I was contacted a few weeks back by Laplink. They gave me a free license of their PC Mover to try out.

Usually, I throw these requests away, but I have used various utilities from Laplink since the early 90s (Anyone remember those Laplink cables!?), and I really like this company. Still…it is a risk sending me something, since if I think it is crap I will say so (Especially since they sell remote control products that compete with ours!).

Essentially the software allows you to move your applications, settings, and user accounts from one computer to another. The cool part is you can move your XP system to your brand spanking new Windows 7 machine.

I did not have the time to try it out when they sent me the license, so I fired off an email to my friend Brett, and told him to report back.

He told me: “Works great, but it did have trouble moving my printers and secured content”

This is totally expected. It can move your apps and settings from XP to Windows 7, but it is not magic. If you have apps or drivers that are not Windows 7 compatible, it is still not going to work when you make the move. In addition, copy protected movies, music and files are going to stop working too. With applications like iTunes, you can easily fix this by re-authorizing the content for the new machine.

I wanted to do a writeup to talk about what Brett found, so I needed to do my own test and take some screen shots at the same time. Laplink was kind enough to give me an additional license to test.

This week is Thanksgiving here in the states, it was a perfect time to move my Dad’s computer from XP, to his new Windows 7 laptop.

Overall, the process is very simple. You first start with the new computer. It takes a snapshot to figure out what it does not need to move

It will scan through your registry, and create a snapshot file to be read by the old computer.

On the old computer, you can decide what user accounts to move to the new machine

And the applications you want to transfer

It has quite a few options for the way you move the settings:

In my case, I just used the storage option, since I had a large external hard drive connected to the PC.

It spent 20 or 30 minutes doing its business, and completed with a moving van file.

I brought the file over to the new machine, and about 30 minutes later it had all the settings and applications moved over.

Now again, it was not perfect. But this is really a compatibility issue with drivers and applications. I still had to go out and find the proper printer drivers. I suggest you uncheck any printer support applications when you make your transfer….those act real funky when the driver is missing.

All in all it saved me a ton of time, I was able to transfer a boat load of apps, without the pain of re-installing. After a few tweaks to the printer drivers, and removing a few old programs that no longer worked – the machine was working great.

Take a look at it at http://www.laplink.com/pcmover

Quite some time ago we released a little utility that allows you to tweak settings in IE 7.

It is called The IE 7 Tweak Utility.

I just got a message from a reader today:

“Steve, I really like your IE tweak utility. Any way you can update it to work with IE 8?”

Sure no problem. The updated version will now work with IE 7 and IE 8:

What does it do? Well it allows you to change 3 settings that are really annoying, and are only available through registry changes:

-Menu bar (Hide or Show)

-Search Bar (Hide or Show)

-Command Bar (Hide or Show)

Get your free copy from here:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/IE7TweakUtility.exe

As always – no spyware, or adward – only freeware goodness

In Network Administrator 3.0, we have a feature that allows you to update the local administrator password – remotely.

This is helpful if you have lots of machines with the same local admin password and need to change it.

Recently we have had a few emails complaining that it would not set the password. After digging deeper we realized that in all of these cases, the local administrator user name was not ‘administrator’

So, we now have an updated version that will allow you to pick the username, and the password of the local account you would like to update:

Get your updated version from here:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/NetworkAdministrator.exe

Two weeks ago, I wrote about backing up a remote windows machine using Remote Desktop.

One thing lacking from this solution is email notification. How do we know if the backup job started? Or finished?

There is a free and open source tool that can be used to solve this problem, it is called blat. It consists of an executable, and a DLL.

You can find it at http://www.blat.net/

Download it, and extract the files to a place where your scripts run. In my case, I put it in c:\backups

To start, you will need an SMTP server that you have access to. That is probably the most difficult part of getting it to work – which means it is very easy to use.

If I just want to send a simple email that tells me a batch script has started, I could call it like this:

blat.exe -f batch@intelliadmin.com -to support@intelliadmin.com -server 192.168.1.1 -subject "Batch file started" -body "The very important batch script has started"

You have five required options to get your email to send:

-f [FROM] (This is the email address that the message will come from)
-to [TO] (This is the email address the message will be sent to)
-subject [SUBJECT] (Subject of the email. Uses quotes if you have spaces)
-body [BODY] (Body of email. Use quotes if you have spaces)
-server [SERVER] (IP Address or host name of the server)


That is for a simple message. Blat is filled with powerful options. For example, I could run a robocopy in my script, and redirect the output to a text file like this:

robocopy c:\backup \\server\c\backup >> output.txt

Then, when I send my notification I could attach the output text file to my email like this:

blat.exe -f batch@intelliadmin.com -to support@intelliadmin.com -server 192.168.1.1 -subject "Batch file started" -body "The very important batch script has completed" -attach c:\backup\output.txt

Once the command runs, the output will show up as an attachment in my inbox:

Like I said, it is loaded with options. Check it out, and when you do just type blat.exe -help to get the entire list of command line parameters.

Original Article from www.networksteve.com

There has been some activity recently in an old 2007 post I wrote about creating a date and time stamp in your batch files.

Well, the funny part was that I said ‘Date and Time’ in the subject, but I only talked about pulling out the current date.

Sue asked “What if I need both date, and time?”

Good question. What if you want to create a file that has the current date and time for each execution of the script?

In my old article I was creating zip files, using an imaginary command line based zip program. So in my article here I am going to make our goal to zip up a folder and name it:

YYYYMMDDHHMMSS_DATA.zip

If it were run today, our script should create a file by this name:

20091111143900_DATA.zip

To accomplish this, you need to use substring batch codes. If you want more detail on how these work, I explain it in the original article:

Create a date and time stamp in your batch files

To get the current time we use the %TIME% environment variable, and %DATE% for the date.

Using the substring batch codes from my old article, this is how we would pull out the year, month and day:

%date:~-4,4%%date:~-10,2%%date:~-7,2%

How about the time? That can be a little more difficult since the numbers returned from the time are not always the same length. For example, if it is 9 o’clock, it will say 9:00 – not 09:00. This will cause trouble when using the value for our filename.

Before we deal with that space, let me show you the substring codes to pull out the time:

Milliseconds: %time:~-2,2%
Seconds: %time:~-5,2%
Minutes: %time:~-8,2%
Hours: %time:~-11,2%

So naturally, if we wanted HHMMSS we could take those values above and put them side by side:

%time:~-11,2%%time:~-8,2%%time:~-5,2%

But like I said before, the hours can give you trouble because of the space. I came up with this code to pull off the space:

SET HOUR=%time:~-11,2%
Call :TRIM %HOUR%
GOTO :EOF
:TRIM
Set HOUR=%*
:EOF
REM You would use your trimmed hour right here
@echo %HOUR%

So, pulling it all together, how would we get an environment variable filled with a good date and time stamp filename?

Here is the code:
REM Get the hour first and put in an environment var

SET HOUR=%time:~-11,2%
Call :TRIM %HOUR%
GOTO :EOF
:TRIM
Set HOUR=%*
:EOF

REM Create our timestamp filename variable
SET DATESTMP=%date:~-4,4%%date:~-10,2%%date:~-7,2%%HOUR%
SET FILENAME=%DATESTMP%%time:~-8,2%%time:~-5,2%_DATA.ZIP

REM This is just an example call using our new filename
REM -=The real PKZIP program probably uses a different command line syntax
pkzip.exe c:\ImportantFolder\*.* c:\ZIPFILES\%FILENAME%

Using the code above, you can easily generate new files using the date and time in your batch script.

Original Article from www.networksteve.com

It has been less than two weeks since we released Network Administrator 3.0.

One of the things we did miss in that release was new icons – we actually used the same icon as Remote Control 4

Normally, this would not be a problem, since you can easily see what program you are running in the task bar. This all changed with Windows 7

In Windows 7, there are no captions by the icons. When both programs are running side by side, it can get annoying trying to figure out which one to click:

We had new icons designed for Network Administrator, and released a new version that uses them:

Now when you are using these two programs together under Windows 7, it is easy to see which one to click:

You can download your update from here:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/NetworkAdministrator.exe