The Channel9 guys have posted an interesting video where the Powershell team discuss the goals of Powershell, where it is going in the future, and showing off the environment in action - check it out at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=309510 Also - an interesting site with Powershell add...

If you install the latest Vista drivers for Intellipoint mice you get a nifty feature. The drivers are located at http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/vista/vistasupport/intellipoint.mspx Once installed, click Pearl (where Start used to be) | All Programs | Microsoft Mouse | Microsoft Mouse By default...

Defender has been in beta for a while but a few weeks ago the final release was signed off. Defender is our free anti-spyware software which runs in realtime. You can download it from http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx Some of the features in this version are...

A colleague of ours liked rain so much he decided he didn't get enough of it here in Ireland so he relocated to Seattle - the only place on the planet that makes the Irish climate seem hot and sunny :-) As part of his new role he has set up an online community for public sector IT people to share...

Most people are familiar with GPMC - the Group Policy Management Console - for administering and troubleshooting GPO's. If you're not familiar with it - download it now, you're wasting your time managing GPO's the "old" way :-) What a lot of people don't know is that when you install GPMC, you get...

This is now available to download for Windows 2003 & XP. There are quite a few new features - more info is over at the terminal services team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ts/archive/2006/11/29/remote-desktop-connection-terminal-services-client-6-0-for-windows-xp-and-windows-server-2003-english...

http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2006/11/08/it-s-time.aspx Nice work. Congrats to the Windows team. When Jim says "it's time", for me that means "it's time" to rebuild my laptop - it's had about a dozen Vista beta builds on it over the past few months and it deserves a...

MCS is like most consulting organisations in that as a consultant, you are working on customer sites a lot of the time. A downside of this is that you don't get to fully avail of "corporate" solutions such as folder redirection, or the use of home drives - meaning most of your data is on your laptop...

A lot of people think IPSec is complicated. It's actually pretty easy to implement and manage, and can bring extra ammunition to your defence in depth strategy to help protect critical systems, or to reduce the threat of malware or viruses. The main reason customers I work with are shy to implement...

You're probably wondering "what is Centro". If so (or even if not, and you know what Centro is!) - check out this blog

SCCP is a great tool for anyone who is designing/planning new MOM or Exchange deployments, or for those who need to determine what is required to support increased growth of an existing infrastructure. I definitely recommend that you take a look if you are using (or intending to use) MOM or Exchange...

For some Office 2000/2003 users, the move to Office 2007 can be a little bit daunting at first. After a few hours you really get used to the new ribbon bar and using the product is much more natural and productive than the old-fashioned way. However, those first "few hours" can be frustrating for power...

In desktop deployment projects we see customers spending a lot of time testing departmental Access databases for compatibility with newer versions of Office. Quite often a home-grown Access database becomes critical to the business. At that point, it is generally better to spend the testing effort in...

I used this method ages ago but have rebuilt my laptop dozens of times over the past few months to keep up with Vista builds. I kept thinking that Adobe loaded much quicker on my old machine and then remembered that I had to configure something to make it happen. So I dug out the URL and bingo, surfing...

I've been doing a bit of research around the theoretical limits in an AD environment as part of a project I'm working on. It's unlikely that many people will ever actually hit these limits (if you do, you probably need to take a fundamental look at your infrastructure architecture and how you support...

OneCare is now in beta for public users from the UK & Ireland. Sign up to try it out at http://ideas.live.co.uk/ProgramPage.aspx?versionId=b2456790-90e6-4d28-9219-5d7207d94d45&pageId=0 What is Windows Live OneCare? An all-in-one PC care service that’s always on, helping provide persistent...

Like most people, I use notepad when I need to put together a script. I never actually looked at the help file for notepad (well, why would you?!?) until I hit the F1 key by accident recently. As a result I found quite a few tricks that notepad provides that I never knew existed. They are turning out...

The following MOM 2005 Management Packs were released this month. All are available for download from the Management Pack Catalog at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/mom/mom2005/catalog.aspx - MOM 2005 SP1 Agent Prerequisite Component for Windows XP Embedded - ISA Server 2000, 2004, 2006...

This is the first post from our MCS team of infrastructure consultants based in Ireland. Who are we? Well we are a relatively small team of guys working for Microsoft Consulting Services. We help our enterprise customers and partners design, deploy and support complex and leading edge solutions based...