XP Remote Shutdown

I picked up a nice little tip the other day (via, I think, Life Hacker). It’s an easy way to shut down an XP machine remotely. I know, it’s nothing new. We’ve been doing it via the command line for years. But, can you remember the command line syntax? Nor me. I have to refer to the help every single bloody time. Well, fret no more. Shutdown.exe has a GUI!

Go to the run command and type

shutdown.exe -i

You get a nice little interface to play with. I used this successfully on Wednesday to reboot a non-responsive machine in the yard that was far too far away to walk to in the rain. Worked a treat I tell ya. It recognised the Active Directory machine reference and away it went. Sweeet!

M$ Q1 Profits

The Register reports today that Microsoft’s quarter 1 profits were down by 10.9% to just $4.3bn.

So, M$ is still feeling the after effects of yet another crappy OS in Vista and the only thing that’s really saving it is sales of the Xbox.

M$ has claimed that it has sold 140 million licences for Vista. Even taking into account world-wide sales, that sounds like a hell of a high number to me. If I had been asked I would have said it was closer to 10 million, taking into consideration all the other operating systems available, and that no corporate customer I know of has upgraded to Vista yet. Certainly my lot have stayed with XP and that’s no bad thing. Hell, much of the MoD is still running NT!

So, what’s next for M$? I know that Server 2008 is on its way, and there was a rumour floating round the ‘nets that M$ might break its desktop delivery schedule and replace Vista in 2009, a year early.

In the meantime I also heard that SP3 for XP will be available Monday. Wonder what’s going t break this time when we install it…

Vista According to the Bastard Operator From Hell

One of the best reviews of Vista I’ve seen yet:

“You should go to Vista.”

“So you like Vista?”

“Not really, no. I run a Vista simulator.”

“Virtual Server?” the Boss asks.

“Nah, I just turned on all the flashy crap in XP, changed the background image, took some memory out of my box and clocked down the CPU. Then broke Media player. Works like a charm.”

“So you don’t like it?”

“No. But it has does have one advantage.”

“What’s that?”

“It causes a clean reinstall of XP which is generally good from a defrag point of view.”

Blatantly copied, unedited, direct from the Bastard Operator From Hell

If You’re Happy And You Know It…

Here’s a really quick one for Windows Users to try:

Either hit the Start button and click Run or on the keyboard hit the Windows key + R.

You’ll get to the command prompt. Type in the following:

If you’re happy and you know it…

Hit return. The result shouldn’t be any surprise. You’re using a Windows system after all…