Category Archives: Windows

Dual or Triple Monitors and Multiple Taskbars for Windows 7

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If you have a dual or a triple monitor setup, and you wish to have a taskbar on the second or second and third monitor. Then you should take a look at Dual Monitor Taskbar.

It’s a free opensource program for Windows 7 that puts a taskbar on your second monitor if you have dual monitor setup or on your second and third monitor if you have a triple monitor setup. I haven’t tried a quad monitor setup or beyond, please let me know if you have in the comments.

Here is a list of configuration options.

  • General
    • Automatically start with Windows
    • Check for Updates
  • Taskbar Appearance
    • Show lables
    • Show clock
    • Mirror mode
    • Use small icons
    • Show notification area
    • Show start button
    • Use custom font
    • Auto-hide the taskbar
  • Taskbar location
    • Mutliple display support
    • Options for Bottom, Left, Right, Top

Below is a screenshot of the settings, and notepad on a second monitor. As you can see, it’s hard to tell the different from a normal Windows 7 taskbar.

dual-monitor-taskbar-screenshot

If you have a program running on your second or third screen, it will show on the taskbar for that monitor, so it makes it easy to locate your programs windows.

There is similar software that you can purchase, however Dual Monitor Taskbar seems to get the job done and is free.

Dual Monitor Taskbar Homepage

Using “robocopy” to Copy EFS Files

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When required to move large amounts data from one location to another, we use robocopy. Why? It’s basically like rsync for Linux, it copies NTFS Security ACL’s and will do file compare on every file to ensure that the destination has the most current version of the file.

So when moving over 50 + user folders, it comes in handy. We simply run robocopy a couple of days before to do the large sync of data. Then we run it during a maintenance window to update any files that have been modified or created.

It works great! But its biggest feature is that it will copy EFS files without the need to have the EFS certificate/key. Using the /EFSRAW switch allows for the copy of encrypted files from one location to another without having to decrypt the data.

Fore more information on the robocopy syntax please see the following site:

http://ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html

Mac Tip: Create a Solid Color for Desktop Background OSX

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I wanted to choose a different Solid Color for my Desktop Background on my Mac. In order to achieve this, you have to complete a couple of steps. All of the default Desktop Backgrounds for “Solid Colors” are located in “Macintosh HD/Library/Desktop Pictures/Solid Colors”. From here you can add PNG images and they wil be available under the “Desktop” section of “Desktop & Screen Savers” in System Preferences. You just need to create a new PNG image with the color your would like to use and then you can set it as your Desktop Background. I’ve provided some steps on how to complete this easily.

1. Double click on “Macintosh HD” on your desktop.
2. Navigate to the following folder “Macintosh HD/Library/Desktop Pictures/Solid Colors”.
3. Right click on “Solid White.png” and select “Duplicate”.
4. Rename the newly created file to “Solid Green.png” or to whichever color you wish to create. (This is important as the name on the file is used for the name under the “Solid Colors” section in Desktop & Screen Savers”.
5. Open the the file “Solid Green.png” in your favourite image editor, I use Gimp. Which can be downloaded for free online at http://gimp.org
6. Change the image to be the color of your choice, and save the file.
7. Open “Desktop & Screen Saver” and you should now see “Solid Green” in the list. You’re done!

Here is a screenshot of “Solid Green” located under “Solid Colors”.

A lost relic from the old days of ASCII Art “DAMN NFO Viewer”

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I don’t know how many of you remember when you had to open up a .nfo, maybe you haven’t. ;D

But there was one awesome program that would display ASCII Art in windows properly. DMAN NFO Viewer. I’ve put it up for download.

DAMN NFO Viewer - A program to view .nfo files correctly, specifically displaying ASCII Art correctly.
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Adding your Desktop Admin Groups to One Global Group for Administrators

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One idea that has come up and is really handy, is creating a general support user so that you can login to machines and have Administrative rights to that machine. We have many groups, and each group has a Desktop Admin group that we add people to who need Administrative access. But we also use it to remove people that seem to abuse it.

Instead of manually adding the groups one by one, you can use dsquery and dsmod. You simple do a query to find the groups that you’ve created. In this example we’re looking for anything that ends in “Desktop Admin”:

dsquery group domainroot -name “*Desktop Admin”

Which returns all of the groups we need. Next step is to take the Global Desktop Admin group and add it to all of these groups. This is simple with dsmod:

dsquery group domainroot -name “*Desktop Admin” | dsmod group -addmbr “CN=Global Desktop Admin,OU=Network Admin,OU=Groups,DC=DOMAIN,DC=LAN”

Voila! Done.