Not Just Another Weblog

Annoyances.org has the fix to a bug that's been bothering me for weeks - how to get Windows Explorer to hurry up and list files/folders/mapped drives by simply disabling LMHosts lookup on the file server(s). Brilliant! link EDIT - I had to revisit this, because working in Windows Explorer continually gives the impressions it's fine. But close it, wait a minute, open it again, and it still hangs. (We're mapping drives via DFS to several servers, but mapping them one by one works fine. Also, I'm one of the few users to have detail view enabled...). Finally, via this page , found this fabulous page over at SysInternals , those people rock. This is such bullsh!t--Microsoft fixed this explorer.exe cluster fsck in Vista--but there's no patch for currently supported OSes! No patch for Windows XP, which our entire org. uses. In fact, most of the Windows PC's run it now. Bastards! Stuff like this from Redmond really pisses me off. I'm switching to Linux,

Excellent post by Alexander Kjerulf over at Positive Sharing--top ten management mistakes with IT staff: "When the geeks at NCR in Australia threatened to go on strike , it was a move that could have paralyzed ATMs, supermarket cash registers and airplane check-in. This underlines the fact that IT has become so central to almost all corporations, that any disruption may cost a lot of time and money, which again means that keeping the geeks happy at work is an absolute requirement for a modern business. Happy geeks are effective geeks...." link

At the office, I'm gradually converting a ton of legacy PC's to virtual machines. The quick & easy way is to run ntbackup on the old box, bring up a vanilla virtual machine, and restore it onto that. NTbackup is also great when, months from now, someone says oops..I need n . The P2V assisitant, and VMWare's Knoppix distro , is also incredibly good. Sometimes, however, even when the P2V process is flawless, Windows still wants to sh!t a bit. Twice now, I've converted Dell laptops to virtual machines, and had Windows Product Activation rear it's ugly head. we have a volume licensing agreement, but for some ungodly reason, these machines were deployed (before I was here) with the image that came from Dell. With all the crapware that they include. And low and behold, following the ntbackup restore and reboot, Windows XP wants you to reactivate. No thanks. I boot from the Ultimate P2V ISO, just because I love it, and you can customize it with a ton of great t