disabling adobe updater from running

Extract from: http://blog.stealthpuppy.com/deployment/deploying-adobe-reader-9-for-windows

To disable Updater from running automatically you can run the following command line as an administrator (or an elevated command prompt in Windows Vista /2008):

REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\9.0\FeatureLockdown" /v bUpdater /d 0 /t REG_DWORD /f

Alternatively, to completely remove Adobe Updater, after installation, delete this folder:

• C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Updater6 (32-bit Windows)


• C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\Updater6 (64-bit Windows)

If Adobe Reader is running as a standard (or limited) user account, Adobe Updater won’t run at all, so it shouldn’t be an issue if you don’t give users administrative access to their workstations.

If you are virtualising Adobe Reader, then disabling or removing Updater is a must.

Cannot see more than 4GB of RAM in task manager

Problem: You have a system with Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 2008 with more than 4 GB of RAM. You can see in the System Properties that there is more than 4GB but when you see the Memory value in task manager you see only 4 GB of RAM

Solution: open an elevated command line window (run as administrator) and type the command

BCDEdit /set PAE forceenable.

Reboot the machine

Word and PowerPoint documents suddenly shows unformatted text and boxes

Problem: When you open a Word or PowerPoint document which had been correctly saved days ago, some text or text boxes looks unformatted or are not displaying as you remember when the document was saved.

Troubleshooting: Check your default printer, may be it was changed to an local offline or generic printer or, if it is a network printer, it was disconnected a lot of days from the print server. Word and PowerPoint are particular reliant on Printer settings in order to show document content.

Office documents prompt for password in anonymous SharePoint site

Problem: In a SharePoint site published in the Internet as anonymous, opening Office Documents in Internet Explorer prompts for password. Pressing the Cancel button opens the file.

Solution: You can check the solution in http://www.objectsharp.com/cs/blogs/max/archive/2008/04/21/enabling-anonymous-access-on-moss-2007-wss-3-0-web-applications.aspx. We implemented it but after a while (may be weeks) the problem rose again. Trying to implement the same solution again did not work.

Our environment uses Microsoft ISA Server 2006 as firewall so we configure the http filter on the web site publishing rule so that it do not allow the verb OPTIONS. After that, the problem was solved. Using this approach, our internal users can still use the advanced features that are disabled when you implement the solution in the link above and our external users can open the files without the prompt.

Name a file based on computer date and time

Problem: we need a Windows batch command file to backup some information into a file and that file must be named based on the date and time of the computer.

Solution:  a script like this should do the required task

rem perform de backup tasks and save the resulting file on a directory, for example e:\backups

rem with a any file name, for example backup.bkf

rem change the current directory to the same where the backup file was created

cd e:\backups

rem proceed to rename using the for function

for /f "tokens=1-6 delims=/: " %%d in ("%date%:%time%") do rename "e:\backups\backup.bkf" ANYTEXT%%d_%%e_%%f_%%g-%%hh%%i.bkf

The command line above can be read as follows:

for the text on %date:%time% split it on tokens taking the characters / or : as delimiters. Use only the tokens 1 to 6 and assign them to letters beginning from d. Finally, rename the file “e:\backups\backup.bkf” with the name formed by the tokens %d,%e,%f%,%g,%h and %i.

The resultant file name can have additional characters. In my example, I am appending the ANYTEXT string to the file name, using the ‘-‘ character to separate date and time on the file name, and including an ‘h’ to separate hour and minutes.

Some examples on the Internet shows the same command but using the tokens 1 to 5. It is important to see how the date and time are actually displayed on the server you are going to run de script in order to choose the right number of tokens. To do that, in a command line you can type date or time and then press ENTER. If the date is not showing the first three letters of the day (for example, Mon for Monday),  you can use the tokens 1 to 5. In my case, my server was showing those three characters before the date and I needed tokens 1 to 6.

Finally, you can run the for command directly on the Windows command line in order to test the rename procedure and being sure that the file is named as you want. However, please take into account that on the command line you don´t need to use the double %% before the token letters. For the command above to be run on the Windows Command line directly, the syntax should be:

for /f "tokens=1-6 delims=/: " %d in ("%date%:%time%") do rename "e:\backups\backup.bkf" ANYTEXT%d_%e_%f_%g-%hh%i.bkf