Office 2010 Completely Silent Install – A really quick rundown

I’ll assume most of the people here are techs and just looking for a quick and easy no hassles ‘get me going’ solution. I’ll do my best to deliver. Use the article at TechNet to get full details on what needs to be done if you want to go in-depth. Run setup /admin from the CD or local store of the Office 2010 files. This is practically the same straightforwardness...

Dell Inspiron N4010 XP Downgrade Instructions

The organization I work for is still currently using XP as our backbone, and now strain is coming onto us techies to keep XP chugging on new systems. I thought I was done for with this one, but I managed to get (what appears to be) everything working. The computer in question is the below, though close variants may succeed with tips in this article: I use a handy utility...

Disabling “HP Printer Driver – Privacy Settings” for Unattended/Silent Installs

If you are trying to deploy newer HP Printer Drivers you may want to disable the ‘nag’ that comes up for users asking for your ‘Printing and Imaging System Configuration’, as seen here: Surprisingly not much information is on this topic. Digging around, this setting is purely within the registry so its an easy change. This particular one is located within the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive so it will be applied on...

November 26, 2010 | 1 Comment

Lacie External Big Disk Harddrive Data Recovery Guide

I recently had to tear apart a Lacie external harddrive to figure out why it had failed. Fortunately it wasn’t all too hard, but I could not find any other websites really supporting this particular approach I needed. In this guide I will mainly outline the process to diagnose for a faulty power supply, but will also  touch up on complete disassembly and what to do if it should be...

Novell Client 2 SP1 (IR2-IR3) Forgetting Tree, Context, Server

Upon installing Novell Client 2 SP1 IR3 I've had the annoying issue of it forgetting all the settings I had defined for it via NCIMAN which allows for an automated setup. I set out to find why my older SP1 client never had this trouble and why the newer client does and found a solution. If you see 'LDAP Contextless Login is not enabled for' at your login screen, you...

September 27, 2010 | 4 Comments

Solution for Unattended/Silent Installs and “Would you like to install this device software” Prompt

Upon my list of problems with Microsoft Deployment Tools (MDT) I've run into a new problem. Dealing with untrusted publishers. If you're here, you likely have the below screen when trying to push out an application as quiet as possible. The solution is quite simple. Using a VM or a system for testing, install the software and check off "Always Trust software from [Publisher]". What this does is place a...

The Consequences and Problems of NewSID 4.10

While there have been compelling posts on why NewSID is not needed, Microsoft still recommends to not image in such a way that you end up with identical Security Identifiers (SID). I prefer to trust Microsoft with this. What is a bit jarring, is that some management software works off of SIDs and will require for you to have unique SIDs. What I never found was a list of what...

September 21, 2010 | 2 Comments

IExpress Windows 7 – Error Creating Process Fix

Currently I am using Microsoft Deployment Tools and dealing with Application deployment. It is quite a nuisance to simply copy a program to the local drive before installing. It’s actually more difficult than it sounds, as batch scripts do not like UNC paths and there is no easy path to work with if you are just running a task and not an OS install. One thing to do is create...

September 17, 2010 | 65 Comments

Windows 7 Deployment Toolkit Deployment Error Solution

*(5/5/2011) Stumbled across some code I was playing with awhile ago to make this error easier to get by. I haven’t had time to reproduce this error to see if the following code fixes it, but if you’d like, you can try this code experimentation. Essentially I wanted to make this problem easier to deal with by allowing for a script to automatically clear the directories. I was later going...

September 3, 2010 | 7 Comments