Some Notes on the Machines

Lots of info concerning offline files, here:

http://offlinefiles.blogspot.com

This little bit of shareware can be very helpful for some laptop users:

http://www.wctc.net/~jodeand3/tygi.html

To prevent problematical files from being cached, go here in group policy:

Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Network -> Offline Files

and set up the entry “Files Not Cached”.

Do a start/run, and type in the below.  Note the lack of a space between oobe and msoobe!

oobe/msoobe /a

This works in recent Windows versions, but not in XP Home:

tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq myapp.exe" 2 > NUL | find /I /N "myapp.exe" > NUL
if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" echo Program is running

This was copied shamelessly from here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/162291/how-to-check-if-a-process-is-running-via-a-batch-script

To create an uber-super-duper control panel in Windows 7, which contains icons for a huge variety of configuration and tweaking, create a folder with this name:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

and then look inside!

If you get activation errors or issues, the first (and usually the last) thing to try is to re-enter the Windows key. In Server 2008 this can be done from the window which comes by right-click on My Computer and Properties.

If, on attempting to install software, we receive a digital signature error, the following is probably for us:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822798/

There is an easy way to fix large blank spaces in Add/Remove Programs. Load up RegEdit, and search for instances of key name “DisplayIcon”. There are many of these, and their data items are always paths, usually to .EXE or .ICO files. If you see any negative numbers at the rightmost end of these paths, delete the numbers. That should fix it.

When Windows Explorer crashes, it’s often due to problematic third-party Windows Explorer extensions. Here is a tool to handle this:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html