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

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Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category

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sorting – Is there a Windows equivalent to the Unix uniq? – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/03/08

TL;DR:

  • Windows 10 has an undocumented /unique switch for sort
  • git for Windows ships with uniq (in a default x64 install, it is at C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\uniq.exe)

From [WayBack] sorting – Is there a Windows equivalent to the Unix uniq? – Super User

This works fine:

dir /s /b *0*.pas *1*.pas *2*.pas *3*.pas *4*.pas *5*.pas *6*.pas *7*.pas*8*.pas *9*.pas | sort /unique > pas-files-with-numeric-names.txt

I need remove duplicate lines from a text file, it is simple in Linux usingcat file.txt |sort | uniqwhen file.txt containsaaabbbaaacccIt will output aaabbbcccIs there a Windows

 

Posted in Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

Windows 10: force to sleep at night, but allow wake up for Windows Updates

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/03/04

I do not like a machine that sleeps after a certain amount of inactivity as I might have a long running job going on.

Usually however, I do like to have a machine off at night, even if I forget to put it asleep.

Exceptions for sleeping are just two:

  • automatic back-up schedule
  • allowing Windows Updates

Luckily you can tell Windows 10 to allow for all cases.

Enabling wake-up during Windows Updates

Note I’m not fully sure which BIOS settings you need to enable – if any- to have this work on all systems. Wake up works on my machine for these [WayBack] psshutdown parameter combinations:

  • psshutdown.exe -h -t 0 (Hibernate)
  • psshutdown.exe -d -t 0 (Suspend)

It fails with these:

  • psshutdown.exe -s -t 0 -f (Shutdown without poweroff)
  • psshutdown.exe -k -t 0 (Poweroff)

The odd thing: Wake-on-LAN can usually wake up the last two.

This is done with the gpedit.msc (via [WayBack] How to prevent Windows 10 waking from sleep when traveling in bag? – Super User, thanks xxxbence)

Follow this path:

  1. Local Computer Policy
  2. Computer Configuration
  3. Administrative Templates
  4. Windows Components
  5. Windows Update

Double click Enabling Windows Update Power Management to automatically wake up the system to install scheduled updatesto show the below dialog.

Enable it:

so it looks like this:

Forcing sleep (in my case hibernate) using the Task Scheduler

In Windows 7..10: disable shutdown/hibernate/sleep/restart from UI I wrote about shutdown /h /f to hibernate a machine. You can force to run this from the taskschd.msc (Windows Task Scheduler):

I wanted history for tasks, so I started taskschd.msc as Administrator, then on the right Actions Pane, I clicked on Enable All Tasks History:

 also explained in [WayBack] How can I enable the Windows Server Task Scheduler History recording? – Stack Overflow and can be verified/set on the console as well:

  • Get as any user: wevtutil get-log Microsoft-Windows-TaskScheduler/Operational
  • Set as Administrator: wevtutil set-log Microsoft-Windows-TaskScheduler/Operational /enabled:true

I named the task __ sleep at 2300 with these settings:

Ensure the Program/script itself is shutdown and the parameters are /h /f:

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

Windows 10: mounting an ISO to a specific drive letter and keeping that drive letter after boot

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/03/01

I tried finding a way with the built-in Windows tools to keep an ISO mounted to a specific drive letter (some software remembers the drive letter it got installed from and disallows changing it).

I couldn’t. Luckily there is WinCDEmu which supports more formats than the built-in Windows tools as well.

[WayBack] WinCDEmu – How to keep images mounted

  1. Right click the ISO file
  2. Choose Select drive letter & mount
  3. In the popup dialog, put check marks if you need any of these options:
    • Disable autorun for this time
    • Keep drive after restart

So I can add that to the list of WinCDEmu features I wrote about before (from newer to older):

WinCDEmu is open source; if you want to build it from scratch, you need these repositories:

 

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

Windows 10 Feature Focus: Backup and Recovery – Thurrott.com

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/03/01

I totally forgot that the Windows 7/8/8.1. stuff (that makes a back-up to VHD/VHDX) is still in the Control Panel:

While Windows 10 doesn’t actually add any new backup or recovery tools, it provides great upgrades to the tools it previously offered in Windows 7 and 8.

Source: [WayBack] Windows 10 Feature Focus: Backup and Recovery – Thurrott.com

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

How to hide an entire drive from prying eyes on Windows 10 | Windows Central

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/25

For my link archive: 3 ways to hide drive letters.

TL;DR:

  1. Using diskman.msc (Disk Management) by removing drive letters or/and changing the mount point to be in another drive.
  2. Using regedit.exe (or other Registry Editor like reg.exe) for a bitmap of drive letters to add a value named [WayBack] NoDrives to
    • globally to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
    • locally for the current user to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
  3. Using secpol.msc (Local Security Policy editor, or find it through gpedit.msc) to add a security policy similar to the registry.

Source: [WayBack] How to hide an entire drive from prying eyes on Windows 10 | Windows Central

After setting NoDrive you have to reboot (logoff/logon isn’t sufficient).

For the NoDrive bitmap: these list below has the values to add for each drive to hide, but it’s easier to use the [WayBack] NT Drive Calculator – The ‘NoDrives’ Registry Key Value Calculator which calculates the Decimal version of the value needed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

When Windows 10 doesn’t recognise your DVD device any more

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/22

Yes, some people still use DVD devices. My mentally retarded brother does every now and then, so it was a big problem that one day he could not put play a photo DVD any more.

This happened:

The selected device was gone. Reboots (including cold ones) didn’t help.

What helped was selecting the “Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller”, remove it, then reboot so Windows would try to re-install the drivers. After that the DVD drive appeared again.

Later I found these two links with similar solutions:

–jeroen

 

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

Windows 7..10: disable shutdown/hibernate/sleep/restart from UI

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/18

I needed this for the Windows 10 machine of my mentally retarded brother: WoL (wake-on LAN) for his machine always works when it is in sleep or deep sleep mode, not every now and then fails when fully powered off.

After it is disabled in the UI, you can still perform it with [WayBack] shutdown.exe, so I added these shortcuts first:

Disabling the Shutdown related actions in the UI consists of two steps:

  1. Removing it from the logon screen using the registry
  2. Removing it from the user using gpedit.msc (which is wrapped in mmc.exe)

I will try to get the registry changes for the second using [WayBack] RegFromApp – Generate RegEdit .reg file from Registry changes made by application (thanks [WayBack] magicandre1981 for suggesting that at [WayBack] windows – How can I use Process Monitor to detect register changes made by GPEdit modifications? – Super User).
The wrapping mmc.exeis easiest to obtain using Process Explorer, and RegFromApp likely needs to run in elevated mode.

If that fails, I can try Process Monitor as suggested by [WayBack] Tom Wijsman in [WayBack] command line – Change group policy using windows CMD – Super User.

The reason for the above is that I want to avoid UI based modifications that are hard to script.

Remove Shutdown options from the logon screen

This is just the registry setting below.

It also removes the reboot/hibernate/sleep options from the logon screen, so you need shortcuts for that.

Remove Shutdown for the regular users UI

This can be done using either gpedit.msc (Group Policy Editor) drilling down to the local policies or secpol.msc (the Local Policy Editor):

  1. Drill down to
    1. Local Policies
    2. User Rights Management
  2. Double click Shut down the system
  3. Remove the groups you don’t want the system to shutdown
  4. Press OK to confirm

See the video below how.

I’ve removed the group Users and kept the group Administrators to allow ShutDown.

Administrators now do need to execute the above commands (for instance shutdown.exe /h /f) in with an UAC administrative token enabled!

If you do not want that, add the users that can perform Shutdown commands to a new group, then aadd that group to Shutdown the system.

If you want to perform this system wide for all users, then it’s faster to change the [WayBack] Windows Explorer NoClose policy (see also [WayBack] Group Policy Registry Reference).

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Ethernet, Network-and-equipment, Power User, Wake-on-LAN (WoL), Windows | Leave a Comment »

Windows <= 10: batch file to open Windows Update panel

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/15

Up until Widows 8.1, you could use wuapp to start the Windows Update panel.

For a while, Windows 10 needed a cumbersome language specific workaround described at Windows 10 – language neutral batch file to start Windows.

That stopped working after a few builds, but I forgot to make a note in which build exactly. Already in Windows 10 build 10122, the icon in wucltux.dll, so this might have been shortly after the initial “RTM” (retroactively named 1507).

So for a while, I had this batch file:

Since then I had to maintain too many locales running Windows 10. So here is the batch file:

for /f "delims=" %%A in ('PowerShell -Command "(Get-Culture).Name"') do explorer "%LocalAppData%\Packages\windows.immersivecontrolpanel_cw5n1h2txyewy\LocalState\Indexed\Settings\%%A\AAA_SystemSettings_MusUpdate_UpdateActionButton.settingcontent-ms"

It uses these tricks:

  1. Set output of a command as a variable (in this case a for loop variable)
  2. Execute PowerShell script in a .bat file
  3. PowerShell Get-Culture (which gets a .NET CultureInfo instance)
  4. CultureInfo.Name property (which has the nl-NL, en-US, etc codes in it)

But now I have extended it to support old and new Windows versions:

if exist %windir%\System32\wuapp.exe (
  %windir%\System32\rundll32.exe url.dll,FileProtocolHandler wuapp.exe
) else (
  %windir%\explorer ms-settings:windowsupdate
)

–jeroen

via: Windows Update Shortcut – Create in Windows 10 – Windows 10 Forums

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

VNC, Windows and UAC prompts

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/15

Since I needed to maintain a Windows PC behind a VPN connection via the console (so not via RDP sessions) including installation of software, I needed a (preferably free or open source) solution supporting elevation through UAC (User Account Control).

For a good description of differences between RDP and VNC, see [WayBack] remote desktop – TightVNC while an RDP session is running – Super User by [WayBack] User Canadian Luke.

Of the many non functional search results, the one suggesting running UltraVNC as a service is the one that really worked: [WayBack] If you install UltraVNC as a service, you can see the UAC notifications and press the buttons… VNC on windows 7 with administrator rights – Super User.

  1. I only needed the “Ultra VNC Server Silent” installation (see screenshot below).
  2. Run the UltraVNC settings (default location for the settings application is C:\Program Files\uvnc bvba\UltraVNC\uvnc_settings.exe)
    1. In the Security tab, be sure to set good passwords for read/write access (VNC Password) and read-settings (View-Only password)
    2. In the  Service tab, ensure the service is installed and if it is stop+start the service
  3. Optionally ensure a TLS or SSH tunnel (as by default ports 5900 and 5800 are unencrypted)
    • I need to research this further, as there seems to be a plugin possibility.

Now I can use Screen Sharing on my Mac to access the machine via a VPN over the VNC protocol. Combined with a Wake On LAN feature in the remote network, this works splendid.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, Remote Desktop Protocol/MSTSC/Terminal Services, Windows | Leave a Comment »

shared folders not visible · Issue #276 · stascorp/rdpwrap

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/11

Reminder to self: check if this rdpwrap issue [WayBack] shared folders not visible · Issue #276 · stascorp/rdpwrap has been resolved by now.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Remote Desktop Protocol/MSTSC/Terminal Services, Windows | Leave a Comment »

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