In a recent tweet Mark Russinovich has confirmed Microsoft are working on bringing a “start menu” to the Windows blue screen of death (BSOD)
It’s not yet clear as to when this will be released to end users.. But it’s certainly going to be a game changer, and will make diagnosing BSOD issues a whole load easier!
Well done Microsoft – a true step in the right direction..
Today I have mostly been fighting with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and our Office 365 setup, as we are still in the early stages of deployment we have not yet implemented our ADFS servers. Which means we have are experiencing some pretty frustrating issues with Office and authentication.
One machine in particular decided to really test my patience and blankly refused to authenticate, presenting the user with a constant reoccurrence of the “Welcome back to Outlook.Office365” login box.
As it happened the machine had seemed to avoid the installation of several service packs, including Office 2007 Service Pack 3, and also what turned out to be some pretty important KB hot fixes. Leaving me scratching my head for what seemed like a lifetime… That was until today! When I finally managed to find the relevant KB hot fixes and install them manually..
| OFFICE VERSION | NOTES |
|---|---|
| Latest version of Office | System requirements for Office 2013 and Office 365 ProPlus |
| Office 2010 with Service Pack 1 | Automatic updates:
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| Office 2007 with Service Pack 3 | Automatic updates:
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| Office 2003 only through POP and IMAP | For more information, see Office 365 will now support POP and IMAP connections to Outlook 2003. |
| Office for Mac 2011 with Service Pack 3 | Mac OS X 10.6 or later is required. |
| Office 2008 for Mac 12.2.9 | Support ends April 9, 2013. |
The journey to 365 has been a long and winding one… This particular highlights the importance of ensuring all machines connecting to 365 are bang up to date with Windows and Office updates and service packs… Lesson learnt.
So.. You’ve got your shiny new Mac! You’re finally a Mac convert.. You no longer need your old slow Windows machine? Or is that not the case….?
Despite what we do sometimes there is truly no escaping the clutch of Microsoft’s ‘monopoly’. Many applications are yet to be ported over to OS X, and even more games besides. But wait.. When you find that one app that requires Windows, you do have to dump your mac, you don’t even have to bootcamp.. All you need to do is bag yourself a copy of Parallels Desktop 7 and you’ll be reunited with your windows applications in no time at all.
What’s more, if you buy your copy of Parallels Desktop 7 before the 19th of August you’ll save yourself 25%! You have to admit its a pretty good deal..
So what is Parallels Desktop?
Parallels Desktop for Mac is the most tested, trusted and talked-about solution for running Windows applications on your Mac.
Unlike other applications on the market, Parallels Desktop boasts the fastest ever start, stop and resume for it’s virtualised machines. It’s also fully compatible with Mountain Lion. So is the perfect addition to your new Mac purchase!
You can download your copy with 25% off until the 19th using this link alternatively check out Parallels press release for more information by clicking the link below.
Using this very simple straight foreword vbscript, you can cycle through all currently running processes and kill the one you name below.
This can be handy if you have an application/instance which has become non responsive, such as IE when loading flash based pages maybe…
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strComputer = "." Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _ & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\" & strComputer & "rootcimv2") Set colProcessList = objWMIService.ExecQuery _ ("Select * from Win32_Process Where Name = 'iexplore.exe'") resp = msgbox("All internet explorer windows must be closed in order to continue" & vbCrLf & "Click Yes to close them now or No to cancel", vbYesNo) For Each objProcess in colProcessList If resp = vbNo Then 'Nothing To do Else objProcess.Terminate() End If Next |
I was recently approached by one of my colleagues with a dilemma, he had to go round our 30+ servers and stop and start a couple of Sophos’s Windows Services.
Now, as you can imagine this was starting to look like a fairly large and mundane task. Which is when I came up with this little VBScript.
Using this script below, you can pass it a text file with a list of machines you would like it to perform the process on.
In the script below you will see a “” change this to your text file containing machines, full file path.
The format of the text file is one machine per line.
This script is by no means ‘bullet proof’ and could be enhanced easily with little time and effort. It could also be modfied to stopstart any services you like.
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Const ForReading = 1 Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Set objTextFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile _ ("", ForReading) Do Until objTextFile.AtEndOfStream strComputer = objTextFile.Readline Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _ & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\" & strComputer & "rootcimv2") Set colServiceList = objWMIService.ExecQuery _ ("Select * from Win32_Service where Name='Sophos Message Router'") For Each objService in colServiceList errReturn = objService.StopService() WScript.Echo errReturn Next Wscript.Sleep 20000 Set colServiceList = objWMIService.ExecQuery _ ("Select * from Win32_Service where Name='Sophos Message Router'") For Each objService in colServiceList errReturn = objService.StartService() WScript.Echo errReturn Next Loop |