| FREE: Utility to Schedule Wake On LAN Computer Power-up |
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Monday, April 30 2001 @ 09:28 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| Most of you have probably heard of the ability to wake up a computer using Wake On Lan (WOL). This functionality allows you turn on computers by sending a "magic" packet to their MAC address.
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| Rights Required For Specific RIS Scenarios (W2K) |
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Friday, April 27 2001 @ 08:50 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| If installing and setting up RIS isn't tricky enough, you also have to setup security to accomodate computer account creation in the domain.
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| Tweaking Windows 2000 RIS (W2K) |
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Friday, April 27 2001 @ 08:46 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| RIS can do some pretty cool things for setting up the desktops in your organization. Sometimes it may be necessary to make a few adjustments to how it operates.
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| FREE: Defragmentation Utility (NT/W2K) |
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Monday, April 23 2001 @ 08:41 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| Why would you need another defragmentation utility when it's already built into the operating system?
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| Batch File Back Flips (BOOTDISK) |
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Monday, April 16 2001 @ 08:44 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| I'm not going to do the standard "we still need DOS and batch files to do bootdisks" rant - but we do. This site has excellent tips and techniques for batch file programming.
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| SMS 2 and Whistler (SMS/XP) |
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Friday, April 13 2001 @ 06:51 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| For many of you, beta 2 is the time to start taking a new Microsoft operating system release seriously. If you have SMS deployed, you need to know which versions of SMS run on which versions of Whistler.
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| Debug Logging of Windows 2000 Upgrade |
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Thursday, April 12 2001 @ 07:48 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| If you are planning a large scale upgrade (meaning installing Windows 2000 on top of the existing operating system) of Windows 98 or 95 computers to Windows 2000 - you will likely run into some odd behaviors.
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| Fast Web Access to Microsoft Knowledge Base Articles (Q articles) |
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Thursday, April 12 2001 @ 07:20 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| Many times I recieve a reference to a Microsoft Knowledge Base article in it's raw form - a Q article ID such as Q172664. Getting on TechNet can be a hastle, especially if you're at one of 20 servers that doesn't have Technet installed.
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| Gartner on .NET |
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Monday, April 9 2001 @ 04:12 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| Gartner is planning a half day event to bring you up to speed on the ever shifting face of Microsoft's strategy.
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| Using Service ACLs to Control Management Agents on Laptops (NT/W2K/WXP) |
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Friday, April 6 2001 @ 08:26 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| A chronic management problem is how to handle software distribution and management agents that run as a service and attempt network access while a laptop is offline.
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| Turning on Detailed Group Policy Logging (W2K) |
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Tuesday, April 3 2001 @ 07:30 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| Sometimes it can be very difficult to debug group policy issues - especially if you have extensive OUs and/or policies.
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| Microsoft MMC Resource Page |
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Monday, April 2 2001 @ 08:35 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| This page directs you to many different MMC resources on Microsofts web sites. |
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| FREE: Antivirus Software (9x, ME, NT, W2K) |
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Friday, March 30 2001 @ 06:43 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| Wow - the Junk Drawer carried an item on Computer Associates free virus software two years ago. At the time I wondered how long the offer would last.
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| FREE: InstallShield Decompiler |
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Thursday, March 29 2001 @ 05:41 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| Ever wish you could understand what that hairy InstallSheild package was trying to do so you could automate it for 10,000 computers?
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| Why You Still Need SMS with Windows 2000 |
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Wednesday, March 28 2001 @ 06:17 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| With all of the management functionality built into Windows 2000, you may be contemplating a world without SMS. If you're an enterprise customer - you should think twice.
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| PCI and AGP Bus Information Site |
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| Zero Dependencies Status MIF Script (SMS) |
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Friday, March 23 2001 @ 07:02 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| This VBS script generates SMS status MIFs. There are three things that are unique about this script over other script-based solutions:
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| Bootdisk Resources Galore! |
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Thursday, March 22 2001 @ 05:31 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| Microsoft's new Remote Installation Services is a great solution to installing operating systems. Unfortunately it is limited to Windows 2000 Professional, requires a compatible NIC, Active Directory, TCP/IP, DHCP a special NTFS volume and it can impact your network dramatically if not implemented properly.
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| FREE: DM/Manager - Enterprise Directory Migration Tool |
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Tuesday, March 20 2001 @ 07:20 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| FastLane is offering a 12 month free license to their DM/Manager product for free to "qualified" customers.
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| How About a Side of .NET With Your Redhat, Sir? (.NET) |
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Thursday, March 15 2001 @ 08:24 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| This infoworld article talks about Microsoft's plans to put .NET on other platforms. This is a little too dejavue for me. Does anyone remember how Microsoft was going to port DCOM to many other platforms. Microsoft decided that it wasn't critical enough to be developed internally and outsourced the effort to DEC. It went nowhere - hopefully they will be more directly engaged this time. If code is not developed internally at Microsoft (or licensed and completely re-written) - it is a pretty accurate guage of how critical they consider the effort.
Visit Site |
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| FREE: Utility to Schedule Built-in Windows 2000 Defrag (W2K) |
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Wednesday, March 14 2001 @ 07:08 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| As you have probably already discovered the defragmentation utility built into Windows 2000 cannot be scheduled. This is by design and is one of the limitations of this built-in "lite" version of Executive software's full blown Diskeeper version. Well such limitations are just too tempting for the freeware community. This little program lets you schedule the built in Windows 2000 defragmentation utility. Very useful!
Visit Site Download Now (50Kb) |
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| New SMS Recovery Tools Posted (SMS) |
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Monday, March 12 2001 @ 07:39 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| Microsoft has posted some new SMS recovery tools to the SMS web site. They are a little out of the way and not listed under the downloads section. The recovery tools area includes checklists, operational procedures, documented scenarios and information on recoverability planning.
Thanks go to Tom Llewellyn for tipping me on the arrival of these tools.
Visit Site |
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| MS Releases Web Reports for SMS (SMS) |
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Tuesday, February 20 2001 @ 06:57 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| The long awaited Web Reports have been published by Microsoft. The Web Reports go directly against SQL to avoid the historic performance problems when doing large scale reporting using the SMS WMI provider.
Visit Site Download Now (612Kb)
KEYWORDS: SMS |
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| WWF Match: Sun Versus Microsoft on .NET (.NET) |
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Tuesday, February 13 2001 @ 08:20 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| Sun's responds to pointed questions by Microsoft about Web Services strategy. This article not only has some serious technical meat - it's also quite entertaining!
Visit Site |
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| SMS Object Security for Control of SMS 2.0 Features |
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Friday, February 9 2001 @ 07:33 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| This article explains the many rich SMS Security capabilities from the perspective of dividing SMS duties into distinct roles and configuring security to support these roles.
Visit Site
KEYWORDS: SMS |
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| FREE: Domain Detective - Analyzing Your User IDs for Policy Compliance (NT/2000) |
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Wednesday, February 7 2001 @ 10:19 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| The domain detective is a tool which allows you to analyze your current Windows NT or 2000 domain. It include reports on users, security and policy compliance. You can report on user names that are longer than your standard or password expirations that are not set properly as well as a host of other non-compliance reports. Thanks go to Brian Mohr for dropping a line on this great tool.
Visit Site Download Now - Registration Required (20 Mb) |
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| UltraEdit - Inexpensive, Super-Versatile Administrators Editor |
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Tuesday, February 6 2001 @ 07:28 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| I have been using UltraEdit for over a year now. It is extrememly versatile and the $30 registration fee makes it very affordable. It supports configurable syntax highlighting (with many syntax files downloadable from their site), ftp connection based editing, search in files, macros, column mode, HTML Mode, automatic backup and file comparison are all included. You can find additional syntax files and utilities on the UltraEdit Download Page. It will also perform binary editing - a great plus that makes it the only editor you need! If you are using Windows NT or 2000 I highly recommend that you download and run the utility that converts the UltraEdit INI file to the registry - UltraEdit starts about 10 times faster when you do this.
Visit Site Download Now (1.2 Mb) |
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| FREE: Viewlets Creates Online Demos - Fast and Easy |
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Friday, February 2 2001 @ 07:27 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| Viewlets is a very easy to use demonstration authoring package. It creates slick demonstrations from screen captures. They can be posted on the web for technical support or training materials. Viewlet Builders supports all versions of Windows, Linux, MacOS and Palm devices. Qarbon also provides a personal area to store your viewlets if you do not have a place to store them on the web. If you do not have the most recent version of the Sun Java installation, it is downloaded and installed during setup.
Visit Site Download Now - Email Address Required (217Kb) |
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| SMS and Windows 2000 Conference - March 5th - 9th |
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Friday, February 2 2001 @ 07:14 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| The SMS and Windows 2000 Conference is just around the corner. This conference focuses on management technologies for Windows. Check out the site to see all the great sessions! If you do come, look me up at one of my sessions and let me know you're a reader! - Darwin.
 Add a reminder to your calendar.
Visit Site
KEYWORDS: SMS |
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| Microsoft WebCast: Managing Mobile Clients with SMS 2.0 (SMS) |
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| WMI, Perl and the W2K Server Resource Kit Supplement 1 |
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Friday, January 26 2001 @ 05:29 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| The Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit Supplement 2 has been released. This supplement introduces a significant bevy of WMI goodies. For Perl devotees there are many, many WMI samples scripts written in Perl. This compliments that many WMI VBS scripts that came with the original resource kit. A special Perl module (wmi.pm) is used by many of the Resource Kit's Perl scripts - it also contains some general routines that could be helpful to systems administration programming. A new WMI provider (dnsprov.dll) for DNS was also included. This provider allows for querying, configuration and control of the Windows 2000 DNS service. The Resource Kit supplement is available in TechNet or from Microsoft's resource kit web site.
View/Buy Book
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| NetExec: Compiled-in RunAs for NT4 and 2000 |
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Wednesday, January 24 2001 @ 09:03 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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For many administrators the most lusted after feature in Windows 2000 is the "RunAs" command. Being able to run select utilities as an admin while remote controlling a user desktop saves tons of time in problem resolution. If you have used the Windows 2000 RunAs command, you will quickly notice that you cannot script the sending of a password to it. NetExec runs as a service (similar to the SUSS resource kit utility), but it has several differientiating features:- Works on Windows NT4 for those of you will delayed Windows 2000 plans.
- Allows you to run a program as another user by compiling a shell executable that uses NetExec apis to switch to another user before running the program (obviously be VERY careful with this)
- Allows multiple, simultaneous interactive logons on NT4 and 2000. This is new feature in Whistler - the next version of Windows 2000.
In Windows 2000, some scripting APIs such as ADSI allow you to logon with alternate credentials and script encoding allows you to reasonably hide passwords. However, if you need to run an executable directly or don't have WSH and ADSI installed, NetExec can provide an excellent alternative.
Visit Site Download Now (355Kb) |
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| FREE: SMBIOS2 - BIOS Data Reading Tool for Your Build Boot Disk |
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Tuesday, January 23 2001 @ 08:03 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| The predominant method for automated installation of Microsoft Operating systems is still the DOS boot disk. How many times would it be really useful to know a few items about the machine to make the process more fool proof or more automated. SMBIOS2, a free utility from IBM, allows you to display the BIOS information of any SMBIOS compliant machine (most every new machine today). Along with the "find" DOS command or any DOS based string processing utility, you can determine whether machines are laptops, what make and model they are and in most cases determine the serial number. I have used this utility in conjunction with a bootable CD, ghosted, sysprepped Windows 2000 build to determine that the computer model matched the model the CD was built for and that the model had the minimum BIOS version for Windows 2000. The web page with SMBIOS2 on it also contains utilities to check SMBIOS information under NT and 2000 and for checking ACPI bios information.
Visit Site Download Now (200Kb)
KEYWORDS: BOOTDISK |
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| FREE: Ranish Partition Manager |
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Monday, January 22 2001 @ 08:06 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| The Ranish Partition Manager is a great little partition tool. It is very comprehensive in the creation and handling of hard disk partions.
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| ERD Commander 2000 - Recovery Heaven (NT/2000) |
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Monday, January 15 2001 @ 11:11 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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ERD Commander is a utility by Winternals that allows you to access and repair a Windows 2000 or NT system that is not booting correctly. When I first saw the built-in Windows 2000 recovery console, I thought to myself "no need for ERD Commander anymore" Well I was wrong. There are many things ERD Commander can do that the recovery console cannot. - For starters, the recovery console requires that you can at least logon (in text mode) to the installation. This means you must know the administrator password and that the system is operational enough to find the password.
- The Recovery Console severely limits which directories and drive can be accessed and written to, where ERD gives full access to the file system.
- ERD has built in editors for the registry and text files.
- It can also compress and decompress files with disk spanning - for those times when you need to copy over large files with nothing but a floppy drive.
- ERD can also change passwords, including the admin password and set NTFS rights.
- ERD also supports batch file execution for the creation of automated recovery scripts.
- One of the best features is being able to make a bootable CD ROM - if you've ever had to solve a difficult recovery problem, you know how many times you have to boot from the recovery tools and can swapping floppies ever add the last straw to your growing frustration!
Visit Site |
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| FREE: Ultimate Multiple OS Boot Loader |
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Monday, January 8 2001 @ 03:18 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| Extended Operating System Loader (XOSL) is probably the best mulit-OS boot loader around. It is comprehensive and very professionally written. It has a graphic administrative and OS selection menu and is briming with configuration options. A password and a partition hiding profile can be defined for each OS boot menu choice. It also supports lesser known OSes such as BeOS. Full source code is available. Some products really set the standard when it comes to freeware, and XOSL is one of them. Thanks go out to Brett Aurand who introduced me to XOSL!
Visit Site Download Now (437Kb) |
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| Butterfly .NET ? |
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Saturday, December 16 2000 @ 09:02 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| Microsoft has fired up the spin-cycle on their .NET architecture. Not everyone is impressed and some folks at Sun who have a deep understanding of platform independent computing have a few criticisms in this article.
I personally feel Microsoft is doing some serious "Obfuscated Benefit Aggregation" For example, when you read the benefits roster of .NET - the many long-cited benefits of the non-Microsoft technology - XML - are touted as .NET benefits. However, when reading the .NET benefits, it is not made clear that these benefits are present as a result of supporting an existing, standards based technology (which itself has not delivered on these promises).
This article also has some additional links to other descenting opinions on .NET.
Visit Site |
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| Extending SMS 2.0 Inventory Data (SMS) |
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Saturday, December 16 2000 @ 08:42 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| 1e has put together a free whitepaper that is an excellent walkthrough on how to extend SMS inventory with existing registry values and how to extend the console to view these items.
I learned the hard way that you can only have one custom extension off of the Resource Explorer console view - so if perform the steps in the whitepaper and then turn around to write your own extension - it can be confusing. You will need to use CIM Studio to remove the one added in the walkthrough. After you click below, select "Extending SMS Inventory" - there is brief, non-threatening registration form before you can access the paper.
Visit Site
KEYWORDS: SMS, WMI |
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| How .NET does DLL Hell |
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Wednesday, December 6 2000 @ 06:02 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| This MSDN article explains the future of handling shared code conflicts in .NET (aka Fusion). An overly simplistic description is that component (COM) registration information will no longer be stored and referenced in the registry, but in the shared code file itself (DLL, OCX, EXE). Currently this information is stored in the component, but only so it can register itself, other programs looking for the component look in the registry, not the file itself. Another aspect is the isolation of applications by design - a feature introduced with Windows 2000. There are additional enhancements to version handling and how components are distributed. Read the article for the full scoop. Thanks go to Joel Garrett for sending this link my way.
Visit Site |
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| FREE: AutoIt a Replacement for ScriptIt |
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Tuesday, November 21 2000 @ 11:12 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| A while back Microsoft published a dumbed down version of WinBatch called "ScriptIt" ScriptIt is used for low-intensity interface automation. Apparently it also inspired Jonathan Bennett to create a new and improved version. Jonathan's version has many improvements over ScriptIt, the most notable of them being the ability to compile scripts into executables and a custom control to allow interface automation through Windows Scripting Host (WSH) languages such as VBScript or JScript.
Thanks go to Tim Plas for letting me know about this great utility.
KEYWORDS: VBS, SCRIPTING, WSH
Visit Site Download Now (380Kb) |
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| FREE: VBScript Editor with Syntax Highlighting (WSH/VBS) |
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Friday, November 17 2000 @ 01:00 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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| This little editor is great. It is a simple executable that does not require an "installation" - just run it. Provides syntax highlighting for VBScript.
Visit Site Download Now (193Kb)
KEYWORDS: SCRIPT
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| User State Migration Tool (9x/NT) |
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Friday, November 17 2000 @ 07:55 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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The User State Migration tool from Microsoft is a part of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit add on tool. It help migrate the complete user environment from a previous operating system to Windows 2000. It stores the desktop environment settings in a temporary file and allows a complete reloading of the computer and restoration of these settings. It migrates wall paper and display settings, but it also handles Dial Up Networking settings and IE settings. Here is a link to download the Chapter 6 of the Change and Configuration Management Guide which provide information on using this utility.
Visit Site Download Now (750Kb)
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| FREE: Download Accelerator Plus |
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Wednesday, November 15 2000 @ 04:37 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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Many of the items in the Junk Drawer are downloadable utilities, making a good download manager a great addition to your toolbox! This little program is hot! It intelligently uses several advanced features of FTP and multiple threads to pull multiple segments of a file at one time. If mirror sites exist, it starts multiple threads, each pulling a portion of the file. If the file is only at one site, it is able to download it in multiple chunks. It also supports "resuming" a download on servers that don't normally support this functionality. This utility is especially boosts transfer rates if you have a high speed link, but I have found it to have benefits even on slow links.
Visit Site Download Now (1.1 Mb)
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| Updated SMS Installer 2.0.91 Available (SMS) |
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Wednesday, May 31 2000 @ 04:03 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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Those of you running SMS 1.2 can now download the version of SMS Installer that shipped with SMS 2.0. This updated version includes some very cool features - integrated debugger and complex expressions are two of the notable ones.
Visit Site Download Now (2.7Mb)
KEYWORDS: DEJD3-3 |
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| Updated Sysprep 1.1 (2000) |
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Wednesday, May 31 2000 @ 03:56 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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Sysprep is a tool used to prepare Windows 2000 builds for duplication by binary imaging software. After installing and configuring Windows 2000 and all application software, sysprep is run to remove the computers SID (Security ID) and reset plug and play to be run when the computer is turned on. Microsoft has updated sysprep from the original version shipped on the Windows 2000 CD. This version has been enhanced to handle different mass storage controllers during the setup process - this allows a single image to be put on different models of computer - reducing the number of images required to support your full complement of computer models. I found that the new documentation and sample files were much more informative, even if you do not plan to use sysprep images with machines that have different mass storage controllers.
Visit Site Download Now (213Kb)
KEYWORDS: DEJD3-3 |
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| Windows Update Site (9x/NT/2000) |
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Wednesday, May 31 2000 @ 03:50 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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Microsoft is now providing a page to solve the issue of distributing Windows updates within a large organization. This site allows you to run queries against all available fixes, download them in a redistributable format, test them and deploy them. The site contains fixes from Microsoft as well as all major hardware vendors. Thanks go to Wayne Stuber for tipping me off on this one.
Visit Site
KEYWORDS: DEJD3-3 |
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| FREE: PowerArchiver (9x/NT/2000) |
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Wednesday, May 31 2000 @ 03:49 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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PowerArchiver is a free "WinZip" like utility. One of the things I like is that it has an "explorer" type interface that navigates an archive like the ever so familiar navigation of Windows directories in explorer. When users need to browse their archive backups to find a lost file after a desktop migration - the familiar interface is a key to alleviating support calls for this self-service restore process. PowerArchiver also recently added a command line utilities package (http://www.powerarchiver.com/download/pacl.exe) - I have'nt had time to check out whether it includes all the functionality of Infozip.
Visit Site Download Now (2Mb)
KEYWORDS: DEJD3-3 |
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| SMSWakeUp (SMS) |
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Wednesday, May 31 2000 @ 10:06 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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SMSWakeUp utilizes the Wake On LAN features that many modern NIC cards have built in. These features allow a special packet to be sent to the NIC card to turn on the computer or bring it out of a hibernation state. 1E now has a tool that will do this for SMS 2.0. 1E has also published a whitepaper on this product.
Visit Site Download Now (4Mb)
KEYWORDS: DEJD3-3 |
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| FREE: InfoZip (DOS/9x/NT/2000) |
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Wednesday, May 31 2000 @ 09:32 AM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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InfoZip is a freeware, console utility for generating compressed (zipped) file archives. Unlike the command line version of PKZIP, this utility continues to be updated. It is also available for many other platforms, including mainframe and mini computers. One of the most helpful uses of a powerful archiving tool like this one is for data backup for desktop deployments. Using infozip I can backup well known data locations as well as sweep the entire hard drive for all know data file extensions. There are multiple downloads to get all the parts of InfoZip and it is available for many platforms - so the download link leads you to the overall information page.
Visit Site Download Now
KEYWORDS: DEJD3-3
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| FREE: Fundelete - A Better Recycler (NT/2000) |
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Monday, February 28 2000 @ 09:02 PM CST
Contributed By: Darwin Sanoy |
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Fundelete replaces your recycle bin - unlike the original, it catches all deletes that take place at the command line. In addition to all your normal Recycle Bin configuration parameters, Fundelete allows you set filters so that specific files are not recycled (i.e. temporary files).
Visit Site Download Now (894Kb) |
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