App In Focus: MoveOnBoot

I was doing some housekeeping on a users (very old) Windows XP machine today and hit a snag when I couldn’t delete a user’s profile folder from the machine – Windows was complaining that NTUSER was being used by another person or program.

That’s when I came across this neat little software called MoveOnBoot.

MoveOnBoot is designed for exactly the kind of situation I was in. As the name suggests, it can move (or delete) files and folders (that are locked by the OS) to a location of your choice when the PC is rebooted.

App In Focus: SpaceSniffer

I received a call on the Service Desk today from a user who reported that he only has 145GB free space left on a 500GB hard disk but he only had 170GB worth of data. He was very keen to know why the math didn’t add up.

I used a nifty little program called SpaceSniffer to work out what was taking up all that space. As you can see below the culprits were the hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys files which were taking up 48GB and 64GB disk space respectively.

For your information, the Hyberfil.sys file is used by the operating system to store data when the computer is Hibernated. This can be deleted simply by turning off the Hibernation feature on Windows. Pagefile.sys is what the computer uses for Virtual Memory when it needs more memory in addition to the physical memory installed. In this particular case the PC had 64GB of physical RAM hence the size of the virtual memory (by default the virtual memory is the same size as the available physical memory in Windows). I was able to reduce the size to a much more acceptable 10GB.

Mouse Without Borders

Having upgraded to Windows 8 recently I found InputDirector, a software KVM solution, doesn’t work as well on the new OS – the cursor disappears from view when moving it into the second monitor. I’ve been really happy with it on Windows 7 until I upgraded.

In my search for an alternative software KVM solution which is compatible with Windows 8 I came across Mouse Without Borders from Microsoft which, unlike some of the other products I’ve come across, is really easy to set up.

Start off with the ‘server’ pc –the computer which has the keyboard and mouse connected directly. Once installed, simply launch the software and click NO on the ‘Let’s get started’ screen.

This will give you a Security Code and the Computer Name of the ‘server’ computer which you will need later on.

vSphere Client 5.0 for Windows 8

I upgraded one of my computers to Windows 8 today. It seems the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant had falsely led me to believe that vSphere Client 5.0 was compatible with the new OS, when in fact it wasn’t.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t get it to install and compatibility mode was of no help either. I tried a few other things too but let’s cut the chase and get to the point here.

In my search for a solution I came across a blog post with direct links to a number of vSphere Client installation files. I can confirm the vSphere Client v5.0 Update 2 is compatible with Windows 8.

UPDATE: This is also works with Windows 8.1 RTM

UPDATE: This is also works on WIndows 10 1507, 1511 and 1607