's preboot environment to replace DOS boot disks for building Windows - but reserved for enterprise clients? Now the world famous boot disk website has devised one that everyone can have. read more FREE: Microsoft SMS 2003 Operations Guide Monday, November 3 2003 @ 08:29 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Microsoft has put together an operations guide for SMS 2003. It is downloadable from their web site. read more InstallShield and Adobe Team Up to Provide Tuner for Adobe Acrobat 6 Thursday, October 2 2003 @ 10:45 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy You can think of this as Office's Custom Installation Wizard (CIW) for Acrobat. It allows you to customize the installation of Acrobat - but much more than just automate the normal user interface. Wow 50% of your packaging woes solved with one download! read more Microsoft Publishes VB.NET Resource Kit Tuesday, September 30 2003 @ 04:12 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Microsoft has published a huge resource kit for VB.NET containing ready to use web applications, self-paced programming guides, training videos, code samples, book chapters and white papers. read more DesktopEngineer.com Offers VMWare & Virtual PC Training Monday, September 22 2003 @ 10:25 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Heard a lot about them new fangled virtual machines? Already using them, but suspect they could be helping you more? Check out DesktopEngineer.com's newest training. read more Windows Automated Deployment Servers Released (ADS 1.0) Monday, September 22 2003 @ 07:49 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Microsoft has made their new Automated Deployment Services available for download. This tool is designed for bare-metal provisioning of Windows 2000 and 2003 servers. read more Hitachi 7200 RPM Notebook Drive - for the VM Addict Tuesday, September 16 2003 @ 07:47 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy I am a Virtual Machine addict. I am also a Laptop addict. The one place where these two vices clash is laptop hard drives spinning at 4200 RPMs! read more New Windows Scripting Host Thursday, September 4 2003 @ 07:11 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Microsoft has released a minor point release of WSH 5.6. XP can be upgraded to this new version. read more Virtual PC Available Via MSDN Download Thursday, September 4 2003 @ 07:02 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Virtual PC can be downloaded via MSDN downloads for MSDN subscribers. read more FREE: VMWare Virtual Disk Driver Thursday, August 14 2003 @ 04:14 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Ever wish you could open a VMWare disk without booting up the Virtual Machine? Now you can! read more FREE: jv16 PowerTools Monday, July 14 2003 @ 08:42 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy This is one of those swiss army knife tools - it can do so many miscellaneous things it is hard to categorize. The registry cleaner alone is very impressive and the command shell tool adds a lot of flexibility for those who use the command line extensively. read more FREE: Microsoft Corporate Error Reporting (CER) 2.0 Monday, July 7 2003 @ 01:09 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy CER allows companies to redirect system errors that have the "Report this error to Microsoft" option to a corporate location. Reports can be generated and the errors can optionall be forwarded to Microsoft. read more Microsoft Pre-Beta of Virtual Server Product Monday, May 12 2003 @ 08:25 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy A pre-beta of Microsoft's Virtual Server product will be made available soon - you must complete a survey to be considered for inclusion in the beta. read more Application Compatibility Toolkit 3.0 Thursday, April 24 2003 @ 10:21 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy The Application Compatibility Tool kit has been updated for Windows 2003 and has had a lot documetation updates for enterprise usage of the various tools within it. read more FREE: Download Windows 2003 Resource Kit Tools Wednesday, April 23 2003 @ 02:43 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy You can download the Windows 2003 Server Resource Kit tools now. Be sure to read the requirements - some of them require the .NET framework! read more VOOM Instant Save Instant Restore (ISIR) Friday, April 18 2003 @ 05:01 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy VOOM Technologies has introduced a new technology which uses a PCI card and associated software which facilitates instant recovery of hard drives at the hardware level. They even claim to be able to rollback filesystem conversions like converting from fat32 to NTFS. read more Post SP1 Fixes for XP Thursday, April 17 2003 @ 12:44 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Here is Microsoft's current list of Post-SP1 fixes for XP. read more Windows 2003 Automated, Remote Server Provisioning Tuesday, April 8 2003 @ 02:06 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Microsoft is recognizing the need for remote and automated server provisioning with new feature sets for Windows 2003. The core concept is being able to take a server with no OS installed, and perform a complete server build remotely. read more Office 2003 Resource Kit in Beta Thursday, April 3 2003 @ 06:53 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy The Office 2003 Resource Kit has been released as a preview beta. read more TIP: Create a TEMP Partition On Your Desktop Friday, March 21 2003 @ 10:41 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Are you finding your system slow? How about Internet browsing - down to a crawl since that snappy new machine was put on your desk? read more $50 Off Virtual PC Until March 31st Tuesday, March 18 2003 @ 11:58 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Virtual PC is having a special where you can save $50 off their popular product. If you buy the downloadable version, it comes to only $179. read more New BITS for Win2003 Monday, March 10 2003 @ 05:11 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Windows 2003 server will feature a new version of Background Intelligent Transfer Service. Among other things, then new version will be able to upload! read more Updated SysInternals Tools Monday, March 3 2003 @ 07:41 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy SysInternals has had some significant updates to the industry renouned free tools! read more SMS: Monster MOF File Thursday, February 27 2003 @ 04:48 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Editing your SMS_DEF.MOF file can be a harrowing experience because it is distributed to every client in your SMS heirarchy. This template MOF helps you get access to a lot of cool inventory information while lowering your risk of causing MOF compiling problems on all your clients. read more The BIOS on Death Row Wednesday, February 26 2003 @ 09:13 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy The PC BIOS has long been a fundamental limitation of the technology we can put in our computers. Intel aims to change all that in a big way with the Extensible Firmware Interface. read more VMWare Workstation 4 in Public Beta Friday, February 21 2003 @ 03:52 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy VMWare's latest version of Workstation is in public beta. There are some cool new features in this one. read more Webcast Series: Microsoft Desktop Deployment Series 2003 Friday, February 7 2003 @ 09:42 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy This 10 part series will be running from January through May. You can signup for all 10 with one registration page. read more BOOK: Microsoft Windows 2000 Scripting Guide - In Paper, Online & Help File Formats! Wednesday, February 5 2003 @ 10:06 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy This book is written by Microsoft's "Windows Resource Kit Scripting Team" This is a well done 1200 page book. It is also available online. read more Extended to Feb 20: Microsoft Offers $50 off Action Pack Subscription Tuesday, February 4 2003 @ 08:02 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy The Action Pack includes thousands of dollars of software for $299 - until Feb 20th that will be $249. Many licenses to Microsoft's server and desktop products are included! Some folks had written to me that the previous discount advertised did not work - I reported it to Microsoft. They recently sent out a partner newsletter that advertised the deal with the updated end date and the same discount code and I've received confirmation from a visitor that the discount code works! read more Microsoft Compatibility Collector (inventory agent) and Analyzer Beta Release Friday, January 17 2003 @ 04:40 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Microsoft is providing a tool that will do detailed inventories of all applications installed on all desktops and then correlate that data with known information about application compatibility. This tool is from the same team that maintains the application compatibility support built into XP. read more FREE: RAM Defragmenter Friday, December 13 2002 @ 04:45 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy I've been wondering about defragmenting RAM for quite some time. I'm still testing to see if it makes a difference for my system. read more FREE: SMBIOSD - Check BIOS Data from Bootdisk Wednesday, December 11 2002 @ 09:42 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) provides a standard for BIOS data structures. On most modern machines you can retrieve an incredible amount of information about the computer while running your build boot disk. read more dotNET Technologies: Group Policies Management Console Thursday, December 5 2002 @ 02:05 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Among the many new technologies in the .NET release of Windows is a new face for Group Policy Management. Microsoft is hoping to address many of the shortcomings of managing Windows Group Policies with this new tool. read more dotNET Technologies: Improvements in GPO Software Distribution Tuesday, December 3 2002 @ 02:12 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy As always there is good news and not-so-good news. read more FREE: Boot Floppy Builder Friday, November 15 2002 @ 03:04 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy NU2 has release a new utility for automatically building boot disks based on their modular book disk approach. read more Partition Magic 8.0 - Firewire and USB 2.0 Support Tuesday, November 12 2002 @ 10:14 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy I recently purchased Partition Magic 8.0 to resized a laptop partition - it now has USB 2.0 and Firewire support. read more FREE: DLL Archiving Utility Friday, November 8 2002 @ 11:28 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Uninstalling software may leave a huge clutter of unneeded DLLs on your system - but removing them can be risk too. DLL Archive helps you get the files off the system safely. read more Microsoft Webcast: Deploying Windows XP Using SMS (12/10/02 @ 9:30 am PST) Tuesday, November 5 2002 @ 09:44 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Planning on deploying XP by upgrading over current versions of Windows? Here's a webcast on how to use SMS to accomplish the task! read more FREE: WinPointer - Annotate Your Computer Screen Thursday, October 24 2002 @ 10:21 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Most presentation software has annotation tools built-in, but what do you do when you are giving a demonstration of software installed on your machine and wish to annotate your screen? read more Application Compatibility Changes for .NET Wednesday, October 23 2002 @ 04:41 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Application compatibility has become a core focus of Windows 2000 and later. In this downloadable document Microsoft details changes in .NET that may cause compatiblity problems. read more Microsoft Webcast: SMS Feature Pack and Patch Management (11/12/02 @ 9:30 am PST) Tuesday, October 22 2002 @ 07:22 PM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy SMS Feature pack includes a bunch of new tools, including patch management abilities similiar to Microsoft's enterprise version of Windows Update called SUS. read more Microsoft Webcast: Microsoft Windows XP Troubleshooting Application Compatibility Issues (11/22/02 @ 10am PST) Friday, October 18 2002 @ 10:52 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Windows XP has excellent features for ensuring older applications run right. It pays to become familiar with this technology because this will always be an issue to manage - even for applications being built now. read more FREE: Hard-link Creator for Windows Thursday, October 17 2002 @ 08:19 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy UNIX fans have been familiar with hard-links for quite some time. A hard-link makes it appear as though a file is located in more than one place at a time, when in reality, only one copy exists. read more Microsoft Webcast: Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition: An Overview (11/06/02 @ 10am PST) Thursday, October 3 2002 @ 09:22 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Media Center Edition claims to run all your digital media needs through your home TV. read more Password Changer for Multiple Local Accounts Thursday, September 26 2002 @ 06:19 AM CST Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy Many administrators must maintain local account passwords on desktop or servers. This utility makes changing these passwords much easier. read more