Systems administrators can never have enough short cuts or creative troubleshooting ideas. In this series, Mitch Tulloch, a well-known industry expert specializing in Windows server operating systems, provides advice for every day administration as well as more challenging problems.

Windows Tip: Specifying the current directory for an admin-level command prompt in Vista (04/08/2008)

Vista takes some getting used to, doesn't it? Especially User Account Control(UAC) and the effects it has on doing things like running simple tasks. Here's how to open an admin-level command prompt for a specific directory. Read more.

Windows Tip: Customizing Vista's Instant Search (04/01/2008)
Here's how you can add a "Search Wikipedia" option to the Instant Search box on your Start menu.

Windows Tip: Sizing your event logs (03/18/2008)

The Windows Event Logs are a good thing -- they're a primary source you can mine when troubleshooting server problems or monitoring server security. Because of this, it's a good idea to collect as much information as possible in these logs in order to provide you with a historical baseline of your server's operations to help you troubleshoot difficult issues, and also to create an audit trail for security purposes. The trouble is, can you have too much of a good thing? Read more.

Windows Tip: Copying email messages using Outlook rules (03/11/2008)

I was messing around with my Outlook rules the other day and discovered something interesting, namely that if you don't watch what you're doing, you might end up with multiple copies of some of your emails! Here's a simple example of how this can happen: Create two rules where the first rule takes messages received from a certain recipient and moves them to Folder 1 and the second rule takes messages received that have a certain word in their subject and moves them to Folder 2. Now ask the recipient to send you a message that has that word in its subject, and when you receive the message you'll find two copies of it, one in Folder 1 and another in Folder 2! Read more.

Windows Tip: Getting RunAs Back in Vista (03/04/2008)

For the last while I've been on the Service Pack 1 beta for Windows Vista and in my opinion SP1 has fixed most of the issues the original RTM release had, especially performance issues. So I'm confident that enterprises will begin accelerating their deployment plans for Vista now that SP1 is about to be released. One thing is still missing from Vista however, and that's the capability you had in XP to right-click on a program or shortcut on your desktop or in Windows Explorer, select RunAs, and run the program with any credentials you want to specify. Instead, Vista replaced this feature with Run As Administrator, which lets you run a program as an administrator (if you know the credentials for an admin account) while logged on to your computer as a standard user. Read more.

Windows Tip: Outlook 2007 formatting (02/25/2008)

Recently, I pointed out how to retrieve

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