At work, they wanted to ability to play a soundbyte on a schedule as a reminder to our sales employees. I think I may have found this on stackexchange but I can’t quite remember at this point to give the full creds. A lot of the solutions I found tried to use Windows Media Player to play sound files or MP3’s, but unfortunately, there was no way to close the program after the file had played. This way uses Windows PowerShell and the .NET SoundPlayer Class to play the file. Continue reading “Windows – Play a WAV file with PowerShell and the .NET SoundPlayer Class”
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KB947222 – Addressing the User Profile Redirection Display Problem with a Different Approach
Instead of using the PowerShell or VB scripts that are out there to address the User Profile Redirection display problem mentioned in Microsoft’s KB947222 article, I didn’t like the idea of having to waste precious CPU cycles on calling one of these scripts every couple of minutes so I decide to take matters into my own hands to come up with a different approach.
Those solutions do indeed work, but even if you’re running this script like once a minute, you still run into the possibility that a user might log in, which in turn creates their redirected documents folders, and then, anyone attempting to access the network share that contains the user profiles at that exact moment, would still run into the same issue until the next time the script ran via task scheduler. Not exactly a great solution.
In addition to that, at least for me, using the PowerShell script seemed to add a whole nother layer of document shortcuts that was reflected upon inside of the user’s environment making it to where they had to click on documents twice just to get into their documents folder. Again not an ideal solution.
Continue reading “KB947222 – Addressing the User Profile Redirection Display Problem with a Different Approach”
Classic Shell – Remove First Run Wizard with Group Policy
Classic Shell is a necessary evil for any normal Windows user who wants to be able remain productive with introduction of the Start Screen in Server 2012 and Windows 8. As a network administrator, I highly recommend Classic Shell because it even has it’s own Group Policy templates that you can add in with the PolicyDefinitions inside your domain’s SYSVOL folder so you can at least somewhat try to put the Start Menu back to the way it once was. The Start Screen is a technical support person’s worst nightmare for novice users who don’t deal well with change (and trust me they don’t).
If you’re trying to customize a Remote Desktop Server environment, one somewhat annoying thing you will run into is trying to get rid of the first run wizard for Classic Shell. Obviously, the first run wizard is handy for anybody who wants to customize the look and feel of their Start Menu, but more than likely in a Remote Desktop environment, you’re going to want all this predefined with no user interaction so the chances of them screwing things up is slim to none.
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Windows 8.1 – Disable IPv6 Components
While trying to troubleshoot some issues with a user’s flaky VPN connection (they could get connected but couldn’t ping anything on the company network), my first guesses were that it was either a routing issue and that IPv6 might be the culprit or that it could be an MTU issue. In searching for the answers on how to disable IPv6, I had stumbled across a blog article that, while seemingly helpful at the time, had some misleading information on it that caused some rather undesirable results. It gave me an incorrect registry value setting of “0xffffffff” that actually caused Windows to take an extra five seconds to boot.
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Windows 8/Server 2012 – Install A Theme for All Users
On Windows 7, 8, and Server 2012, themes can be downloaded from Microsoft here and are typically installed on a per user basis in the following directory:
%localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Themes
To install a .themepack file for all users, it requires a bit of manual intervention. Today when searching for the answer, I found this perfect blog article that explains exactly how to do it so there’s no real point in re-writing it all verbatim here.
Continue reading “Windows 8/Server 2012 – Install A Theme for All Users”