Information wants to be free!
Whenever I upgrade the OS on one of my computers or upgrade the computer itself, I always make a manual backup of the data I need to retain. There are many utilities that do this job for you, like User State Migration Tool and Windows Easy Transfer, but none of them give me that warm …
Continue reading “Backing up your Windows profile using Robocopy”
The use of letters to identity volumes and partitions in Windows is something we have inherited from MS-DOS. Drive letters are still used today due to their ubiquity and for compatibility. However, the Windows operating system does not depend on them. Instead Windows uses a GUID to identify each volume or partition. (Windows Home Server, …
When you install a piece of software that integrates with the Windows shell, typically explorer.exe, you have to restart your computer to complete the installation. If the installer were to close explorer.exe the user would be left without a usable GUI. However there is a supported way of closing the shell process, perhaps saving you …
Continue reading “How to exit explorer.exe gracefully on Windows XP and Windows Vista/7”
The hard drive storing the boot and system volumes of my main home machine failed a couple of weeks ago. The drive first started making strange noises and occasionally the machine would hang or blue screen. The hangs, which usually were recoverable, were accompanied by errors in the system log. Index : 270720 EntryType : …
Continue reading “Using WinPE and ImageX to recover from a failed hard drive”
Ever since I performed an in-place upgrade from Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition to Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition on the server hosting this blog, I have been having problems when adding or edition content as my regular user. I would, for instance, try to create a new post or edit an existing one, the …