Rename a client on an Essentials network

July 9, 2015 by 1 Comment

Dont PanicI see this question crop up a lot, and people can get themselves tied up in knots second guessing the Essentials Dashboard.  The key thing to remember is DON’T PANIC, as our dear friend Arthur Dent was often told.

Firstly, why do you want to rename your pc? Actually scratch that, you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have a good reason. (Obviously)

Secondly, how are you planning to do this? Because, stop right now.. thank you very much. (excuse the Spice Girls reference) Read more of this post

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Install Windows Server Essentials with a Custom Domain Suffix

June 27, 2015 by 2 Comments

After a brief argument with Susan Bradley, and i use the term brief and argument loosely, Grey Lancaster and i were left with a problem…

So can someone blog that/post that on TechNet so that folks aren’t hacking up what they are doing now?

Grey, of course, deferred to me. So here i am Saturday night and I’m writing this. I don’t mind of course because i have nothing better to do, but i digress.

Yes, you can install Essentials 2012 R2 (and probably other versions) with any domain suffix, not just the “.local” that the Essentials Configuration Wizard (ECW) will default to..

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Remote Command Line–GFI MAX

June 16, 2015 by 1 Comment

facepalmI did something stupid. When i say ‘something’ i mean, something additional to the other stupid things i usually do in the course of the day.

We had a new PC in for setup, usually this is the work of my proles Co Workers, but as i was the only one in the office that day i knuckled down and bloody well did it myself. The first task we usually undertake is to remove all of the preinstalled additional programs vendors like to ship with their PCs. If you missed the recent Lenovo incident, that is a great example of why you might want to do this. Read more of this post

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Turn off the Upgrade to the latest version of Windows GPO

June 11, 2015 by 8 Comments

I was continuing the reinstall of my lab today, and noticed a new setting in the policy template.

Turn off the upgrade to the latest version of Windows through Windows Update snip

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Make IE prompt to remember password, again!

June 5, 2015 by Leave a comment

WinningI had saved a password in IE, for a website i regularly log in to. It is a shared supplier account, and for various reasons was changed recently. Unfortunately for me, on my Windows 8 PC at work, it was not prompting me to remember the new password, worse still, it was remembering the old password. Which i was not remembering to clear out, whilst also not remembering the new password. So you had IE not remembering, to remember to ask me to save the new password, and me not remembering to forget the saved password and not remembering the new password. Read more of this post

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Populating Active Directory with Computer Information

June 4, 2015 by Leave a comment

metroHere is a very quick tip i have employed to good effect at client sites.

It goes back to this very cool command i shared a few years ago now, here. Read more of this post

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Hide Users from Essentials Dashboard 2011 & 2012

March 3, 2015 by 1 Comment

LogoI wrote a blog post a few months back about how to use WSS PowerShell to hide Users from the Essentials 2012 R2 Dashboard. A commenter on that post asked whether or not we could do the same for 2012 R1. I know the PowerShell Support for R1 is not as rich as it is in R2, and sure enough i could not see a way to do it directly. But that just makes it more fun!

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