Oct 1, 2012
ThinkPad W510 with unknown device PCIVEN_8086&DEV_4239
The new Lenovo website launched in the last month or so has been the brain of my working life. I visit that site like 10 times a day and since it has changed it has pretty much made my working life hell.Today’s challenge saw me build a ThinkPad W510 laptop with Win7 x64. All went well until I was left with one ? in device manager and it was the wireless adapter. System... read more
Oct 1, 2012
Using WMI to retrieve a computers serial number
We use computer serial numbers to make up part of each workstations network ID. This helps us easily get access to someones system if you can have them tell you the serial number, plus some other advantages when it comes to reporting etc.If you need to retrieve the serial number of a system remotely for first time installations, or to verify a machine has used the correct serial number as part of... read more
Oct 1, 2012
Windows 7 ‘disappearing’ desktop icons
One ‘problem’ that has come up within our win7 user group already is the fact that desktop icons mysteriously ‘disappear’ by themselves. There one minute and gone the next.It seems it happens more frequently after waking the machine up from suspension/hibernation but also happens at other random times.After reading up on this, it appears this is caused by the Windows Diagnosis... read more
Oct 1, 2012
Installing Printers on a Win7 machine without Admin Rights
OK so you’ve deployed Windows 7 to your clients and you have not given them local administrator rights (damn right in an enterprise environment).However non administrator rights means no printer installations without a UAC prompt for admin credentials – which can prove a thorn in the side, especially if your users move around a lot and need to install printers at various locations.This can be... read more
Oct 1, 2012
WSS3.0 Datasheet view on Sharepoint
A weird one this ……We use WSS 3.0 a lot here, and recently we came across a problem which was a bit odd and we couldn’t work out if this was a real problem or some kind of permissions problem.Basically someone had created a view within sharepoint which included some colums in which the fields were set as Multiple ValuesWhen the page was edited in Datasheet view, these fields were no... read more
