Various cool software and more
Be careful what you have on your laptop when entering the USA, the security checks are no longer limited to your physical goods, according to the Danish online magazine ComOn.DK quite a lot of people have had to hand over their passwords to their laptops, in order for the Security personnel at the US airports to search their computers.
Disturbing is the only word I can think of.
Some stupid ¤#?# at Microsoft has seen fit to change the parameter to Mstsc (Remote Desktop) in SP1 (Vista/Win 2008) and SP3 (XP). Before you typed “Mstsc /Console” to connect to the console session at a server (basically some not so well written applications only worked here), but that was then – now say hello to “Mstsc /Admin”…
Even more genius, the /Console is SILENTLY IGNORED… just so it will take you longer to figure out what is wrong, AND of cause all third party Terminal Services applications will no longer be able to connect to console. Yes I know, of cause new versions will be released… but what #¤”% would have been wrong with leaving the /Console for backwards compatibility.
And why, well because Windows 2008 no longer needs this (yeah we heard this one before ;-)), ok cool – but hey Windows 2003 still does and will be around for QUITE some time still (we still have one or two NT4 servers running)..
Sorry no price for that one guys.
You may have heard about the excellent utility TrueCrypt which create encrypted virtual drives or partitions!? But now it has been released in a version 5.0a which should support the underlying OS (that is transparent bootup encryption of the system drive). Excellent.. I have not had time to check it, but if it works its utterly excellent (and best of all FREEEEEEEEEE!).
Recovery is as I read it achieved via an ISO boot image created upon installation, but again I have not checked this.
Need to administer a remotely located server that has not enabled remote desktop!? Sure you can make a GP or do some registry editing, but hey it all takes time, some nice guy has made a util that will deal with this for you, just point and click..
http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2006/06/remotely-enable-remote-desktop.html
Nice, Microsoft is about to get some healthy competition to their Softgrid software virtualization. VMware just bought Thinstall, for those of you who have no experience with Softgrid / Thininstall the brief description of what is is all about would be something like this; Software virtualization is more or less the same as VMware Server / Microsoft Virtual Server is to OS virtualization, it allow you to run an application without installing it and without polluting the host os with registry entries and config files stored all over, an other cool thing is it will allow you to eg. install Office 2000, 2003 and 2007 all at the same time..
Goto http://www.vmware.com/whatsnew/thinstall.html to watch a demo or try http://www.thinstall.com/. Thinstall has the upper hand over Microsoft as Thininstall does not require client software to be installed in order to use a virtual application, Thinstall also include the option to create .msi files (just as softgrid).
Visual tour; http://www.thinstall.com/demos/intro_dec11/
Very cool, and pice of pie… thrust me….
We all experience it, at some time or other we forget an important password :-/
Luckily we also have a tendency of being lazy, and if so there is hope 🙂 Try visiting http://www.nirsoft.net here you will find password recovery software for all your needs (still, only works if you at some time have been lazy enough to make the windows remember your password)… IE Auto-complete, Mail and messenger passwords are only a few of the passwords that this site can assist in the recovery of.. Your product key for windows and office is also no problem, pice of pie 😉 Also this is a wake up call for all of us, passwords stored by Windows IS NOT SECURE….
If you ever worked with deployment, you know the issue where you need an .MSI file or other driver files but all the vendor is supplying is a SETUP.EXE file.
Well many .EXE files can via some obscure parameters /Extract /B or whatever be extracted, but as all vendors use different utilities to create their .EXE files it can be hard to figure out how to expand them, plus some .EXE files actually can not be extracted (or is not designed to).. Usually WinRAR is a good bet, it can actually extract many .EXE filetypes.. but not all 🙁
Fear no more, Uniextract to the rescue… maybe it wont extract ALL but atleast it extracted many of the files I had problems with, so big thumbs up from me.. It is quite easy to use, once installed just right click on the .EXE file and select extract to subdirectory.. Easy as pie 😀
For those who can not afford a copy of WinRAR (www.rarlabs.com) to open .rar files a compatible freeware program is available called LZArc (not to be confused with LHarc from the good old Amiga age).
It will not win any awards for its simple but useful layout, but hey you cant get everything for nothing.
Download it from here
http://www.izarc.org/
;
Finally someone got around to writing a useful program to assist in file-copying 🙂
We all know the feeling, we start a ‘drag-and-drop’ file-copy and somewhere along the line an error occur, bad luck if you are using Windows XP (Vista is just a tad better, but still not perfect) you can start from scratch again because you have no way of determining what actually was copied before it failed..
Well this program claims to take care of this along with numerous other nice features (like pause copy job etc). I have so far only done a quick test, but it seem promising.
Freeware for personal use and a pro version is availabe for corporate use with additional features.
The program adds itself as right click options.
http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php
I just had a Sharepoint 2007 issue, if you use Sharepoint to store your documents and then change your file view to “Explorer view” you will get a warning each time you try to open/edit a file stating that it may be unsafe.
I seem to have drilled the problem down and found a solution;
1. This step may not be necessary but still it removed the “mixed zone” warning. You need to add “about:blank” as an “intranet trusted site” (add via: internet options – security – local intranet – sites – advanced).
2. You need to allow for “Launching program and files in IFrame.” found under (internet options – security – local intranet – custom level).