New PCs are loaded with unwanted trial programs, known as “bloatware”. You can spend time removing them manually, or run the PC Decrapifier, a free download at http://www.pcdecrapifier.com.
Author: Alan
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Acrobat Reader – Turning off JavaScript for the Enterprise
You have probably heard by now that there is another Acrobat vulnerability, and that Adobe does not plan to do anything about it until January 12, see http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7747 The good news is that we now have a single HKLM registry entry to disable JavaScript for 9.2 and 8.1.7. This article: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/504/cpsid_50431.html explains the “JavaScript Blacklist…
Free cleanup tools
Trend Micro has some nice free cleanup tools at http://free.antivirus.com/clean-up-tools/. Rubotted will tell you if your PC has been hit by a botnet trojan. I like using tools like this to second check my anti-virus software.
403 error from Microsoft Update
Microsoft has updated Windows Update, and we saw problems with some systems failing to self-update the agent. The remedy is to do a manual installation of the new windows update client. You can find it here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949104 Tags: Windows+Update
User Account Information
When I wrote the original version of UserSummary.vbs in 2003, I remarked that the code was cut and paste. I recently made some changes, but the code still is a mess, so please don’t look at it as the way things ought to be. This creates a spreadsheet log containing the following information: name, samAccountName, description, account creation date, password age…
Enumerate Recent Documents
We are sometimes asked to say whether a user has accessed a particular document. File auditing for NT has a terrible amount of overhead, so it is usually turned off. Recent Documents are stored on in %userprofile%\recent. There is also the most recently used (MRU) list in the registry for each user stored in HKU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RecentDocs . My effort to…
Get Email Address of Terminal Server Users
This script allows you to get the email addresses of terminal server users, so you may later paste them into the “To:“ line of an email. In the past I used NET SEND /Users to notify users that the terminal server they were logged onto was going down for maintenance. Because of security concerns, the messenger service is…
Avoiding unwanted smileys in WordPress
I found when posting batch files in WordPress I sometimes got unwanted smiley faces. So a batch subroutine called output shows up like this: :output To avoid this use the code : to escape the colon. The result is displayed: :output
Logged on User, part 2
In my post at https://www.akaplan.com/?p=248, I said there are many ways to get the logged on user. That code is limited to console users. I wanted a method that would show me both interactive users and RDP users. I found some nice code by MVP Torgeir Bakken at http://www.ureader.com/message/1436360.asp, and made some changes to add error handling,…
A Low Privilege Internet Explorer Shortcut
Your users should never have administrative rights on their workstations. But many Admins are administrators of their local system, and are obviously running with elevated permissions when they log onto servers. You should never cruise the internet on a server. But you may need to go to Windows Update, or to vendor sites for drivers. The…