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One of my favorite tools in my bag of laptop support tricks is Acronis TrueImage. Users can create unattended backup images of their entire system to a USB drive in just a few minutes a week (after the initial image). If their laptop is lost or stolen, everything they need to recover will be on that image so that their system can be restored to new hardware. The image can be mounted as a drive, for individual file recovery (in the event of accidental deletion) and the image can be accessed as it looked on the day of any incremental backup you select.

The problem I've had in using it since 2006 has been that users running with reduced rights (and that should be just about everybody) can't control when the job runs or restart it later, if they didn't happen to have their backup drive handy.

Having checked the documentation, websites, google, etc., I hadn't come up with a workaround. The usual adding of USER group rights to folders and registry settings hadn't helped.

Then I tried the, restrospectively, obvious...

I've written before about how important it is to have your users running with reduced rights, even remote laptops. By running at reduced rights, you can prevent malware from installing itself or from changing system files. When you run as administrator or the equivalent, any program you run can intenionally or unintentially damage your system.

Laptop users are a little different from desktop users. They are out and about. They need to connect to foreign networks. They need to get to wireless. They need to be able to REPAIR a wireless connection by clicking the repair button or taking the repair option. Using gpedit.msc, you can add back the right for laptop users to enable and disable their LAN connections. However, you can't give them the right to REPAIR a connection and I just spent a few hours figuring out why!

If you ever have to move an old Windows Workgroup-style network (even with Windows Server running, if you don't have the computers join the domain, you are running Windows Workgroup type networking and user management), it can be pretty painful.

If you can front end your server setup with scripts, GPO's, and profiles, it can be easier, but you are still faced with migrating the user's profile off the workstation.

Here are the steps you need to follow to implement a workgroup to domain/active directory model...

Anytime IE6 would attempt to go to an SSL site for a particular domain user, it would fail with a "page cannot be displayed" message. I tried several of the common solutions to SSL problems in IE without success...

I've had a client that had a problem with Word 2003 all of a sudden switching the document's font and squishing it all into 1 narrow column on the left side of the document. Switching the printer to another printer would temporarily fix the problem, but it would typically reoccur in a short period of time.

The problem seems to be that Word leaves behind some corrupt temporary files. Cleaning up these files eliminates the problem (until more files get left behind).

I'm not sure what causes the corruption, but here's how you can fix it...

This was the first time I ran into this, but found it odd... If you have a laptop that you want to have join a domain, you can do so while using a wireless connection (My Computer/Computer Name/Change...) and supplying domain admin credentials, just like you would expect. You'll get a message indicating you've joined the domain.

However, once you log off and try to log back on with your domain credentials, the log on attempt will fail with the system telling you that your domain isn't available.

The reason is pretty simple. You are attempting to use the wireless connection to connect and the wireless connection isn't enabled until the user is logged back in. Sort of a cart-before-the-horse problem.

The way around it is to log in the first time while attached via the wired network. Once you do that and you've been authenticated the first time and the user is set up in the system, the authentication processes is cached and you should be able to log on without a problem.

We had the sound card go out on a Dell motherboard. After replacing it, and after a few days of use, all of a sudden smoke starts coming out of the Dell Optiplex 745. Dell said they would ship us some parts and had us swap the hard drive into another Optiplex so the user could keep working and the drive smoked it! We now have 2 dead Optiplexs and one killer drive.

So we wouldn't lose any data, we hooked the "killer drive" to a USB interface to copy some data off and, man, it really started making the external power supply squeal!

So, it looks like our Seagate ST380013AS will be going off to the data recovery center to be rebuilt while we wait for Dell to send 2 new systems. I smell a class action lawsuit (or it could just be the smell of burnt motherboard in the morning!)."

update: We bought some "tamper resistant" screw driver heads and used one to remove and swap the drive's unremoveable circuit board with a working one's circuit board and recovered the data (saving $300 to $1900 we had been quoted for data recovery services). After we got the important files off, we swapped things back and will be returning the faulty drive (really it was just the drive's circuit board that was the problem) to Dell.

I keep forgetting this because I don't do it often enough...

When you have an email address for a domain and all the mail for that address gets forwarded to an external account, you can create a contact for the external recipient that has two E-mail addresses.

The primary address would be the external address and the secondary address would be the internal address. When an E-mail is sent to the internal address Exchange will forward it to the external address.

It used to be that you had to create a user AND a contact, if you wanted this to work, but with Exchange 2003, you don't have to.

Dell has a critical BIOS update for the D620. I was experiencing problems with my trusty laptop where both processors where running at 100% and the system was acting very flaky. The unit was extremely hot and I didn't feel any air coming from the vents.

I upgraded from A04 to A08 as a matter of course (when there are heat/fan problems on a laptop, you can often solve them with a BIOS update). Since then, the system is cooling off and has been running at normal speeds again.

The update is highly recommended.

A client was getting a crash error in peachw.exe whenever they exited the program. It didn't seem to cause a problem with data, but was certainly annoying.

The error was "Peachtree Accounting for Windows. has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience."

Looking into the crash report, I could see the error code was 0xc06d007e.