Yet another Tech Blog » Windows

Get rid of those annoying Windows Pop-ups

Martin — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 08:36:36 +0000

A lot of companies don’t want their employees (if they have administrator permissions on their windows machines) to update Windows by themselves. To get rid of numerous, annoying Windows pop-ups, reminding you to enable automatic updates, copy & paste the following code into your editor (notepad for e.g.), save it with the file extension “.reg” and execute it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center]
“AntiVirusDisableNotify”=dword:00000001
“FirewallDisableNotify”=dword:00000001
“UpdatesDisableNotify”=dword:00000001
“AntiVirusOverride”=dword:00000000
“FirewallOverride”=dword:00000000

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Download MSDN Library for free

Martin — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 23:08:20 +0000

Microsoft finally decided to offer its excellent MSDN Library for download. These are not outdated versions! The current version they offer is May 2006, which seems to be the most current one. Go get your MSDN Library here!

For those who don’t know what the MSDN Library is: It’s a great collection of documentation and sample code for Microsoft’s programming tools and languages. It is an essential tool for every Windows programmer.

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What the Windows Platform needs

Martin — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 22:11:47 +0000

Having worked as a system engineer for the Windows platform for a few years, a few ideas recently came up my mind on what Microsoft should do to make Windows a better platform.

As I started to use Linux as my main platform about a year ago (I still use Windows for some tasks, but inside a virtual machine), I quickly got accustomed to package managers. All Linux distributions these days come with a package manager, either they’re GUI or shell-based. Of course, this is due to the nature of Linux. Since most of the software users will use on their Linux box is open-source, it is possible to create very distribution-specific packages with insane modifications to them (you can compile a package to run optimized for 686 architecture and Java support for example). If that application is not open-source, then the binary is being downloaded and installed. That is the biggest advantage Linux has (and UNIX in general) compared to other operating systems in my opinion. It lets you search a central repository for a specific application by name or description letting you find and install the right application for your needs almost instantly. Does Windows have that? No! MacOS X does support this to some extent thanks to its FreeBSD roots (take a look at portage, the Gentoo package manager for MacOS X here). Installing an application just seems like an integrated part of the operating system. Updates are also a snap. Gentoo users for example, can easily update their running Linux operating system and all of its applications their dependencies with only a single command: “emerge -u world”. It’s easy as that. How long would it take to update all software applications on your Windows box? Take a guess.

So what can Microsoft do about this? Since Windows is not mainly a platform for open-source software, it could extend its software manager application by allowing users to browse a repository of applications by certified Microsoft partners such as Adobe, Symantec and many other quality Software vendors. It could offer certification for shareware authors and freeware apps making sure they don’t harm the operating system and providing its users with good software almost out of the box.

By making sure every application used the excellent Windows Installer Technology (.msi installer packages), it would drastically improve the performance and reliability of its operating system, since MSI packages are the only ones who really get cleanly removed and also solve dependency problems automagically. As I see it (among many others), the number one reason for Windows installations becoming corrupted, are users who download & install numerous “suspicious” free & shareware applications which contain malware. If they could download and install applications for all their needs from one, central and secure repository, it would minimize that threat to a minimum. At the same time, it would allow end-users with very basic knowledge to install software a lot easier and thus make their offering a lot user-friendlier.

What do you think? Do you have any other suggestions on how to improve Windows, or another operating system? I’d love to hear them.

Here’s a screenshot of Portage the Gentoo Linux package manager compiling and installing the latest verstion of Apache.

Here’s a picture of Synaptic, a GUI front-end for the apt package manager. It’s being used in Ubuntu and many others.

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easy & free Windows System Administration using ManagePC

Martin — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 12:00:18 +0000

Every Windows Administrator knows what Visual Basic Scripts or also called Windows Scripting Host Scripts can do to ease the burden of Windows System Administration. I’ve come across a script that consolidates most of the features you would ever want or need, like doing a hardware and software inventory of your networked computers.
The newest version of ManagePC is built using VB.net, so you will need the .Net Framework 2.0, the older version is still available though.
Take a look at ManagePC here, I’m sure you will appreciate it a lot. If you know any other useful admin tools or script, post a comment!

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Microsoft starting to acknowledge a few of their competitors

Martin — Tue, 23 May 2006 17:53:03 +0000

Have you noticed? Microsoft seems to acknowledge a few of its toughest competitors out there. Firefox and Linux for example. As you can see in the screenshot, Microsoft has enabled Firefox users as well, to install a “Microsoft Genuine Advantage” extension right into their favourite browsers. Well, as we all know, it’s not really an advantage, it’s just a security measure Microsoft has undertaken, to ensure, that your Operating System is licensed properly. Otherwise, you won’t be able to download SDK, Service Packs and so on. There are already numerous hacks out there, that enable to download it anyway. But that’s another story.

The thing with Linux is, that Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 finally “officially” supports Linux, it’s also free by the way, so if you’re interested, you should definetely take a look at it. Not that I use it, I’d much rather use VMWare, because it’s faster, has some pretty nifty features and also runs on Linux. Virtual Server of course only runs on Windows hosts. But never the less, Microsoft officially started to acknowledge Linux and also lists it as one of the features of its Virtual Server product. They seem to have noticed, that Linux won’t go away anymore. So they have to produce better Software and also respect it to some degree and provide compatible products, because the number of companies using a heterogenous datacenter is increasing steadily. So there clearly is a demand from its customers who pay overpriced Windows Server lincensing fees.

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