Everyday Nerd

Microsoft Vista SP1 is RTM today!  It will be available to the general public in March.

Recently Microsoft released an update (also in SP1 for Vista) to the RDP (Remote Desktop Client) that seemed to break the /console.  I found this out earlier this week when trying to connect to the console of a server, but would not - would only connect to the normal RDP non-console session.

Well, after verifying that my shortcut to with the /console switch was there, and I wasn’t going crazy, I ran mstsc.exe /? from the run line, only to find this:

/admin — Connects you to the session for administering a server.

Needless to say, I think Microsoft should have given some warning about this, or at least keep /console active until the next release - to give people a chance to the change.  But that is my opinion…

Source: [Lifehacker]

For the average Windows Vista session, the "Needs your permission to continue" prompts are just momentary, occasional annoyances which can be disabled or by-passed. But if you’re planning to do a lot of tweaking or installations, having a dedicated Administrator account—like the kind available in XP—can be mighty helpful. The How-To Geek blog shows how to enable (and disable) the account from the log-in screen:

• First you’ll need to open a command prompt in administrator mode by right-clicking and choosing "Run as administrator"
• Now type the following command:
  net user administrator /active:yes

Log out and you should see an "Administrator" account available. Un-doing the tweak requires running nearly the same command, but with /active:no at the end. Like the Geek, we’ll note here that only experienced users who know exactly what they’re doing should use this type of account, and that Microsoft obviously doesn’t want you to do this as a normal thing. All the same, it could be a boon for easier troubleshooting.

Have you ever had software that shows up in Add/Remove Programs, but doesn’t have the Remove/Uninstall button? 

I recently had a program (a custom repack of WinZip) that only had the Repair option.  Well, I use WinRAR exclusively,  so I wanted to remove it.

To fix this open Regedit (Start, run Regedit), and navigate to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\

From here, you can either go through each sub-folder, looking for the software in question, or highlight Uninstall, go to Edit, Find and type the name of software you are looking for.

Once you find it, look for two keys:  NoModify & NoRemove - they are pretty self explanatory as to what each key does.  Change the key value from a 1 to a 0 (zero) to deactivate the key.

Next, open Add/Remove Programs again, and you will see the Uninstall button now!

This works for Windows XP / Vista (Probably 2000 as well, but not tested)

I regularly remote administer servers, most of which are Windows Server 2003 R2.  I starting having an issue a few weeks ago when connecting to certain servers that the mouse response was extremely slow.  The keyboard function was fine.  I had a quick fix - every time I click the mouse, I would press the Ctrl key, which seemed to speed it up, but was extremely annoying.

Now I have found a fix!

Open a Command prompt as Administrator, and enter this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

If you want to to re-enable it:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

This immediately fixed the issue - no more slow RDP sessions!  Now, back to work…