Fix Office File Associations for All users

I ran into a strange problem today. I installed Office 2007 Standard on a Windows 7 machine in the same way as I've done hundreds of times. For some reason something went awry this time. Any user other than the admin user, which I used to install the program, had Wordpad set to open all Office documents. Admittedly I only tested three other user accounts but all indications were that this would affect everyone. Since the Default Programs in Windows are set on a per user basis I couldn't very well just fix the associations manually. Instead I found the solution in an under-appreciated comment on this thread:

"Running winword /r corrected a similar issue I was having." - appdce

winword in this case is of course winword.exe which is located in the Office12 directory (usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\winword.exe). Running this command once with an unprivileged user seemed to clear up the file associations for all users. Thanks appdce, wherever you are!

Ping with timestamp in Windows

Since I've had to look this up on a number of occasions I know others must too. It's a common problem: you need to leave ping running to catch elusive network failures but you need to know not just if but WHEN the network failed. There's as many solutions as there are threads but I feel that a program called fping offers the best solution to the timestamp problem (and a bunch of other nifty features as well). For instance unlike with normal ping simply redirected to a file, fping can log to a file while displaying console output. Nifty!

Run Cisco ASDM client on x64 machine

The official Cisco solution is to only use the web client, but this workaround seems to solve the issue. The Cisco ASDM launcher is configured to use javaw.exe inside c:\windows\syswo64\ but this path causes the connection to hang and never connect.

1. Install ASDM normally - From the interface at https://192.168.1.254:444
2. Edit a shortcut - I tend to create a shortcut from the start menu item onto the desktop. Right click and select properties. Change the Target path to use javaw.exe inside Program FIles for example:

"C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_21\bin\javaw.exe" -Xms64m -Xmx512m -Dsun.swing.enableImprovedDragGesture=true -classpath lzma.jar;jploader.jar;asdm-launcher.jar;retroweaver-rt-2.0.jar com.cisco.launcher.Launcher"

The client will now work as expected. You're welcome.

Get Dell Service Tag Remotely

I recently needed to know the service tag of a remote machine. I found this article which gave me the simple instructions which follow:

1. RDP into remote machine.
2. Open command prompt.
3. Enter: wmic bios get serialnumber

Now get with Dell and get your system fixed!

Exclude a single user from a Dynamic Distribution Group in Exchange 2007

By default the Exchange Management Console only shows a fairly limited view of the filtering possibilities for generating Dynamic Distribution Groups. The PowerShell based Exchange Management Shell can be used for much finer grained control of these group filters.

1. Open EMS - Open the start menu and type exchange. Select Exchange Management Shell.
2. Enter the following command: Set-DynamicDistributionGroup -Identity "Group Name" -RecipientFilter {((RecipientType -eq 'UserMailbox') -and -not(Name -like 'Display Name'))}
3. Double check the new filter - Open the filters pane of the group properties in EMC and check that it was updated correctly.

The filter pane in the group properties will now show the full filter rather than the simplified checkbox display.

Shake Your Toner Cartridge

In a story entirely unrelated to the Harlem Shake I was recently almost out of toner on an unbranded cartridge for my Dell 1700n laser printer. Without the time or the resources immediately available to acquire a replacement I opted to just take the cart out, shake it back and forth for ~10 seconds and reinsert it. Voila! >300 prints later and it's still going strong, strong enough that you'd never know it was low on toner. I'm sure it'll still need replacing soon, but as a temporary stopgap I couldn't be happier.

Office 2007, IE, FF show in 8 bit (ish) color in XP

I just came across a very frustrating issue that took me far longer to solve than it should. A user came to me because Office 2007 applications had no color. What I saw when I checked was that they were displayed in what appeared to be 8 bit color regardless of the color depth set on the display. Websites also when viewed in IE or FF were missing colors or images. I tried deleting registry keys for Office to attempt to reset any user modified settings to no avail. I downloaded Chrome in an attempt to check if it was related to some shared rendering library between the other two. What I found was that Chrome looked fine!

Bewildered and frustrated I frantically searched Google and found somewhere (sorry, I didn't save the link) a mention about High Contrast Mode. Now I'm familiar with high contrast color schemes, and in fact I double checked the color scheme and reset it to Windows Classic early in the process. What I was unfamiliar with is the Accessibility Options control panel setting "High Contrast Mode". It just so happens that this had been turned on. It appears that Office, IE, and FF were all attempting to honor this setting and make the computer more accessible by displaying everything in a low color high contrast mode. For whatever reason Chrome ignores this setting.

Unchecking that box fixed the problem across all affected applications.