How to Change Name and Company Information After You Install Windows XP

26Jun09

When you install Windows, Setup requests that you enter your name, and optional…

When you install Windows, Setup requests that you enter your name, and optionally, the organization name.

This registration information is displayed under Registered to in the General tab of System when you click Start, click Control Panel, click Performance and Maintenance, and then click System.

To change your name and company information after Windows is installed on your computer, follow these steps:

1.  Click Start, and then click Run.

2.  In the Open box, type regedit, and then click OK.

3.  Locate the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

4.  To change the company name, do the following:

In the right pane, double-click RegisteredOrganization. Under Value data, type the name that you want, and then click OK.

5.  To change the name of the registered owner, do the following:

In the right pane, double-click RegisteredOwner. UnderValue data, type the name that you want, and then click OK.

6.  Click Exit on the File menu to quit Registry Editor.

Important

This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 322756 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756/ ) How to back up and restore the registry in Windows


Filed under: Windows   |  1 Comment
Tags: , , ,

WHS Drive Balancing Tool

22May09

The AV Science Forums have a post for Windows Home Server users about a new tool that helps with drive balancing.

The utility balances all the data on your drive pool equally, the main purpose being that when a person adds a drive to the pool, it doesn’t necessarily start getting used for a while. While Microsoft has made changes to the usage of the Landing Zone (as in it doesn’t exist anymore), some people’s systems might still be in a non “evened out” state and wish to correct this. On the authors own system, he routinely gets within 2% of perfect balancing on all pooled drives.

NOTE: Usage instructions are available in the following forum post. Make sure you download the latest version, which at the time of publishing is version 1.01 and remember it can take a few hours to balance some systems.


Filed under: Windows Home Server - WHS   |  Leave a Comment
Tags:

Extending Windows Home Server with WSUS

22May09

A while ago now, Kevin Royalty wrote an article on how to use the Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) using your Windows Home Server. What this meant is that you could use WSUS to download any Microsoft updates and have your computers get the updates from the WSUS instead of each one having to go out to the Internet for updates. This also meant that you could control what updates are installed.

Kevin has since updated the article to include an automated way of performing maintenance. So, here it is – thanks Kevin!

By Kevin Royalty, SBS MVP

Thanks to many of the Small Business Server and Home Server MVPs for their invaluable input and suggestions to improve this document. I’m proud to be one of you.

Thanks to Andrew Edney for hosting this update on UsingWindowsHomeServer. Continue reading ‘Extending Windows Home Server with WSUS’


Filed under: Windows Home Server - WHS   |  Leave a Comment
Tags:

Run Gadgets In Windows 7 With Disabled UAC

22May09

The Windows 7 Sidebar and Gadgets do not work correctly if a user disables the User Account Control in Windows 7. There is however an easy way to make the gadgets and sidebar work again without having to replace system files (that was the way suggested in many forums).

All that needs to be done is to change one value of a parameter in the Windows 7 Registry to make the sidebar and gadgets work even with UAC disabled.

Open the Windows 7 Registry by pressing [Windows R], typing [regedit] and hitting [enter]. Now navigate to the Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Sidebar\Setting and change the value of AllowElevatedProcess to 1.

Restart the computer or logout and login again to see if the changes work as intended. The Registry setting ensures that the gadgets and the sidebar are working in Windows 7 properly even if UAC is disabled.


Filed under: Windows 7   |  Leave a Comment
Tags:

How To Install Windows 7 From a USB Hard Flash/Hard Drive

22May09

Windows 7 can run on machines with lower specs than required for Windows Vista, and many users are actually finding it runs better than Windows XP on lower spec machines. It’s also ideal to run on newer netbook machines, but unfortunately many of these do not include a DVD drive so how do you install windows 7 on a machine without a DVD drive?

I spent yesterday researching this exact problem and I managed to install Windows 7 on my Acer Aspire One netbook in around 20 minutes using a 4GB USB Drive. Setting up the USB drive to install Windows 7 was fairly easy in the end, and the installation was quicker than a DVD drive, so this method is perfect if you want to install Windows 7 quickly on several machines.

How To Install Windows 7 From A USB Drive

  1. Find a standard 4GB USB Drive and plug it into your machine
  2. Click Start in your enter ‘cmd’ in the run field. Once cmd is open type in ‘diskpart’ and a new window will open
  3. In the new diskpart window type:
  • ‘list disk’ : This lists all the disk drives attached to your machine
  • Look for your USB drive and note the number and then type: ’select disk #’, where ‘#’ is your USB disk number
  • then type ‘clean’
  • then type ‘create partition primary’
  • then ’select partition 1′
  • then ‘active’
  • then ‘format fs=fat32 quick’

diskpart

Once you’ve finished these steps you then need to copy your Windows 7 files to the USB. To do this you have to mount your Windows 7 ISO as a virtual DVD. Doing this is easy:

  1. Install MagicDisk (free)
  2. once installed, right-click on MagicDisk in your system tray click on ‘Virtual CD/DVD-Rom’, select your DVD drive
  3. then ‘Mount’ and in the dialog window that opens up, select your Windows 7 ISO
  4. Now in windows Explorer, click on your DVD drive and you should see all the Windows 7 Files. All you have to do now is copy and paste all the files to your USB key and you have a Windows 7 USB Installation Stick!
  5. Install the stick in the PC you want to install Windows 7 on and boot up. Remember to change your bios to allow booting from USB

If you follow the steps above then you should have no problems installing Windows 7 from a USB key. But if you do, leave a comment below.


Filed under: Windows 7   |  Leave a Comment
Tags:

Exchange Server Failed Mail Folder

22May09

Exchange Failed Mail Folder

Where does failed mail disappear to in Exchange?

“c:\program files\microsoft windows small business server\networking\pop3\failed mail”

all have *.eml extensions so you can open them with outlook express.

Moving all emails from here “c:\program files\microsoft windows small business server\networking\pop3\failed mail” to here “c:\program files\microsoft windows small business server\networking\pop3\incoming” will force exchange to re-distribute the email to the relevant mailboxes.


Filed under: Exchange Server   |  Leave a Comment
Tags:

How to grant Send As permission

13May09

“Send As” allows one user to send an email as though it came from another user. The recipient will not be given any indication that the email was composed by someone other than the stated sender.

“Send As” can only be granted by a system administrator. “Send on Behalf of” may be more appropriate in many situations, it allows the recipient to be notified both who the author was and on who’s behalf the email was sent. 

The following procedure will allow system managers to grant users the ability to send as another:

  1. Log onto the server running Exchange.
  2. Run Active Directory Users and Computers.
  3. Under the “View” menu ensure that “Advanced Features” is ticked.
  4. Find the user’s account that you want to be able to send as, and open up the account properties.
  5. Select the “Security” tab.
  6. Click [Add ...] (under “Group or user names”) and add the user (users or group) that is to be granted permission to send-as this account.
  7. For each account added, highlight the account under “Group or user names” and in the “Permissions for …” window grant the account “Send As” permission.
  8. Click [OK] to close the account properties dialog.

Note:

  • If there is an account for which a number of people need to be able to send as (such as an account used as a single point of contact for a distribution lists) then administratively it may be simpler to add a group of users who should have that permission and grant the permission to the group and not to the accounts individually.

Filed under: Exchange Server   |  Leave a Comment
Tags:

How to force the address book to update

13May09

When a new email account is created in Exchange it will not normally appear in the address book of others until the following day. This procedure shows how to force newly created accounts to be visible in the address book:

  1. Force an address list update on the Exchange server
  2. Pull down the address list in Outlook.

Force an address list update on the Exchange server

  1. On the server running Exchange, open Exchange System Manager.
  2. Expand “Recipients”.
  3. Select “Offline Address Lists”
    In the default configuration there will only be one offline address list shown in the right hand pane – “Default Offline Address List”. If other address lists have been created then they will also be listed.
  4. Right click the address list to update (typically “Default Offline Address List”) and select “Rebuild”
    A message will be shown warning that this may take a long time depending on the number of recipients in the domain. Allow it to rebuild the offline address list.

Pull down the address list in Outlook

This needs to be done on each pc running outlook which requires the latest address book:

  1. Start up Outlook.
  2. Tools → Send/Receive → Download Address Book…
  3. On the “Offline Address Book” dialog click [OK]

Filed under: Exchange Server   |  Leave a Comment
Tags:

How to configure Exchange to allow users to forward emails (by rule) to external accounts

13May09

When Exchange is installed, the default configuration is to block any user defined rules that would forward their email to an external account. (They can still forward emails manually.)

Why might someone want to define a rule to forward to an external account? One reason is that if someone is out of the office forwarding emails to another account (such as on a blackberry) may be a convenient way of keeping in touch.

Why is this blocked by default? The reason often quoted is that it makes the system vulnerable to email looping. For example, if someone defines a rule that forwards all of their email to home, and then on their home system defines a system for forwarding all their email to work, then the system will be forever forwarding emails. Consider this carefully before allowing emails to be forwarded (by rule).

To enable forwarding by rule:

  1. Log on to the server running exchange server.
  2. Run “Exchange System Manager”.
  3. Expand “Global Settings”.
  4. Click on “Internet Message Formats” to highlight it.
  5. In the right hand window pane, double click on “Default” to open its properties.
  6. On the “Advanced” tab, check “Allow automatic forward”.
  7. Click [OK] to save.

Filed under: Exchange Server   |  Leave a Comment
Tags:
« Previous Entries