Tag Archives: microsoft

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How to restore the classic event viewer in Windows 7

“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things.” —Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian philosopher

Just like most people, I am not a huge fan of change.  However, in the technology business everything is always changing and advancing.  While I may love Windows 7 and think it’s the greatest operating system that Microsoft has ever released…I absolutely despise the new Event Viewer.  My first complaint is that it’s slower than the original event viewer and secondly the detail panes are too small for my liking no matter how I configure them.  If you agree with me then you might be interested in learning how to use the classic Event Viewer that you are used to from Windows XP.

Here is how you do it:

  • Open a command prompt as Administrator.
  • Type Regsvr32 els.dll (if you get error code 0×80070005 then you didn’t run as Administrator).
  • Start mmc.exe and goto File | Add/Remove Snapin.
  • From the available Snapins choose “Classic Event Viewer”.
  • Right-Click Classic Event Viewer under Console Root and select New Window from Here.
  • Choose Customize from the View menu.
  • Deselect the Action Pane and Click OK

Voila!  You have your old warm and snuggly Event Viewer back and it works just as well as it always did.

I will probably learn to love the new Event Viewer in time, but until then I will resort to the classic Event Viewer when I have a lot of research to do in the event logs of a Windows 7 computer.

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The best email client is still Microsoft Outlook

I recently switched my color theme to a darker color and I love the way Outlook 2010 looks now (not that it was bad with the default color theme.)  This is what it looks like:

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There are plenty of people out there who disagree with my opinion that Outlook is the best Email client out there.  There are also plenty of people who don’t know how to get the most out of Outlook.  There is also a small subset of people who don’t work in Microsoft-centric environment but for most of us, we do work around Microsoft products.  If you are still using Microsoft Outlook 2003 (which has an end of life in April 2014) or Microsoft Outlook 2007 you should consider giving Outlook 2010 a try.  There is a free trial available from Microsoft at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/try/

I must admit that for years I tried not to use any alternative to Outlook and I was fairly happy with replacements.  However, over the past decade I have embraced the product and I am much more happy reading my email with the product.

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Upgrading SBS 2003 Exchange SP1 to Exchange SP2

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First, download the Microsoft Exchange Best Practices Analyzer and install it.  Next, you’ll want to run this tool to see what issues Exchange might currently be experiencing and what changes need to be made to make your Exchange implementation perfect.  You don’t want to upgrade a server without it being installed in a perfect manner.

After running this tool, I see that the server that I am upgrading has some issues:

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Also I know that this server has never been backed up.  I started that process before beginning the Exchange analysis.

You can also export a report by using the ‘Export Report’ button.  I can see that there are 18 issues that need to be resolved (four of them prior to upgrading to SP2.)  Here are the details for the issues with this server:

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