One of my distribution points recently stopped getting DP updates. I tried my normal troubleshooting steps - creating a new package, checking disk space, source folder permissions, server reboot, etc., but no dice. I reviewed the DISTMGR.LOG on the primary site responsible for the distribution point, and found the …

Recently I was troubleshooting a Windows 7 Service Pack 1 system where the CCM Client would not install manually or via push. The following was reported in the CCMSETUP.LOG: MSI: Setup was unable to compile Sql CE script file C:\Windows\CCM\CIStateDBUpgrade.sqlce. The error code is 87D00244. MSI: Action 13:27:05: …

I wrote the following queries to find the video resolutions used by clients reporting into SCCM. They currently only look at Windows Workstations 6.x (excludes servers, and also anything older than Windows Vista or whatever v7 ends up being), and only those who have submitted a hardware inventory in the last 30 days. …

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 caption - …

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, …