rsn – Page 2 – I think about stuff. Sometimes I write it down.

Remote Rename Domain PC

If you’re a admin you’ve probably needed to rename a remote Windows workstation. There are plenty of ways on the command line to do it and you’ll never have to open an RDP or other GUI control session for this task.

Find ActiveSync (phone/tablet) devices for a user

When an account gets locked out because of an old Exchange connected device, you need to find out the whole device history. Microsoft has a method but it’s not obvious.

Enable Driver Verifier for BSOD Analysis

In our environment, a particular PC was having entirely random BSODs. It was initially thought to be bad RAM but replacing it with known good sticks did nothing. We started thinking that a driver could be the culprit: it could trigger the BSOD but be buried deep enough that the bugcheck report doesn’t point to it. That’s where Microsoft’s driver verifier came into play and how we discovered that it was the Citrix USB driver.

Re-indexing Windows Search

Occasionally a PC’s Windows Search index can get corrupted. The symptoms can be as follows:

Outlook can’t find some or all messages,
the start menu’s search function is unable to find documents, applications or contacts,
the search indexer (SearchIndexer.exe) will hog the CPU.

Rebuilding the index is easy:

Change Themes from the Command Line

You can change the Windows theme from the command line easily enough with ThemeTool. Scripting it out so the PCs you manage isn’t much more difficult. Getting ThemeTool is probably the most challenging part.

Response Transforms

Creating a “response transform” is very helpful when repackaging software. You create a response transform by running certain software which allows stepping through the app install and subsequently captures all the choices made for that install.

A former employer had an AdminStudio license and I used one feature of InstallShield that allowed creation of response transforms almost exclusively. Nowadays that piece lives by itself: InstallShield Tuner. Here’s a way you can get it.

WinDBG and BSOD/Crash Dumps

App crashes and BSODs are some of the hardest issues to diagnose. Enabling user-mode crash dumps for all apps will capture application crash information. Then you can use some Microsoft tools to potentially make the analysis a little easier. Comprehending the analysis is outside of the scope of this post but here’s a quick how-to to read it.

Print Job Killer for Domain Printers

Here’s another quick utility I authored: PrintJobKill. It’s pretty simple tool in scope: it queries all the servers/PCs in a domain that host a printer, lists the current jobs in each and allows deletion of a selected job.

Target a window to scroll by hovering over it

One of the features I like from X11 is the ability to target a window for whatever content manipulation by simply hovering over it. It is rare, though, that I need anything more than just the ability to scroll.

Automatically enable / disable the IE proxy

It’s rather annoying that enabling and disabling the proxy is no less than a half dozen clicks on the average Windows PC. Many of my clients have laptops and most of them are only just savvy enough to not put their passwords on a sticky note on the palm rests. I needed it to be simpler.