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I am in the middle of preparing to help out a friend with some consulting help for migrating from Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 (SEP11) to McAfee Total Protection for Endpoint on their corporate endpoints. As you may know, Symantec has the only corporate AV solution in the industry WITHOUT a centrally managed/controlled UNINSTALL function.

Anyway, so in researching how I need to accomplish this, I found a good list on MSDN for all of the standard installer command-line options for Windows installer (i.e. msiexec.exe options, MSI package commands). Thanks Microsoft, at least you are helping to document how to clean up after lame vendors like Symantec.

In Symantec’s defense, they do have knowledgebase articles for how to manually uninstall SEP here and MSI options here. However, McAfee ePO has a central way to do this, as does Kaspersky, Trend Micro, Sophos, you get the picture.

When using Windows, it is nice to be able to simply right-click and pop open a command prompt, as opposed to Start — Run — cmd and pressing enter. Running cmd.exe still requires you to go to the exact folder you want to work in. Here are two ways to just right click on a folder to open a command prompt in that particular directory:

Easy Method:

Microsoft has a PowerToys utlity called CmdHere that gives you this functionality. Go here to download. For other cool MS PowerToys for Windows XP, go here.

Not Quite as Easy Method:

1. Open regedit (regedit.exe from the Run dialog box)
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\Folder\Shell
3. Right click on the right side and Create a new key called Command Prompt
4. Your default value should be “Open Command Prompt” (without quotes)
5. Create a new key called Command under the Command Prompt key
6. Your default value should be “cmd.exe /k pushd %L” (again w/o quotes)

Your context menu when you right click on any folder will now contain an option called “Open Command Prompt” which will open a command prompt in the selected folder.

I recently had a need to migrate all of my Outlook Contacts over to Apple Mail/Address Book and Microsoft Entourage for Mac. Since the Outlook PST format is proprietary (direct export/import from Outlook to Entourage is not supported), I needed to find a way to do this. I decided I had 3 options:

1.) I could spend $10 and buy Outlook2Mac.

2.) I could setup an IMAP server on a Linux box and copy all of my contacts to the IMAP server and import from there to Mac email programs, which would populate the Apple Address Book.

3.) I could export my contacts into vCard format (*.vcf) and import into Mac.

Since I was planning to later convert the physical machine to VMware, I chose option 3.

To do this, I found a great VBscript online here (thanks to Dave Moats). I created a new folder on my WIndows XP PC at c:\vcards and ran the script as follows:

cscript exportContacts.vbs c:\vcards

Hope you find this link and script helpful, I sure did, and have added it to my arsenal for