Reset Your Forgotten Windows Password

** copied verbatim from my good friend Mark Dan's excellent blog http://blog.callageek.com.au **

Forgetting your password is never any fun, but luckily there’s a really easy way to reset the password.
All you need is a copy of the Windows installation disk and one simple command line trick.

Resetting Your Forgotten Windows Password

Boot off the Windows disk and select the “Repair your computer” option from the lower left-hand corner.

Follow through until you get to the option to open the Command Prompt, which you’ll want to select.

First you’ll want to type in the following command to backup the original sticky keys file:
copy c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe c:\
Then you’ll copy the command prompt executable (cmd.exe) over top of the sticky keys executable:
copy c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe

Now you can reboot the PC.

Resetting the Password

Once you get to the login screen, hit the Shift key 5 times, and you’ll see an administrator mode command prompt.

Now to reset the password just type the following command, replacing the username and password with the combination you want:
net user Mark NewPassword

Now you can login with your new password.

Checking MAK Product Key Remaining Activation Count

** copied verbatim from my good friend Mark Dan's excellent blog  http://blog.callageek.com.au **

MAK (Multiple Activation Key) product key, is the product key that is provided by Microsoft to its customers on volume licensing agreements to activate many computers running Windows Operating System/Office suite.

Corporate clients of Microsoft has a choice of activating the systems running in their organizations through KMS host or MAK product key. The MAK product key allows companies to activate against Microsoft’s server instead of having installed and maintained a server running KMS service.

One MAK product keys can potentially activate hundreds or even thousands of computers running Windows Vista or Windows 7, or Office 2010 (separate type of product keys for two different products required).

The number of activations can be done by each product key is determined by the software licensing agreements (and the money paid to Microsoft).

Once a MAK product key is been used to activate many machines, most administrators lose count of actual times of remaining activations that can be done with the serial codes.
In addition, some MAK product keys may have been “leaked” to Internet, or “shared” with outsiders, causing the numbers of remaining activation count available dwindling faster than expected.

Microsoft provides a Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) which can be used to check how many activations remain unused for a MAK product key.

If you have a MAK product key, you can check how many activations remain using Volume Activation Management (VAMT) Tool:

1.Download and install Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT).

2.Select….Product Keys in the left pane.

3.Enter….Product Key and a Remark.

4.Click….Verify button.

5.Click….Add Product Key button.

6.Highlight…. the product key in the list below

7.Click….Refresh Product Key Data Online on the right.

8.Check… the product keys listing frame for remaining activation count, which means the number of times that product key can still be used to activate a Microsoft Windows or Office system.

Download

Access your web browsers address bar via the keyboard

You’re browsing the web, going to all the sites you love, and you’re coming down with hand cramps from constantly going back to the mouse just to go back to the address bar so you can type in your next destination. These keyboard shortcuts can save you the trouble.

Making the trip up to your browser’s address bar directly from the keyboard is very easy, but it does vary from browser to browser. Here’s a breakdown:

Firefox: Control/Command + L

Chrome/Safari/WebKit: Control/Command + L

Internet Explorer: Alt + D

Opera: Control/Command + L

Here’s an added bonus. If your browser has a separate search box

Firefox: Control/Command + K

Safari: Command + Option + F

Internet Explorer: Control + E

Opera: Control/Command + E

If you’re not familiar, use Command for a Mac and Control for a Windows machine.

There are many useful browser shortcuts, but this one ranks pretty high. 

All joking aside, it is really annoying to constantly have to use the mouse to go to the address bar.

msosync.exe Process… What is it ?

** Copied verbatim from my good friend Mark Dans excellet site http://blog.callageek.com.au **



If you are using Office 2010, you may have come across MSOSYNC.EXE process in the Task Manager.

MSOSYNC.EXE Process?

Microsoft Office 2010 now caches your document for faster viewing. Whether it is a Word document, Excel spread sheet, or a PowerPoint presentation, Office 2010 will cache the documents. Msosync.exe process stands for Microsoft Office Document Cache and is used to cache the documents. In layman’s term, Msosync.exe process makes caching of Office 2010 documents possible.

What happen if you Kill the process?

It’s safe to end the process. It takes 2-3MB of system memory and does not effect the overall speed of the OS. It will start again when Office 2010 begins to cache a document.

What else is this process used for?

Remember Office 2010 Upload Center?
The documents when uploaded to SkyDrive are cached in the local drive for faster viewing. You can view all cached files by opening Upload Center and then selecting All Cached Files from the drop-down menu.
Short Tip for Beginners: Open Upload Center by typing Upload Center in Start Searchand then hit Enter.

How to Delete cached documents?

Office 2010 by default reserves 10% quota for cached documents. In my case it equals to 14.5Gb of space, which is a lot. To delete cache, head over to Upload Center settings and hit the Delete Cached Filesbutton.

When prompted for confirmation, hit Delete Cached Informationbutton.

This will delete all cached files and free up some disk space along the way. Since there is a direct relationship between the MSOSYNC.EXE process and the Document Cache, we have covered both tips in this post.

Speeding up LAN based Automation OS boot times using a Custom TFTP Server for Altiris (for WinPE and Linux)

(copied verbatim from http://www.winsysadminblog.com/2011/06/speeding-up-lan-based-automation-os-boot-times-using-a-custom-tftp-server-for-altiris-for-winpe-and-linux/)

One of the more easier ways of speeding up your WinPE boot times via PXE are changing the default TFTP server which comes with Altiris. First of all, open up the PXE Configuration Manager and disable Multicast since the WinPE image cannot be transferred over Multicast anyway(only DOS supports Multicast via TFTP). This simple tweak shaves around a second off your PXE Boot time.
Another tweak which can be performed is changing the TFTP Server itself. This sounds quite difficult but is quite easy to accomplish and is a significant benefit.  My own testing has shown that 10 Clients concurrently loading a WinPE image do it around 45-50% faster using another TFTP Server than if I was to continue using Altiris’s own server.
I was also going to cover compressing the WinPE image to reduce its file size, but found thatwhen doing so, the reduction in size was minimal shaving off around 10mb.
I’ll be using the Open Source Open TFTP Server, available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/tftp-server/. Download it and install it either on your Altiris Server or like I did, on my workstation and then copy it over to your server. You will also need to copy over your Settings file.
Firstly, open up the Services control applet and Stop the Altiris PXE MTFTP Server service.
Now comes the good part. Open an elevated command prompt. The following is based on our Altiris setup, with it installed on D drive and me creating a folder under PXE for OpenTFTP and pasting the OpenTFTP executable and Settings file into that folder.

sc config "Altiris PXE MTFTP Server" binpath= "D:\Deployment Server\PXE\OpenTFTP\OpenTFTPServerMT.exe"

That will reconfigure the MTFTP service path that Altiris uses to push out files from the Altiris supplied MTFTP to our Open TFTP server. You can go into the Services control applet and start the Altiris MTFTP service to begin using the new executable.
To try and get the most out of OpenTFTP server, have a play with the Settings file, primarly the blksize option. Ours is set to 1456 and can be changed depending on your network environment.
If for any chance you want to return to the Altiris MTFTP server then you simply need to run the sc config command pointing to your Altiris PXE MTFTP executable so stop the service again and enter the following into an elevated command prompt making sure to match the path to your Altiris location:

sc config "Altiris PXE MTFTP Server" binpath= "D:\Deployment server\PXE\PxeMtftp.exe"

Then start the service again and you are back to using the default Altiris multi-thread TFTP server.
This simple tweak shaves heaps of time off of WinPE (also Linux) automation boot times. If you are running the Dos based automation then there isn’t really a need to run this tweak as the transfer is small enough not to take long anyway.

Convert running Windows 7 to raid

NOTE: These instructions assume your workstation is equipped with an Intel chipset, no responsibility is taken for any loss of data.

To convert a running (ie previously installed) Windows 7 installation from AHCI to RAID do the following:

Step 1. Make a backup of your system
Step 2. Set HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\iaStorv\Start to 0 (zero) - it's a DWORD value.

Step 3. Install Intel Storage Matrix Manager and drivers (look on Intels web site)
Step 4. Reboot.
Step 5. Open Intel Storage Matrix Console, Select Create RAID from the Actions Menu.

NOTE: It is possible to migrate the system drive to a raid system, follow the wizard in the Intel Storage Matrix Console.

Step 6. Wait for the raid array to rebuild - this can take hours :)

Disable Windows 7 Action Centre Backup Notification

(copied verbatim from MSDN)

DisableMonitoring

On Windows client platforms beginning with Windows 7, users are automatically prompted to configure the Windows Backup feature if they have not already done so. These notifications appear at computer startup time, beginning seven days after the operating system is installed. They also appear when the user plugs in a hard disk drive; in this case, the notifications appear immediately.
OEMs and developers of third-party backup applications can use the DisableMonitoring registry value to turn off these automatic notifications.
This value does not exist by default, so it must be created under the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsBackup
The DisableMonitoring registry value has the data type REG_DWORD and is interpreted as follows:

• If the value's data is set to 1 and if users have not already configured the Windows Backup feature, the automatic notifications are turned off. If an automatic notification is already present in Action Center, setting this registry value causes the notification to be removed at 10:00 the following morning.
• If the value does not exist, if its data is not set, or if its data is set to zero, the automatic notifications are not turned off.

Windows Vista and Windows XP/2000:  This registry value is not supported.