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Outlook AutoComplete cache

July 13th, 2010. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

Many times I have been asked about the Outlook address auto complete cache.  This is the way Outlook provides email addresses you have sent or received mail with in the To, CC, or BCC fields in mail messages.  I thought this wasn’t possible in the past.

Not so, apparently.  This cache is stored in the “profilename.nk2″ file, where “profilename” is the name of the Outlook profile.  This file is hidden, so “view hidden files and folders” must be enabled in Windows Explorer.  It resides in the “%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook” folder.  Just copy this over to the new location to bring the autocomplete cache along and remember to rename the file if the destination Outlook profile name is different.

More details for this process can be found in this post at mycomputeraid.com.

CD / DVD drive missing / not recognized by Windows

March 3rd, 2010. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

Recently an associate came across this issue, where a Windows XP laptop was not showing a drive letter for the DVD drive. The drive was obviously powered since it would open when the eject button was pressed. In Device Manager, the drive was showing the yellow exclamation point symbol for a device that had a driver issue. The usual action of deleting the device in Device Manager and restarting did not change this; it just came back with the yellow exclamation mark.

Googling for this issue let to several forum posts where the solution was a quick deletion of two values in the registry. The solution, which works for Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, can be found at the Microsoft Support site.

• Windows XP, Vista, and 7: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060/
• Windows 2000: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/270008/

A quick reboot after the registry deletions fixed the issue on this laptop.

How to access Administrative Shares on Vista (C$)

November 23rd, 2009. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

Found this gem recently about turning on the hidden administrative shares in Vista.

Text clipped from http://www.paulspoerry.com/2007/05/09/how-to-access-administrative-shares-on-vista-c/

To enable administrative shares you gotta make a registry change. Click on the orb and in the search box type ‘regedit’ and hit enter. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System. Add a new DWORD called “LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy” and give it a value of 1. Reboot and yer done!

Disable ctfmon.exe in Windows

May 14th, 2009. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

Just unchecking the selection for ctfmon.exe in a program like Windows Startup Inspector or Autoruns doesn’t stop it from starting itself up again. Sure, you can block it with Group Policy, but that is a little heavy-handed.

You can disable it in XP by going into the Regional and Language Options in the Control Panel, choose the Languages tab, and click the Details button in the “Text services and input languages section”. In the dialog that pops up, make sure in the “Installed services” section you have only your default keyboard layout. If there are speech services installed, select them and click Remove. Then click the Advanced tab and check the box for “Turn off advanced text services”.

In Vista, go to the Control Panel, and choose “Change keyboard or other input methods” in the “Regional and Language Options” section. On the “Keyboards and Languages” tab, click the “Change keyboards” button. On the “Text Services and Input Languages” dialog, General tab, make sure in the “Installed services” section you have only your default keyboard layout. If there are speech services installed, select them and click Remove. If you find it still running after restarting Vista, you may have to run msconfig and uncheck the ctfmon.exe selection on the Startup tab.

Install any Windows application as a service

December 24th, 2008. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

This is very handy for making applications run before user login on a Windows box.  The instructions are pretty simple:

1. Acquire instsrv.exe and srvany.exe from the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit.  You can put these files wherever you want, but it is probably best to dump them into %WINDIR%\System32 (which is usually “C:\Windows\System32″ on Windows XP.  The srvany.exe application must remain where you put it because the service is going to use it to run your application.
2. Open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> type “cmd”) and change directory to where you put these files.
3. Type “instsrv ServiceName PathToSrvany.exe“.  For example, if I desire the name of the service to be BiteMe and I saved the executables where I suggested in Step 1, I would type “instsrv BiteMe C:\Windows\System32\srvany.exe”.
4. Lauch the Registry Editor (Start -> Run -> type “regedit.exe”) and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ServiceName.  Right-click the key named ServiceName and select New -> Key.  Name the new key “Parameters” and click it.  Right-click the new Parameters key and select New -> String Value.  Name this new String (REG_SZ) Value “Application” and set the value data to the path to the executable of the application you desire to make a service.  So if I wanted to make Firefox run as a service, I would put “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” in the value data field.
5. OPTIONAL: Services usually just run in the background and do not need to be messed with.  However, if you must interact with this service, you’ll want to open the Services snap-in (I like to use Start -> Run -> type “services.msc” to launch it) and find your new service in the alphabetical list.  Right-click it and select Properties (or just double-click it).  On the Log On tab, check the checkbox that says “Allow service to interact with desktop”.  This will allow you to interact with the GUI of the application.
6. ALSO OPTIONAL: You can add dependencies, which are other services that must be running prior to this service to start, by adding a Multi-String value to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ServiceName key called “DependOnService”.  In this value you put the actual service name (not the “display”) service name, one service name per line.  You can see the actual service name by opening the properties of the service from the Services application.  For example, if you wanted to add a dependency for the Windows Time service, you would add “w32time” to the DependOnService value.

That’s about it.  The service you just made will show up as srvany.exe in the process list, just like many Windows services run under svchost.exe.  If you want to see what services are running under either of these processes, you can use the following command in a comand prompt:

tasklist /svc /fi “Imagename eq svchost.exe”

or

tasklist /svc /fi “Imagename eq srvany.exe”

Try it out.

Oh, also worth mentioning is removing your service if desired.  You can do this by typing “instsrv ServiceName remove”.

Quickly enable and disable Aero in Windows Vista

November 21st, 2008. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.

There are many articles out there on this already, but I think this one on Tweaking with Vishal is one of the better.  Vishal lists not only the command line arguments…

Activate Aero:

rundll32 dwmApi #102

Deactivate Aero:

rundll32 dwmApi #104

…but also gives directions to add these commands to both the Desktop context menu and the My Computer context menu.  Very cool.