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January 01, 2008
How often do you defrag your hard drives? Do you think it is often enough? Defragging your drives can make a substantial difference in performance, seek times as well as the health of your drive can be improved if you defrag your drives on a regular basis. Keep in mind that hard drives are mechanical devices and eventually one of those moving parts is going to fail and you can extend the life of your drives by making them work less when you try to get a file. Don't believe me? How about ExtremeTech...
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Filed under: SMS 2003, Tools, Hack, ConfigMgr, Cool Tools
December 17, 2007
Back at the end of September I was preparing my home lab for ConfigMgr testing. Since then I have been trying to get back to this article to proof it and tidy it up for publishing. After a number of requests and a light amount of work after 15 hour day today I am sitting in my hotel room, eating mediocre room service, while the Bears are beating the Vikings on MNF, so what better time to do it. Here are the basic software prerequisites for upgrading from SMS 2003 to ConfigMgr: MMC 3.0 .NET Framework...
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Filed under: SMS 2003, Tools, ConfigMgr, Configuration Manager
August 22, 2007
If you have never worked with Microsoft PSS, PFE, QFE, MCS, RRE, or any other arm of their professional support staff you may not be aware of the tools that these army of men and women come equipped with to resolve issues. These are often home grown, field developed, custom tools that these same folks have written to help customers and the support staff at Microsoft quickly resolve issues and the WMIDiag tool is a prime example of this. Often these tools are used only by the Microsoft staff and are...
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Filed under: SMS 2003, SMS Tools, Scripting, Tools, System Center, TechNet, Microsoft, WMI, VB Script
November 28, 2006
Aaron has put together a great list of resources for building a Vista image. If you have not used Vista, or read about it, the install process as well as how the OS is built is different than XP and prior OS’s. In addition with the new OSD FP/USMT we move to .xml files, but probably the most interesting technology so far is WAIK. WAIK will allow you to edit an image without having to lay it down on a system and then recreate the image. You for got a driver, want to add that new company standard...
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Filed under: SMS 2003, Tools, Vista, SCCM 2007, OSD
October 17, 2006
Today it was officially announced that Microsoft will combine the recently acquired tools from Softricity, Winternals, and Desktop Standard into a single package that you can purchase for ~$50 per client. What this package gets you is SoftGrid application virtualization, group policy management/enhancement tools from DesktopStandard, and the remote repair tools from Wintenals. For this price you could not get even the tools from DesktopStandard, the backend for the SoftGrid used to run about $15...
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Filed under: SMS 2003, Group Policy, Tools, Vista, News, Microsoft
September 06, 2006
Where do I sign up? I saw this at MMS but Kevin makes it a little more clear. Original source: Playing with SoftGrid... As you may or may not know, MSFT acquired a company named Softricity over the summer (www.softricity.com). The acquisition is now complete and we will be announcing the roadmap and integration of this killer technology in the coming months. I feel that this 'app vitalization stuff' is going to be VERY huge in the next few years at least... Anyway, so I have been playing around with...
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Filed under: SMS 2003, Tools, Microsoft, SCCM 2007
August 29, 2006
In doing some research tonight on question 13 and collection eval inbox I came across this and it is a great resource. Thanks Ed! Original source: File Extensions used by SMS By: Ed Aldrich Posted On: 8/5/2005 File Extensions used by SMS (from BORK Appendix A; Table A.1) EXT Description .adc Adds a collection to Coll Evaluator .box Folders that hold files until an SMS component moves or processes them .ccr Client Config Request .cfg Cfg file that describes params to use for the client component ...
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Filed under: SMS 2003, Tools, myITforum
May 17, 2006
The picture above is of the SMS Server message explaination in the SMS 2003 Troubleshooting app I am working on. You select the message ID from the drop down menu under the label "Message ID." This then populates the other fields, most inportantly, the Message Explanation field. I plan on adding a notes field that will be editable, where you can input any information you want. It will then add it to the database so when you pull it up the next time the information will be displayed as well. Like...
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Filed under: SMS 2003, Tools
April 28, 2006
The final session I went to this week was Ron’s Web Remote Tools presentation. the day before Ron was telling me that there have been a few people that have taken his code and used it without giving him credit, and some even pawn it off as their own! People are fascinating to me. Anyways Ron discussed how the next version will have a batch file to make the changes needed to adapt it to your own environment instead of editing the pages directly. I did not mind having to do this because I forced me...
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Filed under: SMS 2003, Scripting, Tools, MMS 2006, myITforum
April 25, 2006
This session’s presenter was Rodney Jackson, this session is where they review common support issues and their solutions followed by a Q&A sessions where customers can ask support related questions. I will cover some of the tools he talked about since myITforum.com has most of the areas he discussed covered in the forums. (You can get these tools from your TAM or Microsoft Support) SMS Client Health Collections – If you have not seen or used this tool it will build collections based...
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Filed under: SMS 2003, Tools, News, Microsoft, MMS 2006