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!