windows 7 Archives

Pipe output to the clipboard in Windows

Dave Farquhar War Stories, Windows October 23, 2011April 28, 2017command prompt, JPG, net view, oracle, passwords, pdf files, unix, vista, windows 7, Windows XP

Besides all the changes to the GUI that happened post-Windows XP, they also made one useful change to the command prompt. When you run a command, it’s now possible to pipe output to the clipboard.

If you’re like me and write a lot of documentation, or you just take a lot of notes while doing computer maintenance, it’s a big boon.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

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Use Powercfg to troubleshoot Windows 7 power management

Dave Farquhar Windows October 16, 2011April 15, 2017troubleshooting, windows 7

I found this short guide today to troubleshooting Windows 7’s power management.

You can use powercfg.exe, a command-line utility, to figure out what programs are keeping your computer from suspending, and if your computer is waking up at weird times, what program is waking it up. Useful, and non-obvious.

Dave Farquhar

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An old Windows myth looks to (finally) become reality in Windows 8

Dave Farquhar Windows October 9, 2011October 8, 2011old windows, vista, windows 7, windows 8, Windows Vista

For the better part of my adult life, I’ve been dealing with the myth that if there were certain settings that could speed up Windows, Microsoft would make those settings the default for the operating system. The pundits who perpetuate this myth have their reasons for doing so, but that didn’t make them true.

Now, the difference is harder to notice today than it was when I started my career. There are things I can do to make Windows 7 run better on my 4-core, 3.1 GHz AMD64 box with 8 GB of RAM and a 100 GB SSD. But I won’t notice the cumulative effects of a few 5% improvements on that box. Not the way I did on 50 MHz 80486-based PCs in 1997.

Microsoft’s philosophy for 22 years, from Windows 1.0 in 1985 to Windows Vista in 2007, was to write the software, and if it takes a few years for the hardware to catch up with it, so be it. Windows 7 changed that–for the first time, the actual requirements for running a new version of Windows went down–and, with Windows 8, it looks like CPU requirements will hold steady, and memory usage will actually go down.

Dave Farquhar

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We’re just about ready for an era of 64-bit browsers

Dave Farquhar Software, Windows October 7, 2011October 6, 2011firefox, malware, oracle, Pale Moon, Patch Tuesday, windows 7

Adobe released a new Flash player this week. As almost an afterthought, they mentioned there’s a 64-bit version included.

That means Windows users can finally have mainstream 64-bit web browsers without using any beta software. I can put one on my main machine, and Gmail and Youtube and anything else that relies on Flash works the way it’s supposed to work.

What about Firefox? Read on.
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Dave Farquhar

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Giving Windows 7’s power management more options

Dave Farquhar Windows October 2, 2011October 1, 2011amd, asus, intel, windows 7

I installed Asus’ CPU/fan monitor on my new AMD64 system, and I discovered that the system frequently changed speeds from 3.3 GHz down to 2.2 GHz. Very frequently. In fact, it spent most of its time running at 2.2 GHz. I decided to investigate, and found the setting was in Windows 7’s power management settings.

If you have a newer AMD or Intel CPU and Windows 7, you may find its power management settings aren’t quite as aggressive as they could be.

Dave Farquhar

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Version 7 looks like just what Firefox needed

Dave Farquhar Software September 30, 2011firefox, tweet, vista, windows 2000, windows 7, windows 98, Windows Vista

Firefox 7 is out. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you already have it, because, historically, a large proportion of my readers use Firefox or, in the past, used other Mozilla-based browsers.

The last couple of Firefox versions have been yawners, and a frequent butt of jokes on Twitter. “It’s Tuesday. Time for a new major Firefox release.” This one looks better. Here’s my review, after a few days of use.

Dave Farquhar

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Windows 7 programs quit responding? You have a corrupt user profile. Here’s how to fix it.

Dave Farquhar Windows September 23, 2011command prompt, windows 7, Windows Explorer

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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Dave Farquhar

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Toggle between two hosts files with a simple script

Dave Farquhar Windows September 21, 2011April 24, 2017vista, windows 2000, windows 7, windows 8, windows nt, Windows Vista, Windows XP

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.

Dave Farquhar

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Two commands to fix Internet connectivity

Dave Farquhar Windows September 20, 2011August 21, 2016antivirus, command prompt, malware, Microsoft Security Essentials, vista, VPN, windows 7

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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Dave Farquhar

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