liggyman's blog

This is a note from awhile ago, and I’m not sure what the original source for this solution is.

The Problem: The Service Pack 3 installation would start, but was unable to complete successfully.

The Solution involved registering a bunch of .DLL files by running the below commands. A popup appears after running each line.


net stop wuauserv
regsvr32 wuapi.dll
regsvr32 wuweb.dll
regsvr32 atl.dll
regsvr32 wups2.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll
regsvr32 MSXML3.dll
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
net start wuauserv


If you do incremental or diff based backups, or if you compress your Windows Virtual Machine you will find that this tip will save you plenty of time, bandwidth, and disk space.

The Windows page file changes constantly and is large. It’s up to 4GB on some of my Virtualized workstations. It also doesn’t compress well and is really not needed in your backups.

By filling the pagefile with zeros when shutting the VM down to do a backup, that part of the image will be unchanged between increments/diffs. It will also compress down to almost nothing.

To achieve this we need to set one registry key to do this you can import the following from a .reg file or make the appropriate changes manually.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
“ClearPageFileAtShutdown”=dword:00000001

Every now and then I will be multitasking and will move the Show Desktop icon off the Quick Launch toolbar.  Sometimes clients will delete this icon not realizing how much they actually use it.

To replace it open Notepad and enter the following text:

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

Save the file as ‘Show Desktop.scf’ and place it in the ‘%userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch’ folder.

I was unable to add x64 print drivers (for distribution to 64bit clients) on a 32bit Windows Server 2008 install.  This is the workaround:

1. On an x64 machine browse to \\servername, where servername is the x86 print server.  (Start -> Run…, type ‘\\servername’.
2. In the list of shares, open the Printers folder.
3. Right-click in the Printers folder and select Server Properties.
4. Go to the drivers tab and add a new x64 driver.