I recently found myself in a situation where some pictures, that to me were priceless, had been deleted from my camera memory card. Unfortunately those pictures had not been moved or copied to any other media. Like most of us I wanted a free method of recovering them. I found a software called Recuva, which is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses! Read More...

Windows Steady State has been around for some time. It used to be called Shared Computer Toolkit for XP.  It saves changes to the system disk in a cached area and then when a user logs off, the system is right back like it was before they logged in.  Microsoft calls this Windows Disk Protection.  An admin can log in and make changes that are retained.  User documents can be redirected to another drive letter and those changes will be retained.  This software will work on XP, Vista, standalone, workgroup, domains – with group policies.  Windows Steady State could be very helpful with computers that are shared by multiple people such as those in a training classroom setting.

I visited with a HP storage engineer at a conference and he told me that the I/O module on a 1510i does NOT have the disk configuration information in it’s memory, but that the disk configuration is written on each disk drive. Therefore, if the I/O module fails, you can replace it with another module and the drive configuration (RAID, LUN’s, etc) will not be effected. He also suggested that if the I/O module fails, then you should move the cache memory from the old to the new I/O controller prior to bringing up the system so that the cache will be flushed to the disks.  I definitely recommend contacting HP support if your I/O controller goes out to verify this, but it made me feel better about the recoverability of our SAN.  If you have a spare I/O module on hand, recovering from an I/O module failure should be easy (in theory).

When building a terminal server, don’t forget to uninstall IE Enhanced Security BEFORE you install terminal services on a Windows 2003 Server, especially if you plan to sysprep the server and image it. For some reason, if you don’t do this, certain keys are left behind in the registry and in the default profile user hive (ntuser.dat file) that cause issues. IEES is uninstalled, but new user profiles created on that server still have remnants and do not function as expected. Users may get the IEES pop-ups when visiting any site that is not in their trusted sites list and it seems to affect JavaScript execution privileges as well. Here is the Microsoft article that addresses this issue (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/)933991). The workaround if this has happened is to follow Method 4 and then rebuild the affected profiles. If Method 3 is followed, it doesn’t seem be a complete fix from our experience.

There are two SCSI driver standards that are available for most SCSI HBA’s. The older standard (SCSIport) has been replaced by a newer technology (STORport). STORport allows faster I/O, duplexing and other advantages. You should use the STORport drivers for all HBA’s when available. This is especially revelant for FC cards. The details are: Read More...

Do not install Vmware tools with the complete option on ESX guests to prevent possible problems with your backups.  This installs the shared folders feature which is not available on ESX.  This causes the VMware tools to keep a file (hgfs.dat) open and can cause backup errors.  To disable the shared folders feature, remove hgfs from the registry key ProviderOrder under KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\NetworkProvider\Order\.  Read More...

The Remote Desktop Connection client has been updated in XP SP3. Besides the layout changes shown below, one of the changes in RDP 6.1 is the /console switch. To connect to the console of a machine, you must now use /admin bringing the final command to “mstsc /v servername /admin”. Read More...

For most people who are running Exchange, the combination of “Recover Deleted Items” and standard backups will be enough to restore most deleted emails. But what about when a user is using a PST file instead of an Exchange mailbox and they deleted an item from the Deleted Items folder? Instead of having to listen to a users agonizing sobs when you deliver the “I’m sorry, we tried everything we could but we were unable to save him” line, try the below ‘the gloves are off’ recovery method. Read More...

I ran across a cool add-on to IE 7 called IE7Pro.  I use a lot of extensions to Firefox, but this add-on to IE has a lot of helpful features rolled into one install.  Here is a list of some of its features:

• Webpage capturer
• Ad blocker
• Greasemonkey 
• Advanced Tab Browsing Management
  • Double click to close tab
  • Crash recovery
  • Select the external program to view page source
  • Tab history manager
  • Refresh tab interval
• Inline search
• Spell checking of text you enter in forms
• Proxy switcher
• Super Drag Drop

Read More...

On April 8, 2008 Adobe released a Security Bulletin regarding vulnerabilities with various versions of Adobe Flash Player.  In the Security Bulletin they recommend upgrading to the latest version of Adobe Flash Player (at least to version 9.0.124.0 or higher).  However, various reports were published today from security firms and security related websites reminding users about the threats associated with continuing to run earlier versions of Adobe Flash Player.Read More...