Windows

From modern Windows all the way to Win XP

Win 7 and Win 8 – How to Rename All System Directories
(and W2K8 Server, and R2, and XP too)

2017/07/30
By
Modified: 2017/06/25
Multiple Windows Installs on One Drive

If only you could control names of directories, where Microsoft installs Windows, Data and Program Files. If you could, you  would be able to  install multiple instances of operating system on the same drive.  So. let’s do it anyway.  To do that you need two parallel installs of you favorite operating system on the same computer.  For now it has to be on 2 different drives.   You need this so you can manipulate locked files and directories of one install, while booting into the other one. Disclaimer This article applies to any Microsoft operating system, and uses the most complicated Windows 7 64-bit as an example.  This method was also tested…

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Resolved: The system cannot find message text for message …

2017/07/28
By
Modified: 2017/06/25
NewCMD-Bad

What a pleasure to resolve a long standing problem.   And not by an accident.   No.  But by applying a heavy-duty problem-solving pressure tactic.  This is gold, Jerry, gold!  Can I use it? At some point you are so fed up with a problem, you are ready to tackle almost anything. Ever since Vista and Windows 2008 Server, if you rename cmd.exe for security reasons, you wouldn’t be able to see any messages in a Command Prompt, and what is even worse, you wouldn’t see any error messages. Instead all you see is something like this: The system cannot find message text for message number 0x2350 in the message file for Application.…

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Remotely Power Up or Wake Your Wired PCs Over the Internet

2017/07/26
By
Modified: 2017/06/25
Power-Up

Idea – Reduce Noise, Save on Electricity My electric company installed an electricity consumption gadget, and ability to monitor usage online. A few month into the experiment I realized, that I can easily reduce electric usage, if I turned off my server. It is been over a year since I migrated all my sites to Amazon cloud, so now my server only needs to be on, when I need it on. All the nights and 90% of all work hours it can be off.  But how to do that? I recall seeing something in BIOSes of Intel motherboards called Wake-On-LAN.  First time I saw something like this was in May of…

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Block PC Outbound Connections on Router Level (All but RDP)

2017/06/27
By
Modified: 2017/06/25
Router-Open-Ports-for-RDP-3389

This article applies to a scenario, when you already can establish RDP to a machine on your internal network from a remote network.  Now you’ve decided to tighten security screws and close all external access to and from that machine except for RDP on the router level. Inbound connections to a server you can block easily using firewall on the machine itself.  This article deals with a situation, when you need to block access for any process or application running on your server to the external resources.  Other machines on your network still would be able to make external connections through the router. Note: It is good a practice to change…

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How to Reset Win XP Admin Password

2017/06/21
By
Modified: 2017/04/30

There are two ways to reset forgotten Administrator password. Method one – Reset During Repair Reinstall: Use Win XP installation disk Run Recovery (not Recovery Console) Press Shift+F10 during GIU portion of repair / install Run LUSRMGR.MSC to reset any user password to whatever you want During my tests, this method always ended up in freeze  during a late install stage on “Deleting Temp Files” Method Two – Use LUNIX bootable CD: Download free boot CD software from http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/ It might be called Offline Registry Editor, but this utility main purpose is to reset Administrator passwords to blank. Burn a bootable disk (only 4MB) Boot from this CD. Blank Administrator password…

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Moving Win XP from RAID to RAID Machine

2017/06/18
By
Modified: 2017/04/30

After several days of heavy exhausting battles and sleepless nights, after testing dozens of options, after browsing many proposed Internet solutions, I finally was able to move an old instance of Windows XP on a new machine with new RAID drivers. That happened at 13:23 on December 12, 2010.  I moved Win XP from old RAID machine to a new RAID machine. O boy! I found  a clear and clean way to do this task.  I will also use the same technique to move any Microsoft operating system from a Single drive to a RAID machine.  And this also works great, if you simply switching your PC controller from IDE to…

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Process **\MCSHIELD.EXE contains signed but untrusted code …

2017/05/25
By
Modified: 2017/04/30
mfehidk-EventID-516

This fix was tested with Windows XP Pro SP3 with Office 2003 SP3 and McAfee AntiVirus Plus. Finally.   Finally I found a solution for this really scary-looking error message that was bugging me since 12/24.  Marry Christmas! Description of a Problem Every time you restart you PC you see a very unpleasant Warning Event ID 516 in your system event log from mfehidk. This is the very last system message before computer reboots or goes to sleep. Process **\MCSHIELD.EXE pid (864) contains signed but untrusted code, but was allowed to perform a privileged operation with a McAfee driver. What is Causing it? It appears that most people (and I join them) …

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Cisco VPN Client Error 51 – Open Your Firewall

2017/05/23
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Modified: 2017/04/30
Cisco Error 51

Annoying!  How Annoying! This very simple, very typical error message, but it is so hard to find a quick solution. Symptoms: You are starting a Cisco VPN Client and immediately you are getting this error message: Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem. Please make sure that you have at least one network interface that is currently active and has an IP address and start this application again.     Most of Internet discussions on this error message revolve around MAC OS.  But this error I was able to fix on Windows XP. Quickly – What to Do? Quickly – Open your firewall.  Each firewall solution is different, but…

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Invisible Files in Windows 7, 8 and 10 Program Files

2017/05/19
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Modified: 2017/04/30
Program Files in Windows Explorer

Summary First of all – it is not a virus! It is not a bug either. It is a feature, that doesn’t allow legacy applications to write files inside Program Files directory.  This feature allows legacy applications think that they are writing to a system folders. Symptoms You can see your custom files inside one of the Program Files directory folder through your application.  You can open them and view them and modify them..  However, if you open the same directory in Windows Explorer, your files are not there.  You can’t see them, even if your a super administrator of all administrators.  What is the Mystery? You can see your custom…

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Extremely Slow Windows XP Shutdown – Fixed

2017/05/01
By
Modified: 2017/04/30
WinXP-Slow-Shutdown

Several years I had this problem in one particular instance of Windows XP Professional – an extremely slow shutdown upon clicking on Shutdown button.  For several minutes system would completely freeze, and then Shutdown/Restart dialog box would finally come up. What did I know about the problem.  It was extremely annoying.  It was persistent.  And it was happening only on one  instance of XP, so that excluded the possibility of a faulty hardware. It was so bad, that I came up with a workaround.  I would open up a Task Manager and end one after another svchost.exe processes running under SYSTEM name.  A counter and warning would appear saying that your…

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Save and Restore Registry Security with Microsoft SubInACL

2017/04/29
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Modified: 2017/03/03
SubInACL-Utility-in-Action

Problem You need to search and replace large registry databases with a set of new values.  You have a third-party utility to do the job, but this utility can only update values writable by administrator.  Thousands of registry keys are owned by NT Service\TrustedInstaller and protected even for Administrators.  What to do? If you simply use REGEDIT to take ownership and add full rights to Administrator to all registry at once, you will definitely achieve the goal, but you will ruin the intricate security permissions for dozens of system service accounts that populate registry security.  Windows will run but many features like Windows Update will become broken. Solution The plan of…

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