RDCMan 2.2

If you manage a lot of servers and need to connect to them via RDP, Microsoft has a nice, FREE, remote desktop connection manager. And the RDCMan has been updated in version 2.2.

You can download it HERE (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4603c621-6de7-4ccb-9f51-d53dc7e48047&displaylang=en)

Here’s the description of the utility from Microsoft’s site:
RDCMan manages multiple remote desktop connections. It is useful for managing server labs where you need regular access to each machine such as automated checkin systems and data centers. It is similar to the built-in MMC Remote Desktops snap-in, but more flexible.

12 Display Ports – Crazy

From the Inquirer

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1652779/powercolor-hd5970-display-outputs

Powercolor HD5970 with 12 display outputs

Computex 2010 24 screens from one PC with two cards

By Nebojsa Novakovic

Mon Jun 07 2010, 12:21

BEFORE AMD starts rolling out its next generation of Southern Island GPUs, the usual performance refresh has appeared for the current ATI Radeon HD5870 single GPU and HD5970 dual GPU cards. While vendors like Asus and Sapphire focused on speeding up the cards with exotic cooling systems, Powercolor did something quite interesting that hardly anyone expected – it doubled the graphics cards’ Eyefinity capability.

As one HD5870 Eyefinity GPU card has six Displayport outputs for, yes, six displays in parallel, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get twelve Displayport outputs from a hypothetical HD5970 Eyefinity, if it existed. Well, it doesn’t seem so simple, since no vendor has had such a card until now. And, if you see the Powercolor HD5970 4 B card here, there is the third slot opening occupied by the extra six display connectors, as you can see held by pretty lady Tia at the Powercolor booth at Computex.

Now, who would need 12 displays or, for that matter, 24 displays if you used two of these cards in Crossfire? Well, imagine a mad financial wizard monitoring multiple indices and stocks across several stock exchanges or, far more interesting, an immersive 3D ‘cave’ environment with a giant dome of two dozen 3D enabled monitors truly surrounding you. With falling monitor prices and thin-bezel models all around now, you could actually build such a dome for just a couple of thousand dollars or so. The full 4GB of onboard RAM also covers both multiple high resolution displays in full 3D as well as any large-memory GPGPU computing needs.

For the rest of the story go to http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1652779/powercolor-hd5970-display-outputs

Desktop’s v1.02

I found this new application that allows you to have four virtual desktops with Windows. There are other applications out there like this, but this is simple to install, simple to use and most of all it is FREE.

Go here to get it… http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc817881.aspx

Introduction
Desktops allows you to organize your applications on up to four virtual desktops. Read email on one, browse the web on the second, and do work in your productivity software on the third, without the clutter of the windows you’re not using. After you configure hotkeys for switching desktops, you can create and switch desktops either by clicking on the tray icon to open a desktop preview and switching window, or by using the hotkeys.

Interesting Historic Nostalgia on Memory

Found this interesting historic comparison on memory from The Next Web. Sometimes I don’t think we have a big enough imagination to think what 30 more years of technology evolution will do with computing equipment.

20GB in 1980 versus 32GB in 2010

File & Folder Sharing

As more and more people buy more computers it is very common to own at least two personal computers – a laptop and a desktop.

Having multiple machines means doing common work on both. Most computer savvy people will create a share on one of the machines and then connect to the share from the other machine. This method of file sharing works fine until your machines are on separate network or even disconnected.

Say for instance you need to connect to your home desktop machine while you’re in Muncy, Indiana visiting your Great Aunt Irene. Well, unless you’ve opened up your home firewall to allow file sharing ports, which you shouldn’t, then you can’t get that file – there goes the promotion!

There is a solution that has been implemented by several vendors on the Internet. As of right now I’ve tested a couple of solutions below. As I come across other vendors and test them I will update this post.

Dropbox.Com – Dropbox is an easy to use Internet file-sharing application. Installation is easy and it allows you to have private shares as well as secured shares with friends and family. Dropbox has a free version that comes with 2GB of storage. You can pay for additional storage if you need it. The storage counted against you is for the file folders and files that you share first. So you and your friends could shared more that 2GB by coordinating who is creating the shared folders.
Architecture: It is important to have a basic understanding of the sharing architecture of folder/file-sharing applications like Dropbox. Dropbox is a central sharing architecture. You run the Dropbox agent on your computer and when you create a share this share is also created on Dropbox’s centralized server infrastructure. This architecture allows your shared files to be available any time, anywhere. Yes, you can log into any computer on the Internet and go to the Dropbox website and get access to your shared files. When you invite your friends to connect to a shared drive, they actually get the files from the central Dropbox server infrastructure. If you update a file on the shared folder, it is then updated on the central server infrastructure and then updated to all other clients that have access to the share.
Pros: 1) Easy to install, 2) Easy to use, 3) Central Server Architecture allows user to share files even while the host client is not online, 4) Files are available from any web browser in the world
Cons: 1) Limited free storage due to the centralized server architecture.

Windows Live Sync (WLS) – WLS is a free product from Microsoft for syncing files from one machine to multiple machines.  The upside to this product is that there are no storage limitations for the shared folders due to the architecture.
Architecture: The sharing architecture of this product is a peer-to-peer configuration. All files are located on user machines and when a new file is put into the share, the synchronization is done directly to all other peer machines that have access to the share. In order to receive updates, each peer machine has to be online and active.
Pros: 1) Easy to install, 2) Easy to use, 3) Totally free, 4) Supports synchronizing up to 20 folders containing up to 20,000 files each and the files can be up to 4 gigabytes each.
Cons: 1) Peer-to-peer architecture means that sync clients must be online to send and receive files. 2) Files are not available to any client without the client software being installed

Live Mesh – My friend David Sandor pointed out to me that Windows Live Sync isn’t the cat’s meow. The new king cat meow is in fact from our friends at Microsoft  who have created an enhanced version of WLS call Live Mesh, which is currently in Beta. After going to the web site I remember that I had already signed up for the beta and a friend of mine and I were already sharing a folder.
Architecture: This is a cloud based (central server) and peer to peer sharing application. Each client can update each other and the cloud server with 5 gigabytes of free space that is available for “online storage and synchronization.”
Pros: 1) Easy to install, 2) Easy to use, 3) Totally free 4) Free, 5 giga-bytes of cloud storage used for synchronizing 5) Easy to use Remote Desktop option that allows you to connect to trusted computers (this rocks).
Note: I’m not sure if the beta is open to new users, but if you can get in on the beta, you should jump at the opportunity. This application is a game changer for using multiple devices and sharing.

As I come across other File/Folder share applications I’ll add them to this review.

How Will IT Cope With 48 Core CPUs?

In the world of Information Technology we know of the effects of Moore’s Law – processing power doubles every 18 months for the same cost. These doubling factors have grave consequences for IT departments that aren’t prepared.

The big trend in today’s IT environments is with virtualization technologies such as VMware, Hyper-V, Zen, Unix-Containers and such. Industry studies show that average utilization of server hardware is around 5-10 percent. So vertically stacking more virtual instances on a server makes sense until you reach a tipping point.

The tipping point will be when the hardware processing power can easily host 500 virtual instances on a single server. Will operations and application teams actually feel comfortable doing so?

The day of a 48 core CPU is approaching quickly. Can you imaging a quad-socket server that has a total of 192 cpu cores in a 4U rack server!

Intel Lifts the Hood on its “Single-Chip Cloud Computer”

The Best Remote Desktop Support Application – So Many Choices

In the computer business the term Killer App gets thrown around loosely all the time. You know, from my twenty-five years of using computers I can say I’ve seen my share of Killer Apps. I remember way, way back when Word Star came out – that was a Killer App at the time.

You see, a Killer App is really a computer program that takes a job and makes it so easy to do that it “kills” the pain of doing that job. At least that’s my partial definition of what a Killer App is all about.

I’ve been a follower of Fog Creek Software and Joel Spolsky for some time now. Joel co-founded Fog Creek Software and a couple of summers ago he had his interns build a tech support tool call Co-Pilot. I don’t know, maybe Joel wanted to give the programmer wannabees something to do to get them out of his hair so he could write in his blog. Or, just maybe Joel had this great vision of a Killer App that would solve all remote desktop helpdesk issues. In either case Joel’s intern team hit a grand slam.

If you are the person all your DACUFs (dumb ass computer user friends) call for help when they’ve screwed up their PC or MAC, then you’ll no doubt want to use Co-Pilot. Co-Pilot makes it so easy to connect to the DACUFs computer so you can figure out what’s wrong. No more trying to describe how to get to the Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs icon.

And the really cool thing about Co-Pilot is that the tool is totally free on the weekends – like you didn’t have anything better to do on Saturday afternoon besides fix your DACUF’s computer.

On second thought, never mind, keep this tool a secret else your Saturdays are bye-bye.

But for the professional support people out there, you should invest in this tool and see how much pain is taken away from providing support to the computer illiterate masses.

Co-Pilot is indeed a Killer App in my book.

Update 7/15/2009: So I pay attention to the search terms used by people in Google who get directed to this blog entry and it seems that the searchers are wondering what are the comparisons of Co-Pilot versus  Microsoft’s built-in Remote Desktop and Remote Assistance applications.

Remote Desktop is where you actually attach to a Windows XP’s console and log into the machine, which will log out the user on the other end. Remote Desktop can be used for fixing issues with a Windows machine, but for end-user support it wasn’t really designed for that purpose since the user doesn’t see what you are doing to fix their problem. And with most help-desk issues, the problem most of the time isn’t the computer hardware or application but actually how the user is trying to get something done.

Remote Assistance is Microsoft’s attempt to allow a more skilled computer person to assist the less knowledgeable user. However, to get the skilled user connected takes like an act of God on the end-user’s side to initiate the connection. And then once the connection is made the interface for the person giving help is dog slow.

With Co-Pilot for an end-user to get help they can give a support person one link to initiate the connection to their computer. Additionally the help desk person can give an end-user one link to establish a connection to their computer. Once the connection is established it runs generally 10x faster than anything else I’ve used and it allows both helper and end user to communicate and see what’s going on with the computer.

Updated 06/23/2009:
A friend sent me a link to a free remote desktop support application that works just like Co-Pilot.

I haven’t checked-out or tested Mikogo (www.mikogo.com) yet, but wanted to put it up here for your reference.

If you have a chance to test it, please let me know how it works out for you.

Updated 1/5/2009:
Over the Christmas holiday’s I had the need to help a family member out with a rebuild of thier XP home machine. I found TeamViewer (http://www.teamviewer.com) to be a great remote desktop support application and it is free for non-commercial use. The installation isn’t as easy as using Co-Pilot, but it isn’t so hard to get installed for the novice that you can’t walk someone through the process.

Updated 3/1/2010:
I found another remote desktop application call LogMeIn. This isn’t quite the same as Co-Pilot or Teamview as it is really intended for an individual to be able to remote control back to his computer. I guess you could use this in a desktop support role, but I think it is better suited for the individual who needs to access one of their machines remotely. There is a free, limited version of this application as well as a “Pro” version that cost money, but comes with more features.

Note:
I received no compensation for this review and endorsement. But if Joel finds this one day while wasting time on the Internet he can reward me by sending me an autographed book of his best articles.

Windows 7 – God Mode is in the house…

After finding this on CNET and confirming that it does indeed work, I have one question for Microsoft – Why didn’t they make this feature visible when the OS is installed. I’m not a fan of the multiple menus in the Control Panel as they has evolved over the past two generations of Windows (Vista, 7). I am, though, a fan of having access to all the configuration setting as this view shows.

To get the “GodMode” to appear just create a folder anywhere in the file explorer and name it the following:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

It is pretty cool…

P.S. Although Windows 7 and Windows 2008 share the same code base, this doesn’t work on Windows 2008 64 Bit Enterprise. I haven’t tested any other versions of Windows 2008.

Update: 1/7/2009
Here are more short-cuts to settings for Windows 7, often reffered to as developer commands.

{00C6D95F-329C-409a-81D7-C46C66EA7F33} Default Location
{0142e4d0-fb7a-11dc-ba4a-000ffe7ab428} Biometric Devices
{025A5937-A6BE-4686-A844-36FE4BEC8B6D} Power Plans
{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9} Taskbar Icons
{1206F5F1-0569-412C-8FEC-3204630DFB70} Automatic Logon Credentials
{15eae92e-f17a-4431-9f28-805e482dafd4} Install Program from Network
{17cd9488-1228-4b2f-88ce-4298e93e0966} Default Programs
{1D2680C9-0E2A-469d-B787-065558BC7D43} Installed Versions
{1FA9085F-25A2-489B-85D4-86326EEDCD87} Wireless Network Connections
{208D2C60-3AEA-1069-A2D7-08002B30309D} Network
{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D} Hard Disk Drives
{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D} Printers
{241D7C96-F8BF-4F85-B01F-E2B043341A4B} Remote Connections
{4026492F-2F69-46B8-B9BF-5654FC07E423} Firewall
{78F3955E-3B90-4184-BD14-5397C15F1EFC} Computer Performance Rating

Mounting an ISO in Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7)

If you ever need to mount an ISO file there’s a great utility that is also free that will make the task so easy.

The utility that we will use is called Virtual Clone Drive. This utility will let you mount .ISO, .CCD, .DVD, .IMG, .UDF and .BIN files. Download the utility and start the setup process.

Select Yes or OK at the hardware prompt and continue. You might have to restart your computer. Now you should be able to mount any ISO image by just double-clicking on the file. You can also right-click on the cd-rom drive to mount or un-mount an image.

Notes: If you are going to reinstall this utility, make sure you uninstall it first, or you’ll BSOD yourself repeatedly.  It has been verified that the latest version works on XP, Vista and Windows 7, 64 Bit Edition.

Changing OEM Logo In Windows 2008

If you ever need to deploy Windows 2008 to thousands of servers or just one and you want to add company logo to the image so you look like a detail oriented system administrator here’s the instructions.

1. Run Regedit.Exe
2. Navigate to HKEY_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OEMInformation
3. If the OEMInformation key doesn’t exist you’ll need to create it. Right click the CurrentVersion key and from the drop down menu click New – Key. In the Key dialogue box type OEMInformation and press enter.
4. Create the following keys and modify them with the following values: a) Right click under the (Default) section and select New > String Value. Enter the Value Name: Logo and then enter the full path and name of your OEM Logo file such as C:\Windows\System32\foocompanylogo.bmp b) Add a new String Value and name it Manufacturer and enter the value of your company name like Foo Company.
   You can additionally add String Values for SupportHours, SupportPhone and SupportURL but these are optional.

Here’s what the registry keys will look like when you’ve done it correctly:

And here’s what the System Dialog Box looks like with the final customized OEM information: