IT Knowledgebase Articles

How to use Sysprep with Windows Product Activation or Volume License Media to deploy Windows XP/2003? If you are planning a large deployment of Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, obtain Volume License (VL) media and use Volume Licensing. Activation is not required when you use Volume License media (VL versions of Windows XP/2003) in…

How can I activate Windows XP? Windows XP uses software-based product activation technology, which means that you must activate your copy of Windows XP to use it. This article describes how to activate Windows XP. How Activation Works? Product activation reduces a form of software piracy known as “casual copying”. Casual copying is the sharing…

Microsoft has made some awesome graphical additions to Windows Vista, namely, the Aero theme (read more about it on my “Enable Windows Vista Aero Graphics” and “Aero Theme is Bad, Disable It” articles).   The Aero theme is not available in all the Vista editions. You can read “Windows Vista Editions” for more info, but…

  Why do I get an “Access Denied” error every time I try to read a file even though I’ve double-checked my permissions, and they’re ok? Featured Product: Passware Kit – Password recovery software pack for the world’s most popular office application files including Excel, Word, Windows 2003/XP/2000, Access, Outlook, QuickBooks, Lotus Notes, etc. Download…

In the previous article in this series, I talked about the importance of removing the routing group connectors prior to removing the last legacy Exchange Server from an organization. In this article, I want to conclude the series by showing you how to remove a routing group connector, and how to redirect the Recipient Update…

A hard drive partition can allow you to easily test out new operating systems (like Windows 7 beta) or create a simple way to separate your user data from the operating system install.  You can divide your hard drive into multiple partitions, some bootable, others not. The main reasons for having separate partitions are: to…

One of the most frequent questions I see on forums and newsgroups that deal with virtualization is the age-old question of “I have used all the space inside a VHD hard disk. How do I expand the virtual hard disk to make room for additional data?”. Luckily for us, with Microsoft Hyper-V on Windows Server…

One of the biggest architectural changes in Windows Server 2008 is the inclusion of IPv6. IPv6 has been a part of Windows since Windows 2000, but Windows Server 2008 is the first version of Windows to enable IPv6 by default. Furthermore, The transport stack has been completely redesigned so that IPv6 and IPv4 are able…

Windows Vista shipped without including a number of DLL files for legacy graphics engines like Direct3D.   When attempting to use games or 3D applications that require these DLLs, users can get a range of “required DLL missing” error messages. Additionally, we’ve noticed that there are quite a few searches on the internal Petri search engines…

One of the most frequent questions on virtualization forums that deal with server deployments is the question of how should one deploy their Active Directory domain controllers. Should they be deployed on stand-alone separate servers, should they be kept on separate physical servers, or should they be run inside virtual machines that are hosted on…