Geodo's Pages

Email Password Expiry Notifications to Users

Jorj — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:47:52 +0000

I am looking for a script that I can schedule to run and email users whenever their password is about to expire. I have a lot of remote users who do not regularly logon to the domain.

Desktop Icons rearranged on laptop when undocked

Jorj — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:51:26 +0000

I recently noticed that on some windows xp laptops, the position of the desktop icons get re-arranged if the laptop is docked (and the display spanned to a monitor.)

After much fiddling around, we found out that the resolution of the “laptop” internal display is slightly different when docked to undocked:
When docked it was 1280×768 and when undocked 1280×800.

So we set the docked screen resolution to 1280×800 and restarted out-of and in the dock, and all things worked fine.

Remove the Undock Button from Start menu

Jorj — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:36:44 +0000

I have a laptop with a port replicator.
Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom put a very large button in the Start menu to “undock” the laptop. This causes problems no end, becuase it disconnects networks, keynoards etc that are plugged in through the Docking Station/Port Replicator.

The easiest way to disable this button is to add a special registry entry:

Go to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Add the following DWORD: NoStartMenuEjectPC and set the DECIMAL value to 1 (enabled).

Log off then back on, the button will disappear.

Shadow Protect, VSS and Backups

Jorj — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 06:33:51 +0000

Well, for the last few weeks I’ve been trying to get one of my servers to consistently backup without problems. Unfortunaely, I have not been successful.
It looks like VSS is not functioning properly on the server, at least not consistently. I can restart the server, and the first thing I do is a full backup, and it works fine. Run anything later on that required VSS, and I get nowhere. Shadow protect, which usually only takes a couple of hours for a full backup runs for 24 hours with no activity. Backup Exec 11d gets into a queued state, and never moves on to a proper backup!
I’ve applied some hot fixes, but i’ve not been able to get this thing working.
The thing is, my other server, running Windows 2003 R2 SP2 with Shadow protect have no problems what so ever.