Some Notes on the Machines

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

The Microsoft User State Migration Tool is recommended:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=799ab28c-691b-4b36-b7ad-6c604be4c595&displaylang=en

Before installing XPSP3 on an Hewlett-Packard system with an AMD chip, install this:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericSoftwareDownloadIndex?cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&softwareitem=pv-60484-1&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

Microsoft JET database, service pack 8, can sometimes help a lot in speed in Windows 2000:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/829558

See here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;316739

This permits memory usage tuning for Windows Server 2003.

MSDE has its own passwording system. Instead of “Administrator”, the first username is “sa”. To reset it, log in as local admin, and use this command line:

osql -S COMPUTERNAME\SERVERNAME -d databasename -Q "sp_password NULL, 'newpassword', 'sa'"

COMPUTERNAME is the hostname of the local system, i.e., the contents of COMPUTERNAME in batch.

SERVERNAME is whatever the server name is. Some MSDE installations appear to not need the -S item at all. If you don’t have SERVERNAME, try the command without the -S option, and see if it works. If it doesn’t, you’ll have to investigate your MSDE application to find out what SERVERNAME it is using.

databasename is the database name of the application.

newpassword is the new password you want to use for username ‘sa’.

This procedure may work with the fully-fledged Microsoft SQL Server, but has not been confirmed with it.