Automate PDF printing from batch file command line

Adobe Reader is not suitable for printing PDF files using a batch file because it remains open after the print is done and there is no simple, safe & reliable mechanism to close it.  Instead use Ghostscript commandline as shown below:

gswin32c -dPrinted -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOSAFER -q -dNumCopies=1 "C:\test.pdf"

*Must be a recent version of Ghostscript, e.g. 9.x

Windows 8 Issues

Windows 8 is a nightmare of a PC operating system because it throws out a lot of what you have learned on a PC to-date. It is also very confusing switching between the full screen apps and the desktop.

• Windows Mail app provided with the O/S only supports Microsoft email accounts (Hotmail, Live, etc.). This means you need to install Windows Live Mail for your Gmail or other account.
• By default the "Send to -> Email Recipient" option is not available within Explorer. To fix this create an empty file named "Email Recipient.MAPIMAIL" in folder location "shell:sendto".
• If your Windows Live Mail has not been configured with a Microsoft account you will be prompted to sign in, even though it is not required to send. The only work-around we have found is to create and link a Microsoft account.
• After you fix the "Send to" function and link a Microsoft account any images you send using this function get uploaded to the SkyDrive, without any confirmation from you.
• By default when you go to the Skype page to download Skype it will direct you to the Windows App download for Skype - this is very confusing and must be associated with a Microsoft account, which it will then tell you you must use from then onwards.  It is better to return to www.skype.com and look carefully for the link to download other versions of Skype where you can download the traditional simple installation.
• We experienced some issues with a Toshiba P870 after installing an updated Synaptic touchpad driver which caused the system to freeze at the login screen.  Safe mode would still freeze. Oddly there were no recent restore points and restoring to a 1 week old restore point resulted in much corruption in the Windows start screen tiles and loss of Explorer favourites.

Difficulties flowing over from Windows 7:

• Windows Scan & Fax is an annoying limited piece of software.
• Explorer Libraries concept just causes much confusion and inconsistent behaviour

Toshiba Tecra R850 Recovery

In general the Toshiba Tecra R850 is a good laptop. Light for it's size (15.6"), with anti-glare screen, the only negative so far is the smooth keys on keyboard have a slippery feel.

Various forums that state you can hold the "0" key down while turning on the laptop to boot to recovery mode - in fact, this does not work for this model.  To enter recovery mode you must press the F8 key to enter the Windows boot menu, the top item is "Repair Your Computer". This will boot to Windows 7 recovery mode, where the Toshiba Recovery Wizard can be accessed.  The procedure is outlined in the Toshiba manual for Tecra R850.

*If you cannot access the Windows boot menu, you can also mark the recovery partition (the last partition on disk) as Active - it will boot to the Windows 7 recovery mode.

*The recovery partition is required to generate the recovery DVD's.

In the recovered state the Toshiba has the following layout:
Partition 1 = ~1.5GB System partition (hidden,active)
Partition 2 = C:\ drive system partition
Partition 3 = Recovery image partition (hidden)

Samba DC and Windows 7

An incident occurred where Windows 7 clients were giving the error:
"There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request"
when trying to connect to a Samba 3.4.4 domain controller (eBox). 
The setup had been working fine for approximately 6 months. 
After 1 reboot and many investigations to samba, ldap, DNS configs, IPv6, etc. it was discovered that the nmbd (BIOS name services - WINS) was not stopping when /etc/init.d/samba stop was executed.

Manually killed the service using:
 killall -SIGTERM nmbd
Then everything started working properly again!

Some packet traces revealed the following when trying to re-join a Windows 7 workstation to the domain:
A DNS query is made first.
Followed by NETBIOS-DN name lookups. (UDP port 137)
Followed by the LDAP query.

The server was initialy responding with "ICMP-No response on port 137".
So it looks like in this setup, Samba relies more on WINS(nmbd) than DNS(proper).

Also, we had to comment out the VFS lines in samba.conf,
as described in this post:
http://forum.zentyal.org/index.php?topic=3298.0

Can't access local resources when VPN connected (Vista & Win7)

Windows Vista introduced a new feature that allows PPTP VPN credentials to access resources on remote servers when the VPN is connected. The side effect is that access to local resources then fails.  The feature can be disabled per VPN as follows:

Locate the .pbk file that contains the entry that you dial:

%AppData%\Microsoft\Network\Connections\Pbk

 

Open the file in Notepad.  Locate and change the setting for each VPN: UseRasCredentials=0

Windows Vista & 7 Disconnected drives

Windows Vista & Windows 7 with UAC enabled always show mapped drives as disconnected after login. 

The workaround is a registry setting documented here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937624