How to answer the voice prompts or operator to get them to authorize your install if you have to phone.

Once you’ve picked your country, called in, and punched in all the digits from your screen, you’ll either be given an acitvation code or told “I’m sorry,” by Inoffensive Robot Operator Woman. One of two things will happen: you’ll be transferred to a live operator or the Robotess will begin probing you. Either way, your answers will be the same.

It is important to know which type of install you have - OEM or retail. If you have (or had) a pretty box, it’s retail. If you have a crummy CD with thermal printing on top and a legit Windows product key sticker on your tower, it’s OEM. Tell them it came preinstalled if you have an OEM copy.

Is this the first time you are installing the software? No. Even if it is, say no.

The next question may be worded two ways, so listen carefully. How many other machines is this copy of the software currently installed on? None. Why? Well, your license covers one install, so if it’s on the computer you’re trying to activate and anything else, you’re boned.

You may also be asked “How many computers has this copy of the software been installed on?” One. It’s a reinstall on the original machine. That’s your story, stick to it.

Have there been any changes to the system, such as a hard drive or motherboard replacement? Yes. If asked, your original motherboard died, you replaced it, and you had to reinstall.

I’ve had to call in more than a hundred machines over the last couple of years, and I’ve never been hassled about activation as long as I stick to the script. They haven’t gotten to the point of needing proof of the hardware failure yet, so until they do my method should serve you well.

Good luck - and don’t forget to tell me how you made out if you have to try this!

Oh hell no. This is my computer, and I reboot it when I want to reboot it. I don’t care if your fancy installer doesn’t have a restart later button. I don’t care that you’ve booby trapped it so that if I click ok, finish, or the corner X that I’m screwed. I’ve got you figured out.

My trick is simple. While the notice is up, hit win+r and bring up the run box. Type notepad and hit enter to launch it. Pound on a bunch of keys and type some nonsense.

Now tab back to your installer and click ok. When notepad prompts you to save changes, hoose cancel. Ba-da-bing, you’ve thwarted the evil reboot monkey. Most installers aren’t smart enough to kill off running apps, so when you cancel the sequence in notepad, it’s toast.

Hasslefree Download Appliance
No, not Hasselhoff (ok, after that horrible pun I feel obligated to point you to the baywatchOS - no lie - appliance). It’s designed to download, repair (if necessary), and unpack all the .torrent and .nzb files you can throw at it.

Ultimate Deployment Appliance
If you support more than one OS (and most of us do) this thing is begging for you to install it. Their description says “Bring your own isos, we’ll do the rest,” and they do. It’s a PXE-boot OS loading beast. Press F12 and give me a “Hell yeah!”

Personal Backup Appliance
No, I’m not responsible enough to use a program like this - like most techs I assume that burning a DVD once every three months will be enough to save my butt when my HDD crashes. This appliance aims to make backups easy - on any computer connected to your network. It’ll even clone and restore full drives.

Janus VM
If you’re one of those people like my assistant who can’t help but screw around on NSFW websites during the work day, you should at least be protecting yourself a bit. The Janus appliance encrypts traffic, hides your IP, and generally makes sure your privacy is guarded like the Hope Diamond.

Nagios VMA
Since I already mentioned the fact that I’m not very careful with my backups, it should come as no surprise that I do very little traffic monitoring on our little network. If I did, though, I’d use the impressive Nagios VMA. It’s got tons of functionality and lots of nice, colorful charts for you to page through - and USA Today’s continued success tells me everyone loves colorful charts.

Network Security Toolkit
In the same vein is this appliance, and good god does it do a ton of crap. Check out the list of included apps and functionality on the project’s home page. It’s all usable through a web gui, of course.

doknir
Dokument Nirvana? Ok, I’ll bite - what is document Nirvana? Well, apparently it’s replacing the Windows print spooler service with a fancy Kanotix-based VMA. Why? Well, no one likes it when Windows screws up and you end up with a corrupt job in the print queue that you can only remove by rebooting. Ok, yeah, now it sounds pretty useful…

Got another? Leave me a comment!

Here we go!

Level 1 : Run Linux in Windows

Ulteo is a virtual Linux desktop that you install and launch in Windows, just like any other program. Like most of the other methods, you can learn plenty about Linux while you wait for the download to complete – let’s not forget, you’re downloading an entire OS, so 500mb isn’t all that bad. There’s a torrent available which will speed the process, but

What Ulteo provides that other methods don’t is the comfort and ease of never actually leaving Windows. You’re running Linux applications and getting to know KDE, but active programs still show up in the Windows taskbar (see screenshot). That’s pretty slick, and it’s a tremendous way to ease anyone’s transition to Linux.

Ulteo springs into action, delivering Linux to your Windows like so much pizza to your door…

Popular applications are included: OpenOffice, Firefox with Flash and Java support, Skype, Gimp, Kopete Messenger, KPDF, and many more.

Level 2 : Run Linux in a Virtual Machine

Many Linux distros now offer downloads of pre-made virtual machines - ready to run in an application like VMWare Player or Sun’s VirtualBox.  For the sake of time, I’ll stick with VMWare Player since there are a ton of great virtual machines available for download from a single site - VMWare’s marketplace (don’t worry, the ones I’m listing are free.

To use a VMWare Player machine, first download the player itself and install it, then grab a virtual machine appliance or two, launch the player, and then open the appliance.  It’s just like opening a PDF or Word doc you download, really.

Popular options include Ubuntu, OpenSuse 11, Fedora 9, and Damn Small.

Level 3 : Run Linux From a LiveCD

Just about any Linux distribution that’s worth a damn is available as a LiveCD. What’s that? It’s a CD that can boot into a fully functional desktop with loads of programs all set up for you to tinker with. The great part about LiveCD Linux is that you don’t have to install anything to your hard drive, you don’t have to format your hard drive, and you’re not going to screw up your Windows installation.

They’re usually dead simple to get going. Download an ISO image, burn it with a program like IsoBurner, and reboot your computer with the disc in the drive. As long as your DVD or CD is the first boot device, it’ll kick in automatically and start to boot. If your computer doesn’t boot to the disc, reboot and watch your power-on screen for an option that says “Press F8 (or another number) For Boot Menu.” Press whatever key that is, then choose your disc drive from the list, and off you go! Unlike Ulteo, you will not have any access to your beloved Windows environment, but a quick reboot will fix that (just don’t forget to eject the disc first).

My recommendations would include the widely known and extremely brown Ubuntu, Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu, but prettier), Linux Live Gamers (comes with some nice Open Source FPS action), and OpenSuse. For people looking for a minimalist experience, give Damn Small a shot.

…and now we come to the more permanent methods. All of these will require dumping Linux onto your hard drive – with varying degrees of ease!

Level 4 : Install Linux While in Windows

Ubuntu’s development team came up with a great idea: why not make an application that can download and install their OS without leaving Windows? Introducing Wubi, the fabulous installed with the funny name. Wubi makes installing Ubuntu a snap: just download the 1.1MB program in Windows, make your selections from a graphical menu, and watch it run! It’ll automatically download an ISO image and begin installing.

I can hear Steve Ballmer cringing…Ubuntu in the add/remove programs?!?!

When it’s done, your Windows boot menu will be modified (in XP or Vista) and you’ll have the choice to boot to Ubuntu instead so you can try it out. And since Ubuntu supports NTFS, you’ll even be able to access your images, documents, and multimedia to see how Linux handles them. Wubi is probably the most uncomplicated way to get a full-blown Linux install on your hard drive.

There you have it! Four mostly painless ways to experiement with Linux with hardly any detrimental side effects, apart from the free time you’ll lose and the people that may call you a weiner because you now know how to use Linux a little bit.

Here’s part one of my arsenal of apps - they keep things running smoothly, cost nothing, and make sure I’ve got plenty of time to relax and write blog posts.

Drive Imaging (Windows): Macrium Reflect

DriveImage XML has a lot of supporters, but I think Macrium has the edge when it comes to imaging from inside a working Windows install. For one, it looks a hell of a lot nicer. On top of that, it supports scheduling and has the option to create a rescue CD. In my testing it’s just as fast and the images are pretty much the same size.

Drive Imaging (Command Prompt): PING (Partition Image is Not Ghost)

PING is ultra-powerful, with built in support for most LAN adapters and CD/DVD drives. It supports spanning CDs and DVDs, can create a standalone bootable rescue set, and even includes a utility to blank a local admin password.

System Lockdown / Virtualization: Microsoft Windows SteadyState

Who needs virus protection when your users are running virtualized environments that don’t retain any changes? We threw everything we could at this app on our workbench from normal software installs to intentionally irresponsible browsing to infect it with all kinds of horrible malware. SteadyState performed like a champ, never retaining a single shred of our maliciousness. A great, free piece of software from Microsoft? Who’d have guessed?!

Host File Defense: MVPs.Org Hosts File Blocker

Ok, ok, technically it’s not an app. But it kicks ass at keeping staff off potentially dangerous (and NSFW) websites. Any time a system boots on my network, a batch file runs a quick copy command to overwrite the local hosts file with one from my workstation - which I keep updated with the file from MVPs.org. It’s a quick and relatively fool-proof way to keep a lot of troublesome garbage off your systems.

Remote Admin: UltraVNC

I’ve used UltraVNC for ages as my remote administration app of choice. It’s got a lot of nice little additions that set it apart from other VNC flavors (like TightVNC): a Windows key button, file transfer window, and multi-monitor support. It’s also usually a little bit quicker in my experience.

Mail Backup and Restore: Mailstore Home

Mailstore supports just about every email program that you’re likely to have to support - Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows Mail, and anything that uses the mBox format. No employee wants to lose their precious, precious email, and Mailstore will make short work of backing it up and restoring it later. You can even export to a different format if you need to change clients.

File Backup / Synchronization: Allway Sync

I map all my users’ document folders to a share on our server, and I then use Allway Sync to maintain a live duplicate on an external USB hard drive. As I said before, my network is pretty small, so this is a no-frills, painless way for us to back up. Since the files are just copied and not stored in some backup program’s archive format, finding a single file later would be pretty painless - even for a less technical staffer.

…and so ends part one. There are a ton of other apps that I run on our network to take care of other bothersome chores, so watch for part two.

What about you? What software weaponry do you keep close at hand? Comment it!

In Windows XP, your first stop is safe mode. From a cold boot (read: your computer was off, and you turned it back on), hold down the F8 key on your keyboard immediately after the power on self test screen appears. Select safe mode from the boot menu, and choose Administrator from the Windows Welcome screen. You can then head over to the control panel and remove the password on any other account on your system.

But what if your Admin account has a password on it that you don’t know?

Well, again, you could use l0pht, but I wouldn’t bother with it. Instead, go and download Offline NT Password and Registry Editor. It’s a free bootable CD image and the download is only 3mb. If you don’t know how to burn ISO images, also download IsoBurner which makes the process totally painless.

The author of the Offline Editor has a complete walkthrough on his page, and it’s a good idea to print it out so you can refer to it during the process. It may look a little intimidating at first, but it’s not. Carefully read through the text and you’ll see it’s really quite simple. You need to know where your registry is located (almost always C:\Windows\System32\Config).

Once you set the location and the program proceeds, you want to use option 1 - password reset. On the next menu, you again want option 1 - edit user data and passwords. Now you get a list of users, each one with a HEX code in front of it (like 03e9). Type in that code to select a user, and again press 1 - blank password.

Now press q to quit, agree tat you want to save changes to the registry, and you’re done! Reboot, and your password woes are over.

There, wasn’t that easy?