Pictures from an Exhibition I just returned from Citrix’ bi-annual Synergy event in Barcelona. I am not going to summarize the event here (others have done that better than I could, e.g. Gabe Knuth […] Read more
How to Build a Software Company Which values do I build my newly founded company on? There are many things I value highly – fairness, professionalism, quality, innovation, honesty – but one thing stands out: sharing. […] Read more
Does a Self-Respecting IT Pro Need Antivirus? Microsoft’s latest Security Intelligence Report confirms a feeling I have had for a long time: I do not need antivirus. Let me explain why. Read more
Starting Up After many years of employment I felt the need to reduce the number of people who can order me around. I managed to get it down to two: my wife […] Read more
How User Profiles Will Help Make Windows 8 a Success Competition in the tablet market is fierce because the profits are potentially enormous (check Apple’s financial statements as proof). No wonder everybody is desperate to get their way in, some […] Read more
Tuning the Lenovo T520 – Upgrading Memory and Installing an mSATA SSD Disassembling the Lenovo Thinkpad T520 is easy, which makes upgrading the device a simple procedure. As described in my previous article I bought a T520 with only 2 GB RAM […] Read more
Finding the Perfect Laptop Computer For a geek, one of the most fun things is choosing a new toy. I experienced this once again when I needed to buy a new laptop computer. The selection […] Read more
Shortcut Magic Windows shortcuts aka LNK files have interesting capabilities. The shortcut target can be stored not only as a fixed-path string, but also as an item ID list. If a shortcut […] Read more
Dissecting a Shortcut Ever wondered about the layout of shortcut files? Those tiny little buggers with the extension LNK you have probably dozens of on your desktop? For years the format was subject […] Read more
SetACL Studio Raffle: Results and Quotes The popular German administrator website faq-o-matic raffled five licenses of SetACL Studio. These are the lucky winners: Frank Fester Kurt Rode Michael Kramer Stefan Döhring Ulrike Streich Congratulations! Your personal […] Read more
Working with the Amazon CloudFront CDN This is a compilation of things learned while setting up Amazon CloudFront as a CDN for my WordPress site as well as using it as software distribution network. Read more
How to Reduce Bandwidth Usage and Optimize Website Performance with W3 Total Cache and Amazon CloudFront My website is hosted by Rochen, a company whose services I am very happy with. For reasons I understand they do not offer unlimited data transfer. My account, for example, […] Read more
Officially Announced New Features in Windows 8 (Client and Server) This is an attempt to list officially announced new and changed features in Windows 8. I will update this list as new announcements are made. Read more
Locking Down Internet Explorer 8 with Group Policy Managing Internet Explorer via group policy is a daunting task. Hundreds of policies are available to control the browser’s user interface, security settings and much more. This article lists strategies […] Read more
Quickest Way to Create Text File of Specific Length In order to perform a specific test of my new application SetACL Studio I needed a string with a length of exactly 32,739 bytes. Read more
Access Denied Trying to Connect to Administrative Shares C$, D$ etc. Under certain circumstances, you cannot connect to administrative shares (e.g. C$) on remote computers, even though you use the right credentials. Accessing a normal (i.e. non-administrative) share works flawlessly, though. Read more
Missing Sharing Tab in Folder Properties on Windows 7 Sometimes the “Sharing” tab in the folder properties goes missing. If that is the case and you right-click a folder and select “Properties”, it looks like this: Read more
SetACL Studio – The Beta is Here SetACL Studio is a management tool for nearly every aspect of Windows permissions. It works with the file system, the registry, printers, services, shares and WMI objects. It supports very […] Read more
Dinosaurs on Your Hard Disk: Historical Files in Windows 7 Everybody Seems to Have Forgotten About Everybody knows that Windows installations become bigger with every version. But Windows’ hard disk footprint grows not only because Microsoft adds new files, but also because some files seem to […] Read more
Script Deletes Orphaned Printer Ports The script published in this article was kindly contributed by Bo Riis, a sysadmin working at Danish hosting company dandomain. Here is what he writes about it: Read more
DsGetDcName Timeout Today I was looking for the source of frequent delays when setting permissions from my new application SetACL Studio. I sprinkled the code with timestamped debug statements like these… Read more
PowerShell Script Switches Printer Configurations Between Sites Attending the community conference PubForum E2E Conference has many benefits, the biggest is in my opinion getting to know many very talented and very nice people. One of them, Ton […] Read more
Announcing SetACL Studio – The Power of SetACL in a Great UI SetACL is well-known as a powerful and versatile tool for managing permissions in nearly all corners of the Windows operating system. In fact it is so powerful that the command-line […] Read more
FastCopy – Free File Copy Tool Runs Circles Around Explorer When it comes to copying files, Windows Explorer may probably be called reliable, but fast it is not. After the rewrite of the copy routines in Vista had caused much […] Read more
How to Avoid Data Roaming in the US with Prepaid Data SIM When travelling to the US with a smartphone, Europeans have a problem: either pay horrendous data roaming fees or use the device as a simple 1990’s style phone without any […] Read more
Helge’s Profile Toolkit Helge’s Profile Toolkit is a collection of tips, tricks and tools for working with user profiles. Read more
The Unmanageable File Server I had an interesting little case to solve at home recently when my headless file server suddenly would not accept RDP connections any more. It still worked flawlessly as a […] Read more
Differences Between Citrix Profile Management and Immidio Flex Profiles From time to time I get asked about the differences between Citrix’s and Immidio’s profile management products. Here are some common questions along with my answers. Read more
Why User Profiles Always Get Bigger, Never Smaller: Installers This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. One of the constants in the Windows […] Read more
I Did Not Expect the Wilderness to be so … Wild I was reminded of this movie quote when I stumbled across the following cry for help in a developer’s forum: Read more
