I like to keep up to date with the latest Microsoft technologies and generally have a number of test environments running on my home computer. These test environments grant me the ability to create different "virtual" machines each with their own unique Operating Systems and programs without effecting my main computer. Recently, I had the opportunity to sit through a Window Server 2016 preview and thought I might like to get my hands on the new fledgling OS to see what I could glean from it. This is the first part of a multi part series running through the setup of a virtual environment on Windows 10 and the installation of Windows Server 2016 Essentials Tech Preview 3 on the newly established Hyper-V environment.

Continue reading

Since Windows 7 the "God Mode" folder has presented users with the ability to access all of their Windows settings in one central location. This "God mode" folder has an added benefit to Windows 10 users, however, as the operating systems settings have been divided into two sections: the traditional Control Panel and also in the new Settings menu. (NOTE: The below steps will work for Windows 7 machines as well - ed.)

Continue reading

Last week I was trying to verify whether one of my Windows client servers had been rebooted in order to take care of a check disk task I had set up to run on the servers next reboot. While a simple check for a winint task in my event viewer could have sufficed, I thought it would be fun to find another way around the problem (you can't just do things the easy way? - ed.). So being ever the overachiever I came across three other methods to check the last reboot time/uptime of my server in question:

Continue reading

When sitting in the cubicle today looking for a good way to script a rather monotonous task, I was presented with a lovely melody springing from my laptop speakers. "Greetings!" it chimed in rather overzealously for a Monday. "you may already be a winner of $100,000 dollars." As I scrambled to stop the traitorous noise I realized I had no way of knowing which tab it was coming from. Quickly I shut down Internet Explorer completely and slunk down in my desk hoping no one would peep over my cubicle wall to give me the evil eye. My next course of action was to go against office best practices and install my go to browser, Google Chrome.

Continue reading

When I was working in my last position we ran an Office 365 environment. It had all the features you could ever ask for and very few of the complications one is faced with in a local Exchange environment. Failover was taken care of for us, High Availability didn't involve 6 in house/colocation servers and when an outage did occur I didn't have to wade ankle deep into the shit storm that was an office without email. One slight annoyance, however, was when Gates and Co.  decided to roll out new services. More often than not such new features were like a surprise birthday party. You were absolutely elated to see everyone there, but then you realized they invited Gary the office cynic (the views of this writer do not reflect those of all other staff, many of us love Gary and would be more than happy to invite him to our next party - ed.).  One such example of this was Microsoft's implementation of "OWA for devices"

Continue reading