Do you have enough of advertising on web pages?

We spend a lot of time on browsing the web. We know that and the others too. This is the reason why in the latest years we have to see the desired contents in the middle of advertisements. This makes me crazy and as result, I searched the net for a solution or application that will work. I don’t want to see any undesired advertisement on pages I visit!
The application Adblock Plus is the result of my research. It is easy to use, it works with most used browsers, it is free and it really WORKS! I recommend it to everyone who doesn’t want to see advertising on the web. Surfing is now better for me.

 

Update: Be carefull if you are using internal portals. I am using SharePoint and I have to add the SharePoint url address to the Exceptions..

Remotly manage Local Admins

Many times I come in environments, where it is normal that any user has a local administrator right on his computer. As you probably know (I hope), this is not the best practice and it is very dangerous from the point of security.
Anyway, removing all this users from all computers is an annoying job. Of course, you can do it via Group policy, but you can’t use a filter in case someone has to remain. For those cases, I wrote a small vbs script that you can use.
The usage is simple. Form the administrative command prompt change the directory to the place, where the script is located and run it: RemoveAdmin.vbs ComputerName. ComputerName is the name of the computer you want to check.
The script will have a look into local admin group and you will be asked for every member if you want to remove it or not. Simply, you can filter who will remain local admin and who will lost this privilege. Think twice before you leave this privilege to a user member of local admin group – remove it, if you don’t have a really good reason to keep it.

Download: RemoveAdmin
.

Remotly enable remote registry

Sometimes, when we need to connect to the registry of another computer to view or change some registry key, we are very disappointed, because this functionality is not working.
In most cases, it is our responsibility (we should think of this in advance), but we need to correct it immediately.
As we want to be able to connect on our network registry, we have to start the Remote Registry service on the remote computer. We can start it from the command prompt with sc \\computer start remoteregistry.
This will start the service and it will run it until the restart or shutdown of the computer. If you want to set a service to start automatically, you have to write another command:  sc \\computer config remoteregistry start= auto. This command will configure the service to start automatically – it will not start the service itself.
And just an advice: use a group policy to deploy settings like this. It is more transparent and you will have better results with less work.
Hope the post was helpful..

How to remove WIndows.old folder

After Microsoft Windows OS (desktop and server) is upgraded, we can see the folder Windows.old. I agree that this folder in some cases can be very useful, but in most cases it’s only a “bed history residue” and most of us want to remove it. In the desktop operating systems is easy to do this, but in server systems seems that this functionality is missing.
So, it is not true, we just have to install it. Here is the step-by-step guide how we can do that in Windows Server 2012R2 (it is very similar in Server 2012):

Open Server manager and in dashboard click on Add Roles and Features. On installation type select Role-Based or feature-based installation.

Step1

Select the desired server from the server pool.

Step2

Select Next on Server Roles and in the Features step check Desktop Experience under User Interfaces and Infrastructure.

Step3

Finish the installation, reboot the server and open This PC (My computer). Right click on C disk and select Properties. Now there is the Disk Cleanup button like on desktop operating systems. Click on it.

Step4

After the disk cleanup process will finish, you will be able to see a lot of file categories to clean, but there are no system files from the old installation. To discover this type of files, you have to click on Clean up system files.

Step5

After this process will finish, you will be able to see all old windows installation files. At this point you have to select them and click on OK.

Step6

This will remove all old windows installations and system will looks clean, but before you delete old windows installations be sure, that everything is working with the new OS. After this step it is not possible to go back..

Group Policy and WMI filtering for OS

Many times, we have to apply some GPO only to particular OS, domain controllers or servers. As we know, this is possible with WMI filtering, but it is very difficult to found all parameters to determinate the operating system in one place. This is why I want to write this post.

When you want to use a WMI filter for query OS, you have to use WMI\CimV2 namespace and there are listed some values that you must know:

Operating system version – we can determinate the version of OS with the variable Version:

Windows Server 2012 Version like “6.2%”

Windows Server 2008 R2 Version like “6.1%”

Windows Server 2008 Version like “6.0%”

Windows Server 2003 Version like “5.2%”

Windows 8 Version like “6.2%”

Windows 7 Version like “6.1%”

Windows Vista Version like “6.0%”

Windows XP (Version like “5.1%” or Version like “5.2%”)

As we can see very quickly, some OS have the same number of OS Version, so we have to adopt the second variable ProductType to have a selection:

Client operating systems ProductType=”1″

Domain controllers ProductType=”2″

Servers that are not domain controllers ProductType=”3″

Now, with the combination of those two variables, we can find only the operating system that we need. However, is it a 32 or 64 bit system? Of course, we can sort also this characteristic with another variable – AddressWidth:

32bit systems AddressWidth = “32”

64bit systems AddressWidth = “64”

At the end, to be more clear, I want to write some examples:

All domain controllers in domain:

select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where ProductType = “3”

All 64 bit Windows 8 OS:

select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where Version like “6.2%” and ProductType = “1” and AddressWidth = “64”

All Windows 2012 servers that are non DC’s:

select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where Version like “6.2%” and ProductType = “3”

Of course, we can filter on many more variables than explained. There are many parameters, which are explained on TechNet and in White papers. For example, we can apply policy (e.g. to install some software) only to computers that have more than 1GB of space on HD:

Select * from Win32_LogicalDisk where FreeSpace > 1073741824 (space is in kb).