While working with Windows XP users, sometimes you need to add a local printer to their PC but they don’t have permissions to add a local printer.  Usually to get around something like this in the control panel, we hold shift and right click the icon to bring up a “Run as..” option where we can use admin credentials to get the task done.  However, you will not be able to “Run as..” for adding a printer in Windows XP unless you modify the folder view. 

From within the printers and faxes window, go to tools, options, and select “Use Windows classic folders.”  You will now see an icon for “Add Printer” that you can shift + right click on to add a printer with admin credentials.

Windows Vista Easy Transfer Utility is a product that comes with all Vista machines that allows you to move user settings and profiles over to your new Vista system from your old XP or Vista PC.  The utility supports both XP and Vista as sources, but only Vista can be a destination.

If you are using the Windows Vista Easy Transfer Utility, there are several things that you need to consider. Moving the settings over the network is supported, but it is time consuming and often fails.  I recommend that you use an external hard drive. This takes about 20 minutes to blow onto the drive and another 20 to blow onto the new machine but it is very reliable.

Another thing to consider is that if you are transferring a user's domain account to the new PC, you will want to add the new PC to the domain first. This will allow it to retain the correct settings and will keep you from having to create a new account for that user on the new computer.

I installed Vista Enterprise, and a few days later, I received a message:

“Activating Microsoft Windows Vista Volume License Products gives the following error:
Windows Activation Error: A problem occurred when Windows tried to activate. 
Error Code ________________
For possible resolution, click More Information.  Contact your system administrator or technical support department for assistance.
DNS name does not exist.”

After googling the problem I found that if you go to Control Panel > System > Windows activation and click “Change Product Key”, enter the same product key again, and then Vista will activate successfully.

Recently I was cleaning up some Exchange mail-enabled contacts and moving them to different OU’s.  I had to create a new contact and kept getting an error for a duplicate email address.  I couldn’t find the duplicate using the normal search methods, so after some digging I found this site that provided a custom LDAP query: Read More...

Sans.org published a notice today that there is a 0-day exploit for Internet Explorer in the wild.  The updates released by Microsoft yesterday did not fix this vulnerability.  The specific exploit checks to be sure it is running in IE7 on XP or 2003 before it does anything, but whether other versions are exploitable is not yet known.

The article says "At this point in time it does not appear to be wildly used, but as the code is publicly available we can expect that this will happen very soon."

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=5458

I have had problems with Word crashing when I try to open a document, particularly when online and opening a Word document on the file server.  I can usually get it to work if I open Word first and then open a document but even that doesn't work at times.

I finally found a post online mentioning problems with add-ins.  I looked at the add-ins and my Adobe Acrobat installation had installed a PDF add-in, my scanning application had installed 2 PDF add-ins and I had the add-in from Microsoft to create PDF files.  I disabled the PDF add-ins and have not had the problem since. Read More...

There is a small, simple utility called clip, which takes whatever is given on it’s input stream and places it on the Windows clipboard.  There are many useful things this can be used for.  Here are a couple of things that save a lot of time and work for me.

1)  Add the clipboard to your Sendto menu.  Make a command file, like clipboard.cmd, that has this command in it.

clip < %1

Then create a shortcut to this command file in %userprofile%\sendto.  Then you can right click on a file and send it to your clipboard.

2)  Generate passwords to your clipboard.  I use wapg by Adel I. Mirzazhanov (http://www.adel.nursat.kz/apg/download.shtml) by running a command file like this: Read More...

AVG recently released an update that mistakenly identified a valid user32.dll file as containing a virus.  It instructs users to delete the file, which of course makes the system unbootable.  This affects AVG 7.5 and 8.0 running on Windows XP.  AVG says this only affects a few non-English versions, but the volume of reported incidents indicates this may not be completely accurate. Read More...