ECS Computer Solutions, Christchurch

I created this script out of frustration at work due to people using different systems to access the AIX box and not getting told that their password was due to expire. I then modified it later to then lookup the email address within Windows Active Directory and email the user Read the rest of this entry »

Often when working on remote VMWare servers and you want to boot an ISO from the datastore it doesn’t give you enough time to press ESCAPE and select the CD-ROM. There is an easy fix… Add / Edit the VMX file for the server you are trying CD boot and add the line: bios.bootDelay = "boot delay in milliseconds" - Save the file back in the datastore and your done!

Currently I am entrusted with developing a Windows 7 Professional Image for deployment and have until recently been stuck with getting the default user profile to ‘keep’ pinned start menu items.

While I was copying them to C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\StartMenu they still wouldn’t show up. There is actually a complementary Registry key which makes the magic happen. So without further ado: How to set Pinned Start Menu Items for Default Profile in Windows 7 Read the rest of this entry »

Upon Sysprep-ing our first test image of Windows 7 using an unattend.xml our WDS enviroment would produce the error ‘Windows could not apply unattended settings during pass (null).’ At first I thought my unattend.xml file was wrong BUT the actual problem was that WDS was using a Windows Vista Image for the Image Deployment. The required fix was copy boot.wim from the Windows 7 DVD\Sources directory and add that to the ‘Boot Images’ within WDS. After that you PXE boot as per normal and select your newly appointed image!

This post was inspired by this blog post

Recently had an issue were a users account would be locked out every couple of days in the end we resolved it by downloading Account Lockout and Management Tools from Microsoft and running Read the rest of this entry »

First, click the pencil icon in the Friends box on your profile. Then, uncheck the “Show Friend List to everyone” box. Non-friends who come to your profile will then not be able to see this information. Please remember that your Friends List is always visible to you and your friends.

Your friends will still be able to see your friends list but people who aren’t your friends can’t! Yay!!

After a colleague of mine installed WDS at a client site they found that certain laptops and desktop PCs would not be able to pick up the images that have been captured.

The problem lies in the HAL Type of the PC that was captured and then WDS finds the HAL type for the PC asking for an image and if one doesn’t match then you will most probably get the error: “There are no images available”

My scenario was that we had a generic image built and working for Single CPU and MultiCPU PCs but only the Multiple / Newer PCs could see the image in WDS - that is because the HAL type was “Advanced Configuration and power interface (ACPI) PC” but these older PCs were being recognised as Uniprocessor HAL Types.

The solution: Get the image onto the Older PC type (via Ghost or Clonezilla etc) login to the system. Download DevCon and extract into C:\Windows or any other %PATH% variable you like.
Then run:
devcon sethwid @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 := +acpiapic_up !acpiapic_mp
devcon update c:\windows\inf\hal.inf acpiapic_up

Reboot and Login two times then Sysprep and capture again!

Hopefully your good to go!

Reference: http://www.ngohq.com/processors/11891-how-to-update-the-hal-without-reinstalling-windows.html

Keywords: WDS, Force HALs, Force HAL, Windows Deployment Services, WDS, ACPI Multiprocessor PC, acpiapic_up, acpiapic_mp, No Images after Capture, Change HAL Type

Can’t open this item. The text formatting command is not available - Outlook. This error was received when trying to open an Outlook item. Also it seems that Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) couldn’t render a page and it would just be blank. After trying to remove profiles and repair office etc I traced the fault to a recent Windows update KB978207 for IE to be exact. After removing the update and rebooted everything worked again!

By using Sysinternals PSEXEC I installed Visio remotely unattended.

Copy the visio files to the PC in question
Edit the setup.ini file for visio located in files\setup\setup.ini add:

[Options]
; The option section is used for specifying individual Installer Properties.
USERNAME=Your Name
COMPANYNAME=Your Company

Then fire up a command prompt and execute command:

PSEXEC \\PCNAME -S -E -I MSIEXEC /PASSIVE /QB /I C:\TEMP\visio2003\VISSTD.MSI PIDKEY=12345abcde98765zyxwv34567

PCNAME Being the name of the remote PC
C:\TEMP\visio2003\VISSTD.MSI being the path to the VISSTD.MSI package
12345abcde98765zyxwv34567 being your Visio license key

I came across a Windows 7 Skins for KDE - It looked really….exact but the install script was crap it installed a new user and was only Kubuntu based and was pretty brutal at overwriting stuff so I Read the rest of this entry »