I needed to do this recently and had a few issues. I guess it is not often required to have multiple connections but every now and then it crops up. Historically drivers sometimes caused issues and usually down to power options, understandability to reduce load on batteries. However this time it turned out to be windows that is effecting things. Cutting a long story short, to find the culprit setting run:

From an administrative command prompt type: fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo d: The output will include: Bytes Per Cluster : 4096 In this case Bytes Per Cluster is 4096.

Rather than installing the remote exchange management tools and the pain that can cause, you can use powershell remoting. To setup powershell to connect to the exchange server pop the following into a powershell prompt on your client machine: $cred = get-credential $myremote = New-PSSession -configurationname Microsoft.Exchange -connectionURI http://server_name/Powershell -credential $cred Import-PSSession $myremote The first line prompts you for the account details to connect/manage exchange. Once you’ve entered the next two lines you should be able to run remote powershell commands.

Sometimes you need to find out if you are running a 32bit or a 63bit Windows operating system. You can do this quickly from the command line using WMI: wmic os get osarchitecture Another option is using the following environmental variable: echo %PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE% Short and sweet.

Sometimes you need to use the operating system file manager rather than a terminal so a quick way of opening it can be seen below. For the Windows command line: explorer . The OS X terminal: open . The Ubuntu console: nautilus . This will work for parent folders .. as well as current directory. Note, in case you are interested to do the same in Haiku OS just use the OS X version.

You have a few options for doing this especially if you are using something like WSUS. However if you aren’t, then a registry change via group policy or logon script is probably the best option. Here is a a registry file that will block automatic upgrade to internet explorer 8 and 9: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup\8.0] "DoNotAllowIE80"=dword:00000001 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup\9.0] "DoNotAllowIE90"=dword:00000001 If you are only interested in blocking one version of internet explorer then just remove the appropriate lines.

Alternate Data Streams (ADS) are used by Windows to add an identifier describing the ‘internet explorer zone’ the file was downloaded from. If the zone was not trusted you may have to unblock the file. Certain file types are more at risky and therefore are automatically blocked (see here). To manually unblock the file go to explorer and right click the file, select properties and click unblock. This is somewhat cumbersome for large numbers of files.

This can be a little tricky to find in different versions of Microsoft Outlook. In Outlook 2010 you have to open the email you are interested in, then on the ribbon tool bar select: File > Info > Properties This is long winded and if you often have to do it, rather time consuming. The best way around this is to customise the ribbon tool bar. To do this, select the ‘Home’ tab of the ribbon tool bar.

Windows device manager does not always allow you to see old adapters once the hardware has been removed. You can enable it to do so but when you are dealing with large numbers of virtual machines you need another approach. Devcon can enable you to do this and can be found here if you are after the 32bit version. However there is no 64bit version (just the 32bit & itanium version).

Recently I have seen Microsoft Office 2003 taking an age to open Excel documents over the network. You can use Wireshark to see what is happening at the network level: You can see that it is opening the file a teeny tiny piece at a time. This can cause quite a delay as the spreadsheet gets larger. It turns out that it had been caused by an update to Excel called ‘Microsoft Office File Validation Add-in’: