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...

​Stop the Beeps

How to Keep VMWare Virtual Machines in a Windows Domain

VMWare 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. Sometimes this really isn't possible.

One partial remedy is to disable the password change activity in Windows to reduce the chances of your VM being dropped from the domain. This is done by adding a value in the registry key:

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