Category Archives: Microsoft

Active Directory Explorer

This handy little tool was developed by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, and is part of the most execellent SysInternals tool set. It is more than just a simple viewer tool, though.

Need to bulk import users into Active Directory? Need to make bulk changes to existing Active Directory users? AD Bulk Users makes importing and modifying large numbers of users easy. Import users in bulk from CSV, Excel, ODBC, SQL, Oracle etc.

ManageEngine ADAudit Plus

Compliancy blues got you down? ADAudit Plus can help. I’ve used this tool in the past for monitoring SOX, PCI, HIPAA, and FISMA compliance, and can only say good things about it.

Retrieve System Time within a Batch File

I’ve shown you previously how to get the date value from the system in a batch file. You can also grab the time in a similar fashion.

Why I am ditching Outlook.com

There is one simple reason that I am moving my email back to Gmail: Search is broken.

Retrieve local NetBIOS name with VB6

There are a two really easy ways to get the netBIOS name of the local machine. One leverages API calls to Win32, while the other simply queries an environment variable.

How to fix the Veeam PowerShell Error

During the installation of Veeam Backup and Replication (VBR), you may run into a puzzling error, “Failed to invoke PowerShell query SCVMM components are not installed.” Luckily, an easy fix.

Install VB6 on Windows 10 or 11

So if you don’t know it, the technical preview version of Windows 10 is available. Being the good maintenance guy, you’ll want to know about installing VB6 on Windows 10. This article shows how I got it running on Microsofts latest OS. I won’t run down the list of getting Windows 10 installed. If you’re able to grab… Read More »

VBScript: Dump AD Users to Excel

This handy little script will dump out your Active Directory users to an Excel spreadsheet. Simply run it with an account that has the necessary permissions to query AD, and it will do the rest, including notify you with a dialog box when it is done.

Remove Ghosted NIC from a Windows VM

After performing a V2V, P2V or a clone operation in which the VHD/VHDX file is copied to a new VM, a new NIC is installed in the virtual machine. This is evidenced by the need to once again set the IP configuration of the NIC.