M.A.S. Electronics' Blog

Microsoft developers did a lot of work to make Windows Vista or Windows 7 boot more quickly than previous versions. But, there are still issues that can make your computer boot more slowly than it should. Event Viewer to track down potential causes of long boot times. Windows Event Viewer is a great tool for gathering information that you can then use to troubleshoot many different problems — including longer than normal boot times. Now, there are a whole host…

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Over the last few years, Microsoft has been trying to make PowerShell the management tool of choice. Almost all the newer Microsoft server products require PowerShell, and there are lots of management tasks that can’t be accomplished without delving into the command line. As a Windows administrator, you need to be familiar with the basics of using PowerShell. Here are 10 commands to get you started. 1: Get-Help The first PowerShell cmdlet every administrator should learn is Get-Help. You can…

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The Windows registry is a powerful tool, but one wrong edit can render a Windows machine unusable or worse – unbootable. And there’s nothing worse for an IT pro than making the problem worse while trying to fix an end user’s machine. The first tip should be self-evident, but too many end users and IT pros don’t follow it. And that’s to back up the registry before making any edits. No matter what you are about to do in the registry,…

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There are certain applications that do an unusual amount of reading and writing data. Under normal operating circumstances, these applications work fine. But what happens when those disk-intensive applications start competing with other applications? When this happens, a serious slowdown can occur. You can prevent those slowdowns with the help of RAM disks. A RAM disk is basically a special partition of your PC’s memory that has been formatted and configured (via a special application) to be used as a…

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Sysinternals has been around for quite some time and was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. These are great little tools for getting some heavy-hitting Windows things done and sometimes done better than when using the built-in tools for a task. The entire suite of products is available for download. While this is the easiest way to get the tools because they are bundled together, there are some tools that I find myself using far more than others. Here’s a look…

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Any time a hard drive leaves your possession, whether you’re recycling, reselling, or returning it to the manufacturer, you should securely delete the data it contains. Although physically destroying your old hard drives or running them through a degaussing machine are probably the safest ways to protect your data. These options will destroy the drives along with the data. And, they may not be practical in all situations — like when you need to return a drive that’s under warranty….

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When new hardware is installed on a Windows Server, there are a number of options, such as which driver to use and whether to utilize Windows Update for the driver. There are options for specifying this behavior. For standalone systems, the Device Installations settings option from System properties can dictate behavior for device installation. Figure A shows this option for standalone systems. Figure A If the option needs to be centrally managed for a number of computer accounts, Group Policy…

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Malware authors don’t always get along – in fact, there have been a number of instances where attackers target each other. But sometimes, malware infecting malware can be a good thing for attackers. According to Trend Micro Threat Response Engineer Roland Dela Paz, there has been an uptick of this kind of activity, which he called “hybridized malware.” Recently, Dela Paz wrote, Trend observed an IRC bot detected as WORM_LAMIN.AC that was also infected by a mother file infector PE_VIRUX.AA-O. “It’s…

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More than 1.2 million Websites were infected by malware in the third quarter of 2010, according to security firm Dasient. This includes legitimate sites belonging to government agencies and malvertisements, or malicious advertisements. In the third quarter of 2009, there were 560,000 Websites infected. While Dasient’s researchers had expected the number to increase, the fact that it doubled was a surprise, said Dasient CTO Neil Daswani. Instead of just growing in volume, malware has also changed in the way it…

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If you are a Windows Live Messenger user, you know that Microsoft recently released the 2011 version of Messenger and that the product has been expanded beyond the Windows Live network to become a social networking portal. Well, almost. Windows Live Messenger 2011 will allow you to connect to your Facebook and MySpace accounts as well as to LinkedIn, but it won’t allow you to tap into Twitter. In addition to these main social networking connections, there are connections to…

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