= FAQ Nuggets =

This is a collection of questions that occasionally have plagued us, some of them repeatedly.
Hopefully some of these things will be useful for you, developer or not.

== Stop the Beeps ==

Some Windows operating systems still insist on using the speaker in the case to make horrid sounding beeps.

Here's an article on how to disable the beeps...

[http://www.itworld.com/nl/win_admin_tips/02012002 Stop the Beeps]

== How to Keep Virtual Machines in a Windows Domain ==

VMWare and HyperV virtual machines will often lose their membership in a Windows Domain (not to be confused with an Internet Domain) for a complex variety of reasons.

There seems to be no outright cure except for carefully and regularly snapshotting the machine, and never reverting to a very old snapshot.  This is a fair amount of work, as one accumulates more vms, so it's not ideal and it's not even a total solution.

However, one partial remedy to lost domain membership is to disable the automatic password change in Windows to reduce the chances of your VM being dropped from the domain.  This password is a shared secret password between the domain and your machine, and it seems relatively safe not to update it for test machines that are continually reverted.  This change is only needed on the client side, not on the domain controller.  The password change feature is disabled by adding a value in the registry key at:

{{{
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINES\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Netlogon\Parameters
}}}

called DisablePasswordChange, which should be of type REG_DWORD and have a value of 1.

This can be done from the Windows command line with this command:

{{{
reg add HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Netlogon\Parameters /v DisablePasswordChange /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
}}}