I had the glorious opportunity today of making a Microsoft support call. Im not sure how many of you out there have made one before, but I have to say its getting WAY better. I had a call back in less than an hour, and the tech was very knowledgeable. All said and done, they had the issue fixed in 30 minutes. Whenever I watch another tech work (this time remotely) I like watching what shortcuts they use when they are doing their work. I picked up a couple from this support call that I thought were worth sharing. The first one, in my opinion is enough by itself.
Display your network adapters (Without going to the network and sharing center first!!!)
My biggest pet peeve with server 08 is that it takes more than 2 clicks to see your actual adapters. Not anymore, this shortcut loads the adapter screen in one command!
Command: ncpa.cpl
Usage: Start Menu, Run, Type ‘ncpa.cpl’ – Press <Enter>
Display Add/Remove Program (program and features)
Not a huge breakthrough, but it saves time all the same
Command: appwiz.cpl
Usage: Start Menu, Run, Type ‘appwiz.cpl’ – Press <Enter>
Show IIS (7)
Another time savor
Command: inetmgr
Usage: Start Menu, Run, Type ‘inetmgr’ – Press <Enter>
I’m mostly on the network side, so the first command is most useful to me. Nonetheless its useful to know some shortcuts even with a GUI OS like Windows. As a side note you can also run all of these commands out of command prompt but for shortcuts that don’t have the ‘.cpl’ extension you need to preface the command with the word ‘start’ (EG: ‘start inetmgr’)