In addition to the screen capture tool, Windows 7 and Windows 8 have an automated screen-shot recorder built-in.

Just type “PSR” for “problem step recorder” in the run window, and up pops a 'Steps Recorder' window: then click on 'Start Record'...

It will capture a picture of your screen every time you click on something, and it will even put a green box around whatever you click on.

Recently we had a Windows 2003 server that was having all kinds of issues. Most programs would not open when double clicked, there were missing components in programs, and things were just behaving oddly. Example – The Event Viewer would not open, but I could open Computer Management to access the Event Viewer.

Intrust Group uses Postini to provide spam-filtering services to our customers. Recently, we have been having some issues where users will try to deliver an email from their Postini quarantine. The email will be reported as “delivered” in Postini, but it never shows up anywhere in the user’s Outlook view, including the inbox, subfolders, junk mail, etc.

When we deal with virus infections at Intrust, they seem to come in waves. Though different variations come around, they can all generally be dealt with in the same process. One of the tools we use, which seems to be the most potent at removing malware, is called ComboFix.

When I setup a new computer, every once in a while I come across problems while using Windows Update to get the latest patches and hotfixes from Microsoft. I did not think much of it in the past, since we have software that manages patches and automatically installs updates from Microsoft.

I recently worked on a customer’s Windows 7 laptop that was using offline files, which were pointing to a server that was retired a year or so ago. Originally, the laptop’s My Documents were being redirected to a mapped drive on the server. Now, our customer wanted to switch to storing their My Documents on their laptops and backing up with Carbonite.

A while back, one of our customers had a problem viewing pictures that were pasted into emails that a co-worker would regularly send to him. They were both using Microsoft Outlook 2003 and Windows XP. The person sending the pictures would copy a picture from an application, paste it directly into the email, and then send it.

One of our customers requested our help in creating a Microsoft Excel template in Office 2003 that would apply to every new workbook they started from their computer. Excel templates need to be stored in the “C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART” folder in Windows XP.

So, I created a book.

One of our customers has a few computers with LightScribe-enabled DVD burners. We received a call one day because one of these machines could see the burner in Nero and burn a DVD, but it would not recognize the LightScribe function.

I found the LightScribecontrol panel, but it said there were no drives available that supported this feature.

Our office has limited bandwidth to share among up to 12 people. The firewall in our office supports monitoring overall bandwidth use per computer, but it cannot show the specifics of bandwidth usage for each individual computer. In order to monitor my own usage, I found a great program called Netlimiter.