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Vance Hunt
has provided home-user help desk style support for his consulting company for over 6 years. Making his home in beautiful Southern California, Vance provides general computer Q&A for users via his weekly column.
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 | Friday, August 26, 2005 |
| Discovering your remote users workstation name or IP address, getting to your control panel applets quickly, and utilizing a second hard drive - this week. |
| By Vance Hunt |
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I work on a private help desk and quite often have to remote into a user's current desktop. Getting the computer name or IP address from the user is always a challenge. Is there any logging that an Active Directory backed network does that I can use to look up the users workstation name instead of asking the user for the information?
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No. Out of the box, there is no central location for you to look up the
workstation name for a given user. There are several workarounds for this
that I have either implemented myself within a network, or have seen others
implement. These workarounds range in complexity and each have strong
selling points.
One solution is the use of a third party utility such as Sysinternals'
BGInfo. Utilities such as this can be installed on your users
workstations, set for automatic load on computer startup, and made to be
immediately available to your users. A scenario for such use would be to
have the application installed and running, then when a user calls you have them
open the application and read you the information. The drawback to this is
that you are asking the user for the information instead of being technically
able to determine the information on your own.
I have also seen logon script solutions that are triggered when a user logs
onto or off of the network. The script is designed to determine the
current computer name, IP address and user ID, then record the information in a
central text file, SQL database, or even the Active Directory itself.
The support person in turn looks up the user id in this depository and then has
access to the current workstation name. This solution takes more work and
development, but has a much more polished and professional perception by users.
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I only use a few control panel applets, and I use them a lot. I have found ways to make the control panel fly out from the Start Menu, and add it as a folder on the desktop, but how do I add individual control panel applets either to the desktop or start menu?
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Although there are complicated ways to do this, the best way is actually the
easiest and one that is often overlooked when researching ways to put system
components in other places than where they normally are.
Shortcuts.
The best way to get to your desired control panel applet is to create a
shortcut to it, just like you would create a shortcut to your favorite document,
media file, or program.
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Make sure you are currently using the Classic view within
the Control Panel (if you're running XP or greater).
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Right-click the desired applet, and select Create Shortcut
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Windows will prompt you to put the shortcut on your desktop.
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Drag & Drop, or cut and paste the created shortcut to where
you want it.
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I just put a second hard drive into my tower, which runs Windows XP. It has more room and I would like to move what I can from the first to the new drive, then start using the second hard drive more. What can I move, and how can I make Windows default to the new drive when installing new programs?
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Both actions are actually pretty easy to do. To move your paging
file, do the following:
- Right-click the My Computer icon and select Properties
- Switch to the Advanced tab
- Under the Performance section, press the Settings button
- On the Performance Options dialog, switch to the Advanced tab
- At the bottom under the Virtual Memory section, press the Change button
- Here you can specify where your Paging File should be, how many of them
there should be, and how big they should be.
You can read more on moving the Paging File
here.
Now, the second part is a bit more tricky, because you want to make sure
Windows utilizes the new drive for installing programs, but you don't want to
detach the old Program Files association. The location of the Program
Files folder is location in the registry here:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
ProgramFilesDir
First, create a Program Files folder on the new drive, then change the
path in the above mentioned registry location to point to this location.
Don't try to move any applications that are on the old drive or change any other
registry settings or you run the risk of needing to reinstall the application.
Any new application you want to install will default to you new location and
will install and work as expected. There is a bit of bad news though.
Any application that looks for the existence of another application (for
installing an upgrade version or as an add-in), and the searched for program is
in the old Program Files location, will most likely fail and tell you it can't
find the product.
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