While performing some testing on a Windows 7 Professional workstation running a VL build from MSDN I found that a feature I needed was missing – the new Multi-Monitor RDP support. After a little research I found that only the Ultimate and Enterprise editions support this feature; which thanks to Windows 7’s Anytime Upgrade feature I assumed this would be no issue.
But, it was an issue.
It turns out that the build of Windows 7 I was using was missing WindowsAnytimeUpgradeUI.exe and the other related files needed to make the Anytime Upgrade work – and copying the files from another box doesn’t work. It seems this build simply can’t be upgraded in this fashion. So I tried a few other tricks, hoping to find something that would work:
- Reactivate Windows with an Ultimate key; fails with an error indicating that a Professional key is required.
- Run Ultimate edition installer from Windows; fails with this error indicating that you can’t perform edition upgrades.
So being stubborn and determined not to re-install Windows to make this feature work, I started looking for other options. Thanks to a hack for upgrading the RC builds to Final, I found what I needed.
I edited the EditionID and ProductName to reflect Ultimate instead of Professional, rebooted, and then ran the Ultimate installer from within Windows. This time the installer ran without issue and after an hour and a couple reboots it was done. This in-place upgrade/repair procedure allows you to jump to a different edition with fairly little pain. A couple of Windows settings needed to be corrected (primarily display related) and Visual Studio 2010 had to be re-installed, though otherwise everything worked just as it did before.
This is the only method for upgrading these Windows 7 builds that I’ve found, the only other option is to re-install Windows from scratch.
This post was imported from an old blog archive, and predates the creation of AdamCaudill.com.
This is a useful function to close a program based on a windows caption, this should work for any top-level window. Paste all this into a standard module, save it. Then call CloseApp("Notepad") or whatever the name of the window is, it’s nice & simple and should close the program instantly.
This requires Windows 2000 plus, for older versions of Windows a different method is required, that isn’t covered here, seeing as Windows 2000 and better require special privileges to forcefully close a program.
I recently finished building my first MiniPwner – a tiny OpenWrt-based system for pen-testing. At only 2.25 x 2.25 inches, the device plus battery is still extremely small – it easily fits in a pocket, and could be hidden anywhere.
The device is based on the TP-LINK TL-WR703N, which uses a 400Mhz Atheros AR7240 CPU – not exactly a power-house, but enough power for standard pen-testing (or even just as a super-portable linux box).
When Intel and various industry partners started talking about “ultra-books” as competition against Apple and tablets, I was more than a little skeptical. Ultra-books are small and light weight – but not cheap (average price being around $1,000) and rather underpowered compared to what you can get for the same money with a more traditional laptop (they are basically MacBook Air knock-offs). I had written them off almost as soon as they were announced.
This post was imported from an old blog archive, and predates the creation of AdamCaudill.com.
Visual Basic provides a less than elegant method of saving data in the Windows registry, the GetSetting & SaveSetting functions. These functions store setting in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VB and VBA Program Settings\<AppName>\<Section> not very pretty is it?
The APISettings module is a drop-in replacement using pure Win32 API for its processing power and increased stability. The reason for developing this and for making it drop-in compatible is to all those new to the Win32 API to add its functionality with minimal difficulty.
