Of course, you can always reset a password if you have another admin account for this machine. However, if this isn’t the case, things can get a bit tricky. As a sys admin you are usually confronted with this problem if users have laptops where you don’t have an admin account. Even if you don’t have to reset a password now, you should get acquainted with this issue. Rest assured that sooner or later a user will bug you with this problem. I must admit that I managed to forget my own password more than once.

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When I moved to Vista some weeks ago, I realized that my old CD burning software is not working, anymore. I looked around for another free tool, but wasn’t able to find one that doesn’t install spyware. Then, I found a link to ISO Recorder V3 at Computer Bits.

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Did this ever happen to you? You wanted to install a new program, only to realize that there is not enough disk space left. I guess, it did. Or how about some users misusing your good-naturedness and overloading your file servers? WinDirStat is a free tool that enables you to get an overview of the disk usage of a hard disk or a network share. It shows you what folders and files are occupying much disk space. This way you can locate the worst sinners in your network or you can find files you want delete to get more space.

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There has been a lot of media coverage about Bitlocker recently. It is supposed to be a solution for laptop users who want to encrypt their whole hard disks under Vista. You can’t encrypt your whole system partition with Truecrypt, but, in my view, is a much better solution if you want to secure confidential data.

Update: Please, also check out my review about TrueCrypt 5.

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In February Microsoft released Windows Desktop Search 3.01 for Windows XP SP2 which provides the same search capabilities as you know them from Windows Vista. The new Administration Guide describes how you can deploy and configure Windows Desktop Search (WDS) in a corporate environment. The document does not only apply to Windows XP/2003, but to Windows Vista as well. If you have Vista machines in your network, I highly recommend reading this documentation.

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Microsoft’s Resource Kits for Windows are quite famous. I just saw that the Windows Vista Resource Kit has been published now. The book has about 1,500 pages and costs $37.79 at Amazon.

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The Windows Server Division WebLog reported that the public beta of Windows Server Virtualization (a.k.a. “Viridian”) will be available only in the second half of 2007, not in the first half, as previously planned. I have expected Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 to be released these days, but it will probably be shipped in Q2 only. I think that both virtualization products are very interesting, so I am a little disappointed to have to wait a little longer to get my hands on them.

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Microsoft published a couple of step-by-step guides for sys admins. I think I saw some of them on Technet before. This page lists many important guides as Word files. When I skimmed over the titles, I realized that there are quite a few new things to learn for sysops. This reminds me of a remark Bill Gates made some years ago. He said that in the future Windows will be so easy to manage that there will be less need for system administrators.

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I reviewed HealthMonitor 3.1, sometime ago, and was quite pleased with the free version of this monitoring tool. However, some things didn’t work properly, for example, the HTTP plug-in. I now tested the new version, HealthMonitor 4.0.

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Some days ago, Microsoft released Sysinternals Process Monitor 1.12. It has a very interesting new feature: boot logging. I must admit that I didn’t use the last version of Process Monitor, so I can only rely on this article on SearchWinIT about its new features.

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Microsoft published a paper explaining how to isolate the KMS (Key Management Service) using IPsec. KMS doesn’t require any kind auf authentication. Therefore, anyone who gets network access to your KMS server is able to activate its Vista machine this way.

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Some days ago, I blogged about the pros and cons of KMS (Key Management Service). In this post, I summarized the pros and cons of using MAK (Multiple Activation Key), the second option for activating Vista in a corporate environment.

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The release candidate of VMware Workstation 6.0 has been available for some days already. I tried it now to see if the problems I had with Vista are solved. Unfortunately, I am still not able to use shared folders feature to access a host folder from a virtual machine.

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Some days ago, I published the first part of my review of VAMT where I wrote about my experiences with the Status Collection and the MAK management functionality. Today, I’ll discuss the most interesting features of VAMT, i.e. its ability to deploy MAK keys to Vista machines.

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