The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category

finding duplicates – voidtools forum

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/07

That feeling you have been living under a stone since 2014: [Wayback/Archive] finding duplicates – voidtools forum

1.4 Beta has both dupe: & sizedupe: functions.
(In the Index, you need to index the file size & also enable Fast size sort.)

You can combine them, something like:

> dupe: sizedupe: c: file:

Or even add a size to it:

> dupe: sizedupe: c: file: size:>2MB

Note that that finds file name AND (I believe its an AND) file size duplications – anywhere, not necessarily limited to C:, & also that name AND size are the only qualifications for “duplication”, as in files meeting that criteria may not be (byte-by-byte) “duplicates”.

A partial excuse is that these never made it to the changelog at [Wayback/Archive] www.voidtools.com/Changes.txt or [Wayback/Archive] www.voidtools.com/BetaChanges.txt.

It is in the documentation since May 2017 at [Wayback/Archive] Searching – voidtools though:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Everything by VoidTools, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Notes on Oracle Cloud Free Tier (via «I got the “free forever” 4 core/24GB ARM VM from Oracle Cloud. What should I do with it?»)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/02

Some notes (mainly links) on the Oracle Cloud Free Tier as at the time of writing it is the only provider with a “free forever” tier.

In the past for FOSS, there was [Wayback/Archive] Fosshost on Twitter: “@d_feldman Check out fosshost.org for an alternative to Oracle Cloud for ARM/AArch64. We are free, open source and you will never get bill shock. Open source projects must apply only.”, but at the end of 2022 they started to wind down their services as per [Wayback/Archive] Fosshost to Sunset Tenant Services

Fosshost to Sunset Tenant Services

At this time, Fosshost is deeply sorry to announce we are no longer able to continue offering our services.

Because of this, we strongly recommend all Fosshost tenants to backup their data immediately, and migrate elsewhere as soon as possible.

Oh before you begin: if you need a reverse DNS record then be sure to request that as soon as your free tier starts: at that time you have USD 300 credits for running paid services which includes the support to request reverse DNS records.

Anyway, many links on the Oracle OCI Cloud Free Tier (especially the ARM deal is great: lots of RAM as compared to the x86 VMs):

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CentOS, openSuSE, OracleLinux, RedHat, SuSE Linux, Ubuntu, Uncategorized, Windows, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022 | Leave a Comment »

mutool: all purpose tool for dealing with PDF files | mupdf Commands | Man Pages | ManKier

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/23

Sometimes I feel like having lived under a rock for ages despite trying to live the command-line life as much as possible.

Anyway: not that long ago I learned about [Wayback/Archive] mutool: all purpose tool for dealing with PDF files | mupdf Commands | Man Pages | ManKier

It is part of [Wayback/Archive] Package mupdf – man pages | ManKier which also has [Wayback/Archive] mupdf: MuPDF is a lightweight PDF viewer written in portable C | mupdf Commands | Man Pages | ManKier.

MuPDF – a kind of sibling to GhostScript – lives at [Wayback/Archive] MuPDF: The ultimate library for managing PDF documents.

The below query got me to [Wayback/Archive] mupdf/docs/man/mutool.1 at master · ccxvii/mupdf · GitHub in the “wrong” repository [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – ccxvii/mupdf: mirrored from git://git.ghostscript.com/mupdf.git

The actual repositories are at:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Console (command prompt window), Development, PDF, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Some notes on running Windows 11 on virtualised hardware and some on TPM

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/16

Not all virtualised hardware (older hardware usually has died by now) conforms to the Windows 11 minimum specifications.

So here are some links that should be of help to still get Windows 11 running on those:

If you insist on running older hardware that has a TPM header on the mainboard:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CommandLine, Development, MSI, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 11, Z77A-G43 | Leave a Comment »

msftconnecttest/msftncsi: Trouble connecting to Web sites and services because of certificate errors? Check if you’re being held captive – The Old New Thing

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/05

Note that http://neverssl.com is the way to figure out if you are in a captive portal, see below.

In Windows 10, the name of the endpoint changed from msftncsi to msftconnecttest, presumably to make the purpose of the access more obvious in security and audit logs. Nobody will understand that NCSI stands for Network Connectivity Status Indicator.

[Wayback/Archive] Trouble connecting to Web sites and services because of certificate errors? Check if you’re being held captive – The Old New Thing

It refers to a few other interesting sites, for instance about modifying if/how NCSI detects internet connectivity:

As mentioned at the top: my blog post on http://neverssl.com: NeverSSL – helping you get online on WiFi networks requiring authentication

Other related blog posts:

–jeroen

Posted in Captive Portal, Internet, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »

Some notes on getting CrystalDiskMark portable on Chocolatey

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/03

I needed the portable version of [Wayback/ArchiveCrystalDiskMark on Chocolatey (unlike the [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | CrystalDiskMark (Install) package). Luckily I found the auto-update package [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | CrystalDiskInfo (Portable) and knew both that CrystalDiskMark is from the same author as CrystalDiskInfo, and that their code is on GitHub like the Chocolatey package.

Given I had a the below chocolatey-packages/automatic/crystaldiskinfo.portable as a template, I asked the CrystalDiskInfo (Portable) package maintainer if they were willing to maintain CrystalDiskMark (portable) as well and was glad the response was “yes”: [Wayback/Archive] Portabe CrystalDiskMark similar to the current CrystalDiskInfo? · Issue #159 · mkevenaar/chocolatey-packages

So for my link-archive:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

gsudo (sudo for windows)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/01

Not that long ago, I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] Home | gsudo (sudo for windows)

I wish I had bumped into this much longer ago (:

Source at [Wayback/Archive] gerardog/gsudo: Sudo for Windows.

One installer package (there are others like winget and scoop on the documentation site): [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | gsudo – a sudo for windows.

Via [Wayback/Archive] windows – How can I auto-elevate my batch file, so that it requests from UAC administrator rights if required? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] Gerardo Grignoli)

Edit 20250901 (thanks [Wayback/Archive] mterwoord (Matthijs ter Woord) · GitHub):

Windows 11 has a built-in sudo which has different semantics, and is disabled by default.

Enabling Windows 11 sudo

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, Windows | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Only a few years back I learned that CrystalDiskMark is using Microsoft MIT-licensed diskspd for the actual measurements

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/25

I was looking for a way to measure Windows disk performance from the console as I was used to using the [Wayback/ArchiveCrystalDiskMark GUI measurement tool.

So I was glad to learn a few years back at the end of 2022 that [Wayback/Archive] CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4c is based on [Wayback/Archive] DISKSPD 2.0.21a. Which back then was an older version as [Wayback/ArchiveDISKSPD 2.1 had been released fall 2021.

I found this out via [Wayback/Archive] Performance benchmarking with CrystalDiskMark on Nutanix: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022, Windows XP | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Fix a “Automatic Repair couldn’t repair your PC” on an UEFI system: when Windows cannot be located

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/22

I got the below error when booting a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro, a machine not just supporting supporting UEFI but preferring it, on which I had copied a backed-up disk image, then moved the hidden Recovery partition to the end of the physical disk (to make room to extend either the OS or DATA partitions).

Fixing it lead me to a trip that was on the boundary of software archaeology, so this blog post has a truckload of archived links to information that is still relevant, but for which the original links have long vanished due to link rot or (often worse) part of the historic information got lost because of migration to new tooling forgot to cover important additions (especially in comments).

One thing that I had to unlearn was MBR disk basics, for instance the fact that on GPT disks a partition can be active (they can only be on MBR disks, but despite UEFI supporting both MBT and GPT, GPT disks are way more common and required). The same holds for partitions having a boot flag: that too only applies to MBR disks. For the same reason, bootrec is only useful for MBR disks. More details towards the end of this blog post. CSM (Compatibility Support Module) booting is the UEFI way to simulate BIOS boot for operating systems that do no support UEFI.

Back to the error at hand:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, History, link rot, Power User, Software Archeology, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows XP, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Ioan Popovici @ MEM.Zone on X: “The Inno setup uninstall switches are the funniest thing ever. SILENT, /VERYSILENT I knew about this but didn’t think that the silent uninstall registry keys would be just SILENT. I’ve fixed that in the bulk uninstall tool but man microsoft should have forced”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/21

For my link archive: [WaybackSave/Archive] Ioan Popovici @ MEM.Zone on X: “The Inno setup uninstall switches are the funniest thing ever. SILENT, /VERYSILENT I knew about this but didn’t think that the silent uninstall registry keys would be just SILENT. I’ve fixed that in the bulk uninstall tool but man microsoft should have forced”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Inno Setup ISS, InnoSetup, Installer-Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »