Day 7: Images & IV's

(Hours: 7:30am-5:00pm)

I opened up at 7:30 again today, and then went straight to David’s Office. It was pretty crummy out today and the walk wasn’t very pleasant. I jumped right into the computer I was working on yesterday. The computer still wouldn’t start up; all I got was a black screen and a cursor. It had to be a problem with the .dll file I edited yesterday to put a default logo on the login screen. Since the computer wouldn’t boot I had to use a boot CD. With this boot CD I was able to go into Windows Explorer and change the authui.dll back to the original that we saved in the same directory under a different name, authui_original.dll.

The computer worked fine after this and so I tried to see if the administrator rights that I edited was the problem with the old one. I matched both authui.dll files up and set up the exact same rights and permissions. I made the edited one with the logon picture the default and restarted… then black screen. No go. So I had to use the boot CD again and revert back to the original authui.dll file. I did some more research and found a way to just completely remove the logon account logo frame.

To remove this blank frame from the logon screen, I again had to edit the authui.dll file in the syste32 folder. I used a program called Resource Hacker to open up the authui.dll file. With this program I was able to browse and edit the xml files within the .dll file itself. I followed some pretty basic instructions off an online guide. I had to find 3 lengthy strings of code in 3 separate xml directories (UIFILE\12400\1033, UIFILE\12401\1033, and UIFILE\12402\1033). After finding the 3 strings of code, I deleted them, saved the .dll, and recompiled it. I restarted the computer and it worked! The stupid blank frame was gone and all that was there was a user and password entries, it looks much better.

The Nursing Department just got in a new IV pump and they needed help installing some software on it so I headed there next. The IV pump needed an updated Drug Library installed on it. I installed the Drug Library on a computer, and installed an infrared transfer device that the IV pump uses. To transfer the Drug Library I had to export it and use the Infrared transfer dongle to move the library over. However I ran into a problem trying to transfer the file over, the IV pump is password protected, and there was no documentation on what that password is. A quick call to their support line revealed the default password to be 5555. The Drug Library was installed and everything worked.

After that I went back to David’s office to try one last thing on the windows 7 Image computer. I tried to get the default user to show file extensions in the explorer. It is really easy to do with the current user; it’s just a control panel setting. But with the DEFAULT user profile it doesn’t work. I added a key to the registry and put in a new dword value called HideFileExt, and I set the value to 0. This should in theory work, it does in previous versions of Windows, but it doesn’t in Windows 7.

Once that was figured out, I just had to create a local admin and fix one more Local Group Policy setting and I was done with the image. I finally got to run the sysprep tool that would keep popping up at start up. After sysprep ran we booted to another CD that uses a command prompt.

It is a little tedious but it works, the CD captures the installation (in an image) and places it onto a network share. We ran this once before doing the final sysprep run, to have a safe backup image. Once this finished I ran sysprep again and configured it to put the imaged machine in the “out of the box experience” mode. I will finish this up tomorrow, and hopefully image another computer.

Post time: 5:26pm est