Vista - Revealing Administrator Login

Strangely, you will need to login into an account that has administration rights, then right click on the Command Prompt program and select Run as administrator. If you just run it normally the following command won't work. After it runs successfull, logout, and you Administrator will be displayed along with normal user accounts.

> net user administrator /active:yes

  The command completed sucessfully.

Elsewhere
How-To Geek

Windows Scheduled Tasks

I:\tasks> at 7p /every:m,t,w,th,f,s,su I:\tasks\test.bat ^> I:\tasks\output.txt

  Added a new job with job ID = 1

I:\tasks> at

  Status ID   Day                   Time      Command Line
  -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
          1   Each M T W Th F S Su  7:00 PM   I:\tasks\test.bat > I:\tasks\output.txt

I:\tasks> at 1 /d

I:\tasks> at

  There are no entries in the list.

I:\tasks> at /?

  The AT command schedules commands and programs to run on a computer at
  a specified time and date. The Schedule service must be running to use
  the AT command.

  ...

Windows XP Recovery Weirdness

Here's the deal, could not login. After several attempts, pulled out Offline NT Password & Registry Editor CD and discovered all user accounts, including Administrator, were gone.

• Attempted to do a recovery, but it needs to know Administrator's password so no go there.

  - boot install CD
  - Press 'R'

• When booting from original install media, the is an option to install (ENTER), which will be followed by restore option. Though this appeared to proceed it appears to only restore system files and not recover lost users, so still not able to login.

  - boot install CD
  - Press 'ENTER'
     detect existing installs
  - hilight existing install
  - Press 'R'

• Next option was to re-install XP, but not reformat the partition. This requried booting from XP install media, hitting ENTER to install, then specifying C:\WINALT as system directory. After the install, the system porvided a boot prompt first was new install, second was orginal install (no login). Booting to the new install works. Furthermore, looks at contents of My Documents shows that pre-existing user folders have been left, and new users have been given lsightly different folders names.

  - boot install CD
  - Press 'ENTER'
     detext existing installs
  - Press 'Esc'
  - hilight C:
  - Press 'ENTER'
  - Press 'C'
  - hilight Leave the current file system intact
  - Press 'ENTER'
  - Press 'Esc'
  - \WINALT
  - Press 'ENTER'

  
  Excellent, no user data was lost. So copy all user data to offline media, when done consider rebuilding OS from scratch, fresh HD format, ...

Windows XP Corrupt Login Profile

The current work around for this is

• locate and copy to backup folder all pertinent folders in C:\Documents and Settings
• System Properties > Computer Name
  Change
  Workgroup
  "workgroup"
  [ may need domain admin to do this ]
  ok
  restart
• login as local user
• System Properties > Computer Name
  Change
  Domain
  "Windows Domain"
  [ may need domain admin to do this ]
  ok
  restart
  [ This will destroy data in old domain associated profiles! They should already be backed up at this point ]
• login as domain user
  [ your desktop and settings are reset to system defaults ]

An alternative to this may be to use system restore points. However, unless a known restore point has been made recently this may not be desirable. Also, the system must not be disturbed from the point of corruption discovery and restore point execution, lest the restore may not work properly.

Kelly's Corner

Microsoft

Windows XP Windows Slimming

Windows 2000 (i.e. 'classic' desktop) used reasonably tight window border ornamentation. Windows XP bloats the default window border and other settings. Although there is a setting to revert the whole desktop to 'classic', in some cases the XP look helps you know you are not on an older version of Windows. The following settings should tighten up your XP desktop to pretty much match Windows 2000 without dispensing with the XP color and other thematic trimmings.
Display Properties -> Appearance -> Advanced

• Inactive Title Bar 18 / 8
• Pallete Title 15
• ScrollBar 16
• Selected Items 18
• Icon Spacing (Vertical/Horizontal) 43

Windows 2000/XP Hibernate

Sometime older system freak out out on sleep ...

• Start Menu: Control Panel, Power Options [Power Scheme Tab]
• Check the Running on Batteries settings.
• Notice a time out for sleep and a timeout for hibernate. Insure the sleep timeout is set to NEVER. Hibernate timeout set to something reasonable. Note, you may have to 'enable' hibernate functions elsewhere in the Power Options control panel before you can assign a timeout.

The only reason sleep freaks out a system when going to sleep is due to bad drivers, or out of date 'firmware'. In some cases these drivers can be updated, but if hibernate fixes the problem usually don't bother.

Windows 2000 Add/Remove Programs Broken

> regsvr32 mshtml.dll
  Click OK to confirm
> regsvr32 shdocvw.dll -i
  Click OK to confirm
> regsvr32 shell32.dll -i, and then press ENTER.
  Click OK to confirm

Windows 2000 Network Guest account access

So you have your Windows system on a local area network and you would like others on the network to be able to see your shared folders. Normally Windows require username passwords to match on client and host computer to access shared folders. Unless you enable the guest account.

Windows 2000 Server may be pissy about this until you give the Guest account a password.

Windows 2000 Media Server Setup
This is best done as a fresh install of Windows 2000 Server on to a freshly formatted NTFS partition. Windows Media Server is included with Windows 2000 Server (though you may need the Advanced Server variant), but is not automatically installed.

Installing is typical. When the installer eventually asks what components to install, make sure you UNCHECK IIS which is evil and not required. Make sure you CHECK Windows Media Services. Alternatively, you may defer installing Windows Media Services until after the base OS is in place, apply the latest Service Pack from Microsoft, and then use the Add/Remove Windows COmponents control panel to add the capability.

Depending on your needs, you may also need to Configure Server -> Server Properties -> HTTP Streaming and Distribution so that it is set to WMS Enable HTTP streaming for Windows Media Unicast service.

Windows 2000 Media Server Notes
When it is installed properly, a user NetShowServices and a group NetShow Administrators will be created. Also, four services will be started, and unlike most other services for which Log On As = LocalSystem, these services will have Log On As = .\NetShowServices will be used.

Under some circumstance services may be misconfigured and not start properly. In this situation in may be best to use the Add/Remove Windows Components control panel to uninstall Windows Media Server, and if necessary remove the user and group (if uninstalling doesn't already do that). Then reboot, and reinstall using the same control panel.

Windows 2000 Server + laptop = no sleep
Beware of running Windoes 2000 Server on laptops. If the battery runs low the system will just shutoff, no sleep. All the snazy sleep modes for Windows 2000 Professional are not present in the server version.

CD Burning - using Easy CD Creator

First off, recent versions of Easy CD Creator (circa Version 5) may appear to HANG or otherwise LOCK A MACHINE UP when in fact massive deep file directories are being processed. Delays of 20 minutes or so are NOT UNUSUAL! BE PATIENT! This also means that there may be little value in buying a 1000X CDRW drive over a 4X one since this delay has nothing to do with the CD burner hardware. Furthermore, at least older (circa version 4) versions of Easy CD Creator were well written enough to show nice file update activity and otherwise not hork out on the system during the initial file setup. Later versions are prone to hogging the CPU, ignoring window updates (which makes the display seem to hang), and otherwise not indicate what its doing - bad, bad, bad!

Otherwise the software work pretty well. Note, ar some point Microsoft will probably incorporate into the next version of Windows CD burning capabilities equivelent to the most common used features in Easy CD Creator. Which means future version of CD Creator will be even more funky and prone to ignoring the user in order to free up their developers time to enable some wanger, esoteric performance burning mode not yet supported by Microsoft 'initially'.

Examples

Make 127.0.0.1:80 = zaptech.com web server
  ssh -L 80:192.168.11.1:80 ssh.zaptech.com

Make 127.0.0.1:23 = zaptech.com telnet, 127.0.0.1:2401 = zaptech.com cvs
  ssh -L 23:192.168.11.1:23 -L 2401:192.168.11.1:2401 ssh.zaptech.com

Windows XP Remote Desktop Connection

Remote Desktop Connection aborts
If the host you are connecting to has some pending Microsoft Updates that need a reboot to install, the host may disable Remote Desktop connections until after the reboot. Alas, this means you have to attend the machine directly, check for Windows Updates to see if it is waiting to reboot, allow it to do so. After reboot it should allow remote connections again. In some cases may need to reboot more than once.

Remote Desktop Connection and localhost
If for some reason you want to connect to localhost (say you are using ssh to port forward a connection) you may find XP doesn't want to cooperate. Simple work around is to use 127.0.0.2 which should provide identical function to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1 seems to be blocked by XP).

More elaborate and perhaps unnecessary workaround is to change how you launch Remote Desktop. First make sure My Computer > Remote > [ all connections disabled ] Otherwise attempts to forward port 3389 will fail. Furthermore, with XP localhost connections are not allowed, sort of.

1. Copy mstsc.exe and mstscax.dll to a seperate folder
2. Right click mstsc.exe choose Properties > Compatibility
3. check "Run this program in compatibility mode for:"
4. "Windows 98 / Windows ME"

W2000 Terminal Services

!!! DANGER !!!
It is not uncommon for W2000 Terminal Service to become corrupted after running continuously for several weeks. That is, it no longer accepts external connections, and netstat -ap tcp does not list port 3389 as listen anymore. There appears to be no way to reliably prevent this from happening. Even worse, once it gets in this mode there is no way to fix it without reinstalling the OS! Ergo, save your data elsewhere because the boot partition may need to be wiped to restablish remote terminal service. (if you know a possible solution/workaround for this please notify info@howtolabs.net)

Terminal Server Setup

you will need install cd

settings - control panel - add/remove programs
add/remove windows components
terminal services (check mark)
Details
  - Client Creator Files
    (not needed if you already have a copy of MSTSC.EXE)
  - Enable Terminal Services
remote administration mode
- restart computer -

MSTS uses port 3389 according to netstat -a
To change server listening port use REGEDIT ...

Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE | System | CurrentControlSet | Control | Terminal Server | WinStations | RDP-Tcp
Value: PortNumber

3D Test Apps

These downloadable apps may help qualify a system's 3D capabilities

• oldpc3d.zip (375 KBytes): classic Microsoft Windows' Direct3D and OpenGL demos