Posey's Tips & Tricks


Let Copilot Manage Your Outlook Calendar, Part 1

Microsoft 365 Copilot's new Calendar Instructions feature lets Outlook users create rules for automatically accepting, declining or following meetings based on specific conditions.

PowerShell Trusted Hosts for Mixed Environments

Trusted host lists can help keep PowerShell remoting working in mixed domain and workgroup environments, but only if admins avoid overwriting existing WinRM settings.

Where Air Gapped Backups Actually Fail, Part 2

Air gapped backups can still fail when configuration drift, lost encryption keys and routine human mistakes go unnoticed until recovery is needed.

Where Air Gapped Backups Actually Fail, Part 1

Air gapped backups can provide critical ransomware resilience, but restore testing gaps, documentation drift and media rotation mistakes can leave organizations unsure whether they can actually recover.

Is This My Strangest Project Ever?

Building a modern PC to read decades-old floppy disks turns into a quirky retrocomputing challenge with uncertain odds.

Coping With the Microsoft 365 Update Process

Forced Microsoft 365 restarts can keep Office apps current, but they can also disrupt work and put unsaved data at risk.

Data Hoarding: The Backup Problem that Nobody Wants to Admit To

Letting data pile up may feel safer than deleting it, but unchecked accumulation can make backups slower, costlier and harder to recover when something goes wrong.

Bringing an Evaluation Server into Production

Brien Posey explains how to convert an expired Windows Server evaluation VM into a production server using DISM and proper license activation steps.

Building a Lab Environment in Under 10 Minutes

Using Hyper-V differencing disks, administrators can quickly spin up and reset fully configured lab environments without rebuilding VMs from scratch.

Bringing an Evaluation Server into Production

Here's how to convert an expired Windows Server evaluation VM into a production-ready server without rebuilding it from scratch.

Why PowerShell Timers Cause Problems in GUI Environments, Part 2

A practical workaround shows how PowerShell developers can keep Windows Forms GUIs responsive by moving timer-driven processing into background jobs and using a second timer to update the interface only after the work is complete.

Why PowerShell Timers Cause Problems in GUI Environments, Part 1

Brien Posey explains why PowerShell timers can cause Windows Forms dashboards to freeze or fail to update, and why keeping GUI scripts responsive requires a different approach to timed events.

Stop Doing these 5 PowerShell Function Practices!

Here's a look at five common PowerShell function mistakes that can make scripts harder to read, troubleshoot and reuse.

DIY Network Monitoring for Hyper-V, Part 3

A PowerShell-based Hyper-V health check can be automated through Task Scheduler to provide a daily status report while also running hourly in silent mode unless a problem is detected.

DIY Network Monitoring for Hyper-V, Part 2

A PowerShell-based Hyper-V health monitor can give admins a quick, color-coded view of host, VM, replication, disk and memory issues before they become larger problems.

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