M.A.S. Electronics' Blog

It’s inevitable that clients will infect workstations, PCs, and laptops with spyware and viruses. Regardless of preventive steps, from gateway protection to automated scans to written Internet use policies, malware threats sneak through even layered defenses. What makes the situation worse is that many clients aren’t willing to invest in standalone anti-spyware software, even though they understand the need for minimal antivirus protection. Some IT professionals advocate simply wiping systems and reinstalling Windows, while others suggest that’s akin to giving…

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As you know, the User Account Control (UAC) system is the heart and soul of the security system in Microsoft Windows 7. It is designed to protect your system from inadvertent or malicious incidents that could compromise stability or security while you are logged on using an account with administrative privileges, where you have full access to the system. Of course, you can perform administrative operations simply by working through the UAC prompt. Or, if you totally dislike the UAC…

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The ability to recover deleted files from an NTFS file system is something any good consultant should have in their back pocket. This also applies to the ability to recover files from a machine that has been rendered unbootable. There are plenty of tools available for that task, but few of them are as simple as the free tool NTFS Walker. NTFS Walker is a portable application (it can be used from a thumb drive) that contains its own NTFS…

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Classic Shell is a very good program and must be popular as it has steadily advanced from version 0.9.10 to version 2.9.2. However, using Classic Shell isn’t the only way that you can get a Classic Start Menu in Windows 7. In fact, you can create your own Classic Start Menu and position it right next to the new Start Menu in Windows 7. With this side-by-side arrangement you can have the best of both worlds. You can use your…

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Along with Windows 7’s new features comes a set of new keyboard shortcuts. This little cheat sheet will help you work more efficiently with the latest version of Windows.

When you need to reboot a Windows server, you’ll occasionally encounter obstacles to making that happen. For instance, if remote desktop services aren’t working, how can you reboot the server? Here is a list of tricks I’ve collected over the years for rebooting or shutting down a system when I can’t simply go to the Start Menu in Windows. The shutdown.exe command: This gem will send a remote (or local) shutdown command to a system. Entering shutdown /r /m \\servername…

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One of the annoying features of Vista is that because you have to create an account and a password for every  PC or device that you want to share files with. Because of this, upon boot up Vista will display all of these accounts, even if you don’t actually use them on the PC, and you also have to login everytime. By following these steps this can be done away with: Click on the Start button and type in ‘netplwiz‘….

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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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