stuart test blog

While the NZ dollar has been so strong over the last few weeks, it was a great opportunity to do some shopping online on Amazon. Here are the books I’ve bought recently: Geek books: Active Directory, 3rd Edition by by Joe Richards, Robbie Allen, Alistair Lowe-NorrisThis is the Active Directory bible as far as I’m […]

Windows Script Host 5.7 has just been released for Windows 2000, XP and 2003. WSH 5.6 shipped with Windows XP and version 5.7 shipped with Windows Vista so this is the first that 5.7 is available for the other operating systems. I’m not sure how many changes and incompatibilities there are between versions as there […]

This video by itself is quite funny, but even funnier is that you can get to it via a link from Microsoft: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7200131 Not sure how long this link will stay active for.

I need an extra four or five hours in each day at the moment. I’m adding these videos to my to-do list. System Center Essentials 2007 Training Videos Presenter Biographies Scott Bleasdell Scott Bleasdell is a program manager on the System Center Essentials team responsible for product planning, focusing on future releases. Scott has been […]

Lost in the hoopla of the announcement that Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 has been released, was that their ‘Express’ counterparts have also been updated to Beta 2 and are now available to download from here: Visual Studio 2008 Express Downloads This is great news for us part-time coneheads and there’s a whole bunch […]

As far as I’m aware, Microsoft have been keeping very quiet about Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. Paul Thurrott even theorised that Microsoft may never release a SP3 for XP. So it was interesting to read two posts on the TechNet Blogs site, mentioning the “forthcoming XP Service Pack 3.” This is the first […]

Most large organisations employ dedicated packagers to create automated software installations that can be deployed enterprise-wide using distribution tools such as Microsoft’s SMS 2003 or Group Policies. Smaller companies, however, can’t afford to package applications and often revert to manually installing the software on computers as required. Adobe provides a useful utility to help administrators customise […]

The Disk Cleanup tool can be incredibly useful but is often underutilised. Here are some tips I’ve picked up that can help you utilise the tool to its fullest. Launch the tool quickly by opening the Run command (Start -> Run or Win Key + R) and type: “cleanmgr” (without quotes) To configure the settings […]

[tags]sysinternals,microsoft,tools,utilities,downloads[/tags] A utility that I’ve just recently started to use a lot is the Contig tool from Sysinternals. What it does is check one or more files for fragmentation and then attempts to move the file to an area on your hard drive where the whole file can live contiguously (is that really a word?) […]

Microsoft have just released a new tool under the Sysinternals banner called Active Directory Explorer. Read the blurb from the website below for more information but based on this description, it sounds amazing! It’s odd then, that there is no other information about this new tool apart from the quote below. This seems like a […]