These things actually work.
Even though they advertise “plug ‘n pray”, there’s one shortcoming: PNP creates a new USB printer port, but doesn’t recognize the printer (obviously, because it’s not a USB device!)
All you need to do is manually install the printer on that port. Which port is that? Check your “Printer Properties > Ports” for the USB port with no printer assigned.
OK, not exactly a small business topic, but I’m a Mac kinda guy, and I bought a 40GB Apple TV a while back. It was OK, but I really resented the limited storage capacity. Well, after I found this article at engadget, I was ready to realize my dream for the Apple TV.
Now I have a 320GB Apple TV with room for all my music and movies that I can take anywhere with a decent TV (especially nice with an HDMI connection – lots of hotels seem to be upgrading). 320 GB seems to be the limit for 2.5 IDE drives AFAIK; I went with Western Digital and had no problems
The whole procedure went pretty well, except for the T8 Torx driver (make sure you have one before you start; I ended up with a T8 bit in my 1/4″ nut driver).
The engadget procedure has a VERY handy tip regarding the disk copy procedure that would have saved me a ton of time and makes it almost easy to do this procedure even with an old PowerBook:
dd if=/dev/disk2 count=1335 of=/dev/disk3 bs=1024k
“count=1335″ says “only copy 1335 (1024k) blocks (about 1.4GB)” instead of the whole disk, which is appropriate if you’re doing a disk to disk copy. I don’t think the number is exact, so I think it works in all cases. You could probably delete the last partition before copying (you have to delete it eventually), and ignore the block count, but that’s a little scary for most people.
Another possible frustration saver is the partition recovery step which I stumbled on before I got to engadget. There is a second partition table at the end of the disk which might not get recreated with a partial copy, so partition recovery is a good idea.
Engadget also helps you delete the Spotlight hidden files with some simple sudo commands (type carefully).
Nicely done, engadget.
I use Network Places with Front Page and Expression Web 2. They also make nice shortcuts for remote file transfers. My wife has a tough time with the FTP process, but she can use Network Places quite easily — once they’re set up.
As I recall, Network Places were a lot easier to create in W2K. You didn’t have to use a control panel or a wizard.
XP: Control panel > Network and Internet Connections > Network Connections > My Network Places > Add a network place
HOW TO: Create a Shortcut to a Network Location in Windows XP
I got into a little bit of trouble with WSUS when I moved some files around after my upgrade (probably should have waited to do that inside WSUS), and WSUS uninstallation failed. I was caught in between installation and de-installation. The answer?
Windows Installer CleanUp Utility
This little tool from Microsoft will cleanup uninstall information, including registry entries, I guess, so you can go back to installing software in peace.
I notice there’s some disclaimer about Office 2007 – another strike against it.
Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools contains “ifmember.exe” to test for membership during your login scripts.
@echo off ifmember "domain admins" if not errorlevel 1 goto user echo you're an admin! goto quit user: echo just a regular user
For those of you who are old-time NT, Windows, or DOS batch experts, the resource kit provides Ifmember. Many resource kit utilities run on a server, so you don’t need to distribute them to workstations. But Ifmember.exe is a client-side tool and needs to be present on or available to each user’s workstation to work. You can put ifmember.exe on every user’s hard disk, but that’s too much work. An easier way is to put ifmember.exe into the same directory as the logon batch files. (The Netlogon directory is the default directory when the logon batch file is running. Ergo, putting a program into Netlogon installs the program instantly, hands-off.)
NOTE: Netlogon directory is “\\%computername%\sysvol\%userdnsdomain%\scripts” on your server
You cannot manually delete a USB printer port in Windows Server 2003 or in Windows XP
Says Microsoft:
You cannot manually delete a USB printer port in Windows Server 2003 or in Windows XP. This behavior is by design.
By design? Uninstalling a printer doesn’t always remove the USB printer port. There needs to be a manual backup method! Sigh.
What’s the best way to move local profiles off the C: drive?
Sort of like the old UNIX partition scheme — I don’t like to see a lot of user files on the system drive, so I customarily create a D: drive for temp (/tmp) and user directories (/usr).
There are probably two different answers depending on whether or not you have a domain.
Possible answers:
I’ll keep working on this. Comments are welcome.
This is my new blog dedicated to my small business computer support specialty. I plan to cover issues arising from supporting computer applications for small businesses ranging from 5-25 users.
Future topics will likely cover: