Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2009
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2009
1E released a new white paper written by Ian Godfrey last week entitled Remote Management of BIOS Configuration, which is centered around configuring Wake-on-LAN but the concepts and tools can be used to manipulate other BIOS settings as well.
This paper covers a number of different hardware vendors and how to remotely configure the BIOS, something that is not standard across the hardware vendors. It includes links to different tools, ConfigMgr integration, scripts, tips, troubleshooting, and a very in depth explanation of WOL. If you are having trouble getting some computers to wake up when they are sent a magic packet or you need to learn how to remote administer the BIOS without touching each computer this is a must read.
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
Microsoft MVP System Center Configuration Manager
© Anthony Clendenen
Right before Christmas 1E released its first free tool for ConfigMgr admins in a while called Service Window. This tool will allow you to edit, delete, add and view maintenance windows for ConfigMgr clients. You can run the app on the client machine or by specifying the remote computer you want to examine.
Here is the app running on my laptop where you can see there are currently no Maintenance Windows defined, so essentially my laptop will run an mandatory advertisement or task sequence at any time.
If I want to add a new maintenance window I click the button with the “+” key on it. 
This opens another window to configure and set the maintenance window.
As you can see I can define the start and stop time of the maintenance window, the date it begins, if it reoccurs, what type of reoccurrence, and on which day it reoccurs. There is also a checkbox at the bottom of the window that allows you specify that the maintenance window only applies to an OSD task sequence.
I am going to use the defaults just to create the window. If you are following along you should be back in the main window with the new maintenance window defined like this.
If I select the maintenance window I get the two other options to view the selected maintenance window and edit it, and also the delete button which will delete the maintenance window selected.
At the bottom of the main window is also a view button that will open a window that displays the maintenance windows in a graphical format such as below.
You can switch the view to show a week at a time or just today as well.
One of the best options is the ability to delete a maintenance window, if you are testing a client this tool makes testing maintenance windows easy and extremely quick, you do not have to wait for you clients to get the policy to define, modify, add or delete a maintenance window.
1E has plans to develop a number of free tools for ConfigMgr moving forward, if you have any ideas for tools or have any feedback on this one send me an email.
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
Microsoft MVP System Center Configuration Manager
© Anthony Clendenen
While they also updated several of their tools like Process Explorer, Handle, ZoomIt and SigCheck, the much more interesting news is that you don’t have to download the tools any longer and put them somewhere in %PATH% you can execute them directly from the website. How cool is that?
From a command prompt or Run simply type \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\<tool name here>
And this site has all of their tools, check it out on their site at http://live.sysinternals.com
You can sill download the tools if you want to use them locally, go to the same link and click on the exe and/or the chm file to download them.
This is a quote from the About_This_Site.txt file.
“What is this?
This is a file share allowing access to all Sysinternals utilities. We have developed this to test an alternate distribution mechanism for our utilities.
This will allow you to run these tools from any computer connected to the Internet without having to navigate to a webpage, download and extract the zip file.
If you are unfamiliar with Microsoft Windows Sysinternals, it is highly recommended that you visit the website at http://technet.microsoft.com/sysinternals before using these tools.
If you have any questions or comments on this file share, please email syssite@microsoft.com
Regards,
The Microsoft Windows Sysinternals Team”
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
Microsoft MVP System Center Configuration Manager
© Anthony Clendenen
In case you missed out the free AVG offer here is another free anti-virus product. Once you create a free 
account on the CA site they will send you link to download it.
There words regarding the account.
“This information will be used to create your FREE account in case you are in need of any support. Your information will be kept private and will not be shared with any third parties.”
Get FREE One Year Subscription of CA Anti-Virus – Tweaking with Vishal
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
Microsoft MVP System Center Configuration Manager
© Anthony Clendenen
After you win the Wii at the 1E booth (311) at MMS and you have made Pro on all the sports, have made all your family 
members and friends into Wii peeps, the next logical step is to stream all your music and videos with it from your PC upstairs to your Wii downstairs in your media room. XBox does this out of the box (no pun intended) from what I have heard, since my daughter is only in second grade and my son is just in junior high they aren’t quite ready for an XBox, plus I suck at video games so I am not a gamer. The Wii doesn’t have a whole suite of additional features, and streaming music and video is not one of them. It does come with a built in wireless adapter so you can get it on your home wireless pretty easy. It also uses Opera for a web browser. I mention both of these because you will need them for streaming.
I was first introduced to Orb several years ago when I got my first Netgear wireless router, it was 802.11B, so that should give you some idea on how many years ago. The Orb CD came in the box and I checked it out to see what it was. Set it up, showed it off at work a few times and then I didn’t use it much again. Back when I was still working at ESRI I played Classical music in my office all day and it was local plus I didn’t want to use up the bandwidth needlessly. I looked at it again when I started to travel with my last employer (Hey everyone!) I even bought a tuner card, but I don’t really like TV, and really don’t like 99.99% of movies for a list of reasons so I didn’t really end up using Orb or the tuner card.
But now that I have a home office upstairs, and my wife’s art studio is downstairs when I am at home and the kids are in school and I am not on the phone I will play music, but I have to play music we both like and loud enough for her to hear. So this is not ideal. But our Wii is hooked up to the surround sound system and LCD downstairs, so if she could play music from it and choose her own music, and what level that would just about be perfect!
So what you will need:
Get additional addons for Orb from their MyExtras here.
extras include video mail, watching Internet videos on your mobile device, and watching you video content on your TV instead of in Flash in the Wii’s Opera browser.
You can get version 1.0 of Orb here.
Once you have Orb installed you will have to create an account. Next specify what folders you want to include in the different categories. Keep in mind that any folder you put on there you and your family will be able to access from the Wii console.
After you have Orb configured you will need to get the browser installed on your Wii if you haven’t got it already. Once it is just go to orb.com, put in your account info and you will be listening and viewing in just a few seconds.
In Orb you can search by artist, title, genre, playlist, resume a playlist, shuffle your search results, it’s pretty nice.
And if you have bluetooth in your car, a phone with an unlimited data plan and bluetooth…
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
© Anthony Clendenen
I have gotten a ton of emails asking me if I am going to be at MMS this year and when and up until now I have held off because I was waiting for some things to finalize. But today 1E sent out an email to customer letting them know the booth number, and when Sumir, one of the founders of 1E, was going to speak. Which is right after the State of the Union, and also at the same time as Paul Thomsen is presenting his session on ConfigMgr Client Health. So yes, I will be there from Sunday to Friday afternoon. And we are trying to get my wife to be able to attend at least a day or more as well, I know some of you look forward to seeing her more than me – but I won’t mention any names, you know who you are! Not that I can really blame you…
I will be doing my best to blog live or very close to it when I am there but this year I will have to actually work so it may be more hit and miss regarding coverage of the sessions for those who can’t attend or those who use my posts for your justification to attend.
We will be having demos at the booth of the different 1e products and most of us can also do an impromptu demo if you want to see something that isn’t on the schedule. Just hunt me down and I can arrange it.
There is more info on the 1E presence below, our booth is in the second row right as you walk in the doors. I am finalizing some plans to hold a special session in one of our conference rooms and when that it finalized I will publish the detail of it.
I look forward to meeting up with a bunch of you again I am sure there will be quite a few people from the myITforum.com list, Microsoft, and Dimension Data that I haven’t seen in at least a few months, people like Omar it has been since last MMS.
Dear Colleague,
1E will be exhibiting at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas from
April 28 – May 2, 2008. Please come and visit us on Stand 311, where you can:
· Find out how to dramatically reduce the cost of running Windows infrastructures
· See ‘live’ technical demos of our core solutions
· Discover how you can quickly & easily save $45 per PC per year
· Find out how Dell is saving $1.8 million a year across 50k PCs
· Enter our competition to win a Nintendo Wii
Come and listen to 1E CEO Sumir Karayi speak, following Bill Anderson’s "ConfigMgr – State
of the Nation" session. Sumir will talk about real customer System Center and PC power management success stories.
1E has been providing robust integrated Windows systems management solutions for over 10 years. Join us as we detail real-world experiences of System Center success and PC power management implementations in large, complex, distributed environments.
» Book a 1:1 meeting
Use this opportunity to book a pre-arranged 1:1 meeting with 1E while you are at MMS. This
will give you the chance of discussing your requirements with us at an agreed date and time, and make sure that you maximize your attendance at the event.
For more information, please visit the 1E website.
We look forward to seeing you at MMS 2008.
Best regards,
1E Events Team
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
© Anthony Clendenen
FolderShare has gotten a face lift, new client, and has moved to the Windows Live platform. If you are not familiar with FolderShare Microsoft bought them a couple years ago and the concept is that you can setup shares among computers that sync with each other. I have been using it for years to sync computers and make sure that I have the same documents on each computer. You can set the sync to be automatic or on demand, you can also share your FolderShare libraries with your friends. It is similar to Groove but it is a free service.
New FolderShare Blog.
New Windows client direct download.
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
© Anthony Clendenen
How often do you defrag your hard drives? Do you think it is often enough? Defragging your drives can make a substantial difference in
performance, seek times as well as the health of your drive can be improved if you defrag your drives on a regular basis. Keep in mind that hard drives are mechanical devices and eventually one of those moving parts is going to fail and you can extend the life of your drives by making them work less when you try to get a file. Don’t believe me? How about ExtremeTech.com? This link is to a portion of an article they wrote regarding optimizing performance and this piece is specifically about defragging your hard drive, including the Master File Table (MFT), and your Page File.
There are a ton of products out there some free, some pay, and the old standard that is included with the operating system. Below is a list of available software for defragging your beloved hard drives. If you find that you like one that does not have a scheduler then use either ConfigMgr to schedule a reoccurring ad to start the defrag or use task scheduler.
How-To Create Your Own System Restore Partition!
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
© 2007 Anthony Clendenen
I Recommend These Books!
SMS 2003 Administrator’s Reference: Systems Management Server 2003
And you can check out more books and gadgets at my Amazon store here.
Computer Active is giving away the Pro version of AVG for free. I use the free version of AVG on several computers at home and it works fine, you get those annoying widows during updates because it is free, with Pro you can turn that off. Right now it looks like their servers are being flooded but you have until Jan. 17th with the option to stop the offer at anytime, which means they only have so many licenses.
Details here.
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
© 2007 Anthony Clendenen
If you wonder how I make those images, its all done with Paint .NET, which is 100% free and all the plugins are 100% free. I know Ron and Rod use it as 
well and you cannot be the price. I have used Photoshop and it is a great product but kind of pricey! Paint .NET is build from the .NET Framework and costs you nothing so if you haven’t tried it and use another similar product you should give it a try.
Regards,
Anthony
Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E
© 2007 Anthony Clendenen
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