Mark Minasi's Windows Networking Tech Page
Issue #84 Late January 2010

What's Inside

News
- Join Me at a Seminar!
Tech Section
- Catch Up On 90s PC Advice at Compute!'s Archive
- Liven Up Your WinPE with a Custom Background
- God Mode Works on 64-Bit Vista/2008 After All
Conferences
To Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Read Old Newsletters or Change Your Email Address

News

Hi all —

I've been writing computer articles and columns since the early 80s, but to this day I never know which articles will generate reader interest and which won't, so I was happy to see that many of you liked the piece on the so-called "God Mode" folder. I said in the last newsletter that as far as I knew, you couldn't make "God Mode" work on 64-bit Windows, but a reader wrote to show me how, as you'll see in this issue. And speaking of columns, I came across an online archive of all of the columns I wrote for Compute! in the early 90s, and I've got the link to that archive here for your entertainment. But that's not all; in this issue, I also want to tell you how to spruce up a WinPE desktop with a custom bitmap. There's lots to talk about here but first, a word from our sponsor:

Current Seminars

The Complete Two-Day "Running an R2-Based Active Directory" Seminar Comes to Charlotte, San Francisco and Chicago in February, March and April at a Discount Rate

After a very successful one-day "beta" version of my new AD class (many thanks to our December attendees!), I got some material shaken down and found out what topics I needed to add to create a two-day AD class that you'll find a cost-effective use of your time. To kick off the new complete version of the class, I'm running sessions in Charlotte, SF and Chicago and knocking $100 off every seat.

As Active Directory enters its "tweens," most AD admins and managers have moved from "how do I design and set this up?" to "now that I'm in charge of somebody else's 10-year-old AD, how can I most easily and cheaply manage it, fix it, and streamline it?" I get (and answer) those questions all the time, and now I can answer them for you. Join me for a fun, fast-paced two day of AD setup, management, upgrading and troubleshooting. The course includes some in-depth DNS and AD troubleshooting, expert advice on safely virtualizing DCs, a practical, example-rich dive into solving AD admin problems with PowerShell, a quick review of the latest thinking on AD design and R2 upgrade, and in-depth discussions of R2's most significant "hey, I want that!" AD-related features. Everyone who's been asking for this class over the past year have been so patient that as a small "thank you," I'm running the first three sessions at $100/seat below the normal rate. The first run takes place in Charlotte (Feb 20-21), San Francisco (March 19-20), and Chicago (2-3 April), and if you're thinking of signing up, consider doing so early -- I was surprised to find that I had to close registration on the Seattle and New York classes last December. (The classes outgrew the hotel conference rooms we'd booked and there wasn't any place to move them to at that point.)

Find the course outline here and then you can sign up here. I hope to see you in Charlotte, San Fran, or Chicago!

Three New Audio Sets

Many of you couldn't make it to my Win 7, R2 or Cloud Computing talks, so we've got them available as audio sets:

With the holidays just around the corner, could you possibly imagine a better stocking stuffer?

My Free Replacement for Steady State... Steadier State

I know that a lot of you really miss Steady State, the tool that lets you essentially create virtual machine "snapshots," but on a physical copy of Windows like a classroom lab PC, public library workstation, kiosk PC etc, and that lets you un-do all of the mess done to a Windows box in under four minutes with no admin interaction needed. So I created what I call Steadier State. Put it on a PC, get it the way you like it, and snapshot the machine. Then turn it loose on the public for as long as you like, and reboot it. One of the reboot options will be "Roll Back Windows," and if you choose that, then in under four minutes everything that the users did is completely un-done. Give it a try at http://www.steadierstate.com.

Tech Section

Catch Up On 90s PC Advice at Compute!'s Archive

In the early 90s, I wrote a monthly column called "Hardware Clinic" about PC hardware and repair. Some kind souls have resurrected them in an archive of old computer magazines. You can find my old columns at http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/index/index.php?author=Mark+Minasi. (And before you spend too much time there, rest assured that there is probably no actual information value in the columns -- making the choice between 386DX and 386SX chips just isn't something we need do very much these days!)

Liven Up Your WinPE with a Custom Background

I use WinPE a fair amount both for deployment and system recovery tasks. Its ease of use -- it fits on a USB stick -- and versatility makes it an essential tool in my PC support toolkit.

But ever since Server 2008 came out, WinPE's had this dull, boring gray bitmap for a background. I mean, at least Vista's WinPE had this colorful blue-green thing that sort of reminded me of a kelp forest. How, I wondered, can I get something better for my WinPE wallpaper?

Well, a bit of Googling reveals two kinds of Web pages on the subject. The first, which far outnumber the others, are pages explaining how to use the MDT to set a custom wallpaper bitmap for WinPE. I don't use MDT (there's nothing wrong with it, I've just not had the need to learn it), so those pages were no help. The second and smaller set of pages had some advice that said something like

"Well, in theory, all you need do is to put a file named winpe.bmp into \windows\system32 of your WinPE image and that'll be your WinPE wallpaper. But you've got to exactly match the characteristics of the current winpe.bmp file, or WinPE will just ignore your wallpaper."

Aha, I thought; heck, if anyone can create an image to a given specification, that'd be me, with my extensive photography tools and such. So I took my favorite bullfrog picture and set it up just as the default WinPE bitmap file "winpe.bmp" is set up: 1024x768, 24-bit color, 72 DPI resolution, Windows BMP format. I then

Copied the new bitmap, which I'd named to winpe.bmp, to c:\winpe, which is where I keep my WinPE stuff (see Newsletter #59).
Fired up my Deployment Tools Command Prompt, which I got when I installed the WAIK (ditto).
Changed my default folder to c:\winpe by typing cd \winpe.
Mounted the boot.wim that I use in my WinPEs by typing imagex /mountrw iso\sources\boot.wim 1 mount
Copied the new Winpe.bmp by typing copy /y winpe.bmp mount\windows\system32
Unmounted the boot.wim by typing imagex /unmount /commit mount
Created a new WinPE ISO by typing oscdimg -n -h -betfsboot.com iso frogpe.iso

I then burned frogpe.iso to a CD and booted from that CD. When booted, the WinPE screen looked like this:

Neat, eh? The beauty of having a bullfrog in your WinPE background is that it distracts the client, who then is more interested in the bullfrog than in asking you annoying questions while you're trying to fix their problem. (Haha. Kidding. Kind of. Not really <g>. Feel free to grab the picture and crop it as you like, it's at http://www.minasi.com/photos/2009/content/bin/images/large/bullfroginwater_1.jpg.)

The odd thing is that I then tried messing with the bitmap to see why WinPE allegedly rejects attempts at replacing winpe.bmp. I was, however, unable to break the thing. Color depth, size and DPI had no effect. So, the bottom line is that if you'd like a different background on your WinPE, it's as simple as creating a BMP file, naming it winpe.bmp, and installing it in Windows\system32 on your WinPE image.

God Mode Works on 64-Bit Vista/2008 After All

In the last newsletter, I discussed Windows' capability to create a single folder that displays a sort of flattened view of your Control Panel applets, something that many on the Web have dubbed the "God Mode" folder. I said that it didn't work on 64-bit Vista or 64-bit Windows Server 2008. Based on reader questions and feedback, here's a bit more info.

There's no way to do it on XP. I got this question from 15 readers, so I guess I didn't make clear that XP can't do it, no matter what.
There is a way to create a "God Mode" folder on 64-bit Vista and 2008. Reader Peter Kraemer was the first to tell me the fix. Peter says, "Launch the command line (or make a shortcut): %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe shell:::{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} This will bring up the explorer window described in your newsletter even if you are on a 64-bit system." I've tried it, and it works like a charm. Thanks to Peter and the others who offered this tip.

Do you hate printers? I do, and so does this clever person

This is fall-down funny. My thanks to Wes Lazara of the Forum for pointing this out.

Mark's upcoming conference appearances

Conferences

Windows Cloud Connections, Las Vegas March 26-29 2012

The Connections folks have assembled a show that is, as you can tell, cloud-focused, featuring folks like my friends Brian Desmond, Paul Thurrott, Sean Deuby, Don Jones, Jim McBee and others (as well as me) talking about cloud and cloud-related technologies. I'll be doing my "Windows 8: A Report from the Future" keynote, as well as my DNS troubleshooting talk (just try to get your cloud stuff working when DNS is broken, as, um, Microsoft found out last year in their cloud offering) and my popular IPv6 talk (where do you think we're going to get the addresses we'll need for all those cloud servers now that we're out of IPv4 addresses?).

Find out more at http://cloudconnections.com/shows/sp2012/default.aspx?s=187.

The 6th Annual Minasi Forum Conference, Virginia Beach April 29-May 2 2012

We took a year off but we're back! Ten years ago, I started my online forum at www.minasi.com/forum and am blessed with a globe-spanning array of very smart and helpful folks. Six of the past seven years, we've met in Virginia Beach to network and present some great topics. We've got some big names -- Mark Russinovich will Skype in to talk to us about Azure, PowerShell Gods Don Jones (who's keynoting and doing some PS stuff) and Ed Wilson, The Scripting Guy will talk about, well, PowerShell -- but that's not all. This conference is also a chance for some of our forum members, most of whom aren't "big names" but who spend their days in the trenches, to talk about the things that they know inside and out. You may not yet know James Summerlin, Anne O'Day, Stacy Hein, Dennis Olidis, Curt Spanburgh, Jim Vigotti, Dave Bison, Eric Rux and others ... but you will once you've heard their great coverage of SQL, SharePoint, Sysinternals system repair tools, AppV and other topics. (There's also a rumor that I'm going to do a session or two.) What you may like best of all, however, is the price -- $450. We'll have the details up soon, but you'll be able to find out more (and until then, you can see 2010's schedule) at www.minasiconference.com.

To Subscribe/Unsubscribe, Read Old Newsletters or Change Your Email Address

To subscribe, visit http://www.minasi.com/nwsreg.htm. To change e-mail or other info, link to http://www.minasi.com/edit-newsletter-record.htm. To unsubscribe, link to http://www.minasi.com/unsubs.htm. Visit the Archives at http://www.minasi.com/nwstoc.htm. Please do not reply to this mail; for comments, please link to http://www.minasi.com/gethelp.

Mark Minasi's Windows Networking Tech Page Issue #84 Late January 2010