I wrote the following script to find inactive computers in Active Directory and then find & delete them from SCCM. Feel free to use & abuse as you see fit, but always run through a test environment first. My version makes sure to target only Windows Operating Systems, and excludes anything with Server in the …

The following query can be run in SQL against your CAS or Primary Site to collect the status of one or more advertisements. I find it useful to run this instead of the built-in reports because I can more easily link out to other sources, in this case my Active Directory Users table (v_r_user) and add/drop data as …

I wrote the following script a few years ago to help me loop over all user profiles to make changes to a configuration file that was stored there. The target systems were all Windows XP and Windows 7 at the time, but I couldn't be certain where the profiles would be (C:\Documents and Settings, C:\Users, D:\Users, etc), …

The Microsoft Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) is an administrative console meant to make it easier for IT Staff to remotely manage the Microsoft licenses on devices on the network. It can deploy and activate keys for products like Windows (both desktop & server platforms) and Microsoft Office. While the …

While there are plenty of benefits to vendors using the Windows Installer, if you've used Windows long enough, and you've installed enough applications, you've probably been plagued by messages such as these: In this post I'm going to talk about why this happens, and steps you can take to resolve it. The primary reason …

I recently had to troubleshoot an issue where a number of people were unable to publish to their blog from Microsoft Word 2010. They would get the error Word cannot publish this post, and pressing CTRL+SHIFT+I revealed error 701797 in the dialog box. The same error occurred on both SharePoint 2010 and WordPress. There …

I've often had the need to take a list of computers or servers and run the same command against all of them, and then take some result from that command to report back on. For example, I may want to ping a list of machines and log the response times, or perhaps check the status of BitLocker using manage-bde. Typically, …

This post was previously released under a different blog and is being republished by me below. That site is no longer available. I am the original author. I was recently tasked with adjusting the DCOM Security Settings (DCOM: Machine Access Restrictions and DCOM: Machine Launch Restrictions) in the local security …