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Apr 22, 2009 By Jared Heinrichs Leave a Comment

How to Dual Boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista

If you’re dying to try out Windows 7 but aren’t ready to give up your installation of XP or Vista, let’s take a look at how to dual boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista.

Preliminary tasks: Download the Windows 7 Beta and Burn It to a DVD


Assuming you’ve already downloaded a fresh copy of Windows 7, you’ll need to burn it to a DVD in order to do a fresh installation. To handle this task, grab a copy of my favorite CD and DVD burning tool called “ImgBurn”, burn the ISO to a DVD, and move right along to step 1.

Step 1: Partition Your Hard Drive

Before you go installing Windows 7, the first thing you need to do is create a new partition on your hard drive to hold the new installation of Windows. Partitioning your hard drive will vary depending on whether you’re running XP or Vista—namely because Vista has a partition tool baked in, XP does not.

Partition Your Hard Drive in XP

To partition your hard drive in Windows XP, you’ll need to download some sort of third-party partitioning software. I prefer to the GParted live CD, a free, open source boot CD that can handle all kinds of partitioning duties.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To use it, just download the GParted Live CD, burn it to a CD, then reboot your computer (booting from the disc). You’ll boot right into the partitioning tool.

  1. Resize your current OS drive to free up enough space for a Windows 7 partition (the minimum system requirements ask for 16GB).

  2. Create a new partition from the newly freed space.

  3. Apply your changes.

Partition Your Hard Drive in Vista

The folks at Redmond were kind enough to include a disk partitioning tool in Vista if you know where to look. So go to:

Control Panel

  • System and Maintainence (skip this one if you’re in Classic view)
  • administrative Tools
  • Computer Management.

Once you launch the Computer Management tool, click on Disk Management under the Storage heading in the sidebar. It’s partitioning time.

Step 2: Install Windows 7

Now that you’ve done all the heavy lifting, it’s time for the easy part: Installing Windows 7 on your new partition. So insert your Windows 7 disc and reboot your computer (you’ll need to have enabled booting from your DVD drive in your system BIOS, but most PCs will have this enabled by default).

Once the DVD boots up it’s a simple matter of following along with the fairly simple installation wizard. When you’re choosing installation type, be sure to select Custom (advanced) and choose the partition you set up above.

DISCLAIMER

Be careful here. Choosing the wrong partition could mean wiping your other Windows installation altogether, so make sure you pick the new partition you just created.

After you select the partition, go grab yourself a drink and let the installer do its work. Windows will run through some installation bits, restart a few times in the process. Eventually you’ll be prompted to set up your account, enter your license key, and set up Windows.

Filed Under: Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP

Apr 22, 2009 By Jared Heinrichs Leave a Comment

How to fix “You might not have permission to use this network resource” file sharing message

Windows XP usually plays nicely, but occasionally you do the odd recalcitrant box that doesn’t want to play nice with the other computers, and share.

If you’ve ruled out the Windows Firewall (Make sure that Windows File Sharing has a checkbox in there for allowed), and everything else looks correct, but it still isn’t working, try the following:

As we need the NTRights program, and it doesn’t come with XP, download and install the administration tools from one of these locations.  Don’t worry about the name, the Kit works fine on XP also:

Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools (Microsoft)
http://www.computersolutions.cn/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/rktools.exe (Locally)

Once installed, please do the following:

  • Click Start, Run (or Press Windows R)
  • Type cmd and click OK
  • In the DOS window (the black screen that just appeared), type the following:
    • net user guest /active:yes
    • ntrights +r SeNetworkLogonRight -u Guest
    • ntrights +r SeNetworkLogonRight -u Everyone
    • ntrights -r SeDenyNetworkLogonRight -u Guest
    • ntrights -r SeDenyNetworkLogonRight -u Everyone
  • Reboot, and try again.  It should work.

Filed Under: Windows Vista, Windows XP

Mar 26, 2009 By Jared Heinrichs Leave a Comment

How to schedule a Windows Powershell script

Couple of things to know

There are two main things that you have to do to schedual Powershell scripts.

  1. Allow Interactive Commands using set-executionpolicy command.
  2. Put Powershell script in a ".ps1" file. You can use any text editor to make this.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that Powershell is set to execute Powershell scripts, instead of only allowing interactive commands to be run in the Powershell environment.

Type the following at the Powershell command prompt:

set-executionpolicy RemoteSigned

This will allow the system to run Powershell scripts that are created locally (Remote Powershell scripts that may be downloaded must be signed).

Once this is done, you can create your Powershell script using notepad. Just make sure you name the file with an extension of .ps1 . Now to run the script outside of its Powershell environment you type a command similar to the following:

powershell -command "& 'MyScript.ps1' "

Just put the above command into a .bat or .cmd file and schedule it like you would normally schedule a script to be run with Windows task scheduler.

Filed Under: Powershell, Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2008, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP

Feb 1, 2009 By Jared Heinrichs Leave a Comment

Can't delete offline sync in Vista

How to remove and offline sybc in Vista

Although I love Windows vista there are some things in it that are much harder then they need to be. One of these things is removing “Offline Files”. You’d think that in order to remove the sync you’d go through either “Offline Files” or “Sync Center” in order to remove an old sync.  If you did think that way you’d be WRONG! Don’t worry… There are other people on the net that will tell you to:

Go to C:\Windows\CSC\v2.0.6\namespace
take owner ship of files
Delete
Reboot
blah, blah, blah...

Well.. I tried out pretty much all the items that people were suggesting. They all didn’t work. If they did work they only introduced more issues. So you are probably saying how the heck do you remove the offline sync then. Well here it is:

How to propperly remove offline sync in Vista

Go to Sync Center
Right click on the sync that you no longer want.
click BROWSE CONTENTS OF
You will notice the files and folders that still have offline sync.
They will still have that little green sync orb as part of the icon.
Right click the file or folder
Un-select "Always Available offline"

Voila! It’s no longer synced.

Hope this will save you a ton of time.

Filed Under: Windows Vista

Jan 30, 2009 By Jared Heinrichs 1 Comment

How to reset Group Policy after a virus

How To Reset A System’s Local Group Machine Policies to "Fresh Out Of The Box"

Group policies are the way to control a 2000, XP or 2003 system. But they have something of a black box-ish feel to them in that they’re hard to troubleshoot despite the XP and 2003 "resultant set of policy" (RSOP) tools. But even then, RSOP tools are most useful in an Active Directory-based domain with centralized group policies, and not everyone has an AD.

Sometimes I want to take a system and wipe it clean of any domain or local group machine policies, to essentially reset its state to "just installed." As policies live in several places, that’s not as easy as it sounds. Here’s what I’ve found useful.

There is no one single place where policies live. When you fire up gpedit.msc or Local Security Policy (secpol.msc), then you’re directly tweaking items in many parts of the Registry, as well creating or modifying data in \windows\system32\GroupPolicy. (It’s a hidden directory, so set Folder Options to show hidden files and folders if you want to look in it. And if you’re running Windows 2000, then the directory is \winnt\system32\GroupPolicy.)

Most of the changes to machine policies seem to live in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Security and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft, as well as a file named Registry.pol in \windows\system32\GroupPolicy\Machine. Here are the basic steps that I’ve found allow me to reset a system to almost new:

  • Reset HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft to an out-of-the-box state by restoring a copy taken from a freshly-installed system.
  • Delete \windows\system32\GroupPolicy\Machine\Registry.pol, if it exists.
  • Run the Setup Security template.

Here’s more detail on the rollback steps.

Every XP, 2003 and 2000 system includes a security settings template at \windows\security\templates\setup security.inf. (Again, 2000 systems will use \winnt, not \windows.) Apply the template from the command line like so:

secedit /configure /db junk /cfg "c:\windows\security\templates\setup security.inf" /overwrite /quiet

In that command — which should be typed as all one line — you’re telling secedit to use a template named "c:\windows\security\templates\setup security.inf" to create a security database called "junk" and to overwrite any existing security databases called "junk." We’re only doing this because secedit can’t directly apply a security template; it must first create the security database, and then it applies the security database.

This command make take a bit of time to run; run Task Manager and you’ll see secedit.exe in the list of running processes while it’s working. (Or leave off the /quiet and it’ll yammer at you while it’s working.)

Applying that template will reset many security settings, but not, unfortunately, all. For example, software restriction policies will not be rolled back, and IPSec filters won’t be restored to their initial state just by running "setup security.inf." To roll those back, we’ll restore a Registry key, HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft. That’s the key where most of the policy information lives. The easiest way to roll back most of policies, then, is to restore this key to its pristine state. And the easiest way to do that is to grab a HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft key from a newly-installed system, or for that matter one that hasn’t had any policy work done on it. (But before you do all this work, check your system — if you never messed with IPSec or software restriction policies then simply applying the template might have done the "policy reset" trick for you.)

The easiest way to do that is to open up Regedit on your newly-installed system and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies, where you’ll see a folder icon labeled "Microsoft." Right-click it and choose Export, then point Regedit at someplace to put the file. For my example, I’ll call it policies.reg, but you can put it anywhere you like — just remember wherever you put it. I then copy the policies.reg file to the computer that I want to reset policies on; for the sake of example, let’s say that I store it in c:\oldreg.

Now, I don’t want to just apply that Registry file to my system, as .reg files really only merge information into the Registry — I want to reset that part of the Registry altogether. So before I apply policies.reg to my system’s Registry, I’ll first delete the current HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft key in the Registry. (As always, PLEASE be careful when messing with the Registry!) You can either do that by opening up Regedit, navigating to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies, clicking on the Microsoft folder and pressing Del, or you can do it from the command line:

reg delete hklm\software\policies\microsoft /f

Now I’m ready to apply the Registry fixes either by double-clicking on policies.reg, or from the command line like so:

regedit /s c:\oldreg\policies.reg

Finally, zap \windows\system32\GroupPolicy\Machine\Registry.pol either from Explorer or from the command line. Restart and the policies are gone! Let’s wrap that up into a step-by-step:

First, export the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft key from a "virgin" system; call the file policies.reg and store it on the system that you want to reset in a directory named c:\oldreg.

Second, create a batch file with the following lines in it, or just copy the lines from this document. Save the file, calling it resetpol.cmd. Store it and policies.reg on a floppy somewhere so they can be easily transported to any other system that might need its policies reset. If your system is a Windows 2000 system, then type "\winnt" where you see "\windows" below.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2008, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP

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