Handy Hyper-V Tools

This week we have been building a new Microsoft Hyper-V server for a client. For this installation, I decided to use a couple of tools that really helped to speed up the process.

Hvremote is a handy script written by John Howard who is a senior program manager on the Hyper-V team at Microsoft. This script compiles the multiple strings of commands used for diagnosing and configuring the Windows firewall, WMI and DCOM permissions in order to control a Hyper-V server from a remote client MMC regardless of the domain or workgroup association of either computer. This was once an extremely lengthy task that can now be completed in just 3 or 4 commands using the hvremote tool.

VHDtool was another big help. I needed to create a rather large 450GB fixed-size VHD. Personally this is the largest virtual hard disk that I have ever created and I was quite surprised at how long the process was taking through the manager. After several hours I decided to employ VHDtool.exe which is a nifty command line tool that allows you to instantly create large fixed-size VHDs. My 450GB VHD was created in approximately one second! This tool also provides the ability to extend drives, convert RAW disk images to VHD and repair broken Hyper-V snapshot chains.

I will definitely be keeping both of these time savers in my Hyper-V arsenal! If you need help configuring a Hyper-V server for your company feel free to Contact Us and an engineer will be glad to assist!

Adam Jones - Systems Engineer

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!

Data Recovery

This week, a client accidentally deleted files and folders from his local hard drive. I found some free software that had very good reviews and seemed to have a friendly layout for easy use.

I find that when recovering data from a drive or partition on a drive, you do not want to install the program on the same drive or partition as the file were deleted from. So I pulled out a good old flash drive, put it into the PC and pointed the installation wizard to install the data recovery software on my flash drive. This way, when you save the files you want you do not over write anything on the desired drive that the file originated on. I did the following steps below:  

1. Download software to your PC.  Most of them require you to install the program. Just make sure you do not to install the program on the drive you lost files on.

2. Connect your flash drive to PC and then run the software which might recognize your flash drive to be external drive and then just click it and run recovery.

3. Save the found files to your local PC or flash drive just not to the drive you lost files on.

Dennis Foote - Systems Engineer

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!

Shortcuts

I just wanted to take a minute in this week's blog to give a list of some keyboard shortcuts.  It may seem like basic stuff to technicians and computer users in general, but not everyone knows about them.

Ctrl + C or Ctrl + Insert

Copy the highlighted text or selected item.

 

Ctrl + V or Shift + Insert

Paste the text or object that's in the clipboard.

 

Ctrl + Z and Ctrl + Y

Undo any change. For example, if you cut text, pressing this will undo it. Pressing Ctrl + Y would redo the undo.

 

Ctrl + F

Open the Find in any program. This includes your Internet browser!

 

Alt + Tab or Alt + Esc

Quickly switch between open programs moving forward.

 

Press Ctrl + Tab to switch between tabs in a program.

 

Ctrl + Back space

Pressing Ctrl + Backspace will delete a full word at a time instead of a single character.

 

Ctrl + Left arrow / Right arrow

Move the cursor one word at a time instead of one character at a time.

 

Ctrl + Home / End

Move the cursor to the beginning or end of a document.

 

Ctrl + P

Print the page being viewed.

 

Page Up and Page Down

Pressing either the page up or page down key will move that page one page at a time in that direction.

That's all I can think of for now.  I find a lot of these to be very useful and hope you will too.

Kristen Hewes - Hardware Technician

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!

DHCP Fix

Every now and again I find with a Windows XP PC I cannot get the computer to take an IP from a DHCP router. I also find that running the cmd netsh winsock reset does not always work. When I run cmd ipconfig /all I find that the ip will show up as 192.168.1.x.  However, it said that it was finding a DHCP server. I knew DHCP was enabled, and a DHCP lease had been obtained that expired in 30 years. From the cmd netsh diagnostic gui, the scan would always report this subnet as invalid. I found that you could manually configure any ip that was valid for the network, to force it to work. However windows would always report, unable to obtain ip address from DHCP server. I found that by going into your add/remove windows components and uninstalling the Internet Information Services, the computer finally gets back to subnet of 255.255.255.0 and obtains DHCP Lease.

Dennis Foote - Systems Engineer

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!

Testing Fax Machines

This week, I have had a couple of fax machines brought in that were not sending or receiving faxes.  Well, we only have one fax line like most places, so testing them can be a bit frustrating.

I changed the faulty parts and got to the point of testing them, and this always leads us to "who-do-we-harass-with-a-flood-of-sent-faxes" and "please-send-me-a-fax" requests. I hate doing that to people, so I did some internet searching and found a website that allows you to send from their page to your machine. There are plenty of these sites out there, but the one I used was www.interpage.net.

They let you send faxes for free!! That made my life (and the life of others) much simpler.

On the other end to test if a fax was getting there, I found a site called faxtoy.net.  This site gives you a toll-free number to send faxes to, and then posts them directly to the website in the space of a few F5 refreshes.

I saved both of these to my favorites, and now texting fax machines is not so much of a chore for me.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Kristen Hewes - Hardware Technician

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!

Wireless Profile Cleanup

I seem to be running into this a lot lately. When you connect to a wireless network, your computer saves the configuration. So all of your old Internet connections in the Network and Sharing Center hang around even after you are done using them.

This might be helpful if you are going to be around the same connections all the time, but you may wish to clean up the old unneeded connections if you are having issues with your network card or connection. You can navigate to the Network and Sharing Center on your computer to manually to remove the old network connections that you no longer use. When you remove the network connections, this also removes the Internet configurations that go along with that connection. Use the following steps to remove the old unwanted connection profiles that may be causing some of the headache.

Click the Start menu and select Control Panel.

Click Network and Internet and select Network and Sharing Center.

Click Manage Network Connections. This will show you a list of all network connections you have created on your computer.

Right-click the old network connection and select Remove network to delete the network connection and the Internet connection associated with it.

Click Yes when prompted to confirm the connection deletion.

Repeat the process for each old Internet connection you wish to delete.

Dennis Foote-Systems Engineer

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!

What is The Cloud?

Like many people, you've probably seen products and services talking about "the Cloud" for a year or more.  But what is the Cloud?  Most people understand that when they buy a product or service in the Cloud, that means its somewhere "out there" on the internet; somewhere they don't have to worry about it disappearing or going down.  But what makes something a Cloud service?  Does this mean all companies will someday have all their services hosted out on the internet somewhere?  What about companies concerned about security or centralized management?  Is the Cloud not right for them? 

In fact, the concept of the Cloud applies to all types of companies, and many companies are already using Cloud services without even realizing it.  If you've followed our blog, you may have seen Dennis' post on Virtualization some time ago.  Virtualization is a driving technology behind the Cloud.  Virtualization allows software to run without depending on the particulars of hardware; in the industry, we call this "hardware agnostic."  For instance, an email server may be set up with all your employee mailboxes and years of email history.  What happens if that server crashes?  Maybe you can fix it, then restore all your data and rebuild it, but during all that time, your employees will be without their email.  With virtualization, the email server runs independently of the server hardware.  In fact, the entire operating system, data, and configuration information is basically just a file which can be copied and pasted onto a completely different server, without even interrupting service.  What this means is that if server hardware fails, it's literally no more difficult than to copy and paste to get the email server software back up and running on new hardware somewhere else.  And this can be automated so that if the server fails, another copy of the email server is up and running in an instant, so the end user never notices a thing.

This ability to move software around freely is what enables the Cloud to be so robust.  By making services independent of the hardware on which they run, that software can be moved around without the people using the service ever knowing.  This lends itself very well to internet-based services, but cloud computing can also be used internally.  By setting up groups of servers known as server farms, a company can create their own cloud for internal servers, ensuring their software stays up and running regardless of what may happen to any individual hardware servers.  This allows companies to offer more robust services to their user base, ensuring more productive and happy employees.

In addition, cloud computing means you no longer have to be tied to one software server installation for each hardware server.  Virtualization allows more than one software server to run on a single hardware server, sharing the resources between them.  This means companies can easily create new software servers and offer new services to their employees without investing in additional expensive server hardware.  This also saves on server room space and electricity and has allowed many enterprises to drastically scale down their hardware investment through server consolidation.

This also means small companies can create their own Cloud, even if they have only a single server.  By running multiple software servers on a single hardware server, small companies can maximize their return on investment, getting the absolute most out of any server hardware purchase.  And with only two hardware servers, a small company can ensure that even if one of those hardware servers fail, all their software servers can be shifted to run on the working hardware server, ensuring their users are never interrupted.

Whether you are an enterprise consolidating your server hardware, or a small company looking to make virtualization or cloud technologies work for you, Contact Us and Terminal will be glad to help. 

Brian St. Marie - Sr. Systems Engineer

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!

PC Doctor

This week, I am blogging about PC Doctor, I don't normally name products, but this is one I really like!

I have been given a lot of laptops this week with intermittent problems: blue screens, memory issues, and the all that jazz.  These issues can be harder to diagnose due to their inconsistent nature.  They don't always show up when you are looking.

I found them all using the tools on PC Doctor, and some were not even the ones I was looking for.

I had a laptop with encryption software on it that was throwing us a memory error.  I tested the memory with PC Doctor and never got a hit, but when I tested the hard drive - Bingo!  It showed that there was a problem there. It seems that the a bad block on the hard drive was causing the issue because of the encryption sorftware.

It also suggested that the cause for a blue screen today as being the systemboard. I highly recommend it!

Kristen Hewes - Hardware Technician

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!

Rebuilding Virus

A client this week had a virus that kept rebuilding itself. I found through trial and error in my past that the bad ones should be dealt with by removing the hard drive from the notebook. I removed the drive and then proceeded to hook it up to my IDE/SATA reader to run a scan with Symantec Antivirus and Malwarebytes. Once the drive was fully scanned, I placed the hard drive back into the notebook where it came from and then started it back up without giving it a chance to boot normally.

I still wanted to make sure all was okay with the drive and the virus would not rebuild itself. So when starting the notebook, I made sure to get it into safe mode right away so I could run Combo fix to see if the notebook was in fact cleaned of any and all malicious software.  I suggest you run Combo fix more than once. It may tell you it deleted something but once the notebook is back up and running, the root kill that was thought to be deleted can reinsert itself back into your windows and cause you to end up back in the same place.

I suggest that you run all your malware and antivirus software multiple times before calling your hard drive clean of all and every virus and malware.

Dennis Foote - Systems Engineer

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!

Touch screens

This week, most of my time has been used in building touch screen systems for a client. These are not computers as such, but touch screen units that go inside a bigger machine.

Having never built these before, they have been a bit of a challenge working from drawings that are not always intuative, and a very strict QA department. Don't get me wrong, it is always fun to do something new.

The biggest issue has been the calibration and testing, as these are not computers.  They have their own software and unique connections to calibrate.  The controller was timing out so we could not save settings, such as the screen sensitivity and glass thickness.

I have finally got most of them nailed down, and I must admit I am quite proud of myself for building them and figuring out the issues.

All in all, a good week.

Kristen Hewes - Hardware Technician

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!

Daemon Tools

This week, a client wanted to have data transferred from one PC to another. The client had an image backup.  Because the hardware had changed so dramatically, I knew the idea of dropping the image on the new PC was out of the question.  So using Daemon Tools Pro, I was able to mount the image and pick through the files and folders to get what I needed for the transfer.

I suggest using Daemon Tools to mount an image because of the ease of use. If you have an image file and need to get to the files and folders on it, Daemon Tools will definitely be handy.  

Daemon tools will work with almost all image file types, even if you have one-click backup software that comes on most external hard drive these days. Chances are you can mount the backup in Daemon Tools and recover just some of your files and folder, rather than replacing your current install of your OS with the backup.

Dennis Foote - Systems Engineer

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!

Windows Server Update Services

Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) is an essential tool for maintaining Windows updates in networks of all sizes. WSUS allows administrators full control over which critical and noncritical updates are applied to client computers. 

Updates are downloaded from the public Microsoft Update site and are stored in a repository on the WSUS server. Next, they are met with an administrator led approval or disapproval process. In the situation where a critical security patch needs to be deployed to all client computers on the network the administrator will mark this as an approved update. You are also given the option to set a deadline for the deployment to ensure that all computers receive the update in a timely fashion.

The ability to disapprove an update is equally important. Administrators and developers can verify the compatibility of the updates with company-wide applications before deploying them to the entire network. Some other major advantages offered by WSUS are the ability to identify failed or missed installations and define groups to which various updates may apply. These features are a must for ensuring that your computers are properly protected.

If you think your company would benefit from WSUS feel free to Contact Us.  An engineer will be ready to help.

Adam Jones - Systems Engineer

Give Us a Call 617-731-6319 and Ask a Professional IT Support Technician Any Questions You May Have!