Microsoft

If I didn't love my current job so much, and I wanted to move to Washington State, I'd be all over this like Kristie Alley on Krispie Kream donuts.

http://blogs.technet.com/exchange/archive/2005/12/21/416390.aspx

Nice.

http://cdoom.d3files.com/index.php?page=news

In a round about way, yes, this indicates I found a $9 copy in Grandville. I couldn't resist giving my MSI 6600GT video card a work out.

It's at EB Games for that price apparently.
I think EB Games was bought out by GameStop so maybe it holds true at GameStop too, I don't know.

Here is a link for it anyway:

http://tinyurl.com/ccsub

I know the running joke about Doom 3 was that it was too dark, but that seems like quite a price drop.

On my desktop machine (which I just added 3 hard drives to, and a video card in the last month), I was using a retail copy of Windows XP I received from some MS thing I went to years ago - I probably don't even have the CD anymore, but either way, it was a legal copy and it might have even been from the XP launch party.

Today I'm woken up to the 'you need to reactivate since we think you're a horrible pirate and installed your copy on a brand new machine' activation... with a 3 day timebomb.. great... like I don't have enough things to do this week.

So, yada yada, won't register on internet, call the clearing house, fight with the automated attendant that doesn't seem to want to take numbers but needs you to speak 'yes' or 'finished' or 'mother may I'... I don't know why but that just irritated me more.

It's activated again but it still put me in a foul mood.

I've seen this firsthand now, after hearing about it here and there on various message forums. Most of the time it is related to Symantec's SymEvent driver leaking non-paged pool memory and causing STOP errors. You will want to FTP into ftp.symantec.com and go into the /public/english_us_canada/symevnt/ directory and download sevinst.exe and run 'sevinst SAVCE' (assuming this is for Symantec Corp Edition)

I was having a lot of terminal servers in the past going down from lack of non-paged pool memory and this answers a lot of questions I had.

Anyway, it also seems that there are a few W2K3 post-SP1 VSS updates available from Microsoft, specifically KB 887827, which supercedes KB 833167, which is already included in SP1.
I've got the SymEvent driver updated on the server in question at the moment and disabled VSS for the timebeing since everytime VSS starts up on this server, a few minutes later, you will get a nice STOP error.

If it keeps failing, I'll try out those hotfixes.

I'd love to hear comments from other people about this.

Edit: Looks like people are talking about it here too -> http://tinyurl.com/c42ah

Spotted this on Bink.nu and it is too good not to spread the word:

http://www.2x.com/securerdp/

2X SecureRDP for Windows Terminal Services dramatically increases the security of your terminal servers by accepting or denying incoming RDP connections by IP, Mac address, computer name, client version or based on time of day.

It looks like there are some worthwhile bug fixes since 10.0.0.938.

http://tinyurl.com/abop7

aka

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ent-security.nsf/ppfdocs/2005062413405248?OpenDocument&ExpandSection=2%2C1

The best part about these tools is that for some of the utilities, you don't even need to be running R2 to get most of the features. Case in point: The Print Management Console that I wrote about last month.

So, in other words, if you are running on a 2000 network, you might want to grab this package.

http://tinyurl.com/9ugg6


X64 version:

http://tinyurl.com/ajclf

Normally I'd post the long link but some browsers like to munge them up.

Oh and R2 RTMd on the 6th... I've just been too crazy busy to mention it.

This is just a personal pet peeve that I see more and more programs doing. It is typically done by programmers that either didn't have time to come up with a decent icon or didn't know how to change it within Visual Studio. When I see programs that use defaults in their resources like 'Form1' and such, it just gives me the impression of sloppy coding, even if I haven't seen the underlying code.

Sure, you could use a resource hacker program to insert your own icons but I wish more programmers would not use the default icon sets.

Here is an example of what I am talking about if this isn't making any sense to you:

The ISA Server Team will release an update to the ISA Server 2004 Firewall Client. As part of the development process, they are running a short beta program to collect valuable feedback.
Highlights:

* Support for the Microsoft Windows Vistaâ„¢ operating system (builds 5231 and later).
* Support for the the 64-bit versions of the Microsoft Windows operating systems.

If you are interested in joining this beta program, please follow these instructions:

1. Go to http://beta.Microsoft.com
2. Sign in using your Passport account details
3. On the home page, click the link below the welcome message ("If you were issued a Guest ID by Microsoft, you can sign in by clicking here")
4. Enter the Guest ID: ISAFWC_x64
5. Choose "Survey" on the left side of the page
6. Complete and submit the survey.

Easy to do in a Novell world, not so straightforward in a Windows world.

This application makes it a whole lot easier, and should hopefully be put into Vista:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2005/05/UtilitySpotlight/default.aspx