When I tried the new Procmon 2.6, I couldn’t access the tool’s help file, which is a problem I have often encountered when downloading a Sysinternals tool. I have figured out now what went wrong and I thought I should note down the solution once and for all. I think, my blog is the best place for it because I am probably not the only one who run into this problem: The table of contents in the left plane is displayed correctly, but the contents pane only shows “Navigation to webpage was cancelled – What you can try: Retype address.”

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Some days ago, I wrote an article about the alleged superpowers of the built-in administrator account. As it turned out, the local administrator has more or less the same privileges as the other administrator accounts, but this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require extra care. In this article, I will share some tips on how to handle the built-in administrator account in a corporate environment. These are partially based on an article by security expert Jesper Johansson, although our opinions on some points differ.

Disable the built-in Administrator account

On Vista machines the built-in administrator account is disabled by default. This is a good a thing. Of course, it is the primary target of all hackers (I don’t distinguish between hackers and crackers; it is all the same to me). I also recommend disabling the built-in Administrator account on all XP machines.

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Knowing that deleted Active Directory objects are not erased immediately, but only after 60 (Windows 2000/2003) or 180 days (Windows 2003 SP1/2008), can save your day if you accidentally delete user, computer or container objects. I have reviewed two free tools that allow you to restore deleted AD objects (Quest Object Restore for Active Directory and ADRestore.NET). These tools can recover objects that are marked for deletion, so-called “tombstone” objects. The technical term for this process is tombstone reanimation. Who knows?; if you accidentally delete your boss’ account, then this term might take on a literal meaning.

A downside of tombstone reanimation is that by default, important attributes are stripped from AD objects when they are deleted. For example, user objects’ last and first name attributes are not saved in tombstone objects. Perhaps even more problematic is that the password is blank after you restore a deleted user object, which means that you won’t be able to keep it a secret that you have accidentally deleted users accounts.

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In the last two parts of this series, I covered the factors of temperature and charging. While the high temperatures inside modern laptops are probably the worst enemy of a Li-ion battery, frequent discharge/charge cycles will negatively influence a battery’s life. If your laptop is a desktop replacement, then you probably only need the battery every now and then. It can be quite frustrating if you want to use your laptop for the first time after a year without AC, only to realize that your batteries are already dead even though you never really used them. However, if you remove the battery from the laptop and store it accurately, there is a good chance that it will be in good condition when you need it next time.

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A laptop battery can be charged 300-1000 times. The actual number depends on the way it has been treated. In the last post of this series, I outlined the influence that the temperature has on a battery’s lifespan. Today, I will explain how a battery should be charged and discharged with care.

Fully discharge a new battery and then re-charge it. This calibrates the battery.

Calibrate the battery every 30 charges, i.e., fully discharge it and charge afterwards.

Avoid frequent full discharges. In contrast to NiCd (Nickel-cadmium) and NiMh (Nickel-metal hydride) batteries, Li-ion (Lithium-ion) batteries show no memory effect. That is, it will do no harm to the battery if it is re-charged before it is empty. Full discharges will strain the battery.

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When I bought a new notebook recently, I resolved to take better care of my laptop battery this time than I had with my previous ones. With my last laptops the battery was more or less dead after a year or so. If a battery is treated with care it can last up to four years. I thought that I knew how a notebook battery has to be handled, but after googling this topic, I realized that quite a few of my beliefs were outdated. Most of my layman’s knowledge about rechargeable batteries was related to Nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) and nickel-cadmium (NiCd) batteries, which are no longer used in laptops (as far as I know). In this post, I summarize the tips I found on the web to preserve lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, which are probably in most laptops nowadays.

There are two important keywords when it comes to battery preservation: charging and temperature. That is, how the batteries are charged, and the temperatures to which they are exposed, are key factors that determine their lifespan. Today I will write about how temperature influences the lifespan of a laptop battery, and in my next post I will cover charging and discharging.

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I’ve never really understood why uninstalling programs in Safe Mode isn’t officially supported in Windows. The main purpose of Safe Mode is to troubleshoot Windows, and what usually causes the trouble? Right, misbehaving programs. This may not even be the fault of the program itself. Windows is a very complex system and sometimes unforeseeable things happen. If an application has been somehow damaged, it might not even be possible to uninstall it. For example, its service could hang immediately after the system boots, or other programs could interfere.

In Safe Mode, Windows has reduced functionality, because only the core components have been loaded. In such an environment it is much easier to get rid of an application that has gone mad. Windows Safe Mode can be entered by pressing the F8 key before Windows boots up.

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