Ed Bott discussed on a ZDNet blog a case of a Microsoft blogger who, according to him, gave some wrong advice. The post is about a problem that might occur during the installation of the IE7 preview. The Microsoft blogger explained how to circumvent this problem by making some changes in the registry. A friend of Ed Bott followed the instructions, thereby, severely damaging his system.

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OpenedFilesView is a free and cool tool that allows you to manage opened files and directories on a Windows 2000/XP computer. It also seems to work with Windows 2003, although the readme file doesn’t say anything about it.

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RunAsLimitedUser is a nifty RunAs tool that is so easy to use even for lazy admins. You probably know that Windows comes with a built-in RunAs feature. So-called security experts usually recommend that as a sysop you should only start applications with Administrator privileges when it’s necessary. The most secure way is to work with a normal user account, and start admin tools which need more rights, with an Administrator account. Well, I don’t know any sys admin who really works this way. It is just too time consuming to logon every time you need more privileges. RunAsLimitedUser works the other way around.

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The Bulk Rename Utility is one of these must-have tools for Windows system administrators. Windows only offers some very basic ways to perform bulk operations on files and folders. With the free Bulk Rename Utility, you can do almost any kind of change on multiple files and folders with one step. It allows you to change filenames, perform string substitutions, change the case of filenames, append dates, auto-number files, supports directory recursion, rename files using input files, and more.

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Almost all news sites are reporting it Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 is now available for download. I just had quick look at it. The first thing I check with a new web browser is its zooming function. There are so many web sites out there that use tiny fonts. It is the best way to ruin one’s eyes. You won’t believe it, but the zooming function of IE6 was the major reason why I changed first to Opera and then to Firefox. Now, it seems, IE finally got a good zooming function too. One can now enlarge the fonts of a page by pressing CTRL plus turning the mouse wheel. That also worked before with IE6, but not with all web pages. Well, I know, IE7 has some more new features. The most comprehensive reviews I saw, so far, are the ones from Paul Thurrott: [1] [2].

VMware Virtual Machine Importer allows you to import virtual machines from Microsoft Virtual PC and Virtual Server. The 2.0 beta supports the latest versions of Microsoft’s virtual machines format. You can also import from Symantec’s LiveStat and Ghost 9. Provided you use one of this Symantec tools, Virtual Machine Importer is an alternative to VMware P2V Assistant, as you can use it to transfer physical installations into virtual machines. Importer 2.0 also supports the latest VMware formats, especially ESX Server 3.0 Beta 2. VMware Virtual Machine Importer 2.0 Beta is now available for download. Also check out their press release.

Last week, Parallels released VM Compactor 1.0 beta. They claim that the software can compact the size of a virtual disk up to 80 %. Disk space is always an issue, if you are running many virtual machines on one host. So I was curious what VM Compactor can really do.

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Some applications lock their opened files which means you cannot simply rename or delete them. In most cases, this makes sense and it is not advisable to circumvent it. However, there are situations where you might want to unlock a file, like when a program crashed and you want to delete its locked files. Usually you have to reboot for this, but you can do this faster with Unlocker, a free Windows tool.

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There are many tools that allow you to get an overview of the disk space occupied by your company’s user. Most of them, however, are commercial products. Folder Size Shell Extension is a free and simple tool that extends Windows Explorer’s folder properties with a new tab. It displays a folder’s subfolders in a hierarchical tree showing the space that each folder occupies. Folder Size Shell Extension was originally developed for NT, but it still works with Windows 2003.

PropertiesPlus is a simple, free tool that integrates itself in the Windows Explorer. It allows you to modify file attributes, extensions and time stamps of multiple files with an easy-to-use GUI. You start PropertiesPlus from a folder’s context menu in the Windows Explorer. The tool can be configured to perform changes on all subfolders of its selected directory. It seems that its programmer has stopped developing it since it’s not on his homepage. You can download PropertiesPlus from several sites, though.

XDir and YourDir are two very different Windows programs, but they basically have the same purpose. They create your directory structure’s output which you can use for further processing. XDir is a powerful command line tool, whereas, YourDir is a relatively easy-to-use Windows tool with a GUI.

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You probably use the Windows Clipboard all day while working on a computer. The copy-and-paste-function is certainly one of the most important functions of any OS GUI. Unfortunately, the Windows Clipboard lacks a key feature. One can’t access older clipboard entries. I tested several free tools which close this gap.

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Are there some CDs that you use often? If so, you should consider copying them to your hard disk for faster access. This is also useful for servers since that means not going to the server room every time you have to insert a CD. However, there are some CDs which only work properly, if they are in a CD drive. The trick is to create an image of the CD and use CD drive virtualization software to mount the CDs to a drive letter. This post introduces some free CD virtualization tools.

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My VMware test environment runs on a host which I remotely control using RDP. I always found it strange that the Windows XP GUI is so slow within the VMware Workstation console with this setting. The same applies to VMware Server and most likely also to VMware GSX Server and ESX Server (I didn’t test the latter two). Application windows open somewhat slowly and the mouse pointer is quite jerky even with a 100 Mbit connection. Since it is faster with Windows Server 2003, I was sure that this is not only a bandwidth issue. Now, I found some time to solve the problem. Some of the tips here can also be used on other guest operating systems like Linux, for example.

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I welcome every tip that helps me to avoid typing. If one drags a file or folder from the Windows Explorer to the command line, the whole path plus the file name will be copied there. You might say, I should have known this. Indeed, you are right, but I didn’t. I found this tip at Digital Inspiration. The blog post there discusses some useful command line tools. Many of them are well known to most sysops though.