If you have been an admin for any length of time, you have certainly discovered situations where a server spikes in CPU use or memory utilization and/or load levels. Running `top` won't always give you the answer, either. So how do you find those sneaky processes that are chewing up your system resources to be able to kill 'em?

A very useful function which is missing from the Windows library of command line tools is the ability to replace text in plain text files. Here's how to do it with a simple script.

Common system and/or environmental events such as resuming from standby or losing network connection can cause problems for certain applications which expect to be always on and connected.

When you have a bunch of end user computers on a network, it is important to be sure files stored locally on the respective computers are backed up in the event of hard drive failure. Maintaining backup programs, configurations and, possibly, support costs on each machine can be a real pain, so as an alternative [...]

Every server administrator has a set of utility programs they like to use. Typically, these tools are kept on each machine to ensure availability and can come from a variety of sources such as Sysinternals and Nirsoft. To keep these tools updated to the latest versions, manually updating can be quite tedious and time consuming, especially [...]

The zip format is the standard for file compression, however many power user and system admin types prefer to use the 7z format because it offers significantly better compression ratios. So to get the best of both worlds, we have created a script which will convert your zip files into 7z files with a single command, a process we are calling “deep archiving”.

In today's batch scripting lesson, we'll show you in true “set it and forget it” fashion, how to create a batch script which will adapt to your SQL Server as new databases are added and removed.

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.

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!

In our previous article, we showed you the fastest way to go from a simple list of users to their creation in Active Directory. However, you’ll frequently get a list of users that will have extra data fields. Since we can’t write a script ahead of time for every possible scenario, we’ll show you how to take our user creation PowerShell script and modify it to suit your purpose.

Creating users through the AD Users and Computers snap-in is a very easy process, but you’ll frequently face the situation where you need to create accounts for a whole group of people at once. We've made it super easy.