January 04, 2007

Some Vista irritations

I've been using Vista daily for a while now, and on balance I like it quite a bit. However, there are some things that irritate the dickens out of me, mostly because I haven't figured out to escape them. I'm going to keep a running list in the hope that either people will suggest solutions, or that I'll attract enough other people who have the same problems to gain critical mass.

  1. Connecting and disconecting VPNs. I like the way XP and Mac OS X both do it: you get an icon in the system bar, and you can directly click it to disconnect. With XP, to connect I can hit Ctrl+Esc, T (for "Connect to"), <return> and be connected to my primary VPN. In Vista, there doesn't seem to be an equivalent, except for putting a shortcut on the desktop.
  2. Bonus annoyance: after you close a connection, you get a dialog telling you it was closed, which you must dismiss.
  3. The center scroll feature of the TrackPoint doesn't work. Update: this was because I didn't have the correct driver. Lenovo will be releasing full versions of all their Vista drivers at the end of January; the prerelease versions I have work quite well.
  4. There's not yet a working version of Verizon Access Manager, so I can't use the spiffy integrated EvDO modem. Update: still no love on this. I've seen Keith Combs' instructions on how to get the KPC650 working, but that approach doesn't work for the internal modem because you can't activate it without VZ Access Manager, which doesn't see the card.
  5. I'm having fits with one particular client's VPN implementation; I can usually connect, but I can't reach most of the internal sites I need. If I connect at the same time from my XP machine, the connection is rock-solid, so it's clearly a Vista oddity. Update: Turns out this is a Vista bug, slated for a QFE sometime in the future.

Posted by Paul at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2006

How to programatically mail-enable an Exchange public folder

KC http://blogs.technet.com/kclemson/archive/2006/08/21/448401.aspx on her blog: set two attributes via MAPI and you're done.

Posted by Paul at 11:24 AM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2006

Using PowerShell over SSH

Matt Michie explains how to use PowerShell over SSH-- very cool, given that there won't be secure remoting in the version of PowerShell that should RTM later this year.

Posted by Paul at 03:27 PM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2006

Script to find EDB and STM file sizes

Michael B. Smith posted a cool script on his blog today: it finds all the EDB and STM files on Exchange servers in your organization, then tells you how much disk space they actually take up. If you've ever wondered how much disk space your Exchange data is consuming, now you can find out.

Posted by Paul at 03:29 PM | Comments (0)