1. Launch TSAdmin from an adjacent server and connect to the problem server
2. Click the “Sessions” tab
3. Reset RDP-Tcp and any other items that’s in “Down” state

Dropbox is a great service. It provides seamless file sync and online storage that “just works” on almost all platforms. I also own an Android  and as you can imagine, one of the first thing I did is to install the Dropbox app for Android. This little app works great, but I have one minor problem. I wanted a separate account for this device as my existing account is shared with others. As anyone who’s used Dropbox before knows, Dropbox only installs on one user account and does not allow you to use multiple user accounts with the same installation. Bummer!

So I started searching the net until I found this brilliant article. Why didn’t I think of this before! I started implementing the steps and realized that while this is a brilliant idea, it does still have room for improvement. Firstly, newly created account will be visible on the Windows Logon screen and every time the second instance of Dropbox is launched, I will need to enter the password for the new account. I can foresee the latter quickly driving me up the wall. It was time to put the thinking hat on and find a solution to this.

Here’s what I ended up with.

Note: These steps are for Windows 7

First, create the new account.

Click Start > Control Panel > User Accounts > Manage Another Account > Create a new account.

New account creation

In the new account creation window, enter a name for the new account and select “Standard user”. Also, remember to give the account a password. Since I will only be using this account for Dropbox, I decided to call it “dropbox.svc” and made the account a “Standard User” account.

The new account created

Next, copy the Dropbox installer that you have downloaded to the root of your C: drive or any other location that is accessible from other accounts.

Now, create a new folder that you would like to use as your new Dropbox folder. If this folder is created in a location that is only accessible from your current user account, you will need to give permissions to the new account.

To do this, simply right-click the new folder, select Properties > Security > Add. In the box titled “Enter the object names to select:”, enter the new account name then click “Check Names” followed by OK. By default, this new account will only have Read-Only rights to the new folder. We will need to give it “Write” permissions for Dropbox to work. In the permissions window that you are currently in, tick “Allow” for “Modify”. The image below shows the permissions that the new account should have for that folder.

Write permissions for the new account

Continue clicking OK until all the windows are closed.

Now, switch to this newly created account and install Dropbox. Once the installation completes, sign in with your new account and configure Dropbox to use the newly created folder as Dropbox location.

You can now log off this account and if everything continues to work as it should on your system, you will never need to log back on to that account again.

Log back on to your primary user account and browse to the following location.

C:\Users\<new account name>\AppData\Roaming\Dropbox\bin

Here, you will see the Dropbox file. Right-click this file, then select “Create Shortcut”. After the new shortcut appears, you can rename it to anything you please. When you’re satisfied with the new name, right-click that shortcut and select “Cut”.

We are going to place this shortcut in the Startup folder so it starts automatically when we log on. To do this, click Start > All Programs then right-click Startup and select Open or Explore.

Paste the shortcut in this folder then right-click the shortcut and select “Properties”. We will need to configure this shortcut so it will run Dropbox with the credentials of the new account.

Select the Shortcut tab and place click in the text box labelled “Target”. Move the cursor to the beginning of the line and enter the following.

runas /savecred /user:<user account name>

runas command added to the shortcut

Now click OK to close that window. Lets test this shortcut. The first time you open it, you will need to enter the password for the new account. When prompted, enter the password then hit Enter.

By this point, you would have noticed that the new account is appearing on your Welcome Screen and you’re probably thinking wouldn’t it be nice if it didn’t appear on that screen.

Here’s how to hide it.

Launch Registry Editor by clicking Start > Run or pressing “Windows Key+R” then enter “regedit” without the quotes and click “OK”.

Next, browse to the following registry key:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

On the left pane, right-Click “Winlogon” then select New > Key and enter “SpecialAccounts” without the quotes and press Enter.

Now, right-click the SpecialAccounts key, select New > Key and enter “UserList” without the quotes and press Enter.

Select UserList and on the right pane, right-click anywhere in the blank space, select New > DWORD (32-Bit) Value. Enter the name of your newly created account for the name of this DWORD value then press Enter. Once this is done, right-click the DWORD value, select Modify and enter the numeral zero for the “Value data” and click OK.

The UserList registry key

The registry value for the new account

To check if this has worked, select Switch User on the Start Menu. The new account should no longer be there.

And there you have it. You have a second Dropbox account that works.

Enjoy!

Now, there is one problem with this setup. I also have other users connecting to my network from time to time who will……as expected…complain about the poor network speed…from time to time. I know what’s taking up all the bandwidth…its my torrents, but I’m not always there to throttle it or turn it off and it does not make sense to throttle it when there’s no one else on the network.
How did I solve this problem?
Easy…firstly, I wrote a simple script. The logic behind this script is to check the network for known machines. If such a machine exists, turn off Torrents. If it does not exist, turn on Torrents. Listed below is the resultant script. I then pasted that into a text document and converted it to a batch file, then placed that file in a folder called “scripts” in C:\

Now, the script is ready but how do I get it to run every 5 minutes?

Windows already has the answer. Task Scheduler.

All I needed to do now is to schedule a task in Windows Task Scheduler with the following parameters (Refer to screen shots for more details) and that’s it.

Script:

@echo off
ping computername > c:\scripts\utorrentping.txt
cd c:\scripts
FIND /i “Reply from” utorrentping.txt
IF NOT ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO KILLUTORRENT
GOTO STARTUTORRENT

:KILLUTORRENT
taskkill /f /im utorrent.exe
GOTO END

:STARTUTORRENT
tasklist > c:\scripts\utorrenttasklist.txt
cd c:\scripts
FIND /i “utorrent.exe” utorrenttasklist.txt
IF NOT ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO END
GOTO STARTPROCESS

:STARTPROCESS
CD C:\Progra~1\uTorrent\
START utorrent.exe
GOTO END

:END
cd c:\scripts
del utorrentping.txt
del utorrenttasklist.txt
END

Schedule: Every 5 minute(s) from 12:00am for 24 hour(s) every day, starting 10/8/2010.

First configure this

This is the important bit.

I enabled the "Wake the computer to run this task." option, just in case.

I haven’t tested it properly yet but preliminary test results shows that it works just as expected.
If you happen to try this out and there are any issues or if you’ve got an even simpler way to do this, do let me know by commenting on this post.

Now, we all know, that if you’re on the same network or you’ve got VPN access to the network, this can be done easily with a file share. Or, there is always the other, less productive, option of emailing files between participants.

Problem here is, I wasn’t on the same network, VPN was out of the question and we needed to work together at the same time with minimal disruption (that rules out email).

Enter Dropbox….

Dropbox is an application that works with an online file storage/sync/sharing service and its free! Well, at least 2GB of storage is free.
I was skeptical at first, given the poor quality of the internet connection where I was, I thought this would never work. Boy was I wrong. The client application is small, and easy to install. Configuration is minimal. Its so simple that signing up for a new email account is difficult by comparison. The best part of all of this…..its fast! As soon as one person clicks save the document, the other gets a notification that a new document or an updated version is available. Its syncs seamlessly and you don’t have to do anything else to get it to work correctly.

Don’t believe me? Scoot on over to the Dropbox website for a video on what it is and try it for yourself.

Oh…..and documentations were completed in record time. Anyone wants to take a guess at what I’ll be recommending to my clients when they ask about an online file storage service?

One neat tool that’s available (for free) is psinfo from Sysinternals. With psinfo, you can easily check the remaining disk space on all volumes on any server on your network (provided your current logon has administrative rights on the server) without actually logging on to it.

Here’s how to use it.

Firstly, download PsTools and extract the files to either C:\ or the System32 folder.

Once this is done, fire up Command Prompt and browse to C:\ or if you’ve extracted the files to the System32 folder, just enter the following command.

“psinfo -d \ \\computername“

In a few seconds, you will the information you need.

If you need to check the disk space on several machines at once, just write a simple batch script to get the info and pipe it to a text file.

You have to admit, this is a lot faster than having to RDP to the server just to find out that the system already has sufficient disk space.

And what do you do if you need to perform housekeeping on the volume?

Simple. Run the following command to open the drive and fire away.

\\computername\drive$

e.g. \\winsvr2k3\c$ for C: drive on remote computer “winsvr2k3″

Wasn’t that easy.

There is a known issue where Windows and Office on a Mac machine will prompt to reactivate on every reboot of VMWare Fusion or Parallels virtual machine.

This issue only occurs if the ALL the following conditions are true.

1. Windows is installed on Bootcamp
2. The Bootcamp partition is being loaded in the Mac OS as a virtual machine using VMWare Fusion or Parallels

Windows and Office, as we all know, has a built in activation mechanism. This mechanism uses what is called an Installation ID that’s generated based on the Product Key and Hardware ID. Hardware ID is generated based on the key components in the system, for example, motherboard, CPU, etc. On a regular computer, Bootcamp and a Virtual Machine, the Hardware ID is always the same, so the activation mechanism knows that the software is still on the same computer.

The problem surfaces when a Bootcamp partition is loaded on Mac OS using either Parallels or Fusion. For some reason, the Machine ID generated by the machine changes every time the Virtual Machine is restarted. As expected, Windows and Office will detect that it has been “moved” to another computer and prompt for activation.

Solutions:

The best solution for this issue is to use Windows and Office in either Bootcamp or a Virtual Machine and not combine the two. If for some reason you need to use Windows and Office in the configuration listed above, the only solution available is to re-activate Windows and Office every time the Virtual Machine is restarted. I know this is not acceptable for most people however at the time of writing, I have not come across any workaround for this.

If you do know of any workaround for this problem, please do let us know. I’m sure it will come in handy.

Based on the Blog post, the Mac BU is looking to release the next Office for Mac by the 2010 holiday season.

Next major version targeted to be ready by 2010 holiday season

The best part of this all is it may include Outlook for Mac as a replacement for the aged Entourage. This is supported by a previous Press Release by Microsoft on PressPass website.

Microsoft PressPass - Outlook for Mac

I can’t wait!

Lets hope they get rid of the oh so problematic Database and introduce .pst files instead. Better html support and improved compatibility between Windows and Mac would be great too.

Set Up and Get to Know Your New Windows, Mac, or Linux Computer

It covers Windows, Mac and Linux. Complete with lists of must have free applications, how-to guides and all the tools you need to get you going like a pro!

Here’s how to hide it.

Firstly, bring up the registry editor by clicking Start > Run or pressing “Windows Key+R” then enter “regedit” without the quotes and click “OK”.

Next, browse to the following registry key:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Add the DWORD Value

Add the following registry key by clicking Edit > New > DWORD (32-bit) Value:

Value Name: NoDrives

Value Data (Decimal): 65536

DWORD Value added

Once this value has been created, click OK and close the registry editor.

Please note that this fix will only work in the user account you’re currently logged into.

To apply this fix machine-wide, make changes to the following registry key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Alternatively, you can also create Binary values as described in Microsoft’s KB555438.

There you go. This should put an end to the “Access is denied” error message while maintaining Office 2010 Beta’s “Click-To-Run” functionality.

All the best!

Dual-Boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu in Perfect Harmony

As far as “How-to” articles go, it doesn’t get any better than this.

Simple, clear yet detailed instructions.

The author holds your hand and guides you every step of the way.

Simply awesome!