The Lonely Administrator

My weekly column that I’ve been writing for MCPMag.com is now officially Prof. PowerShell. The column’s goal is to introduce you to PowerShell and help you get up to speed. I obviously can’t teach you everything in a weekly 300 word column, but hopefully it will be enough to get you going and if [...]

Late last year I had moved my PowerShell blogging to PowerShellCommunity.org.  However, decisions have been made to discontinue the blog module.  Now, all my PowerShell related blogging will be back at blog.sapien.com. Hopefully you already have it in your RSS feed. You can click on the Powershell category to see all related posts from not [...]

This week’s Windows Tip Sheet column is about opening an Explorer window from the command prompt. One of my readers sent me an email about using this tip in Vista:
I’m currently running Vista and when I type “explorer.exe /e, %cd%” I get the same results as “explorer.exe /e /root, %cd%”.  So is /root really necessary?  [...]

In my current Windows Tip Sheet column on the popular freeware program nLite, reader Tim from Michigan makes an excellent observation:
Have used both nLite and vLite and agree both are excellent tools and have real value. My concern however is what else is the program doing? The program is free and having built multiple iso [...]

As many of you know, I write the popular Mr. Roboto column for REDMOND magazine. Starting in January, I will be taking on a new title, Professor PowerShell. The weekly Windows Tip Sheet column I’ve been doing for MCPMag.com will be come Prof. PowerShell. The column will still be weekly, but will focus entirely on [...]

Not too long ago, I wrote an MCPMag Tip Sheet column on using the pipeline in PowerShell. I showed how you could get the start time of a specified service:
$svcname=Read-Host “Enter a service name” ; get-process | where {$_.id -eq (get-wmiobject win32_service | where {$_.name -eq $svcname}).ProcessID} | select -property StartTime
We can take this a [...]

I did a MCPMag.com TipSheet column recently on compacting files to save space. I thought I’d take a moment to respond to some of the comments. First, today’s hard drives are enormous and drives are cheap. However, there are still plenty of 3 and 5 year old servers that need to squeak by for a [...]