Microsoft’s Patch Tuesdays (the second Tuesday of every month) are an important part of every user’s regular Windows operating system maintenance. In fact, regular fixes, patches, and updates should be part of every user’s regular routine, no matter which operating system they use.

But sometimes Windows XP gets stuck in update mode. It will continue to show the flashing yellow shield in the System Tray suggesting you need to download and install important security patches. Windows may even display a chat bubble reminding you there is a system patch available. This may appear even after you have already applied all the patches — Windows just doesn’t recognize its current status.

Or, as in the case of TechRepublic member Riggy001, Windows may be telling you that SP3 is available, even though you have decided you don’t want to apply it right now or in the near future. This is the dilemma Riggy001 described in a TechRepublic Discussion Thread. To relieve this annoyance, Riggy001 called Microsoft support and finagled a procedure to reset the Windows update management system.

This cialis en francais blog post is also available in PDF format in a TechRepublic download.

Resetting Windows

Figure A

Services dialog box

1. From the list of services, right-click and then click Stop for the following services:

• Automatic Updates
• Background Intelligent Transfer Service
• Cryptographic Services

1. Next click Start | My Computer.
2. Double-click the drive where XP is installed, usually C:\.
3. Double-click Windows.
4. Right-click on the file folder SoftwareDistribution and rename it SoftwareDistribution.old.
5. Next double-click on the System32 file folder.
6. Right-click on the folder Catroot2 and rename it Catroot2.old.
7. Right-click on the folder SoftwareDistribution and rename it SoftwareDistribution.old.
8. Close C:\Windows\System32 explorer window.
9. Now, go back to the Services folder, right-click and then start the following services:

• Automatic Updates
• Background Intelligent Transfer Service (unless it was originally set to manual and you never had to stop the service in the beginning)
• Cryptographic Services

1. Close the Services Window and go to the Administrative Tools window (which should still be open).
2. Click the Back Button on your toolbar to get back to the Control Panel.
3. Double-click Automatic Updates (Figure B).

Figure B

Automatic Updates

1. Select “Notify Me but Don’t Automatically Download or Install Them” radio button and then click the OK button.
2. Close the Control Panel and resume computing.

One annoyance gone

This procedure forces Windows to reset the files that track what updates you have installed. This means that the automatic update will stop nagging you to update even though you already have. For Riggy001, this procedure means Windows will stop trying to download and install SP3.

One word of warning though, in general Windows updates are important not only for your security and peace of mind but also for the security of everyone else. I highly recommend that you apply the patches as soon as you can. Our Windows Patch Tuesday feature will keep you informed of just what each patch contains.

On the Advanced tab of the Power Options Properties dialog box, Microsoft Windows XP provides you with several built-in shortcuts for putting your computer in Suspend mode — either Standby or Hibernation. These shortcuts allow you to reconfigure the operation performed when pressing either the Power or Sleep buttons. (If you’ve enabled the Hibernation feature from the Power Options Properties dialog box, using these shortcuts will put your computer into Hibernation mode. If you haven’t, using these shortcuts will put your computer into Standby mode.)

Figure A

Power Options dialog box — Advanced tab

This blog post is also available in PDF format in a TechRepublic download.

However, if you wish to expand your alternatives, you can create a standard shortcut that will put your computer in Suspend mode. You can the put the shortcut on your desktop or place it on the Quick Launch bar, where you can easily put your computer in a suspended state with a click of your mouse.

Here’s cialis ejaculation how:

IEHistoryView can allow an administrator to quickly see a user’s browsing history without extensive preparation and configuration.

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Tracking a user’s browsing history can be both an expensive and a daunting task, especially if you’re a one-man shop in a small company. For those that are blessed with users that behave while they’re online at work, you are lucky indeed. For the rest of us, there is IEHistoryView.

Created by Nir Sofer, owner and operator of NirSoft, IEHV is a simple, yet powerful, tool with a fairly small footprint (37 KB). Downloading and installing IEHV is as simple as getting the zip file from the Web site and extracting the three included files into the folder of your choice.

Included are the executable (with both GUI and command-line functionality), a compiled HTML (.CHM) help file, and a ReadMe file that contains version history and some quick-start instructions.

This blog post is also available in the PDF format in a TechRepublic Download, which includes all the code in a separate file for easy copying.

Initial look

The first thing you see when opening IEHV is a grid interface of the current user’s Internet Explorer history (Figure A). As we look around, there are several toolbar buttons and a few standard menus as well.

Figure A

Current user’s Internet Explorer history

As in most well-designed Windows programs, all the toolbar functions can be found in one of the standard menus. In these menus (Figure B) we see several familiar options as well as many more that we will either have to guess at or try out. (I edited the opened four menus together in the same image. The actual application does not function in this manner.)

Figure B

All the menu screens at the same time

Delving right in, scroll through the grid to get a nice reverse-order history of the user’s browser activity (Figure C, which is edited together from several screen shots).

Figure C

Scrolling through the history

Looking at this user, after they went through the Microsoft RunOnce wizard they first fired up XKCD.com (important things first) then went to TechRepublic and read several articles and blogs as well as viewed a photo gallery or two. After leaving TechRepublic, the user Googles the Google Headquarters and then checks out the headlines on MSN.com. Finally, this person Googles “crack WEP encryption” (must have gotten the idea from “Video: How to Spoof a MAC Address” viewed earlier) and then spent some time browsing a few sites on the topic before logging off.

Viewing other users, other folders, and subfolders

So, now we know what the logged-in user has done on the Internet. But, what if you wanted to look at another user’s history on the same machine, a different machine, or just wanted to look at a particular date or range of dates? IEHV has the ability to browse the list of user accounts on the local machine as well as give the user the ability to specify a history folder (useful for networked computers) or a history subfolder (to look at a shorter period of time), which can be seen in Figure D.

Figure D

Viewing different folders

Choosing either another user from the user accounts chooser or specifying a history folder will give the same type of information as we saw in the initial view. The main difference is in the history subfolder. As you can see in Figure E, the Hit counts are much smaller than in the main view. I was unable to find anything in the documentation to explain this, so I simply chalked it up to a functionality of Internet Explorer (perhaps the main view shows image hits as their own hit under the page they are loaded from).

Figure E

History subfolder of another user

Saving, deleting, exporting, and printing

By checking the boxes next to one or more of the entries in the grid, several of the menu options become usable.

Other functionality

So, what else can we do with it? Well, there are a couple of different Search functions. The first, “Find History Item,” is your traditional search dialog. Also available is “Select by URL,” which allows the user to input several carriage-return-delimited strings that are searched for and automatically selected in the grid.

One feature in the menus that stood out was “Show All Google Searches” (Figure F). This does exactly what it says: it shows all Google searches that haven’t been cleared from the browser.

Figure F

Showing all Google Searches

After pretty much exhausting the menus, the next thing to try is right-clicking on one of the records. Some of the same functionality that is in the menus and toolbars is also available via a right-click context menu (Figure G).

Figure G

Right-click context menu

Let’s look into the properties screen (Figure H). The properties screen shows the same information that is in the grid, just laid out in a traditional data form format.

Figure H

Properties screen

Command-line functionality

The command-line functionality is a little more difficult to jump right into, and a simple “iehv /?” just launched the GUI.

Here is the command-line syntax:

• Action: tells IEHV what type of file you would like to export to. Options are similar to the GUI Save function.
• Destination File: absolute or relative path and file name to store the exported data
• Source Type and Source: optional parameters used to redirect IEHV away from the currently logged-on user (similar to the functions above in Figure D)

Figure I shows the failed attempts at discovering command-line options as well as a simple implementation of the command line that exports all History for User “TRTest” to a tab-delimited text file named “export.tab.” While not as easy to use for simply viewing, the command line would be very useful for reporting and archiving.

Figure I

Command line

Aggregating cialis effectiveness and archiving

The following section is simply a “proof of concept” that should not be taken as a complete solution. I have used VB.NET 2005 to demonstrate these ideas.

The core to this concept is executing the command line, writing the data to a temporary file, and then reading that data into a VB.NET application for aggregation and archival. The challenge is to build the command line for each computer/user/folder you want to aggregate.

Executing a command line from Visual Basic is limited to a few options. I could use the Shell() command, but the outputs of that are very limited and Shell can be temperamental. The .NET Framework also has a Process class within the System.Diagnostics namespace that seems a bit more robust, so we’ll use that.

NOTE: Please refer to the documentation on System.Diagnostics.Process for more detail.

Among other things, the Process class has options for a File Name as well as Arguments. The File Name is the full path to the IEHV executable and the Arguments will be filled in dynamically with the custom-built string we’ll create later. The command line we will use is:

What this command does is create an output of a specified History folder to a temporary tab-delimited text file in the user’s temp folder. So, we first break off the “iehv” because that is being handled in the Process class’ File Name property. Next, we need to use the .NET Framework to get the user’s temp folder path and substitute that in for “%temp%”. Finally we need to ask the user to specify the path to import into our application.

Prompting the user for this information can be done in one of many ways, depending on how sophisticated you want the application to be and how many folders you want to import in a batch. For the purposes of this proof, we will assume that you want to gather usage for all users on one specified machine and load that information into a DataTable, which can be tied to a backend database.

Code Listing A shows a snippet of how to get the user’s temp folder as well as loop through the user directories gathering the Internet Explorer History and loading it into the DataTable.

Listing A

Considerations

IEHistoryView can allow an administrator to quickly see a user’s browsing history without extensive configuration and preparation. For more advanced archival needs, the command line can be used alongside some custom programming to create a simple, low-cost (time is money) Internet usage monitor.

Using IEHV to monitor Internet usage is dependent on users not deleting their browsing history through Internet Explorer. Fortunately, those rights can be controlled via Group Policy as discussed in this IT Dojo blog post.

If you’re trying to format a selection of paragraphs that have different indents, Word won’t let you set tabs for all of them using the handy ruler shortcut. Here’s a trick for getting around this limitation.

Using the ruler to add tab settings is a common practice. However, users often find that when they try to use the ruler to change the tab settings of multiple paragraphs all at once, nothing happens. For example, say you’re formatting some text that has been copied from several documents, each with its own first-line paragraph indent settings (Figure A). When you select the text, all tab markers are grayed out and can’t be changed.

Figure A

Fortunately, you don’t have to go back and change each paragraph individually. Follow these steps:

Figure B

1. Click the horizontal ruler at the 1-inch marker to define the new tab setting cialis drug impotence for the selected paragraphs.

As Figure C shows, all paragraphs are now indented identically.

Figure C

This blog post is also available in PDF format as a cialis dosages target=”_blank”>TechRepublic download.

Sometimes, depending on the manufacturer and on the particular layout, your keyboard can be a great source of frustration. For TechRepublic reader Frank Reeves, the Caps Lock key is the one that drives him crazy. After seeing the TechRepublic How do I… about how to disable the Insert key in Word, he asked for information on how to similarly disable the Caps Lock key.

There are several ways to accomplish this task. One way is to discover the scan code for the Caps Lock key and for the key you want to map it to and then edit the Windows registry. The folks at Annoyances.org explain this method. However, their explanation is more complicated than it needs to be, and there are easier and safer ways to accomplish the same thing.

Third-party keyboard layout and mapping tools are available that will allow you to change the behavior of the Caps Lock key, but many of these really boil down to a .reg file, which edits the Windows registry for you. In general, these .reg files are fine and come from people and organizations just trying to help make your life easier, but it still involves a stranger editing your Windows registry files. That makes me uncomfortable.

The best way to remap the Caps Lock key or any key on your keyboard is with a free utility from Microsoft called remapkey.exe. This little utility is available in the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools. It is one of many utilities included in the kit and works with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista. This TechRepublic How do I… shows you how to use the remapkey.exe utility to remap the Caps Lock key.

Remapping

Once you download and run the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools file, you will have a long laundry list of utilities located in a single directory. I used the default location (Figure A):

Figure A

Tools

When you start the remapkey utility, it presents a screen displaying two keyboards, as shown in Figure B.

Figure B

Remapkey utility

The top keyboard is the standard base keyboard layout. To remap the Caps Lock key, in the top keyboard, click on the key you would like the Caps Lock to be remapped to, drag it to the bottom keyboard, and drop it on the Caps Lock key there. In my example, I am remapping the Caps Lock key to the left Shift key. (Note the red key in Figure C.)

Figure C

Caps Lock is now left Shift.

When you are satisfied with your remapping choices, click the Save And Exit icon to implement the change (Figure D). A reboot of the operating system will be required for the change to take effect.

Figure D

Save your settings and exit.

As you can see in Figure E, the remapkey utility is writing to the Windows registry, just like the methods mentioned earlier were going to do, but this gives you more control over that delicate editing process.

Figure E

Remapkey writes to the Windows registry.

Note: For Windows Vista, you will have to run the remapkey utility in administrator mode.