Tired of having to go around the houses to look at the system properties on a server or workstation ? The quickest way to gain access is to use the built-in shortcuts. Just enter the below at the start menu search box to gain fast access:

Advanced Tab – systempropertiesadvanced
Remote Tab – systempropertiesremote
Hardware Tab – systempropertieshardware
Computer Name Tab – systempropertiescomputername
System Protection Tab – systempropertiesprotection
Data Execution Prevention – systempropertiesdataexecutionprevention
Performance Options – systempropertiesperformance

Of course, you don’t have to remember all of the above, just using systempropertiesadvanced will get you straight to a single tab so that you can navigate from there.

If you ever want to test something that requires lots of files to be created, whether it is is configuring Robocopy of writing files to disk to test throughput or for alert generation then HP have a great free tool you can use, CreateData.exe. Download it here.

If you want a similar tool to generate “read” type access then the ReadTool can be downloaded here.

There’s a little known tool that sits on your computer called eventcreate.exe. Its a command line tool and it lets you create your own event log entries in the event viewer (but not the security log for obvious reasons). You can create any event with an event ID up to 1000 (events above that value tend to be used by Microsoft).

To use the tool simply go to a command prompt and create an event with appropriate switches – you can get a list of all these and an example of how to use the tool by entering

eventcreate /? at the command prompt.

Why would you want to do this ? Well, one thing is to test any monitoring tools you have. The other thing is you can call the tool to easily write to the event log from any scripts you create, for example when deploying software from a batch file you can write an event to the log showing that the software was deployed.

My favourite use is around April Fools Day. A typical example would be:

EVENTCREATE /T ERROR /ID 69 /L APPLICATION /SO iexplore.exe /D “<username> has now spent a total of 465 hours browsing http://www.facebook.com this calendar year”

Just run the command using a remote command prompt on the users machine and then ask them and why you have received an alert about their browsing then point them to the event log.

You probably know how to run GPResult to see which policies etc are being applied to an end user workstation or server but did you know for Windows 2008 / R2 and Windows 7 there is now an easy way to format those results ? Just run the command below:

GPResult /H GPResult.html

and the results will be held in a html formatted page. Run the command below and it will display the page automatically for you.

GPResult /H GPResult.html & GPResult.html