Karen’s LAN Monitor is a freeware tool that displays all kinds of network related information. The tool comes with eight tabs: Adapters, Phonebook Entries, Connections, Traffic, IP Stats, TCP Stats, UDP Stats, and ICMP Stats. I have created a screenshot for each tab because this is the fastest way to give you an idea as to what kind of information you can retrieve with Karen’s LAN Monitor. I like the tool because you can access all the data quickly. Unfortunately, it has to be installed. It would be much more useful, if one could just launch it on a computer to get a quick overview of all network-related information.

Adapters

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• An application war is brewing in the cloud
• How Many Servers Can One Admin Manage?
• Market analyst: Two thumb up for Microsoft stock

The System Information Viewer (SIV) is a freeware tool that allows you to display information about your computer in remarkable detail. SIV is a tiny portable application that supports 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. The information is so detailed that if you are not a super geek, then much of the information will mean nothing to you. Nevertheless, this also assures that if you ever need any particular information about a computer, you will most likely find it in SIV.

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• Microsoft’s Desktop Virtualization product line as of 2009
• Good Guys Bring Down the Mega-D Botnet I nteresting article about the war on malware
• Adobe will be top target for hackers in 2010, report says – Microsoft only second
• Microsoft confirms IIS hole No patch yet, threat moderate
• Microsoft Begins Delivering Word Patch (that removes the controversial lawsuit feature)
• Paul Thurrott: Office 2010 Public Beta, Part 4: Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint

I am currently in the Philippines and it is a bit hotter here than in good old cold Germany. When I am working at the beach, I can literally feel my laptop sweating. It is a high-end laptop and its power adapter is as big and as heavy as a netbook; its components therefore produce a lot of heat. With CPUID HWMonitor I always have an eye on the temperature of various devices.

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• Microsoft makes the best free anti-virus software – best performance
• Microsoft Loses Lawsuit, But Word Likely to Stay
• 5 funniest Microsoft stories of 2009
• 13 Microsoft Milestones in 2009
• 2010 data security trends: External attacks from the inside
• 10 big cloud trends for 2010
• Do you know the TechNet Script Center Repository? Hundreds of useful scripts
• Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have problems with big SATA drives. Hotfix available.

Q-Dir is a free powerful File Manager suitable for all Windows versions. Did you ever wonder why Microsoft is quite conservative when it comes to adding new features to the Windows tool that is used most often? The answer is simple. The majority of Windows users are not IT pros and they would only be confused by too many Explorer features. Q-Dir is one of these Explorer alternatives that has too many bells and whistles for the average user, but many of its features are quite useful for administrators.

The info on Q-Dir’s website is a bit sparse and you will only understand how its many functions work if you try the tool yourself. What follows now is a list of Q-Dir’s most important features, with a short explanation.

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Double Driver is a free standalone tool that allows you to backup and restore device drivers. This is useful if you have computers with pre-installed Windows and no driver disk, and want to re-install the operating system. Or perhaps you want to transfer a driver from one computer to another.

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A few days ago, Microsoft’s Open Source tool Core Configurator 2.0 was released. It allows you to manage Server Core with a nice GUI. I also reviewed Core Configurator 1.0/1.1 a while back. The old version is still valuable because it also runs on Sever 2008 Core, whereas version 2.0 only supports Windows Server 2008 R2.

Core Configurator 2.0 is a completely new tool, as it is based on PowerShell and .Net 2, which are not officially supported on Server 2008 Core. However, there are ways to install PowerShell on Server 2008 Core. Thus, it is perhaps possible to get Core Configurator 2.0 running on R2. The other question is if you really want to install unsupported software on a server. Note that you don’t have to enable PowerShell and .Net before you install the Core Configurator 2.0 on R2 Server Core because its setup program (Start_CoreConfig.wsf) does this for you.

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Device Remover can do much more than its name indicates. It has all the features of the built-in Windows Manager plus a few additional functions that can be helpful if you have to troubleshoot device driver problems. Here is a list of the most important features of Device Remover:

• In-depth information about devices and drivers
• Print device tree
• Displays hidden, non-present, and problem devices
• Searches device drivers
• Bulk removal of device drivers
• Backup device drivers
• Open and export device driver registry entry
• Start/stop, enable/disable device
• Update driver
• Save detailed driver information

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• Morgan Stanley: More users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years
• Office 2010 Volume Activation Tips and Tricks
• Windows 7 ROI (Return of Investment) Tool
• Poll: Are Registry Optimizers or Cleaners safe & recommended?

HWiNFO32 is a freeware hardware information and diagnostic tool. The information it provides goes far beyond the built-in Windows tools. To get an idea of how detailed the information is, please have a look at the screenshot, which displays data about the CPU. The Windows Device Manager basically only tells you the brand name, whereas HWiNFO32 has information about more than 100 different CPU parameters. Such detailed information can be useful if you have to fight with device driver problems, because you can use it to search on the Internet. These details are also helpful if you are planning to buy new computers and have to compare different PC models.

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• Microsoft Launched A Install, Reinstall, Uninstall Help Site to Help Your Windows Installation
• Hyper-V Performance FAQ R2

Submitted by Joe

I couldn’t live without this marvelous little tool. Take any machine in any AD domain and it will display a plethora of data about it as well as letting you control services, uninstall software, create scheduled tasks as well run standard stuff like MMC consoles, VNC etc. For such a small application it’s amazing how many features are packed into it.

From the publisher’s site:

ManagePC is an open source .NET application for PC management in Windows environments.

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In my last post, I explained how you can provision Active Directory to offline domain join a computer. Doing this for one computer is one thing; deploying a large number of computers which are already domain members when they boot up the first time is another thing.

It is possible to offline domain join a computer in an unattended installation. For this, you have to perform the two steps I outlined in my last post, i.e., create the computer accounts in your domain and the blob that contain the meta data. Then, you can add the following section to the unattend.xml:

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