Network Steve — Windows Administration Tools, Tips and News

Convert mailboxes to pst files in Exchange 2003

December 2, 2009

Mike wrote in, and asked:
“Steve, We are working on a move from Exchange 2003 to a hosted Gmail solution. We will be using Outlook 2007 to access the Gmail accounts. I have not had much experience with Exchange 2003 – is there any way to convert those Exchange mailboxes to PST files without going to [...]

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An easy move from XP to Windows 7

November 27, 2009

I was contacted a few weeks back by Laplink. They gave me a free license of their PC Mover to try out.
Usually, I throw these requests away, but I have used various utilities from Laplink since the early 90s (Anyone remember those Laplink cables!?), and I really like this company. Still…it is a risk [...]

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Send mail from your bat files

November 17, 2009

Two weeks ago, I wrote about backing up a remote windows machine using Remote Desktop.
One thing lacking from this solution is email notification. How do we know if the backup job started? Or finished?
There is a free and open source tool that can be used to solve this problem, it is called blat. It consists [...]

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Date and time stamp in your batch files

November 11, 2009

Update 11-12-2009: Looks like I made a typo. The date should be extracted with this line:
%date:~-4,4%%date:~-10,2%%date:~-7,2%
I have updated the article below, and thanks to Jim.G for noticing it!
There has been some activity recently in an old 2007 post I wrote about creating a date and time stamp in your batch files.
Well, the [...]

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Secure remote backup using remote desktop

November 5, 2009

I have been playing around with a few ideas on how to backup a server I have that is on the other side of town.
One of the problems I have is that the Internet provider blocks VPN traffic, and most other ways I know of getting a secure connection.
The one thing I can do [...]

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Windows 7 – Why your computer won’t go to sleep.

October 28, 2009

I have been playing around with the powercfg utility built into Windows 7, and I came across an interesting command line option:

powercfg /requests

What it does is list the reasons why your computer failed to go to sleep. I had the sleep function enabled on my desktop PC, and I noticed when I came back after [...]

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Connect to your VPN from the command line

October 21, 2009

I was setting up an offsite backup system for our source code. I wanted to use the VPN client within windows to connect the two machines.
One of the problems with this idea is that I only wanted this connection to be active while the source code was being copied
It turns out that it is very [...]

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Hide user accounts in Windows 7

October 14, 2009

Many times it is convenient to create a special administrator account that can be used for the task scheduler.
Unfortunately, if your Windows 7 computer is not joined to a domain, any accounts you create are shown at the start-up screen:

It would look better if you could remove this special account from the welcome screen, and [...]

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Windows 7 – "Identifying Network" (Resolved)

October 7, 2009

I was at a friends house last weekend. I found a very interesting problem with Windows 7. They had a laptop they just purchased in Taiwan, and no matter how they tried to connect it to their network, it would always say “Identifying Network”:

Now, in the screen shot it is the wireless network, but this [...]

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Free Tool – Suspend from the command line

September 22, 2009

I have a system task schedule that wakes up my system at night, runs a few backup processes…and then shuts the computer down.
What I really wanted it to do was to suspend, or hibernate. That way I can get back into my computer quick when I come back in the morning.
After searching around, I found [...]

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