Category: Microsoft

How to Remove the Loading Screen in Windows Vista

Windows Vista displays a boot loading splash screen with a small progress bar animation. Behinds the scenes drivers and configurations are being loaded. For troubleshooting purposes it is useful to remove the simple boot loading screen and display the drivers and configurations being loaded while Windows Vista starts up. Here is how you remove the simple boot loading screen and display the verbose boot loading screen:

  1. Open run by pressing Window Key+r
  2. Type “msconfig” without the double quotes and press ENTER.
  3. Click on the boot tab and check the option “OS boot information“.
  4. Click ok and apply

Windows Vista

Access Windows Live Hotmail in Outlook

Microsoft Office Outlook Connector is a free program released by Microsoft which will allow you to access your Hotmail and Microsoft Office Live email accounts from within Outlook. Here is Microsoft’s official description of the application:

With Outlook Connector, you can use Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 to access and manage your Windows Live Hotmail or Office Live Mail accounts, including e-mail messages and contacts for free! Calendar, tasks and notes synchronization are not available on all services. If your service offers calendar synchronization, tasks and notes will synchronize as well. See the feature list for your service for details.

Outlook Connector enables you to use your Live Hotmail accounts within Outlook:

  • Read and send your Office Live Mail/Windows Live Hotmail e-mail messages.
  • Manage your Live Mail Contacts.
  • Use advanced options for blocking junk e-mail messages.
  • Manage multiple e-mail accounts in one place.

With a paid subscription, Outlook Connector enables these additional features:

  • Manage, share, and synchronize your Windows Live Calendar in Outlook.
  • Access your Tasks and Notes.

You can download the application from Microsoft from this web page: Link

Microsoft Office Connector

Using Robocopy to Copy Files and Folders While Maintaining ACLs

Robocopy is a Windows Server Resource Kit command line tool that allow you to copy files and folders while maintaining ACLs. In addition it allows you to copy files across networks with fault tolerance capabilities – if the network connection is disrupted, the copy operation will continue where it left off when the connection is restored. Robocopy will also allow you to synchronize local or remote directories and if changes are detected, only the changed bits in a file are copied as opposed to the entire file being copied.

How to use Robocopy to copy the contents of one directory to another while maintaining ACLs:

  • NOTE: Do not put a trailing backslash at the end of the directory paths. The destination directory does not have to currently exist.
robocopy c:\pathToSourceDirectory c:\pathToDestinationDirectory /E /SEC

Here is a link to a Microsoft article that talks about the GUI version of Robocopy: Link

Robo

Vista – How To Disable the Remote Desktop Warning: “Remote Desktop cannot verify the identity of the computer you want to connect to…”

The Remote Desktop client on Vista gives a REALLY annoying warning message every time you connect to a preVista computer such as a server running Windows 2003. The warning message looks like the one in the picture below:

Remote Desktop Warning

You can get rid of this warning message by editing the registry or configuring a setting in the client itself. Here is how you do it by editing the Vista registry:

1. Open up the registry editor

2. Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client

3. Add a new “DWORD” entry named “AuthenticationLevelOverride” and assign it a value of “0” (zero).

4. You should now no longer get that annoying warning message.

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Here is how you do it by configuring a setting in the Remote Desktop Client:

1. Click on “Options”

2. Click on the “Advanced Tab”

3. In “Authentication Options”, select “Always connect, even if authentication fails”