tips and tricks

Shortcut Tip: Quickly Navigate to a commonly used folder

I recently found a useful tip for those of you that always have tons of windows open, like me, and minimizing them all to get to an item on your desktop is just a pain. Create a shortcut with a hot key combination to open an item on your desktop! It works with all your windows open in their current location and is a HUGE time saver. here are the instructions

1. Select the folder in Windows Explorer.
2. Create a shortcut, and place it on the desktop. (You create a shortcut by opening the folder, pointing to New on the File menu, then clicking Shortcut. Drag the shortcut to your desktop.)
3. Right–click the new shortcut, and then click Properties.
4. In the Properties dialog box, click the Shortcut tab, and in the Shortcut key box, enter a key combination (for example, CTRL+ALT+D or CTRL+SHIFT+D when D is for Documentation), and then click OK.

The trick here is that the item MUST be on your desktop in order for the hot key to work… but then again, what’s one more thing on your desktop.

Enjoy!

OneNote Tip: Take better notes during meetings the easy way!

Microsoft has a product called one note that i really didn’t know a lot about. They really haven’t pushed it a lot and it just comes bundled with Office so I’d never really tried to use it, however, I found an article over at Microsoft’s site that gives an excellent set of tips for how to use it to take better notes in meetings.

If you’re like me, you scribble notes (and doodle) on a notepad, open up word on your PDA, or if in a conference call full blown word on your laptop. You take notes as the meeting progresses and then later look back at your notes and wonder… “what was that I wrote about? That note doesn’t make any sense.”

Well Microsoft has a couple good tips at the one note site to make your life easier taking notes.

Check them out!

How to Make Your Computer Boot Faster

I read an interesting article recently that gave some excellent tips at making your computer run faster– without an upgrade! I thought I’d pass some of these tips along and add a few of my own.

First, You can make your computer run faster (and free up space by uninstalling software that you no longer use. You can easily do this with an excellent piece of software called, PC Decrapifier.

The other thing you can do is ensure that you remove applications from your startup that you do not absolutely need. In Vista, you can manage startup applications through Windows Defender. Defender has an integrated tool called Software Explorer that lets you check programs that load at startup and disable anything unnecessary.

You can also access the list of startup applications in either Vista or XP through the Msconfig utility (type “msconfig” into the Run box in the Start menu). Select the Startup tab, then uncheck any applications you think might be slowing your startup.

Consult an online database of startup processes, such as Sysinfo, to find out what the process may be– keeping in mind that it may not be 100% accurate.

If you’re serious about shaving every last second of startup time, dig into the Boot tab in the Msconfig utility, which controls the settings for the boot.ini file. Generally, users should tread carefully when tinkering with boot.ini, because one slip up and you can have a non-bootable computer. But one easy edit is to check the “/noguiboot” option to time by skipping the Windows startup animation.

Another useful tip is to clean up the registry. There are various applications out there, Free programs such as CCleaner and Glary Utilities, as well as more fully featured software such as System Mechanic (System Mechanic just simply can’t be beat in my opinion, the others are free but sometimes don’t do as complete a job) are available for download online and will scrub the registry for “keys” left over from old applications no longer resident on your machine.

Doing some or all of these will no doubt result in some extra free space on your computer as well as some extra free time– who knows, you may not even have time to get that first cup of coffee in before your computer is totally logged in.

Enjoy!

Job Hunting in a tight Market

Let’s face it… Job competition is fierce out there in today’s Market. But that doesn’t mean you should give up the search, or that it’s impossible to get that great job. You just have to go back to basics and sell yourself better than the competition!

Here are some great tips from Microsoft for finding and landing the job you want. View the article

BlogJetThis! extension for Firefox 3 Fixes Firefox plugin installation error

This really isn’t Systems Administration related, but I recently started using a tool called blogjet to write blog entries and had a hard of a time getting the extensions to work properly in Firefox. It was telling me that the BlogJetThis! extension was not compatible with Firefox 3.0.6.

Essentially, It looks like it was installing a Firefox 2 extension… even though the extension said it was for “< 2.0”. A quick google search found this article that solved the issue.

 BlogJet extension for Firefox 3.

Tip: Searching Google for solutions to a Microsoft product problem

Maybe this isn’t earth shattering, and most all of you already know this trick. However, I just stumbled upon it and am willing to bet at least a few people are troubled by searching google for answers to problems and finding the needle in the haystack. Here’s the scenario:\

You’re looking for Microsoft Knowledge Base articles on a error your getting with a particular Microsoft application and using google to do the search because you can search better with it compared to the Microsoft site. However, you get so much noise back in your results in links to pages that were never solved, the solution is ambiguous, or (frankly) the solutions that are given are coming from sources where you simply question which end of the gene pool they are standing in at the time they wrote the proposed answer… you know what I’m talking about. Those guys that give answers like Format and call me back later or “Re-install the OS to get the drivers updated”.

Well, I suddenly noticed a trend at the bottom of some KB articles I had to call MS to get an answer to a problem. They are tagging the articles with key words! Yes, I know it’s not earth shattering. However, the following might help you.

For troubleshooting articles, it seems they always tag it with: kbtshoot

For articles that mention a event log error message they always tag it with: kberrmsg

Soooo…. If you need to search google for a Microsoft product KB article put this in as part of your search! It greatly limits the number of noisy results in your search! For example, you get trouble shooting KB articles for Microsoft CRM try this in a Google search:

kbtshoot “Microsoft CRM”

Of course that’s very generic… but hopefully you get the idea. Enjoy!

Windows Tip: Clearing Internet Explorer cached data from the command line

As a Network Administrator sometimes you need to clear the browsing history, cookies, or the like for a entire community of users. Sure, you could tell them how to do it thinking that you were being super smart by providing instructions for them. However, as you well know there will be some who will be unable to follow the directions and you will spend 3 times the amount of time it took you to write the directions and refine them to a point where any one could do it— or so you thought. All the while, thinking about the amount of time you will save by having the users do it.

Why not be really lazy!!!??!? And do it with a batch script? You could then put it in their login script and it would happen at their next logon, or every logon for that matter. Well, there’s an easy way to do this with windows’ built in functions– it’s just obscure enough to not be found anywhere you would normally look!

Yo can preform many of the things I mentioned (and more) with Microsoft’s RUNDLL.EXE file, plus you don’t have to write a line of VBScript to accomplish the task!

Here is a short list of some tasks you can preform on IE, along with the command to do it… give them a shot!

Temporary Internet Files
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 8

Cookies
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 2

History
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 1

Form Data
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 16

Passwords
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 32

Delete All
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 255

Delete All - “Also delete files and settings stored by add-ons”
RunDll32.exe InetCpl.cpl,ClearMyTracksByProcess 4351

 These commands should work in Internet Explorer 7

Word Tip: Quick and easy tables in Microsoft Word

This isn’t a VBScript tip— or even a systems administrator tip. However, it is a valuable tip on a quick easy way to create tables in word that are EXACTLY the size you need without knowing ahead of time and doing a lot of clicking in the menus… and if your like me with the number of tables you have to create for documentation this tip is a life saver!

Essentially, You Type the rows like you would a normal sentence except between where you want the columns you place a tab. When the row is completed, instead of pressing ENTER to start a new row… press SHIFT ENTER to start a new row. Then, end the table by simply pressing ENTER.

Finally, highlight the text you wanted to make into a table and select “Make Table” or “Insert Table” from the menu in Microsoft Word, depending on your version. TAHDAH!!!

Here is an example:

This is a cell ”Tab” in a row ”Tab” that is the first row ”Shift Enter”
This is another cell ”Tab” in another row ”Tab” that is the second row ”Shift Enter”
This is a cell ”Tab” in the last row ”Tab” that is the end of the table ”Enter”

It should look like this after you select to Insert the table:

Windows Tip: Moving a window from off screen back into view

If you’ve ever hooked up your laptop to a secondary monitor and then disconnected without remembering to move the windows back to the primary desktop, you’ve probably encounted this problem: 

The application is running. You can see it in the taskbar, but you can’t see it on the screen, because it still thinks it’s running on the secondary monitor. You try and use right-click, Move, but that doesn’t do anything, and the window doesn’t move anywhere. Maybe you try doing a minimize and then a restore… but still the window doesn’t come into a area of the screen you can actually use. Likely, you simply end up rebooting.

There’s a simple trick to get around this. First make sure you’ve clicked on the windows to bring it into focus. Then right-click on the taskbar and choose Move, then hit any one of the arrow keys and simply move your mouse.

TAAADAHHH!!! Enjoy!

Fun with the registry: Saving shares and share permissions from a server (and moving them to a new server)

On occasion you have to rebuild servers, some are worse than others to rebuild. File Servers are not that difficult to rebuild, but one of the tedious tasks in moving a file server is setting up all the shares that have been added over time all at once. you know the drill:

Point. Click. Click. Click. Add. Double check settings. Click OK.  Pray it’s right.

Well, all the shares and the share permissions that are associated with each share are actually saved in the registry! You can save a TON of time and look like a super hero IT professional– and be lazy! By simply exporting the proper key in the registry and importing it to the new server! (Note: If your drive letters change you will need to update the paths in the registry to get them to work.)  The registry key is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\Shares

Keep in mind… your editing the registry on your fresh new server… so I’ll blatantly copy Microsoft’s stereotypical disclaimer: 

Caution, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow the steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

322756   http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756/ ) How to back up and restore the registry in Windows