Can I save my searches to reuse them in Vista?

So are you wondering why you would want to save your searches?

Think about it… How would you like the ability to dynamically find the items you need with a saved search? So the boss called and said - I need all the purchase orders less than a months old and tagged Smith?

How about Power Point Presentations created by your partner in the past two weeks?

All of those with the letter z in the title?

Just the ones with the word NEW in the file name? We see your creating crazy searches and we know you hate to have to recreate em’ each time. Do you want to make it a little easier on your self?? Save them searches!

You can do it easily! Just follow these steps:

1. Browse as normal to Start Search.
2. Type any characters in the search box (a star works great because, as a wildcard, it won’t restrict the search once you save it)
3. then click Advanced Search. Modify the fields however you want and when you are satisified,
4. click Save Search.

From Microsoft’s Website:

Depending upon how often you search for a certain group of files, you might want to take advantage of Windows Vista’s new Search Folders, too. These are searches that run instantly when you click them—you don’t even need to insert a search term after the first time you run a search and save it.

You can use the preconfigured searches that Windows Vista offers, such as Recent Documents (which shows you all recently used documents on your computer), or you can set up your own searches.

To set up your own Search Folders, click Start and click your personal folder. In your personal folder navigation pane, click Searches to bring up the program “searches.” Click the program and the Search Folders window will appear.

Next, type in the information that you want to search for in the search box at the top right of the Searches window. In the example shown here, I typed in Microsoft. Then I clicked Save Search to save the search. Now, the next time I’m looking for information related to Microsoft, I just click my personal folder and select the Microsoft search from my Search Folders.

And you now have a custom search saved for you! You can set up several of them for your most popular search terms. Anyone else using this out there in Admin land?

_theSearchForMeAdmiN_

Adding your own options to the XP right click menu.

As avid Windows users you have seen how applications add right click menu options. For instance Mcafee antiVirus adds a shortcut to Scan For Threats in the selected folder or Resco’s options to encrypt or de-crypt a folder.

It is actually pretty easy and involves NO registry editing like you might have expected. Simply open up my computer choose Folder Options and then File Types

And then click the advanced button and then the New button to associate an Action with this file type. For this example I am associating JPG files with editing in Adobe CS2. In the action line I type what I want to show up on the right click menu and the application used to perform action is the command line for the magic behind the shortcut.

I advise you to use the Browse button to browse on over to the EXE associated with the application you want to open. Here I browsed over to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Photoshop.exe . It puts this in quotes leave them there and put a space after the last quote and add another quote followed by %L and another quote. This passes the selected file name to the application. Without this it will just open Photoshop and what good it that?

But after you are finished and click ok on all the open windows you can go check out your handy work by right clicking on a JPG…

And what do you know? It actually works! Ah what a great way to start the day shaving valuable seconds off of my work flow. It might give me an extra 15 minutes over the course of the day to play with FireNes!

_TheRightClickThisAdmiN_

Can I Make My Own High Priority Folder Like My Documents?

This morning we had a request for adding a “High Priority Folder”.

This would be a top level folder that shows up on your Windows desktop and in My Computer. Didn’t think you could do that? Well read on…

The folder we will be creating can not be removed - just like My Computer or My Documents. Easy accessibility for your most used folder.

You can assign the folder to be anywhere you have access to and use your own icon file for it. It will be the first view you see in any Open File box.

We found the step by step from PcTools talking about windows 2000. With a few slight mods we got it working on XP and it should work on Vista as well.

Now you can create your own custom system folder, like “My Documents”, that can not be deleted or renamed and place it on the desktop and My Computer. All you need to do is add a handful of registry entries. The last two steps add the shortcut to My Computer and The Desktop. You can do one or the other.

Editing the registry can be dangerous so be careful and make a backup before you begin!

1. Create the following series of keys and values in the registry at [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID] or [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID]. The GUID, globally unique identifier, can be a random number, in this example “FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345″ is used. See this article for more GUID examples.
2. Create a new key called [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}] and set (Default) to equal the name of the folder e.g. “My Folder”.
3. Create a new sub-key under the main key called “DefaultIcon” (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\DefaultIcon]) and set (Default) to equal the filename for the icon you want to display e.g. “c:\windows\myicon.ico”.
4. Create a new sub-key under the main key called “InProcServer32″ (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\InProcServer32]) and set (Default) to equal “shell32.dll”, also create a new String value called “ThreadingModel” and set it to “Apartment”.
5. Create a set of sub-keys starting at the main key “Shell\Open My Menu\Command” (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\Shell\Open My Folder\Command]) and set (Default) to equal the command to execute when clicked, in this case explorer, e.g. “explorer /root,c:\MyFolder”.
6. Create a set of sub-keys starting at the main key “ShellEx\PropertySheetHandlers\{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}”
   (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\ShellEx\PropertySheetHandlers
   \{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}])
7. Create a new sub-key under the main key called “ShellFolder” (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\ShellFolder]) and create a new Binary value called “Attributes” and set it to “00 00 00 00″.
8. (Optional) To place the folder on the desktop add the following key:
   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
   Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}]
9. (Optional) To place the folder in My Computer add the following key:
   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
   Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace\{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}]

Now the folder cannot be deleted from the desktop or My Computer, nor can it be renamed other than removing the CLSID and the entries under NAME SPACE.

If you flucked shit up Are Banging your head against you desk messed up on any typing a blank icon will appear on your desktop or in My Computer - go back and check for any erroneous characters!

_TheMyShortcutsBetterThanYoursAdmiN_

Can I migrate printers from one machine to another easily?

I had the pleasure of attempting to migrate a print server this weekend. I mean I had to figure out a quick and efficient way to install the 70 some odd printers on a new server. I was not going to be doing this manually that was for shit sure! I had some junior admins standing by -

I quickly found out that Microsoft provide a tool to back up and restore your printers. Score!

It said it will back up all your printers, settings, and drivers into a .cab archive, and then it allows you to restore the cab file on a different machine.

This small app grabbed ALL my printers including the local ones, copied all their drivers and crap to a single cab file. I was able to run the PrintMig on the new server and import the printers.

In 15 minutes or so all my printers were installed and working properly except one USB guy that needed to have its port switched. All in all it went very well. And I discovered another thing while testing:

So you can copy printers from one machine to another, create cab files for different off domain laptop configurations. Or this is great if you don’t do the Active Directory thing and want to semi-automate printer installation.

The latest version of Printmig is 3.1 and is available for downaload here.

more details available from:
http://www.microsoft.com/printserver

A special thanks goes out to the internet on this one. Thanks for always being there for me man!

Slipstreaming A Service Pack

Have you ever needed a specific version of an OS for an install?

You need a Windows 2003 Server Service Pack 2 CD and you only have SP1?

Have you ever wanted to upgrade your original Windows XP CD to SP3?

That is where slipstreaming comes into play. Slipstreaming a service pack saves time, disk space and makes future installs easier.

When you slipstream a service pack into an OS the finished install already has the service pack included so you don’t need to install it as a separate step.

All you need to do is install the 87 #%^@* updates and patches Microsoft has released since the service pack. :)

You will need a few things to create a slipstreamed OS disc:

1 - The original bootable OS CD.
2 - The full version of the service pack you want to slipstream. Microsoft refers to this as the “network install” version. It is used by admins to install the service pack on multiple machines. It is much larger than the other SP versions you might come across and cannot be obtained from Windows Update. You can find the network install version of Windows XP SP2 here. Windows 2003 Server SP2 is available here.
3 - A copy of nLite.
4 - Software to burn the slipstreamed ISO image to disc (like Roxio).

I won’t go into all the step-by-step details here because there is already a great set of instructions on the MSFN site.

When you are done, you will have an OS installation disc that functions exactly like your original OS disc, but contains all the updates included in the service pack.

You can also use nLite to add additional patches and updates as well as additional drivers. There is a guide on the nLite site that goes into more detail about how to do this.

Slipstreaming a Windows service pack works the same way for both server and desktop operating systems.

That is, until Vista…

Yes, that is right. Among the many other changes Vista brings, you cannot slipstream SP1 into your original Vista RTM DVD.

Microsoft’s official stance is that you should install Vista, install SP1 either through Windows Update or a network install and then use the WAIK to capture the image that includes SP1. This is presumably going to be the same for Server 2008 since it has the same code base as Vista.

The same group that created the nLite tool has created vLite which will allow for slipstreaming Vista SP1, but it is still in beta and has some caveats. There are some other tools out there to create Vista SP1 slipstream discs, but my guess (and this is purely my opinion) is that Microsoft will not support any installation that is created this way. If you run into problems with a slipstreamed Vista install, I expect they will say reinstall from RTM media, apply the SP from Windows Update and if you’re still having the problem then we’ll talk.

_TheSlippinAdmiN_

Mount Your Mac on Your PC Using Target Disk Mode.

You read that right homeboy.

Now that I have jumped deep into the pool that is Apple I have discovered some tricks that those fan boys don’t want you to know.

I am going to combine two of them into one tip for you out there in AtA land.

The two tricks are - reading ANY MAC disk on your PC or from within BootCamp. And the other is to use Mac’s fancy smancy ultra insecure target disk mode to turn a MAC of your choosing into nothing more than a glorified firewire drive sans security!