The ramblings of a computer geek
Had this rather annoying issue with a Dell Latitude E5420 and trying to image it with Microsoft Windows XP SP3 Professional using Microsoft WDS and MDT 2010 Update 1. Basically using the Dell driver pack the machine would image okay, but then on the mini-setup the computer would freeze saying “please wait…”, even leaving it … Read more
I’ve been with plus.net for my ADSL broadband for a few years, I was working at home more and was finding my current broadband speeds were giving me problems with some of the work I was trying to do. I was getting about 6.5Mbps download and a 0.3Mbps upload. Not too bad but I really … Read more
If you are lucky enough to get a software manufacturer to use MSIs for their software your life should be easier when it comes to packaging and installing software, however sometimes you end up with just an .exe installer here’s some switches i’ve found for silent or quiet installers. setup.exe /s setup.exe /silent setup.exe /sms … Read more
So to find any failed logon requests for a user you can use one of the two following XML queries, the first just shows all successes and failures for that user. The second shows just the failures only for that user. 1. Open the event viewer, and click on the “Security” log on the left … Read more
What a pain to have this happen, however once you’ve imported from PST you can run the following script from within Outlook 2010. In this example it changes the items in the “Calendar” folder under Outlook. From the Outlook 2010 client do this: Press Alt+F11 which will open the VBA window. In the left pane, … Read more
Heres a nasty little problem, we have a SharePoint farm that consists of 4 servers, two Web Front Ends, and application server and a SQL server. This is Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Enterprise SP2 running on Microsoft Windows 2003 R2 SP2 (32-bit), all was well until a recent automatic update was installed which broke the application … Read more
Sometimes the interactive logon message that you can apply to machines via GPO can get in the way. But you may not want to disable it for everyone just an OU, in which case configure this against a low down OU (i.e. one nearest the computer object) that will get precedence. GPO Computer Configuration Policies … Read more
A Windows XP machine doesn’t apply computer GPO on boot, all seems to be well and the GPOs can be run once logged on and all appear to be okay. You just don’t get the software installation happening or any scripts running on boot. Strangely if you set the machine to use a static IP … Read more
We had a very old server running SQL 2000 SP4 that we needed to upgrade to SQL 2005, as we didn’t have the staff resource available for a complete rebuild of the whole server to Windows 2008 and SQL 2008 we decided to do an inplace upgrade. All seemed to go swiminingly until I hit … Read more
After a power cut one of our Windows 2008 R2 VMs was dead, even though it was cleanly shutdown by the UPS something must have happened and it would not boot. When booting the VM it would just boot straight into the Windows Recovery tool, this was not good news. Running any commands against the … Read more