Windows

Windows shutdown command

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,
Windows shutdown command

Let’s say you need to shut down or reboot your computer from a command line, a batch file, or a desktop shortcut. Maybe you want to shut it down right now, or in an hour. You can do all of that and more with the Windows shutdown command, shutdown.exe.
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Windows 7 programs quit responding? You have a corrupt user profile. Here’s how to fix it.

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

Windows 7 can suffer from old-age disease, where it thrashes hard drives, programs quit responding, and it generally becomes unusable. I’m beginning to wonder if my main PC might be suffering from this. Microsoft prescribes this cure.

If you’re comfortable with a command line, I can make the solution faster and easier.
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Toggle between two registry settings with another simple script

Dave Farquhar Windows

On the heels of yesterday, the same technique that swapped hosts files can be adapted to toggle registry settings too. The registry, if you’re not familiar, is a central database that stores Windows configuration settings.

Perhaps you want to be able to toggle your screen saver timeout from the default of 1500 to a value of 9999. That way, you can easily choose between the screen saver interrupting you or not. I run into a problem when running certain emulators with the screen saver timing out on me; this would solve the problem.

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Toggle between two hosts files with a simple script

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

A longtime reader wrote in asking if it was possible to easily toggle between two hosts files. There are several possible uses for this. When I’m at home, I need to address my web site by its internal, private IP address. On the road, that private address obviously doesn’t work. He wants something like this for other reasons; I believe he’s blocking ad servers with his hosts file and needs to unblock one or more servers temporarily for select sites to work properly.

This solution would make my Computer Science 203 professor rescind the B I received in his class if he saw it, but it works, and I don’t think he reads this blog anyway.

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Two commands to fix Internet connectivity

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

I can think of two times someone has asked me to fix their computer when it has suddenly lost the ability to connect to the Internet. Assuming there’s nothing wrong with the modem or the network card, the problem usually comes down to something messing with either the TCP/IP stack or the Winsock. Security software frequently does this, as does malware. A few years ago, I briefly worked for an ISP that provided a security suite based on F-Secure, and that program was notorious for breaking the Winsock.

Here’s the simple fix.
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Windows 8 on a VM

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

If you’re looking to play around with the Windows 8 developer build that Microsoft pushed out this week, be aware that it won’t run on VMware player or any version of VMware Workstation prior to version 8.

It does, however, reportedly work on Virtualbox if you use the Windows XP compatibility settings. Read more

How to slipstream IE9 and hotfixes into Windows 7, step by step

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , , ,

Normally, after you install any version of Windows, you have a ton of patching to do. And that patching takes as long, or longer, than the installation takes, while leaving the system vulnerable to exploits in the meantime. Slipstreaming your hotfixes into your installation media sidesteps those issues, and reduces fragmentation. You get a faster performing system, you get the system up and running a lot sooner, and you save a lot of unnecessary writes to your SSD.

So I wholeheartedly recommend slipstreaming.

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Moving a users directory, or anything else you want off an SSD to save space

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

Dan Bowman sent me the following link and asked me to comment on it: http://lifehacker.com/5467758/move-the-users-directory-in-windows-7

It needs little comment. It’s a brilliant solution to the problem.

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Chasing the ramdisk and slipstreaming rabbits

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

I’ve been messing around with slipstreaming and with ramdisks, but since I’m not completely certain the slipstream process works consistently, I’m not publishing it today. I’m very excited about the possibilities that ramdisks have, but I got the ramdisk to fail on me twice last night. In light of that, I’m not going to come out and say what a great thing this particular ramdisk product is when I have doubts about its ability to stand up to heavy use.

In my Amiga days, I did most of my everyday computing using a ramdisk as my main storage medium. The operating system used it heavily, and all my downloads went there. I did all my creation and extraction of Zip files there. I even had the machine configured to reboot off one. The initial cold boot had to come off a hard drive, but the machine was capable of warm booting from its ramdisk. I took advantage of that, and when I had to reboot, the machine was back in literally seconds. Booting Windows 7 from a ramdisk is a non-starter on several levels, but if a ramdisk can’t do everything else an SSD can do and do it faster, I don’t think it’s worth having.

So I have high standards and high expectations.

When I find something that works well, I’ll share it.

Consider disabling the DNS Client service if you have a dodgy Internet connection

Dave Farquhar Windows

When I wrote about using ipconfig /flushdns to fix intermittent Internet problems, a longtime reader reported he has the problem frequently on his dialup connection. If you find yourself doing this a lot, there’s a more permanent fix.

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