Something that caught me out recently was trying to bring up system information about my Windows Server 2008 machine.  I have in the past always typed ‘winmsd’ and a box would appear with a pretty decent amount of information on the system from which I ran the command from.

Though trying this old faithful of a command from my Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 (and I believe the same is true for Windows Vista) machines led to nothing happening and no useful system info window opening.  Now this is probably something that I have missed over the last year or so but ‘winmsd’ has now been replaced with a new command called ‘msinfo32’. (Amendment: @wilva has kindly informed me that ‘msinfo32’ has been around since NT4 days – thanks ) So if you run this command from either a 32 or 64 bit version of Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7 you get the familiar ‘System Information’ screen and details you used to get by running ‘winmsd’.

Maybe I could have run the ‘msinfo32’ command all along (see amendment above) but I thought I’d throw it out there in case there are some fellow ‘winmsd’ die hards out there like myself. 

For more information (credit to @wilva) check out this Wikipedia entry on Microsoft Diagnostics.

Here’s another free Microsoft E-Book download.  This time the book is on “Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions”.

This download will only available for a short while so download it, if interested, while you can.

When going to open my Outlook email client this morning I received the following error message:

“Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook  window.”

This was easily solved by running the following command from the ‘Run’ prompt. *IMPORTANT: Make sure that you have a space between the ‘Outlook.exe’ and the ‘/resetnavpane’ command switch.

If you are running Windows Vista or Windows 7 you won’t have the ‘Run’ option enabled by default.

To enable ‘Run’ option go to the ‘Customize Start Menu’ section and check the ‘Run command’ box.

Everything going well this should fix you’re “Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook  window.” error.