Greetings, I'm Professor Kay. And in this short video presentation, we're going to see how we go about creating a heads up display of our systems information, so that we can have it presented to us when we log in to our machine for the first time. Now we can create this heads up display using a free utility called BG info. This utility has been around for a long time, it was created by the individual who created and started another organization called sysinternals, which was super popular back in the late 90s. And early 2000. Microsoft bought the company from Mark russinovich.

I hope I said his name right. And he's a really smart guy. And he's the one that discovered that Sony was installing rootkits onto their software and allowing access to individuals machines, that was capturing data and sending it off to Sony. He did that using some of these utilities. So this is a pretty smart guy. And this is one of the better utilities that I have used over the years.

Now, there's a lot of free utilities up here that you can get from this sysinternals sites, I would highly recommend that you go up and check some of them out. Now this utility works across all Microsoft operating systems. And it's going to allow you to see what's going on on your machine without having to dig into any of the resource utilities, or the diagnostic utilities. As soon as you log in, you're going to be presented with whatever information you want to see on that desktop. Now, let's go ahead and get started and show you how to do this. So again, the tool is called BG info.

Here's I've got a folder and I downloaded it, I've extracted it, I've created a share on my network. And now I'm going to show you how I use this to get that heads up display on all of my clients servers and their workstations if I want it, so we're going to run the 64 bit version. So I'm just gonna go ahead Run it, I'm going to accept the license agreement. Now this is a self running executable. There's nothing to install. Let's say I agree to that.

Now we have to choose exactly what information do we want to see here, a lot of this information you may not want, and a lot of it, you may, but you have to go in here and you can pick and choose which items you want from that list. We're going to close this out. And now you'll see that this has all the information. Now if you don't like it over here, you can move it over to the left, or you can move it to the center. And all you have to do is just relaunch that utility. And let's see if we can select a position.

And if we would like to have it center, we can do that. Or we can move it over to the left. You can move it up and down. You can do whatever you like with it. And now you'll see that it's in the center. Now you'll see all this information that is presented to the administrator or the individual logs onto the machine.

Now you can understand how great this would be if you remoting into the machine from outside. So If I'm at home, and somebody calls me up and says, Hey, our Exchange Server needs to be rebooted, well, then I'm going to remote in to the first available server, which will probably be a domain controller, then from there, I'm going to hop on over to the Exchange Server. But it's really nice. When I do that RDP, that when I get on to that desktop that I actually see the name of the machine. So you can have the name of the machine, you can have its IP address, the default gateway, the amount of free space on the C drive, Service Pack information, what the operating system is, you can see all this information. And it's just a great way for you to be able to keep track of what machine you're on at that given time.

So we're going to see now how we go inside of this utility and we can modify it to our own specification. So what I've done is I have moved things around And I've gotten it to what I think are my best preferences. So when I log on to a machine remotely, I want to see the hostname, the IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, DHCP server, DNS server, and anything else that I deem important. Now a lot of this stuff you don't need, but you have to be able to decide what best fits your criteria of information that you want to see when you log on to this machine. So you can see that I can add all this information just by highlighting and over here, and I just click on the Add button. And there I'm back and I have the name.

Now I don't need this. We get rid of this here real quick. And what we're going to do is we're just going to highlight it like that, and I can just hit the delete button and it's gone. I don't need this. I'm gonna delete that. So you can get in here and you can modify this any way you like.

And you can tighten it up. You can make spaces, whatever you like to do. Delete that There we go. So you can clean this up, you can straighten it up and you can add things. And you can take things out just by using this Properties window here, you can also do custom settings. So if you have something that you want, inside of here, you can add the identifier, the type and you can put in the path, and you can add your own special information settings that you would like to see present.

So again, we're going to go ahead and just say apply to all this. And then I'm just going to go back over here, close this out. Now you'll see that this is the information I like right here. This is all I need. I don't need much of anything else. But if you want, you can have the whole ball of wax.

You can have all that information up there if you want. I find that it gets kind of in the way, but features on. As I previously stated I like to have this information presented to me each time I log on to the server. Now you can imagine working in a data center Where you've got hundreds of servers, and you're sitting back there remotely going into each one of these either with a KVM switch, or you're using an RDP connection, to log on to that machine remotely, you're not going to be able to do it physically from every machine in the room. Because that would just be way too many monitors. That would be way too many keep keyboards and mice just it would just be too administratively burdensome.

So you're going to have to do it remotely. So you want this information, you want to be able to see exactly what it is you're logging into. So again, we're gonna open this up. And again, I'm just going to go ahead and launch and again, we'll accept the licensing. And here we have it again. And so as I stated before, you can go through here, and if you don't need the IP version, you can just highlight it and delete it.

The same thing with the networking type. If you don't need that just deleted. Whatever you don't need in here, you can just highlight it and remove it. And it's not going anywhere, because you can go right back over here. And you can find it again. And if you need it later on, you can put it back in.

Now remember, you can also change the position. So if you got it where it's kind of been washed out because of the background, not a problem. And you can also do multi, multiple monitor configuration, which is pretty cool. So I can locate this over here all the way to the left over to the right up and center of this screen at the top of the screen, wherever I want to put it top right of the screen top left of the screen. You got a lot of room to maneuver with this utility. And it's just one of those things that just makes your life as a network administrator or even a consultant so much easier.

One more thing before we get out of here, yes, this will work on your laptop or your desktop at home, or any computer that you have. Alright, so that's all I got for you for this short video presentation. on how we go about getting a heads up display without having to dig into all of those resource and diagnostic utilities that we normally would have to use to pull up this information. So if you have any questions or you have any concerns about the information that was presented to you in this video, please don't hesitate to reach out contact your instructor and I'll see you in my next video.