Podcasts: A Tour of Windows 7

It came out this week a new podcast from Microsoft.

This podcast it’s a 1 hour “general information” mostly about UI enhancements, new features and components for Consumers, Developers and IT Pros.

Here’s the link:

A Tour of Windows 7

Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 Released

The latest SP for the Microsoft’s Office suite was released today.

The main enhancements reveled are:

1. Some fixes that weren’t previously released and were made specifically for this service pack
2. General fixes to improve stability, performance and security
3. Some more info can be found at this Knowledge Base Article: 953195

So, here’s the link:

Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2

P.S.: Remember that after downloading the SP you can always extract it (/extract:<path>) and copy the extracted file to you Updates folder for an unattended installation!

Pin to Start Menu – Alternative Way

At the end of March, I’ve published a way to Pin to Start Menu the shortcuts you wanted.

Then after some testing and research I’ve found out the this could be a real pain to make this configuration to all users.

So…I’ve managed to find/get an alternative way to do this using the good old Default User + Registry.

To do this you’ll need to:

.: On a reference machine configure all your pinned shortcuts

.: Then go to registry:[HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StartPage]

.: Export the reg key to a file and just the the keys:
  :: FavoritesResolve
  :: Favorites
  :: FavoritesChanges

.: Now using for example a vbscript you need to load the default user hive to “inject” your registry file.

Here’s an example on how to do this:

‘Pin Icons to Start Menu            
Wshshell.run "REG LOAD HKLM\TMP C:\Users\Default\ntuser.dat" 
WScript.Sleep 2000 
WshShell.run "REGEDIT /S C:\exportedregfile.reg" 
WScript.Sleep 2000   
Wshshell.run "REG UNLOAD HKLM\TMP"

And this will do the trick!

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Beta 2 Webcast

Fresh news from the MDT 2010!

Michael Niehaus recorded a new webcast for the MDT 2010 Beta 2.

The link for the webcast is this one:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/InviteOnly.aspx?EventID=3A-78-05-A7-61-B7-4B-2B-08-41-98-B1-8C-3B-92-B4&Culture=en-US

You’ll need to register first before download it.

I’ve not seen it yet, so please feel free to give some feedback about it.

Opening “Stored Users and Passwords” from command-line

This tip could help a lot of people that needs to support locked-down or low privileged machines/users.

Sometimes integrated authentication may not work if an user for some reason saved an Internet Explorer password and then changed it on the Active Directory.

So it may be necessary to clean that password through “Stored Users and Passwords” applet.

To do so, you need, with user logged in, open the applet through a command prompt or a batch file.

the command-line to open it is this one:

rundll32.exe keymgr.dll,KRShowKeyMgr

Hope this helped someone!