SQL Server Management Studio makes restoring a database easy, and today we'll walk through the simple process of restoring a database through the GUI. Expert users might want to skip this one.

The most important part of a SQL Server maintenance plan is backing up your databases regularly, and even though Windows isn't as command-line friendly as Linux, you can still trigger a database backup from the command line.

You might want to reuse all of the arguments to a previous command in the shell if you realized you want to open the file with a different utility, but don't feel like typing out the whole path again.

Yesterday we showed you how to install PHP on IIS for Windows Server 2003, and today we'll walk through the same process for Windows Server 2008, which is similar but a little different.

While the Microsoft Sysinternals tools are incredibly powerful and useful, the one feature they lack is the ability to check for new versions. Here's a batch script to automatically update them.

One of most popular development platforms on the web is PHP which powers many popular applications and sites such as Facebook, Wordpress and Joomla. Here's how to install it into IIS version 6 on Windows Server 2003.

Have you ever typed out a really long command, realized it worked great, and then wanted to save it to a file? There's an easy bash trick you can use to do just that.

When you create a Microsoft Virtual Hard Drive either through Virtual PC or Virtual Server, you have to specify the maximum size of the file up front. Here's how to tweak the size later on.

If you're working on a project, and you've copied in or created a whole bunch of new files, you might find it tedious to manually add each of them. Here's the quick command you can use instead.

When it comes to gathering statistics on web sites, you can never have enough. While one of the most popular method for tracking statistics is through services such as Google Analytics, log file analysis remains a reliable way to track your visitors as they are immune to script blockers.

As an IT manager, there are a lot of things you can do which directly impact your company’s bottom line. While the most obvious are direct hardware and software costs, an often overlooked aspect is energy/electricity consumption by computer systems.

If you want to quickly see what processes are wasting all of your memory, you can do so with a simple command.

If you've got a web application that uploads files to the server through a PHP script, you might have noticed that by default you can't upload terribly large files. Here's how to change it.

All Dell servers come with the Dell OpenManage Server Administrator software which has the ability to monitor and display system level indicators. Here's how to batch assign them to send an email.

When you've got multiple RDP servers sitting behind a firewall, it's tricky to access more than one through Remote Desktop on a single IP. Here's the solution.

Have you ever used a tail -f on a logfile, only to find that it's scrolling by way too fast for you to deal with?

Changing the group a user is associated to is a fairly easy task, but not everybody knows the commands, especially to add a user to a secondary group.

When working on development projects or doing product demos which utilize email, having an environment you know will work can be critical. For these situations, having a completely self contained email system is imperative, and here's how to set one up.

Have you ever needed to quickly share a folder with another machine?

If you use the rsync utility to keep your backups synchronized from your database server over to your backup or secondary file server, you might want to prevent the script from using too much bandwidth. Here's how.

Microsoft Office 2007 introduced a new XML based file format for the Office suite of products, and what you might not know is that you can easily extract the images, text, or embedded files from within these documents.

There are lots of great utilities out there which do essential tasks such as monitoring and reporting that once you have configured them, they just sit in your system tray and do their job without you ever knowing. Here's how to run an application as a Windows service whether or not the user is logged in.

Keeping your servers clutter-free is easy with Disk Cleanup, and scheduling a cleanup makes it effortless.

Keeping your hard drive clutter-free is essential to having a well run server. The tool to accomplish this is Disk Cleanup, but it is conspicuously missing in Server 2008… or is it?

For frequent PowerShell users, the standard settings might not be ideal. We can change the settings of our PowerShell window to how we like it by modifying the profile.

Typing out full commands all the time can be tiresome, but aliases make things a snap. Check it out!