Saturday, April 28, 2012

Bits and Pieces for the Admins - Quick Post #2

OK. This next collection is a mashup of various items. Mostly new utility finds as well as few tips/tricks.

Probably something in here to play with for a while.

Microsoft Security Essentials 4.0 Released - Quietly…and related curiosities

I noticed last week that I had some out-of-cycle updates waiting. Curious, I checked on them and found that one was a new version of MSE. Most all of the changes are “under-the-hood” items, although there are a few GUI tweaks you might catch if you look close enough.  If you use MSE and haven’t gotten an update for it yet, I recommend you manually apply it.

Utilities

Image Writer in Launchpad - Neat tool to write images to USB or memory sticks - Cool project by Michael Casadevall. Read this important announcement as well: Version 0.6 release is back - with a warning.

Image Resizer for Windows - CodePlex project. I’ve posted this utility before but for some reason never got around to installing on my own Windows system at home. Egads! Realized it when I had to resize some pics to send to my brother and wanted to tell him about it for quick-resizing work.

Known Folders Browser 1.0 (for Vista and Beyond) - Kenny Kerr - Super neat tool to show virtualized folders and linking to the actual paths going on behind the scenes. A must-have tool under Vista/Win7. Spotted at ToolTip: Known Folders Browser - Anything about IT blog.

The above tool reminded me of the similar tool (and beloved) SpecialFoldersView over at NirSoft. Take your pick. Both it and Known Folders Browser come in x32/x64 flavors.

Portable WinCDEmu - Not really “portable” but once you run it and do your business, you can then uninstall the driver from within the application. I prefer ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver and Pismo File Mount Audit Package supplemented with SlySoft Virtual CloneDrive on my system. You may also want to check out OSFMount (based on ImDisk), Gizmo Drive, or MagicISO for some more full-featured ISO mounting apps. Spotted over at ToolTip: Portable WinCDEmu - Anything about IT blog.

Fixing Remote Desktop Annoyances - What the.....? blog - a collection of clever tweaks for you power Remote Desktop junkies.

JunctionMaster (or MoveAndLink) - Clever and powerful tool to create NFTS Junctions on your system. Really neat and handy tool as long as you manage to keep your real and virtual link relations straight! Spotted via this JunctionMaster: Move A Folder Without Changing Its Path (Hard Link) post at Addictive Tips blog. Similar (though it doesn’t let you create them) NTFSLinksView utility over at NirSoft. Sysinternals’ Junction tool is a CLI tool to let you view existing ones and create them.  Junction Link Magic is another freeware GUI tool. Check out Link Shell Extension as well. Finally there is ntfs link over at elsdoerfer.name for one more tool.

Tips of Note

Windows and boot disks larger than 2TB - Awesome roundup of tips and tricks at TinyApps blog. With large-storage (1TB+) getting more and more common at the consumer level, dealing with prepping these drives for maximum compatibility and usage can be challenging. Thanks TinyApps bloggist! Your awesomeness remains supreme!

Disconnect USB Devices Without Using Safely Remove Hardware Option - AddictiveTIps blog. For those of you who prefer the “snatch-n-go” technique this may be beneficial.  See also USB Safely Remove v5.1 (not free), EjectUSB (via freewaregenius/Softpedia), or USB Disk Ejector Free (via Softpedia). For more feature-rich USB removal support there is my new favorite, Dev Eject (beta version 1.0.23 released 4/25/12).

Windows Prefers Wired Connections - Clint Huffman's Windows Performance Blog - I really-did already know this but it was a nicely composed reminder.

Cheers.

--Claus V.

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