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Over the last few years, I've been a consultant for a major IT Services company; worked for a UK-based support services company; contracted for Australia’s largest independent magazine distributor; worked in-house designing and project managing a Europe-wide infrastructure refresh for a major fashion design, marketing and retail organisation; and ...

I just discovered this and think it's really useful... I'm in the process of documenting a client's server configuration, using a virtual machine with a VPN connection to the client's network and then a remote desktop protocol (RDP) connection to their servers.  Because the VPN is within a virtual machine, I'm constrained by the limitations ...

I use Windows Notepad a lot and, a few months back, I posted a tip for Send to... Notepad to help people open text files from a context-sensitive right click.  Whilst watching me struggle to edit a load of text files with strange file extensions (as he taught me how to use PHP yesterday) Alex came up with another ...

One of my clients is undertaking a domain consolidation process, moving to a new Active Directory (AD) forest called companyname.com with two child domains - emea.companyname.com and americas.companyname.com. All of the user accounts from the various NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 domains around the organisation are being migrated into this structure ...

Finding information on the Microsoft website is not always easy, but there is some good stuff buried deep there.  Like the Windows Server 2003 TechCenter, with topics including: Best practices for security Active directory best practices Managing core network services For anyone looking at developing a set of operational procedures, the ...

I run Windows Server 2003 on my work laptop (largely because I'm getting up to speed with Windows SharePoint Services right now).  I find that pretty much anything designed for Windows XP runs under Windows Server 2003, but there are some configuration differences out of the box.  One of these is the shutdown event tracker - a useful feature on ...

The UK IT industry is a small world and I frequently attend events where I bump into people that I haven't seen for a while.  A couple of months back I turned up at a course and found myself next to a former colleague from 10 years back. This week I'm attending an SMS training course at QA where the instructor is Bernie Kilshaw, who delivered much ...

Yesterday, I blogged about a shortcut to hibernate a Windows XP PC (for people who are too lazy to use between 3 and 5 clicks when a double-click will do). Keni Barwick replied with an alternative to lock the workstation (%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation) and when I said ''What about Win+L - oh yes, forgot, two fingers ...

I can't find the reference which started me off with this, but a few weeks ago I came across a tip for creating a shortcut to hibernate a Windows XP PC (for people who find that 5 clicks is just too much).  How people find these obscure features I'll never know (I guess its straightforward for a developer to find all the calls to a DLL?), but here ...

After a few weeks developing my unattended PC build using physical PCs, today I needed to deploy a virtual PC (VPC).  It should be simple to boot a VPC to a Remote Installation Services (RIS) server and apply an image as normal, but in case anyone else out there is googling to find out why they can't get it working, here's some of the stuff I've ...