In Windows 7 you can easily change icon for any folder or shortcut via Properties. There a number of places in Windows 7 where you can locate buit-in icons. Some of them  are: C:\Windows\system32\shell32.dll (General) C:\Windows\system32\imageres.dll (General) C:\Windows\System32\DDORes.dll (Devices) C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe (Internet Explorer)

C0000218 {Registry File Failure} Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) occurs if Windows is unable to read one of the registry database file. This can occur because of software or hardware issues, for example: power cut while Windows was writing to registry file (software), or a new bad sector on the system hard drive (hardware). Full…

Skype by default saves all your historical chat (IM) messages on a local computer. This can be disabled in Tools > Settings > IM & SMS > IM Settings If you are planning to re-install Windows or migrate to another PC you may want to keep your historical chat messages. This can be done by…

If you install Exchange 2007 Management Tools on Windows 7 client and try to access Client Access Server (CAS) via Exchange Management Console (EMC) you may get various IIS related errors such as this: An error occurred while trying to access IIS (Internet Information Service) metabase. Make sure the Internet Information Service Manager component is…

Recently came across a new Microsoft utility called Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool (OCAT). This utility works in  a similar way as Microsoft Exchange Best Practices Analyzer, but is looking for issues in local Outlook configurations.

Scenario Exchange Server 2007 Windows 7 client with Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2007 management tools installed Trying to export user’s mailbox with Export-Mailbox cmdlet Problem After running Export-Mailbox –Identity user.name -PSTFolderPath c:\archive.pst Exchange Management Shell crashes with error below:

If you need to find out DELL service tag without physical access to a remote Windows computer you can do this using command line tool wmic.exe Open command prompt (CMD) and run:wmic /user:domain.local\administrator /node:192.168.15.1 bios get serialnumberWhere:domain.local\administrator – domain admin user account192.168.15.1– Remote computer IP address. In theory you can use host name as well,…

If you are accessing Remote Desktop (Terminal) server located in another domain you can come across an issue where Remote Desktop client refuses to use saved login credentials, forcing you to re-renter password every single time. Following error is displayed: Your Credentials did not work Your system administrator does not allow the use of saved…

Ramdisk RamDisk as a virtual hard drive that uses part of your RAM. To the Operating System and applications it appears as a normal physical hard drive. These drives are very fast, much faster than any mechanical or SSD hard drives. Unfortunately they have very limited use because of two reasons: RAM is much more…

Sophos Control Centre can deploy Sophos antivirus software to your client computers remotely. In my experience installation on Windows XP never caused any issues and machines were ready out of the box. On Windows 7, however, installation was failing with folowing error: 0000002e  The installation did not start.  The computer may have been shut down,…

Download PsExec (this is part of Sysinternals PsTools) Start command prompt (cmd) as Administrator Navigate to location of downloaded and extracted PsExec.exe Run: PsExec.exe -i -s cmd.exe-i – Run the program interactively-s – Run in the System accountcmd.exe – Application to start This will open another command prompt window which will run under Local System account. You…

Recently upgraded some machines from Windows XP SP3 to Windows 7 SP1 (fresh install). Couple of users started experiencing serious issues with their Outlook 2010. Soon after starting Outlook would hang and then crash. Outlook.exe process, however, would stay in the task manager and nothing would kill it. New Outlook instance would refuse to start…