Removing the status bar and standard buttons tool bar from the Remote Desktops MMC

Two things that have always bugged me with the Remote Desktops Administrative Snap-in was that there were no options on the menu to customize the view, specifically, the status bar and standard buttons toolbar. 

I’ve googled around trying to find a fix, then it dim 20W bulb went off in my head.  Look at a standard MMC console and make one how I want it and copy the config to the TSMMC file.

It was pretty simple.  The key line from the tsmmc.msc is:

<ViewOptions ViewMode="Report" ScopePaneVisible="true" NoStatusBar="true" NoStdButtons="true" DescriptionBarVisible="false" DefaultColumn0Width="200" DefaultColumn1Width="0"/>
    </View>

By adding NoStatusBar=”true” and NoStdButtons=”true” I was able to get more remote desktop “desktop”.

On my secondary monitor, my TS screen is now 1768×1000 vs. 1768×953.  Not a big deal on a 1920×1080 monitor, but 47 pixels on smaller screens makes a big difference.

TCP Tools: TCPing and Advanced IP Scanner

tcping.exe – ping over a tcp connection

tcping.exe is a small console application that operates similarly to ‘ping’, however it works over a tcp port. Not a terribly interesting concept, but I had trouble finding a windows utility to do this that I was happy with. There are now several different implementions of this floating around, written independently by different people. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Update: tcping now also speaks http. If the ‘-h’ flag is used, tcping will connect and attempt to download the given url over http in addition to opening the port.

→Download Here←

 

Advanced IP Scanner (Free Network Scanning Tool)

Advanced IP Scanner is a free, fast and easy-to-use network scanner for Windows. In a matter of seconds, this utility finds all the computers on your network and provides easy access to their various resources, whether HTTP, HTTPS, FTP or shared folders. With Advanced IP Scanner, you can wake up and shut down remote groups of Windows machines. If you use Radmin remote access software, you will also enjoy the improved Radmin Server detection and integration capabilities, which allow you to connect to any scanned machine with Radmin Server. →Download Here←

KBD Shortcut to access Control Panel–>System

I just found out about the sweet little winkey+pause short-cut that takes you directly to your System info page under Control Panel.

Great timesaver

Hyper-V configuration with hvremote.wsf

I wanted to set up a Hyper-V server for testing and keep if off the local domain.  My first attempt with a standard Windows 2008 R2 installation failed miserably.  I started down the manual configuration road from John Howard’s website and came to a dead end.  I then tried his hvremote.wsf script to finish, but apparently I really messed things up when I was manually changing stuff around.

I wiped the install and installed the free Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and started out with the hvremote.wsf script.  This time I was able to get things up and running pretty quickly.

The hvremote.wsf script should be included with the Hyper-V server.

Turning Aero back on in Win7

I have this cheapo web-cam that works great, but doesn’t get along with Aero in Vista or Win7.  When I forget and access it via IE on my Win7 box instead of a VM or via RDP on my server, it switches me back to the basic theme (yuck!).  Normally, all you need to do fix it is a) switch to another aero theme, then switch back, if that fails b) search “aero” and run the troubleshooter.  Both fixes failed me tonight.  I found the hack to enable Aero on a non-Aero system, but all I really need to do was:

net stop uxsms

net start uxsms

Bingo! Aero is back!  Original info from: Hack to force Aero

ODIR – Outlook Duplicate Items Remover

Despite it’s name, this little app doesn’t stink.  I just used it to clean up my PST file that had gotten duplicate and triplicate emails from moving my PST to a new profile under Outlook.  ODIR successfully removed 357 duplicate emails from my POP account’s PST file.

http://www.vaita.com/ODIR.asp

Google Apps Sync for Outlook gsync.dll error on x64 system

Anyway, my company just moved to Google Apps Premier for their email solution, sorry MS.  I’d been using the IMAP client for quite a while, but now that we’re Premier we get access to this new too to sync your Outlook info with Google, which I then sync to my phone.

But, after importing 1GB of email I closed Outlook to come home, upon restarting Outlook, I got a gsync.dll error.

Fortunately, the solution is simple.  I copied the “C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Google Apps Sync” folder to “C:\Program Files\Google\Google Apps Sync” and added this path, ”C:\Program Files\Google\Google Apps Sync,” to the system environment variables.  Note that the path for the (x86) folder was in the path, apparently Google Sync just doesn’t like 64 bits.

Thanks to the Google forums for the pieces of info I needed for this.

UltraMon Multi-Monitor Utility

This is another nice little tool I like. Allows for a taskbar across multiple monitors, spanning wallpapers, etc.

A really nice thing is the licensing.  If it’s for personal use, you only need 1 license for the household.

http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/

p.s. The reason I’m posting all this utilities is that I was having a lot of problems with my main Vista x64 box, VPC just stopped working after I’d swapped out the video card and some other apps started to fail, so I decided to format and to a fresh install.  Now, I’ve got to dig up all the apps and utils that I’d installed over the past 2+ years.

BrandonTools Start++ Utility for Vista/Win7

I stumbled across this not too long ago. 

http://brandontools.com/content/StartPlusPlus.aspx

It adds some nice little CLI type features of *nix into Vista or Win7.  For example, from the search or run box, you can type “sudo cmd” and you get a administrator command prompt.

Slysoft Virtual CloneDrive

This is another great little tool I like for mounting ISOs on my PCs, works on Vista x64 and W7 x64, and it’s free.

http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html