Critical: Patch Windows Against WannaCry

A critical part of preventing against the WannaCry ransomware is making sure that you have Microsoft's Security Bulletin MS17-010 (also know as Security Update for Microsoft Windows SMB Server).

Here's where to go to get it.

Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 10:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms17-010.aspx

Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, and 2016:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms17-010.aspx

Windows XP (with SP3) x86:

http://download.windowsupdate.com/d/csa/csa/secu/2017/02/windowsxp-kb4012598-x86-custom-enu_eceb7d5023bbb23c0dc633e46b9c2f14fa6ee9dd.exe

Windows Server 2003 x86:

http://download.windowsupdate.com/c/csa/csa/secu/2017/02/windowsserver2003-kb4012598-x86-custom-enu_f617caf6e7ee6f43abe4b386cb1d26b3318693cf.exe

Windows Server 2003 x64:

http://download.windowsupdate.com/d/csa/csa/secu/2017/02/windowsserver2003-kb4012598-x64-custom-enu_f24d8723f246145524b9030e4752c96430981211.exe

Comments

Where are SCANPST.EXE and/or SCANOST.EXE?

I sometimes have to deal with customer computers whose Outlook PST or OST files have become corrupted. Very often the fix is to run SCANPST.EXE on the offending PST/OST file. However, every time I go to do this I forget where the two executable files are. Here is where they are on a Vista machine running Office 2007: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12 I hope this helps.

WSUS Issues

Was configuring WSUS on a Server 2016 VM for a customer recently and found the performance to be very sluggish and most of the time the client PCs would time-out and throw an error message when trying to check for updates. After much digging on different forums I came across a fix that worked nicely: Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager and click on Application Pools Then Right-Click on your WsusPool instance and choose Advanced Settings Scroll down to Private Memory Limit (KB) and change it from the default of 1843200 to 0 which means unlimited. Then right-click and stop the WsusPool and then start it again. Hope this works for you.

Unable to Extend Volume because the Windows Recovery Partition is in the way

I had to increase the space allocated to a customer's WSUS server VM that had run out of capacity and was keeling over. So I powered off the VM, added the extra capacity to the virtual hard disk, powered it back on, and went into Disk Management to extend the C: drive partition. However, I discovered that because the Windows Recovery Partition was in between the C: partition and the new unallocated space (similar to the image below which I've copied from Woshub.com ), I was unable to do an "Extend Volume" job. The solution was to move the recovery partition. This involves disabling it, deleting it, extending your partition as required, and then re-creating the recovery partition and enabling it. Here are the steps involved: Disable existing recovery partition: You will need to disable the existing Windows recovery partition. To do this, run this command from an admin command line/PowerShell: reagentc /disable If you get the error message "REAGENTC.EXE: Operati...

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