Administrative Tools - Joey D's Mind Share

Moving from SQL Operations Studio to Azure Data Studio

SQL Operations Studio has been renamed and moved to a new project called Azure Data Studio! It's time to move over to the new hotness.

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Joey's Toolset - v2019.04

Like any good I.T. Pro I use a ton of different tools to "get the job done". In today's article I'll provide my list of favorites, and my reasoning for why I have chosen each utility.

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Joe's Super Simple Windows Powershell Log Parser

Hello IT Pros! I’ve got another really helpful post today. It is a very simple log file parser for Windows Powershell. This script was built when my colleagues and

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Install GNS3 v1.4 on Windows 10

Hello world! It has been quite a bit of time since I last wrote a post here. In my defense I have been insanely busy with family, work, and especially

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Viewing logs in Apple iOS

One of the best features of all of Apple's Mac OS X and iOS versions is that the operating system is constantly logging things. Logs are a history of what is going on with your device. If you are experiencing network or wireless issues,

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The Foundation of Windows 7 and Windows 8 Application Compatibility - Shims

The message says “SolarWinds Orion Network Atlas requires Windows XP/2003/2008/Vista/7 to run.” Believe it or not, this is extremely easy to work around. Right-click the installer and choose properties. From the Compatibility tab, enable compatibility mode for Windows 7 and

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Test Your Website Performance with HttpWatch

An interesting problem came up today where I needed to test the performance of a web site. The site would take longer than 30 seconds to display the initial page, then it would take longer than 20 seconds to load a link per click.

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A Must Have Tool, Notepad++

Notepad in Windows is a necessary tool. It is a quick text editor that opens fast, and does Instead, I use . It is a free Notepad replacement that can handle hundreds of different types of files and is an excellent HTTP, XML, CSS, and

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The Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit

With the public release of the Windows 8 Release Preview, Microsoft has gone back and thought about how IT Pros are going to handle imaging. I suppose this is a good thing since it has become increasingly difficult to locate, download, and install the

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Advanced Format Hard Drives and OS Deployment with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit or SCCM

After about a week, I finally figured out how to resolve a problem that we were experiencing with the Dell Latitude E6420 laptops when trying to re-image them with a custom Windows XP image in our MDT environment. The WIM image deploys normally to

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Scan a computer for malware, offline

I’m too lazy tonight to write a full article on the new Windows Defender Offline Scan “Sometimes, malicious and other potentially unwanted software, including rootkits, try to install themselves on your PC. This can happen when you connect to the Internet or install

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Help fix family and friends’ computer issues using TeamViewer

One of the things that I truly enjoy is donating my time to family and friends to help them fix a problem with their computer (only as long as they don’t abuse this free service ). The problem is that I live in Florida

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Get Your Windows Computer Running Faster Again

I got to thinking about a question the other day simply because of the fact that someone that I was helping over the phone with their computer issues asked me a similar question. It went a little something like this, “So this computer is

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Change the Windows Workgroup Name from the Command Line

I have been tasked with changing the WORKGROUP name to something different on several computers. Unfortunately, it can take upwards of 10 minutes to do this manually. It is time to use an administrative script to do the job for me! Make sure to

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Free PC Tool, Smart Defrag 2 for Windows

As you may or may not know, the standard\basic Windows defragmentation tool is not that amazing and it only does one job – defragment the hard drive(s). I have been trying out a different defrag tool and I am liking it quite a

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USB Boot Disk Edition #4 – Using the Windows USB DVD Download Tool

The from Microsoft is an incredibly useful piece of But this is not the only magic of this tool. Using the , any WinPE based image can be made into a bootable USB stick! This includes: Windows Vista Windows 7 Windows Server 2008 Windows Server

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Convert MP4 video to DVD with Windows Live Essentials

What is MP4 video? Right now it is a popular mobile video format that is compatible with iPod, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Zune, and Windows Phone devices. It is a format designed to have a low bitrate but maintain high quality video on mobile devices.

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How to add the Sysinternals Suite as an application install in MDT

I really enjoy Sysinternals tools and I prefer that it is included with every OS install that I deploy. The reason is because sometimes I need to travel to provide on-site support and I don't want to waste time downloading and installing the tools.

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5 Best Free Remote Desktop and Screen Sharing Applications

Normally, I would be the one to write the article on this topic. But AddictiveTips.com beat me to the punch! on some of the best, free, remote desktop sharing programs. For a quick list, here is what is in the article: TeamViewer YuuGuu

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Convert a physical PC to a Microsoft format virtual hard disk using Disk2VHD

This post is for the system admins in the bunch…. Microsoft has a great group of software coders under their wing. In my opinion, Microsoft’s team is their most prominent and valuable group thanks to their excellent support tools and admin software. In

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USB Boot Disk Edition #2 - Install Windows XP from a USB drive

Yes, Windows XP is still the ‘top dawg’ as far as OS installations go. Installing Windows XP is as easy as it gets, from a CD. Wouldn’t it just be easier to install it from a USB drive? Well sure it would! However,

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Enhance the Windows command line user experience with PowerCMD

Windows administrators are pretty familiar with the Windows command line, or CMD. But even with Windows 7, CMD has not changed much since the release of Windows NT 4. You cannot cut and paste easily to or from the command line, you can’t

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USB Boot Disk Editon #1 - Install VMWare ESXi 4.0 from a USB flash drive using Windows 7 64 bit

Bootable USB drives are a great thing. You can easily upgrade the software on a USB drive, wipe out the drive, or replace it. Heck, even most USB flash drives can get run through a washer AND dryer and STILL work! So with this

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Converting old Windows XP Ghost images to Microsoft Deployment Services or Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

**Special Note: Please keep in mind that this article does not explain how to prepare or configure your network environment for imaging. There is simply too much information to write and is out of the scope of this article. I could literally write a

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Desktop Imaging and Operating System Deployment solutions for Windows

I have been assisting with maintaining the desktop images at my current place of employment. Everything works fine for now, but the company wants to deploy Windows 7 with Office 2010 VERY soon. The problem is, we are still using Symantec Ghost 7.5.