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

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Windows 7: you can only change the language for Ultimate and Enterprise editions – not Professional (or home)

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/15

It is hard to find in the Windows MUI Knowledge Center for which Windows 7 editions you can change the language. Only when you carefully read Language Packs in Windows 7, you see a table with “Availability and usage” indicating how you can get language packs. To summarize, Complete language packs are only available for:

  • Ultimate Edition
  • MSDN subscribers
  • Registered OEMs
  • Enterprises
  • Server

Virtually all UI languages are complete language packs as shown in the table under Available Language Packs.

In other words: you cannot change the UI language in Windows 7 professional as this post phrases in a much simpler way:

Unfortunately, the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) Language Packs will only work in Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise editions.

So of all Windows 7 Editions, only Ultimate and Enterprise allow you to change the language.

Bummer, as for all Windows 8 editions (same for 8.1 and up) allow you to change the UI language.

–jeroen

via:

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 7 | Leave a Comment »

Ensure DeployIT can execute commands on your Windows machine

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/08

DeployIT (now XL-Deploy) uses a Remote Plugin to connect to other systems. When conncting to Windows systems, it requires WinRM to be configured on the target.

You can either run winrm qc or winrm quickconfig (they are equivalent), then answer y to the question.

C:\temp>winrm quickconfig
WinRM already is set up to receive requests on this machine.
WinRM is not set up to allow remote access to this machine for management.
The following changes must be made:

Create a WinRM listener on HTTP://* to accept WS-Man requests to any IP on this
machine.

Make these changes [y/n]? y

WinRM has been updated for remote management.

Created a WinRM listener on HTTP://* to accept WS-Man requests to any IP on this
 machine.

More detailed instructions are in the overthere/README.md.

–jeroen

via:

Posted in Console (command prompt window), Power User, Windows | 2 Comments »

It was fun while it lasted: Barracuda Copy – Copy End-of-Life

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/05

Copy had some advantages and disadvantages. For instance, it was better handling long file names, character encodings in filenames and a lot easier to configure over a CNTLM proxy than DropBox, but unlike DropBox didn’t keep history of changes.

Alas no more copy.com as of 20160501: [WayBack] Barracuda Copy – Copy End-of-Life.

They suggest using [WayBack] Mover with OneDrive as target: [WayBack] Barracuda Copy – Moving Your Data from Copy

Note that Mover has many more connectors, including cloud storage ones (Box, Copy, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and Yandex.Disk are free):

[WayBack] Connectors • Mover: FTP, Dropbox, Box, GoogleDrive, Copy, Egnyte, Amazon S3, SharePoint, MySQL the list goes on!

For me it means it’s time to think about what kinds of cloud storage I want to use and how to share what data with others at which access level. As I’m already contemplating on how to use ZFS, I now have two storage concepts to think about.

–jeroen

Posted in Cloud, Cloud Apps, Cntlm, Copy.com, DropBox, Infrastructure, NTLM, Power User, SocialMedia, Windows, Windows-Http-Proxy | Leave a Comment »

Registry trick now fails to work for the Yahoo Search Engine update in Java 8 – was: Registry keys to prevent Java installs from adding sponsors (Ask/Google/Yahoo Toolbar, McAfee virus, etc) via: Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/01/20

Anyone who knows a trick to prevent Java 8 from installing the Yahoo search/toolbar in Chrome and Internet Explorer?

This trick used to work in the past, but fails as of Java 8:


Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft]
"SPONSORS"="DISABLE"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\JavaSoft]
"SPONSORS"="DISABLE"
; http://windowsitpro.com/windows-server/how-do-i-place-comments-reg-file
; a semi-colon starts a comment line
; http://superuser.com/questions/549028/how-can-i-prevent-ask-com-toolbar-from-being-installed-every-time-java-is-update/562869#562869
; this switch not only disables the Ask.com toolbar installation and prompt, but disables all of the sponsors potentially bundled with the Auto-update setup/Online setup (Google toolbar, Yahoo toolbar, McAfee something, etc…)

view raw

PreventJavaSponsors.reg

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

–jeroen

The old trick from Registry keys to prevent Java installs from adding sponsors (Ask/Google/Yahoo Toolbar, McAfee virus, etc) via: Super User « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

HP CLJ9500 Service Menu Pin Codes

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/01/15

For my own memory in case I need to do CLJ9500 maintenance:

  • Model: Color LaserJet 9500 / 9500 mfp
  • Service Menu PIN code: 04950003

–jeroen

via: Service Menu Pin Codes.

Posted in HP Printer Drivers, Power User, Printer drivers, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Figuring out Windows Registry Permissions: AccessCheck

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/01/06

I had to verify the rights on some parts of the registry were the same for a lot of machines. So I used AccessChk by SysInternals.

If there were difference, my plan was to use REGINI to fix them.

It appears that AccessCheck does not show the permissions for objects within the specified path, not for the path itself.

As I observed that

accesschk -k hklm\software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell

does not reveal results.

But

accesschk -k hklm\software\Microsoft\Windows

shows:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2 | Leave a Comment »

finding and deleting Windows EFI partitions with wmic and diskpart

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/01/05

DiskMgmt.msc does not allow you to delete EFI partitions.

I tried with WMI first.

wmic has a nice assoc mode that allows you to find associated classes like the logical drive association to physical partitions.

But lets start simple: physical partitions and logical drives.

C:\temp>wmic partition get DeviceID, DiskIndex, Index, Type
DeviceID               DiskIndex  Index  Type
Disk #1, Partition #0  1          0      GPT: System
Disk #0, Partition #0  0          0      Installable File System

C:\temp>wmic logicaldisk get Caption, DriveType, FileSystem, ProviderName, VolumeName
Caption  DriveType  FileSystem  ProviderName  VolumeName
C:       3          NTFS
D:       5

These Associations:

They can be hard to use.

LogicalDisks are bound to a Partition, but a Partition does not need to have a Logical Disk.

I wanted the other way around: finding partitions not having a LogicalDisk association. But that does not seem to be possible with WMI at all.

Heck, detecting EFI partitions with WMI seems to be impossible.

DiskPart

Even though there needs to be a 15 second delay between DiskPart invocations:

you must allow at least 15 seconds between each script for a complete shutdown of the previous execution before running the DiskPart command again in successive scripts

it seems to be the only way to go.

But it is hard, as there seems to be no way to convert from volume (which lists the EFI partition as ESP), to disk+partition.

So a way to automate what How to delete a protected EFI disk partition with Windows 7 or 8 | WinAbility Software describes seems impossible.

Any thoughts on that?

This is what I have done so far

  1. diskpart
  2. list volume
    1. now note the volume that has ESP
  3. list disk
  4. for each disk
    1. select disk #
    2. list disk
      1. to confirm you selected the correct disk
    3. list partition
    4. select partiton #
    5. list partition
      1. to confirm you selected the correct partition
    6. list volume
      1. to confirm the partition indeeds corresponds to the EFI volume
    7. delete partition override
    8. list volume
    9. list partition
    10. for each partition coming after the EFI partition
      1. select partition #
      2. list partition
        1. to confirm
      3. delete partition
      4. list partition
        1. to confirm

Now you can create a new partition on the disk.

–jeroen

via:

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

TaskMgr gripes

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/01/04

Bad bad TaskMgr: showing less information than before.

Bad bad TaskMgr: showing less information than before.

Many people regard the task manager introduced in Windows 8 not as a big success. Of course there is Process Explorer, but you need to download that and it’s quite heavy.

A long thread with a lot of complaints is at The new Task Manager is stressing me like crazy, so if you miss something, look there if it is covered.

The thread also mentions where the TaskMgr stores its settings. Which is important as TaskMgr destroys its in-memory settings when windows auto-update restarts your system. Which it does very often. This is the scenario:

  1. TaskMgr starts
    1. Reads settings from registry
    2. Erases settings from registry
  2. TaskMgr runs
  3. Windows-updates reboots automagically

What Microsoft expects to be the normal scenario is this:

  1. TaskMgr starts
    1. Reads settings from registry
    2. Erases settings from registry
  2. TaskMgr runs
  3. User stops all applications before updating
  4. TaskMgr quits
    1. TaskMgr saves settings to registry
  5. Windows-updates reboots

This also happens in many other scenarios (for instance when logging off, Windows only waits a short while for all applications to stop voluntarily, then just kills them).

This queries the content:

reg query HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TaskManager

This saves the settings once:

reg export HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TaskManager "%APPDATA%\TaskMgr8.settings"

This imports when needed:

reg import "%APPDATA%\TaskMgr8.settings"

Note that the files is a traditional .reg file, but I use a different extension to you cannot accidentally import them.

If you really want, you can install the Windows 7 TaskMgr and have it act as Debugger over the new one (this doesn’t overwrite it, just replace the behaviour) with a registry script. See How to restore the good old Task Manager in Windows 8

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9 | Leave a Comment »

Hack the Remote Desktop .RDP file

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/01/01

Glad I found out about the string to add to a .RDP file to make it connect to the administrative console whenever your remote supports that:

connect to console:i:1

–jeroen

via: Hack the Remote Desktop .RDP file.

Posted in Power User, Remote Desktop Protocol/MSTSC/Terminal Services, Windows | 1 Comment »

robocopy: mirror with security without following junction paths

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/12/24

Command:

ROBOCOPY /MIR /SEC /SECFIX /XJ /W:1 /R:1 source destination

via:

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, RoboCopy, Windows | 2 Comments »

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