Chris Hubbard

There are times when the best way to read something is to have it on paper, especially if you want to write comments in the margins and it needs to be portable.  On Windows XP, I have always used Wordpad for print RFCs since it correctly handles the page breaks (control-L) that are embedded in the RFC text.  Any other text editor would mess up the pagination.

I recently upgraded to Windows 7 and I tried to print an RFC with Wordpad and I noticed that it didn’t look right.  It was in Courier New 11 point and the margins were all messed up.  I tried different fonts to no avail.  I am thankful that I still had my Windows XP machine and a little side-by-side comparison showed that the only difference was that XP defaults to Courier New 10 point.  I switch to that font and it printed out faithfully.

I have started using Windows 7 at work a while ago and I use three monitors.  There is a new shortcut key in Windows 7 to move a window between monitors: WIN-SHIFT-LEFT ARROW (or RIGHT ARROW).  This works great, except that I normally run remote desktop sessions full screen on one of the monitors and that doesn’t work when Remote Desktop is full screen.  However, there are shortcut keys for Remote Desktop and one of them is CTRL+ALT+BREAK to switch the client computer between a window and full screen.  So I can switch it from full screen to window, use the new shortcut key to move the window to another screen, and then back to full screen. It going to take a while to get the muscle memory down. 

BTW, the original dilbert strip only had two monitors.  That is so…two years ago.

How is that for a cryptic title?  IE ESC is Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration.  If I remember correctly, it is turned on by default in Window Server since 2003.  I install Windows Server to test our products at my day job at Interactive Intelligence.  I will often need to browse to web sites to get some software that is needed.

When I first started using 2003, I saw this feature and it was a little annoying.  There was dialog that popped up and you could add an exclusion.  That was slightly annoying, but eventually I turned the feature off.  You had to go to add/remove programs, add/remove windows components, and unselect “Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration”.  Done.

With Windows Server 2008 R2, there is no option to add an exclusion and there is no option to uninstall the “feature” so you are stuck with it.  It is difficult to figure out how to add an exclusion.  So by default, IE if extremely limited.  I could understand this for your average Server that will be deployed and facing the Internet.  This is completely annoying for internal servers.  I finally found the “work around” for this!

1. Launch “Server Manager”
2. Select the “Server Manager” node on the left and scroll on the right to the “Security Information” Section.
   
3. Click on “Configure IE ESC”
   
4. Change the settings for either Administrators or Users.

Realistically, it is nicer that you can turn it off only for administrators.  However, it was not the easiest setting to find.  I am documenting here so that I don’t have to find it again (for the third time)!  I found this on one of my servers.  A month later, I wanted to set it but couldn’t remember the magic location.  I went to the original server and IE conveniently told me how to re-enable it (and hence were to disable it on the new server).

I recently changed PCs at work. I am now running Windows 7 x64 on a Quad Core with 4GB of memory.  Sweet! 

I was running bulk call simulations that would generate 20-30 calls/sec and our logging would generate gigabytes of logs.  So I got another 1TB disk to store all of this data and any other logs that I would look at for different support scenarios.

I brought the disk over to the new machine and forgot about it since I wasn’t running those simulations anymore.  I realized today that the drive was not showing up.  The IT guy was in the office looking at another problem (actually my previous PC failed to boot after I rebooted the day I switched machines!).

We looked at the disk management node under computer management.  I saw a disk, but it had a yellow exclamation next to it.  That can’t be good!

I heard him exclaim, “who setup the disk as a Dynamic Partition?!?!”  I sheepishly ask why that mattered.  It turns out that “Dynamic” means that it can only be used on the original PC that it was created on (which will no longer boot).  Maybe a name other than “Dynamic” should have been used to describe this type of partition.  Heavy Sigh…

Note to self: Don’t use dynamic partitions (if I want the data to be portable).

There is a very convenient button on my keyboard for launching my email client.  However, if I have a remote desktop session running at the same time, the key sequence will get sent to the remote machine which would never have an email client configured and I have to cancel through several dialogs while Outlook Express is insisting that you create an account so that it can get started.  This has annoyed me for years.

I finally spent the time to figure out how to stop this behavior.  Windows will use the email client setup in Internet Explorer’s programs configuration, which defaults to Outlook Express.

I used Process Monitor to watch for registry access.  First I selected only to monitor registry changes.  Then I included iexplore.exe and then excluded all the registry operations that I was not interested in.  When I launched the options dialog in IE, I saw that it was enumerating the [HKLM\SOFTWARE\Clients\Mail] registry path.  I went to that path and saw that the default value was “Outlook Express” just like it is displayed in the options dialog.

I cleared the default value and went back to IE and verified that the “E-Mail” program entry was cleared.  I hit the email button and…nothing!  Just what I wanted!  Now I have to remember this so that I can clear this setting when I connect to a new server (hence the reason for this post)!