• Fact: Shell scripting is a must for any serious IT admin managing a server. From automating backups to checking logs and keeping server performance and load in check, scripting is a must.
• Fact: Shell scripting on Windows sucks. Monad (Microsoft Power Shell) attempts to fix that, but so far the results are mixed.
• Fact: Shell scripting on Linux and other *nix operating systems is powerful, well-documented, and quite straight-forward.

Most people take a look at these three facts, and instantly come to a conclusion.. the wrong conclusion: you can’t properly manage a Windows server because it’s inherently lacking in the shell scripting department.

If you’re a regular reader, you probably know by now that we just love performance and can’t get enough of server performance-improving software/code… Especially when it comes to WordPress.

Donncha has recently released a great plugin for WordPress, called "WordPress Super Cache." It builds on the original WP-Cache plugin by Ricardo Granada - except that it fixes all the bugs in the original implementation and has been written in enough pure PHP that it’ll also run on Windows servers - both IIS and Apache for that matter! <cue applause>

At the moment (as of version 0.3.1) it needs a bit of work to make it run, but not much. So here goes - 10 easy steps to get cached content on your IIS or Apache server under Windows:

Of the many controversies surrounding Windows Vista, probably the most infamous (and pathetic) issues brought to the table is the Windows Vista Startup sound - and how to get rid of it. If  you were anywhere but under a rock during the beta, it’s impossible to have missed the posts going back and forth by haters and supporters of Windows Vista’s new startup sound - which, like almost everything else in Windows Vista, doesn’t even always work.

This sound isn’t the one you get on startup (which is still there, just like in previous versions of Windows), but rather the one that plays right when Windows finishes loading - and you can’t do a thing about it. In our opinion, it’s a quite nice sound, but unfortunately you don’t get to hear it (most of the time) if you have a analog/digital sound card with analog being the default. At any rate, for those of you that don’t like it, chin up: it can be changed!

Ever since Windows Vista came out, a lot of hype has been going around the new bootloader. That’s the hype that drove us to create EasyBCD, and that’s the same hype that’s been driving people to ask all around the web: “How can I install the Vista bootloader on my XP-only machine?”

First, a disclaimer: In order to use the Vista bootloader, you’ll need some licensed Vista files. The only legal way to get these is by already having Windows Vista legally installed on another machine and grabbing the files from there. Kapish?