Changing the Spacing Between Icons on the Windows 7 Taskbar

Rich Stevenson — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 14:59:39 +0000

When you right-click any shortcut, and select Pin to Taskbar a new shortcut is pinned in the Windows taskbar. The problem with this is the large amount of space between those shortcuts. There’s no way to actually modify that space, but there is a work around that can eliminate the extra space.

Right-click the taskbar, and select Toolbars|New Toolbar
In the Folder field, select a folder for the toolbar or simply paste ‘%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch’ if you want the standard items.
Make sure you toolbar is unlocked, right-click on the new toolbar, and uncheck Show Title and Show text.
Look to the left of your pinned icons and grab the dotted divider and drag to the right, past your new quick launch toolbar and drop.
Now grab the same divider and drag to the left.
Right-click on any shortcuts in the original toolbar, the one where the shortcuts are pinned to, and select Unpin from Taskbar.

That’s it! Just drag and drop any shorcuts you want in your new toolbar.

Starting my new job at Dell Inc.

Rich Stevenson — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 12:00:34 +0000

Today marks the start of my new career with Dell as a Systems Integration Sr. Advisor.

Find out when a users password expires.

Rich Stevenson — Tue, 24 May 2011 18:58:50 +0000

Slowly but surely I’m upgrading our Server 2003 DC’s to server 2008. When the DC that the I.T. department was authenticating against was Server 2003, we used the Acctinfo.dll module from the Windows 2003 Resource Kit. This module gave us an Additional Account Info tab on the Users Object that displayed, among other things, when their password expires or expired. Unfortunately, there is no such module available for Server 2008, so I turned to PowerShell to get the job done. I found a PowerShell script written by M. Ali over on MSDN that does exactly what we needed.

Windows 7 Pumpkin Carving

Rich Stevenson — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:21:44 +0000

Just to be a geek and also to see my wife roll her eyes. I decided to carve a pumpkin to help announce the release of Windows 7.

Expanding a RAID5 array without losing data

Rich Stevenson — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:16:26 +0000

One of my remote offices was getting a little low on drive space on their data partition, so it was time to upgrade the existing drives to large capacity drives. This particular server is a Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard SP2 on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with six 146GB SCSI drives and a PERC 5/i integrated controller. Drives 0 & 1 are configured RAID0 for the system partition and drives 2-5 are configured RAID5 for the data partition. Six internal drives are all the server is capable of, so I have no empty slots for additional drives to expand the RAID5. So replacing the 146GB drives with 300GB drives is the route I took to add additional space to the array. Here are the steps:

1. As always, make sure you have a good backup of the server in case things go wrong.
2. Remove drive 2 and replace it with one of the new 300GB drives.
3. Wait for the array rebuild to complete by watching it in Dell OpenManage Server Administrator.
4. Repeat steps 2-3 for the remaining 3 drives.
5. Once the four drives are replaced, restart the server and hit Ctrl-R when prompted to enter the BIOS of the PERC5/i.
6. Write down all of the settings for the existing RAID5 configuration, i.e. stripe size, read ahead.
7. Deleted the RAID5 virtual disk and then recreated it with the new 300 GB drives, making sure to match the settings of the old virtual disk and be extra sure that the option to initialize the disk is NOT selected. If the disk is initialized, you will lose all of the data and will have to restore from your backup.
8. Reboot the server and allow Windows to load. Once the OS comes up, login and verify that all of the data is still intact.
9. From a command prompt type diskpart.
10. At DISKPART> type list volumes and locate the Volume # of the volume that you want to add the additional free space to. In my case it was volume 1.
11. At DISKPART> type select volume 1.
12. At DISKPART> Type extend.
13. At DISKPART> Type exit and close the command window.

Your RAID5 should be expanded with all data intact.