For the most part, 32-bit applications just work on the 64-bit version of Windows. However, I was curious about how it all works behind the scenes. In this post, I go down a rabbit hole exploring what makes 32-bit applications work on Windows 64-bit. WoW64 When Microsoft transitioned from 16-bit to 32-bit, they created a…
PowerShell is a wonderful tool built into Microsoft Windows. Both Windows and Windows Server come with PowerShell version 5.1 pre-installed. PowerShell version 5.1 was initially released in 2016. Since then, there have been many improvements to PowerShell. However, many of those improvements are only available in newer versions of PowerShell and aren’t always backported to…
There’s not a lot of official information about the prefs.txt file that the Omnissa Horizon client (formerly the VMware Horizon client) creates and uses. I’ve figured out that the prefs.txt text file is in XML format and is generated by the Horizon client, usually once the user changes a setting in the Horizon client. It…
I write a lot of PowerShell scripts for application installations, and many download the install files from a URL. Because the URL is hardcoded in the scripts, if the URL changes, I need to update all the scripts. This exact issue happened to me a few years ago, and my solution at the time was…
If you accidentally delete something in Active Directory, it can be difficult to undo. Fortunately, you can enable a recycle bin for Active Directory, making life much easier if you need to restore something. The Active Directory Recycle Bin (sometimes called ADRB) was first introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2. You need to enable it…
The way I manage my email might seem a bit strange. Due to working in IT, I get lots of emails. Some emails need action, some are regular emails, and some are notifications I want to know about as soon as they happen. I feel like a normal person would make an Outlook rule to…
Usually, when you want to control the Windows Update settings, you create a GPO to manage the settings or tweak some registry entries. Both methods alter the registry values in the registry key To reset any custom Windows Update settings, I nuke out that registry key or reverse the GPO or both, and restart the…
Active Directory is very much a database. It even has a schema to define what can and can’t be created and how everything is related and linked. An oversimplification is that the Active Directory schema is the rules about the types of items you can make in Active Directory, and this also includes the available…
A while back, Microsoft added a feature to SharePoint Online called Add shortcut to OneDrive. This feature adds a shortcut to the file or folder in another SharePoint site directly in your OneDrive. The Add shortcut to OneDrive feature is on by default. Depending on your setup, you may want to turn the Add shortcut…
When using VMware vCenter, you may only occasionally need a configuration backup of each VMware ESXi host. However, there are some situations where having a config backup of each ESXi host is nice to have. I didn’t want to back up each ESXi host manually, as it doesn’t scale well. Instead, I created a PowerShell…
