If you have a network share mapped to a drive letter, and it stopped connecting because the password changed, it won't ask you to correct the stored password, or even delete it.

I am having a problem with crashing computers, and need to get a record of crashes. This filter finds all the "unexpected shudown" events.

This is a collection of articles about system administration of Windows, Unix/Linux/BSD, and Macintosh computers and networks.

We got these new computers at work, and for some reason, mine was crashing.

It's common to get a list of names and phone numbers in a spreadsheet or from the web, and the formatting varies. In the US, people don't use a standard formatting consistently. Lately, they have taken to making phone numbers look like domain names or ip addresses, example: 415.555.1212. This function normalizes phone numbers to look like this: 213-555-1212 x1234. The code's structured so multiple regexes are used to perform the matching, allowing for easier modification of the code. (This code was written in Excel, but should work in any VBA application.)

If Windows 7 seems much slower, try changing the theme. Click the Start Menu, then type "theme". The option to change the theme should appear. Click on it.

After reading some of the documentation and the website page about SATA, I got the software working by doing the following.

I'm on a low-volume personal boycott against Adobe because of the Dimitry Sklyarov bust 10 years ago. See Wikipedia's entry. It was a long time ago, but, it remains an attack against the First Amendment. /soapbox

Aside from that, Acrobat is expensive. Mac and Linux users don't pay anything to produce PDFs because it's built-in to the printing system. Windows users have to pay.

Also, in 2010, they were pretty lax about dealing with some security issues that led to the proliferation of malware being delivered as PDF files.

The top PDF makers are:

I have been holding back on writing this post, but we just bought a bunch of Bytespeed brand computers at work. They're boring but nice. The boring part is the generic looking black case. The nice part is that they only use Intel motherboards, and they have a good return policy and warranty. Hopefully, they'll also be boring and not crash or break.

The other pluses are that it's put together in the US, and tech support is also domestic.

I'm reading up on Exchange 2010 and it's clustering and failover tech. It seems "wrong" to me.

Here's one possible reason:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;290684

Here's a fix:

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1130775940

The Windows server's printer server works like this: when you go to a server and double click on a printer icon, the system will download a printer driver from the server and install it into your loca

It's pretty difficult to share from an XP Professional machine participating in a domain to a cheap laptop running Vista Home (Basic).

(I did this before learning about Clonezilla and Fog. It was all done within two days. If I were to deal with this again, I'd get Clonezilla.)

It all starts with Windows NT, the secure Windows. NT4 added many features and a nice visual onto NT 3.5, but it crashed a lot. Windows 2000 fixed a lot of crashes, and became the stable Windows OS. XP added better multimedia, and improved ways to handle network security. After service pack 2, XP was stable and good.

Vista added many features. The problem was, it added too many new features that also slowed the machine down, a lot. Customers bought new, faster computers expecting them to be faster, but they were slower. Everything worked differently too. People were frustrated. Vista flopped.

Windows 7 design goal was "performance". Generally, the easiest way to improve how fast a system feels is to stop running programs that you're not using. Windows 7 does that. It comes with less software installed. Reportedly, it's still slower than XP, but faster than Vista.

They also fixed up a lot of interface issues and added some features.