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Solution Accelerators

Solid “core” recommendations when shopping for new desktop PC hardware.

What I look for in a Vista PC | Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise |

Drivers for common hardware types in a single location.

The Vista Master Driver List | Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise |

No third party utilities required.

Merge two file names ( may.csv and may1.csv ) into a new file called may2.csv, use the following from a command window:

copy/b may.csv +may1.csv may2.csv <Enter>

How do I merge or join files from the command line?

• Processor — A minimum of a 600-MHz processor is required and a 1-GHz processor is recommended.
• RAM — A minimum of 256 MB of RAM is required and 512 MB of RAM is recommended.
• Disk Space — A minimum of 170 MB of free disk space is required, with the Microsoft .NET Framework V2.0 as a prerequisite.

Upgrading MSDE 2000 to SQL Server 2005 Express

Active Directory Explorer AD Explorer is an advanced Active Directory AD viewer and editor. You can use AD Explorer to easily navigate an AD database, define favorite locations, view object properties and attributes without having to open dialog boxes, edit permissions, view an objects schema, and execute sophisticated searches that you can save and re-execute.

AD Explorer also includes the ability to save snapshots of an AD database for off-line viewing and comparisons. When you load a saved snapshot, you can navigate and explorer it as you would a live database. If you have two snapshots of an AD database you can use AD Explorers comparison functionality to see what objects, attributes and security permissions changed between them.

AD Explorer works on Windows 2000 and higher.

Active Directory Explorer v1.0

Alcohol 52 is emulation software allowing users to play CDs DVDs without the need for the physical disc. Notebook users and PC Game players would benefit the most from Alcohol 52%. It supports 25 plus languages and can handle up to 6 virtual CD DVD-ROM drives, all at once. The reading speed of a virtual CD-ROM is 200X.

Example use: Trying to install the Windows Vista Automated Installation Kit to access the Windows PE utilities. This WAIK download saved to a hard disk is stored as vista_6000.16386.061101-2205-LRMAIK_EN.img (note the .img file extension). Mount the WAIK image via the Alcohol 52 interface.

Alcohol 52% Free Edition

Have a 40GB external USB drive you’re trying to use with Ghost? If you format the external drive with the XP formatting tool, the maximum size XP will format it to is 32 GB. To format the drive to a full 40 GB, use Windows 98 or ME formatting tools — yes that means booting into one of those operating systems.

From a XP command prompt type:

format X:/fs:fat32

Moving a large group of terminal server user home folders from one clustered hard drive share to another on a SAN. If you try to manually copy or “move” the home folders, the NTFS permissions on the new home folders are not retained and users are not able to access their directories on the new hard drive share properly.

Solved by:
Creating a backup of the original home directories using ntbackup.exe and then restoring them on the new hard drive share. The original NTFS permissions are retained for all files and folders.

After restoring the home folders to the new location, return to the old home drive share and delete the previous home folders.

If you have difficulty deleting folders and files from the old home drive share because of errors like this “Cannot delete file: Access is denied”, then use a utility like Unlocker. It’s a free delete utility and works quite well.

Don’t forget to update the terminal server home folder location in each user’s profile. Use ADModify.net for bulk account changes like this.

This article provides a step-by-step guide to making bulk changes to users in Active Directory using the ADModify.NET tool.

Making bulk changes to Active Directory users with ADModify.NET