Devang Gandhi

If you are using one of the public/lab machines and want to find out information about the users logged on to that machine, just open the command prompt (Start->Run, type “cmd”) and type

For each user, it returns information like username, sessionname, id, state, idle time and logon time. If the state is “active”, that means the user is currently logged on. If the sessionname is something like “rdp-tcp#0″, that means the user is connected to the machine over a remote desktop session.

Older systems that are upgraded to Windows Vista may run slower if they have less RAM. Just today I came to know that Vista has a built in solution for that without having to buy more RAM. It is a Vista feature called “ReadyBoost”. It allows the system to use a USB flash drive as additional memory. You can check out Tom Archer’s blog for details.

I think it is a really cool feature and I am not sure how many people know it or are using it. It is a very inexpensive way of improving the performance of your system.

I was pretty annoyed with my computer which would lockdown if left idle for 10 minutes, and then ask for the password to log back in. This behavior is actually caused by the screensaver settings. Right click on the desktop, select Personalize, select Screen Saver from the next screen. In the Screen Saver Settings windows that appears deselect the checkbox that says “On Resume, Display logon Screen”. This should fix it.

I had tried to hook up two monitors to my Vista machine but it didn’t work. My computer has just one DVI port so I am using a Y DVI splitter. I tried a couple different ideas that I could find online but still no solution.

I figured the problem is with the display card since it would not even detect that there were two monitors connected to the computer and would just use the monitor connected to the primary end of the Y splitter. So I go to Control Panel -> Device Manager -> Display Adapters -> right click on my Display Adapters -> click Update Driver Software. I selected the option to let the computer “Search automatically for updated driver software“. Turns out the display adapter driver was outdated and the computer updated it. I restarted the machine and it detected both the monitors. Now I have nice dual display set up.

A nice quote that fits here: “People are always neglecting something they can do in trying to do something they can’t do.”

This morning, I had a problem with the remote desktop client. The problem – I could not get the remote desktop client window to go in full screen mode. It would maximize to a window size smaller than my monitor. I restarted both the machines – no use. Then digging through the internet, I finally figured it out. The solution – pressing Ctrl+Alt+Break while in the remote desktop client.

Another piece of advice for remote desktop sessions, to restart your remote machine type shutdown /r at the command prompt.

We all have had to archive our old emails as we run out of email server space. You can set up autoarchive but sometimes you might need to archive that one folder manually. Here’s how to do just that.

1. Select the folder that you want to archive from the side panel.
2. On the File menu click Archive.
3. Select the option Archive this folder and all the subfolders.
4. Enter an appropriate date in the Archive items older than field.
5. Click OK.

The folder contents are moved to a folder with the same name under Archive Folders which you can browse from the side panel.

A couple of days ago, I needed to create a bootable windows XP setup disk from an iso image. I came across this nice article which did the trick. Note that this article primarily deals with creating a bootable setup disk from a preinstalled system. You can however follow the instructions to create a bootable disk from the iso image as well once you extract all the setup files from it. The main trick is to include the boot sector on the windows setup cd.

I was trying to install virtual server 2005 R2 on windows vista and it did not work. After digging the depths of the internet, I came across this nice article that solved my problem. Additionally, you may also need to download this update from msdn that updates virtual server to support vista.

I was trying to install windows vista via network boot the other day. However the installation could not find the hard disk. The error was that some of the drivers were missing. After a lot of poking around I tried to disable RAID from the bios setup and that did the trick. So remember to try turning RAID off, if you are having problems with windows installation.