Posted by jpluimers on 2016/10/07
I’m a fan of sdelete, but the most recent v2.0 update seems – released alongside SysInternals support for nano server – to be a lot slower than the v1.61 version:
I have the same problem with Sdelete on my SSD.The resource monitor showed v.2 writing the disk at approx 40Mb p/swhile v.1.61 at 1,300 Mb p/s SDelete v.2.0 is faulty (shows 100% all the time) and dead slow, don’t use it.Google v.1.61 , it works just fine.
Source: SDelete hangs at 100% – Sysinternals Forums [WayBack]
–jeroen
Posted in Power User, sdelete, SysInternals, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/09/30
There are odd things with the InitialKeyboardIndicators registry setting. Technet only documents bitflag value 2.
According to the docs it should be a bitflag, but sometimes you encounter InitialKeyboardIndicators value 2147483648 (0x80000000) especially as part of the .DEFAULT profile at HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Keyboard.
The problem I had was having these symptoms:
InitialKeyboardIndicators=0 in my local profile at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Keyboard.After reading Num Lock problem: Strange number in InitialKeyboardIndicators in Registry, I set both values to 0.
Now that it is 0 in both at HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Keyboard and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Keyboard, symptoms 4-5 still hold. Strange.
It is not the same problem as Num Lock state not retained after resume from Hybrid Shutdown in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.
If it persist, I might just put a script in: [Partially Solved: re-wired keyboard lol] Registry key “InitialKeyboardIndicators” NEVER keeps NumLock ON + ScrollLock ON (6) at startup and reverts back to NumLock ON (2).
–jeroen
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Event, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, Power User, ThinkPad, UltraNav keyboards, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/09/21
These NirSoft tools helped me finding out about some crashes that never made it to the event log:
At first I thought my own software development caused them, but In the end they were caused by buggy video drivers.
–jeroen
Posted in Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/09/20
via:
Posted in HP Printer Drivers, Power User, Printer drivers, Windows | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/09/20
In the 2009 past, sdelete used the -c parameter to zero wipe clean a hard drive and -z would clean it with a random pattern.
That has changed. Somewhere along the lines, -c and -z has swapped meaning which I didn’t notice.
This resulted in many of my virtual machines image backups were a lot larger than they needed to be.
The reason is that now:
-c does a clean free space with a random DoD conformant pattern (which does not compress well)-z writes zeros in the free spaceIncidently, -c is a lot slower than -z as well.
sdelete -z C:
Where C: is the drive to zero clean the free space.
–jeroen
Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Fusion, Hyper-V, Power User, Proxmox, Scripting, sdelete, Software Development, SysInternals, View, VirtualBox, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/09/20
I wrote two tiny batch files that would dump the environment variables from the registry.
Various reasons:
show-user-environment-variables.bat:
reg query "HKCU\Environment"
show-system-environment-variables.bat:
reg query "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment"
Filtered results:
Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows NT, 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 Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/29
Sometimes RDP limits you to 2048 pixels vertical (or 4096 pixels horizontal)
Just found out why on some Windows versions, the RDP sessions form my 4K monitor has some small black bands on top/bottom: older versions of Windows limit their RDP server to 4096 x 2048.
A 4K monitor will not hit the width limit (as 4K cheats: it is usually “just” 3840 pixels wide), but it does hit the height limitation (2160 is slightly more than 2048: you miss 112 pixels that show as two small black bands).
A 5K monitor is worse: it will hit both limits (5K does not cheat: at 5120 × 2880 it is exactly 5*1024 pixels wide) so you miss 124 pixels horizontally and a whopping 832 pixels vertically.
Don’t buy a 5K monitor yet if you do a lot of RDP work to older Windows versions.
The link below has a table listing various Windows versions, but it omits end-of-life versions so I’ve done some testing: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 share the same limitations as Windows Server 2008 most likely because their latest service packs share the same RDP 6.1 version.
I updated this in the table:
Posted in 4K Monitor, 5K monitor, Displays, Hardware, Microsoft Surface on Windows 7, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/22
I’ve had a SUA3000XLI for years using the USB cable and default Windows support as PowerChute Personal Edition would fail to recognise it and abort installation (so I could not use APC drivers as described on youtube).
A while ago, Liander – the energy distribution company – wanted to replace both the gas and electricity meters to become “smart” during day time. The server configuration load was heavy enough for Windows to indicate the UPS would last about 30 minutes. At night that’s not much of a problem but during 1 hour replacement day-time it would be a problem.
So I bought a SUA48XLBP battery pack (and a SUA039 cable as the cable wasn’t long enough to keep an inch or so air space between UPS and battery pack) so the battery would last about 3 times as long.
Windows would still show it would last about 30 minutes. Strange. So I started looking around and it appeared the SUA3000XLI needed calibration which requires PowerChute. Since PowerChute won’t work, I was almost back at square 1. Almost, as I know knew it required calibration.
In the past I had come across apcupcd but that was a long time ago when it supported a limited set of operating systems and a limited set of features so I never installed it.
But when searching how to calibrate the without using PowerChute, it quickly appeared that the apctest part of apcupsd can do just that: soft calibrate the UPS/battery combo. There are some steps and prerequisites (the most important ones are to turn off the apcupsd and provide enough load and 100% battery charge at start).
Spoiler: the combined UPS/battery-pack now lasts for almost 2 hours which is long enough.
I’m describing this from a Windows perspective and it’s dead easy:
The USB connection to the UPS delivers slightly less options than using a serial cable
Posted in APC Smart-UPS, apcupsd, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, ESXi6, Liander, Power User, UPS, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows XP | 1 Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/15
Solitaire Collection display issues on older ATI/AMD Radeon graphics cards
If you’ve installed Windows 10 and the Solitaire Collection looks like the picture on the right, then there is a good chance your machine has an older ATI/AMD Radeon graphics adapter (or mobile one).
At least these categories are affected:
Despite Microsoft knowing this (heck it fails on some Windows 8 systems as well), it keeps luring people into upgrading their working systems with Windows 10 resulting in non-working systems.
Not a smart move…
–jeroen
via: solitaire collection display problems radeon – Google Search
Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2016/08/12
I can imagine why some people hate the HP Solution Center software: it’s a dork on the language front and not even Unicode-aware.
You cannot set the language form inside it. The language is fixed at install time. You’d think it would take the users language settings for that. But it doesn’t: it takes the users non-Unicode language setting for it. Which – of course – you cannot find when searching in the control panel for Language (or Dutch Taal) you get there by searching for Region (or Dutch Regio).
This succeeds:
Nederlands (Nederland)
It fails when it is set to:
Engels (Verenigde Staten)
–jeroen
Posted in HP Printer Drivers, Power User, Printer drivers, Windows, Windows 10 | 2 Comments »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 