I've had a load of fun with Windows this week. Let me summarise for your reading pleasure.
To start with, Monday morning saw the CEO locked out of his computer, achieved by removing himself from the Domain. It's actually quite a common occurance - and even if it isn't, telling him that definately made him feel better about it. Anyway, I've played about with ERD Commander for Windows 2000 before, and thought about giving it a try for XP. The new version does support XP, however it also costs a hell of a lot of money. A bit of searching found this little gem, the Emergency Boot CD. Basically, it's an all in one set of tools all compiled on a bootable CD (which is actually running Linux). It will let you recover corrupt OS installs, reset computer passwords, and read NTFS filesystems without knowing any passwords. It's incredibly handy, totally free, and to top it all off there's something quite amusing about recovering a Windows installation using Linux.
My little Sony VAIO got itself a new hard drive a while ago, and I was looking to sell it. In the meantime, the new hard drive died as well, neat. As the computer doesn't have a CD-Rom, and USB CD-Rom's aren't bootable, recovering data from it is a real challlenge. In my search, I found this File Recovery Disk from good old Bootdisk.com. It's a simple bootable floppy disk, which lets you access NTFS partitions and get at the data. It supports long filenames, and allows you to traverse the directory structure and then copy anything you want to any available FAT partition (in my case - the floppy drive). As I was only after 2 small data files it was perfect for my needs, and while traversing the directory structure it gave the hard drive a chance to make some truly horrible noises to inform me that it was quite fucked.
This week also brings about the discovery of 5 new vunerabilities in Windows, and 4 critical patches in need of applying to fix them. This is getting a little ridiculous. Word on the street is that there's already code circulating to take advantage of the exploits, so go forth and patch.
On the subject of Windows security (or lack of it), this page gives you some good info on how to run Windows 2003 Server as a Workstation. Windows 2003 server is a lot more secure than any of their workstation products, and apparently it seems to boot a lot quicker than XP Pro, even on laptops. There's also a certain novelty value to running it as a workstation that warrants further investigation.