I was just reminded through an article from WebWorkerDaily.com that today is National Clean Out Your Computer Day! Originally sponsored and created by the Institute for Business Technology, National Clean Out Your Computer Day comes around every second Monday in February.

So clean up those old files, uninstall those old apps you never use, vacuum the stale chips from keyboard, and if you haven't defragmented your platter-based hard drives all year, get to it!

Here is a simple VBScript that you can schedule to run nightly that will clean out files and folders in a selected path older than a specified number of days. Maybe you have a shared temporary working space for documents or a location where scanned or faxed documents are dropped. This VBS script will ensure that these locations don't get clogged up or overly cluttered. Read further for the code...

Luis Villazon has submitted an article at TechRadar UK that outlines some of the more annoying issues that people may run across while using Apple's Mac OS X Snow Leopard operating system (next to the issues with NTLM, of course). It's a nice compilation with some of the solutions being the harder ones to figure out (e.g., tracking down a corruption issue with Smart Groups in Address Book). The annoyances:

1. Exposé leaves windows in the background
2. Can I stop the screensaver from closing?
3. I can't log in as root user when using Terminal
4. My Time Machine backups are broken
5. Files don't open in the right application
6. How can I change the Stacks display?
7. How do I get a Stack's items to be highlighted on mouseover?
8. Can keyboard shortcuts open applications?
9. Address Book and Mail crash at the same time!
10. Exposé doesn't work on the Dock when I'm using Spaces
11. Where have some of the preferences gone?
12. How can I find and open a single hidden file?
13. How do I get rid of the blue glow in Exposé?
14. The icons from the menu bar have vanished
15. Snow Leopard won't install on the hard disk
16. Can line breaks be added in Text Substitution?
17. I can't change application icons
18. QuickTime X won't auto-play
19. I can't run Windows apps via Parallels
20. QuickTime videos simply refuse to play

 If you want the solutions, you'll have to head on over to techradar.com and read the article 20 Snow Leopard annoyances solved.

[Update: Microsoft has released a fix in the Windows 7 April 2010 stability/reliability update. Link: KB980408]

Those who prefer performance & productivity over eye candy will often eliminate anything that could distract them or take up [what used to be] precious RAM. If you're one of these enthusiasts you may even choose not load a desktop wallpaper and have only a solid color as your background. No one could have guessed, though, that if you are running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, by doing so you would be reducing your performance by introducing a 30-second delay to your logon time.

Read more to get the details and resolution...

So, you need to make a custom address list (address book) for your Microsoft Outlook users with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. This is one of those things where it's pretty easy to get what you want until you need a list with more than just one object type (users, contacts, groups, etc.). If you want an address list to include more than just one type, you'll have to do a custom LDAP query. Another reason you may have to do a custom LDAP query is if you want an "OR" in your conditional statement; in other words, you need to have an "either/or" condition (e.g., you want users who are part of either Group A or Group B).

Most of you probably don't want to have to learn all about LDAP query writing just to get the right items to appear in your Outlook address list. This article should get you going quickly by showing you a couple shortcuts to getting the query you want. We will outline:

• Where & how to create custom address lists in Microsoft Exchange 2003
• How to quickly get a basic outline for your LDAP query
• A couple basic LDAP query syntax rules to make the changes you need

Read on for the tutorial...

The other day I was on the phone helping a teacher who wanted to insert a couple clip art items into a Microsoft Word document. She wasn't getting many results for her search on "dogs" and was wondering why. It turned out that she just needed to tell the clip art wizard to search in "all collections" so it goes out to the Web to get more results. The funny part happened right after that, though!

All of a sudden, I hear her say, "Why am all I getting are pictures of doctors?"

Confused, I loaded up Word on my machine to see if I could repeat her clip art query for dogs. In my search results I also was shown doctors as the first few results: ANIMAL DOCTORS. It turned out that the first couple pictures were of veterinarians!

Just a warning out there to those who use SanDisk, Verbatim, or Kingston USB flash drives and take advantage of their encryption to secure your files that these are easily cracked due to an extremely dim-witted move: the same decryption string is provided when accessing encrypted files no matter what your password is. Meaning, you just have to bypass their authentication program and send this string, which is even the same string on all three of the brands listed at the beginning of this article. Yeesh! Remember folks, these are the same drives that are certified by NIST as FIPS 140-2 Level 2 (PDF) and are used by the American Armed Forces and the US government (for unclassified data).

Security expert firm SySS (click here for english link) has created a demo program that can access encrypted files within seconds. You can access their press release and papers here.

Read more to see the recalls and security notes from the three flash drive makers...

A minor update to our File Searcher by Owner utility has been released, bringing it up to version 1.0.1.0. This tool can be used to search for local or network shared files and folders by a local or domain user or group. New features include:

• Search by Security Identifier (SID)
• Version checker

Click Here for the ChangeLog and Download

Microsoft has recently updated the Enterprise Learning Framework (ELF) with content for Windows 7. ELF is a is a web based tool that helps corporations develop a training and communication plan for employees during a Windows 7, Windows Vista, or 2007 Microsoft Office system deployment (including SharePoint). The tool helps you find content for a number of different audiences and assists in finding the right content for topics you are interested in, within particular deployment time frames. You can even generate customized e-mail messages or a Word document that you can send to your users with the content you find.

Click here to be taken to Microsoft's ELF tool

Tip: Click the Get Recommended Topics link to begin

The Grim Admin is happy to announce a free tool, called File Searcher by Owner, for Microsoft Windows systems that allows you to search for files and folders based on the owner of the object. Since this feature has not been built into any version of Microsoft Windows, prior to this tool you would have to run some crazy command-line hacks like dir /q /s | find /i "domain\username" or try to create your own custom batch file, a rather tedious task.

File Searcher by Owner is a simple to use utility that allows you to search for local or network shared files and folders by a local or domain user or group. Features include:

• Support for UNC paths
• Export to comma-separated (CSV) file
• Preserves right-click context menu for files & folders
• Portable and lightweight

Click Here for Details and Download