New Dell Vostro Caution

Just bought a new Dell Vostro 230 for a work location. Wow these cases are cheap and thin but good enough for government work. Hard drives screw to the side of the case, no bays, hilarious. My surprise was it comes standard with a DVD ROM only - no burner. Who does that? Dell tech and I took several hours and I finally said, "I wonder if this thing is just a reader". We were both incredulous about not having a DVD-RW standard. Sure writers are cheap and now that I know - no problem but cripes, at least give a guy some heads up if you are going to change the rules. It's tough enough to find out detailed specs. on these Dells.

On the plus side they did provide an OS disk so imaging was not important.

SmartSniff to see activity on your NIC

SmartSniff: Packet Sniffer - Capture TCP/IP packets on your network adapter

SmartSniff is a network monitoring utility that allows you to capture TCP/IP packets that pass through your network adapter, and view the captured data as sequence of conversations between clients and servers. You can view the TCP/IP conversations in Ascii mode (for text-based protocols, like HTTP, SMTP, POP3 and FTP.) or as hex dump. (for non-text base protocols, like DNS)
SmartSniff provides 3 methods for capturing TCP/IP packets :

Comments: When analyzing a slow PC I like to know if some trojan is stealing bandwidth. SmartSniff will do it on Win 7 easily.

Possible Replacement for Info Select

The Holy Grail of Ubiquitous Plain-Text Capture
Until Vista/Win7 I used InfoSelect for years. I threw every random fact, subject, number that I thought would be important. "Who was that guy who wanted me to plant Jerusalem artichoke?" OK maybe some ended up unimportant but the searches and entries were lightening fast. Info Select was expensive and became increasingly bloated with each revision(typical software path) plus another $100, would not sync. to anything and worst of all would not work under Vista/7.

I am hoping Simple note does the trick (and I can resurrect my old InfoS data base which I still miss monthly) "Who sold me that commercial washer so cheap 6 years ago?" I now have data skattered all over and can't find anything.

Evernote, although good, didn't push my button.

Network Logon Will Not Remember Credentials

Windows 7 – Fixing The Mapped Drive Credentials Problem | The Gadget Grill

When you log on to a network volume and assign it as a mapped drive, there is a “Remember my credentials” checkbox on the login dialog. One would expect that this should add the login credentials to the Credentials Manager, so that the details are retained and you can automatically log in to that mapped drive the next (and every subsequent) time that you restart the Windows 7 system.

Fix is in the link.

Here is another discussion on the subject.

Path Too Deep (too long file name)

Windows can only handle around 25x characters (including spaces)for files and folders in a path or they can not be deleted or removed. I had a rogue back-up program write files and folders too deep to count. Here is what worked and what did not.

Unlocker programs.
Nix - didn't even try, locking was not the problem.

Renaming all the files and folders to "1" in attempt to get below the limit.
Nix ... I had too many folders deep and renaming stopped working at some level.

RD /S from elevated command.
Nix

Java program claiming abilities.
Nix

Map the folder to virtual drive and work from there.
Unknown because next solution worked.

Here is the winner - very simple. (lost track of who gave it)

If you have Vista or Win7 you're all set to go, or you're on XP then you need to download the Windows Resource Kit Tools installer. Basically you just need to have robocopy.

Make an empty folder say C:\temp

(go to elevated command prompt)
Then use robocopy to copy it to the folder that you can't delete say C:\TooDeep

robocopy C:\temp C:\TooDeep /E /MIR
("TooDeep" is the first folder in the path. Be sure to leave space between /e and /mir)

The /MIR option makes robocopy mirror temp onto TooDeep, or in other words deleting extra files and folders.