Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Use PSExec to Remotely Audit machines

This may be less applicable to some than most of my posts but I was able to pull this off today on short notice and thought it deserved sharing. I was requested to audit an entire departments Windows computers with the assumption that we would need to run the Audit executable manually on every users machine. This seemed like a good opportunity to script something.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Deploy a Safe Senders List to Outlook Clients via Group Policy

It makes sense for the environment I manage to try and do as much as I can for our users in order to cut down on support calls.  Scan to email from our Xerox machines, automated system related messages re: password resets and more can all get sent into the junk folder. Specifying a safe sender lists for Outlook can cut down on these potential issues rearing their ugly head and group policy is the best mechanism for deploying the setting.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Powershell: What AD accounts are set to never expire?



Here's a quick Powershell script that just came in handy for me recently. I was trying to find what users on our domain were given an exception to our password expiration policy and were set to never have their password expire.

Monday, April 2, 2012

Explorer Freezing and Crashing in Windows 7

I've come across this over 10 times now over the last year or so supporting about 400+ users. I'm not sure of the root cause but the behavior you will generally see is Explorer stop responding, Windows tries to find a solution in vain, and then explorer just restarts. This will occur every time you Right-Click on an explorer object such as

  • The Computer option in the Start Menu
  • The Taskbar
  • Any File or folder