Monthly Archive for January, 2008

Show devices in windows which are no longer connected

Published on January 31, 2008 in Technical Tidbits. 0 Comments

I found this solution online posted by “FTPServerTools” It lets you show devices in Device Manager, which are not currently physically connected to the system. You might want to do this if for instance you want to remove a driver installed on the system for a device, but the device isn’t available for whatever reason. (Such as in my case where a driver was crashing the system when the device was connected, but the driver couldn’t be ‘replaced’ in the GUI because it doesn’t show up when the device is not connected!)

System Environment Variables Screenshot ThumbnailAdd in your system environment variables (Setting in User Environment variables worked for me too) the variable:
DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES
set it’s value to: 1
reboot your machine (A logout was all I needed…)
goto your device manager
show all hidden devices (menu)
Now you can see all devices you ever installed including the ones that still have drives installed but are no longer in use. So dont be surprised if you see multiple monitors or haddrives and so. Just simply delete the network card you no longer have and you are done.
Without this environment variable you will not see the devices that are no longerpresent.

Windows DNS Suffix Search List limited to 255 characters.

Published on January 23, 2008 in Technical Tidbits. 0 Comments

Windows Server SP1 and Windows XP SP2 (and probabably other versions of Windows) seem to have a limit on the ‘length’ of the ‘DNS Suffix Search List’ that can be defined.  I ran across this when setting a list of DNS Suffixes via Group Policy.  The entire list as configured in Group Policy was passed to the client machine, and displayed fully when running the command “ipconfig /all”; however the last entry was getting truncated when performing DNS lookups from most programs.  I examined the list and discovered that the cut-off character was the 255th character in the list… I doubt that’s a cooincidence!  Note that in Group Policy the list of suffixes is defined as a comma-seperated list of domain names.  The commas do count in that 255 character limit.  I blame the DNS service, as the Group Policy and Regisistry, and the output of ipconfig /all all display the full list of suffixes.

More information on setting the DNS Suffix Search list can be found in this MS KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/275553