Windows – Nedatanet

Startech USB2DVIE2 USB display adapter

Adding an additional monitor with Startech USB2DVIE2 USB display adapter

Adding an additional display to an older machine can be expensive and complex. ATI’s multi monitor eyefinity solution requires a new card to be purchased and installed, which is simple enough if a card is available for the specific AGP, PCI or older spec PCIE slot on the motherboard. The cost can scale from 100.00 and up for a low end card.

The goal was to just prop up another old 19 inch flat panel in addition to two other existing monitors. The box was an older dell that had a 1st generation PCIE card in it, and getting a cost- effective card to support eyefinity was out of the question. The goal was not to have 3D gaming on the display, rather to show financial and stock data. Because of the low cost, a Startech USB2DVIE2 adapter was purchased. Supporting a DVI monitor over USB, this cheap adapter allows adding up to 4 additional screens to a PC.
With 16MB of on board RAM, the adapter is listed as supporting up to a 1680×1050 resolution. Continue reading “Startech USB2DVIE2 USB display adapter”

Flexible Single Master of Operator Roles and How to tell Which Domain Controller Owns Them

The Operations Master roles ( AKA FSMO pronounced FIZZMOE) are, by default, assigned to the first DC installed in an Active Directory environment.

Schema Master The Schema is the field structure of the AD Database in this context – The Schema master maintains that schema, in the case of Schema modifications – such as intalling Exchange, running adprep.exe/forestprep or a third party app that hooks itself into Active Directory (Cognos for example.) This role is unique to the forest. To view the Schema Master, you need to register the schmmgmt.dll file, and then add Schema Management to a mmc console. You can now right click and view the owner of this role (and change it if so desired.)

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.msp files eating up my disc space!

Working on a system recently, I noticed that its 20 GB primary partition was low on disc space. There was nothing immediately obvious as to the cause, so I broke out the windirstat utility. This gives a visual representation of the filesystem, using different sized blocks to identify large files, and color codes each file to show the data type. This great utility immediately pointed out some large files with the .msp extension that were taking up 5GB of space on the disk. Continue reading “.msp files eating up my disc space!”

Quickbooks shipping manager problem | settings unavailable or problems starting the add in

You may receive Error 25002 or Error 11949 in the log files or event manager as an indicator of a problem in Quickbooks when setting up or using the shipping manager add-in.

Assuming the Quickbooks settings for shipping manager have already been set, a profile has been created on the computer. It appears that the Quickbooks shipping manager settings are per-user, so the first method of correcting the problem is to go into the settings and delete the ship information and close the shipping manager settings. If this does not work or the settings for shipping manager are unavailable, there is another way to reset Quickbooks’ settings: Continue reading “Quickbooks shipping manager problem | settings unavailable or problems starting the add in”

Nedatanet’s Sirius Media Player Windows Icons

These are windows .ico files to be used in creating desktop shortcuts to the Sirius online player application. Create a new shortcut to http://www.sirius.com/servlet/MediaPlayer? and give it a name. Right click, choose properties, and then hit the Change Icon button. Browse to the location you saved the .ico of your choice to. Finally, hit OK. Now click it, log in and rock out.

Mouse over, save as, preserve the .ico extension using these images

Norton Save And Restore Restoration Point On USB HDD Not Available

Norton Save And Restore is a retail package software applicaton that includes Disk Imaging technology. It differs from Norton Ghost corporate edition, but includes the old retail Norton Ghost 10. It allows a GUI backup to a selected location – in this case a USB hard drive.

Sometimes, an issue arises where during a recovery, and booting off the recovery CD, the backup restore point on a USB HDD is not seen by the program. Using the Browse For Recovery point shows no available points and the user cannot browse to the USB hard drive.

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Using the DSQUERY utility to print a system generated list of Active Directory users

DSQUERY is a command line tool that comes with Windows 2003 server. This utility can be run locally or copied off to a domain joined XP workstation for use. To generate a list of users from Active Directory, navigate to the utility’s directory via command prompt.

Use the folowing example to dump a list of all accounts to a .txt file named netusers at the root of the C drive.

dsquery user -o rdn -limit 500 >C:\netusers.txt Continue reading “Using the DSQUERY utility to print a system generated list of Active Directory users”

Diskpart.exe Windows Disk Command Line Tool

The diskpart command starts diskpart.exe, a command line interface to disk partitoning tools. The tool allows creating, reparing and breaking a mirror, marking a partiton active, assigning drive letters, volume control including create and extending, deleting an object and gathering information.

‘diskpart list’ as a command will display a list of objects. ‘diskpart rescan’ will rescan for disks and objects. The ‘select’ command allows the utility to explicitly set the focus on a target – commands are then aimed at the active target. The ‘detail’ command provides details for disks, partitions or volumes.

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Cisco VPN Client on Windows Server 2003

When using the Cisco VPN client on windows Server 2003, users may experience inability to create a tunnel. This is caused by the Windows IPSec implementation stepping on the Cisco client’s connection. Fortunately, getting the Cisco VPN client up and running on Win2K3 requires only a small bit of tweaking. First, get version 4.8.1 of the client from your source, be it Cisco or your VPN host who should legally be able to distribute it.

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Users Log In To Domain Workstation, But Windows Creates A New Profile For Some Ungodly Reason

This issue occurs occasionally, as if the logging in user has never logged into a machine before. The old profile is still in in Documents and Settings, along with the newly created profile. Suspicions point to ntuser.dat becoming corrupted.

How to return to the old profile Continue reading “Users Log In To Domain Workstation, But Windows Creates A New Profile For Some Ungodly Reason”