I just discovered a nifty utility in the eXpress share called wndctl.exe. You can use it to lock the keyboard and mouse prior to any install/script and unlock it later. It can also activate, minimize, maximize, restore, hide, show, flash, close, disable, enable, tile, cascade, center, move, and resize window(s).

wndctl.exe can be found in any of the following places (in x86 and x64 versions):

• Bootwiz\platforms\Winpe\x86\Optional\Boot
• Bootwiz\platforms\Winpe\x64\Optional\Boot
• Bootwiz\platforms\Winpe2\x86\Optional\Boot
• Bootwiz\platforms\Winpe2\x64\Optional\Boot

The syntax for wndctl.exe is:

wndctl <command> [<"window title text">] [<n>]

<command> is the command to perform, and is one of the following:

Wouldn't you be a bit frustrated if your My Computer icon disappeared? Well, that can happen.

In capturing a PC transplant Personality from a Windows 2000 client computer and restoring that personality to the newly imaged XP computer, upon inspection, it was found that the My Computer icon, and other commonly found shortcuts were also missing, such as My Documents, etc.

The nasty culprit here is the checkbox in the template creation that allows Active desktop settings to be captured. For some reason, when going between Windows 2000 and Windows XP, this causes that to happen.

Alas, simply unchecking the Active Desktop Settings capture item, and re-running the personality capture, gets the personality correctly assembled. Then the restores work just fine!

With the release of Asset Management 6.5 the whole process of Receiving and Stock Rooms have been added. Here is a summary of how the stock room is used.

Stock rooms are used to house and monitor consumable catalog items. Consumable items are less important assets that are not tracked as individual resources but by quantity in the Stock Room resource type. Stock rooms are linked to a manager who is the recipient of stock allocation requests and order notifications. Stock room order items can be linked to an owner. For consumables this must be a cost center/department (as the cost is attributed to the cost items dataclass), which ensures that accounting details are recorded. Stock rooms are unique based on location.

In the Stock Order Details, the Order Level field for each row, means that when the number of a particular item in the stock room goes down to the specified order level, the stock room manager will be notified, and a purchase order will be...

The Wise arm of Altiris has come up with a pretty slick technology in their "Linux Package Editor". It basically allows one to use a Windows box to create packages for Linux machines. Here's a list of the key features in this handy tool:

1. Linux Package Editor lets us to use a Windows computer to create packages that install software on Linux computers.
2. Using an interface that is similar to that in other Wise installation development products, we can easily create Linux packages without having an in-depth knowledge of Linux commands .
3. With Linux Package Editor, we can either import an RPM file or Linux archive file, or build an RPM from binary application files.Then we can edit the installation and add scripts to provide additional functionality during the RPM installation.
4. Linux Package Editor does not build or use a spec file or a source RPM, which typically are used to create RPM packages. Instead, you specify source files and...