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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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Changing the Windows Profile type: roaming versus local

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/10/26

I  just made this little batch file to start the dialog that allows changing the Windows Profile type:

"%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe" sysdm.cpl,EditUserProfiles

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9 | Leave a Comment »

DYMO Drivers and Downloads for my LabelWriter 400; USB extender to get it connected to a VM under VMware ESXi

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/10/23

DYMO Drivers and Downloads has the Windows drivers for my LabelWriter 400:

I’ve had this LabelWriter for a long time, but I retired my physical Windows XP PCs a while ago so I needed to get it connected to a Windows VM on my ESXi rig.

The rig and printer are almost 10 metre apart (bruto distance through cable ducts) which is beyond the maximum USB distance of about 5 metre. A repeater or Active Cable can get around that limitation. Basically these repeaters are bus powered 1-port hubs. I already had good experience with a 5 metre extender combined with a 7-port external powered USB hub to connect the XP machines to some USB printers in the printer closet (a 5 metre USB cable sometimes would fail; the repeater always worked).

So I bought a 33ft 10M USB 2.0 A Male to A Female Active Extension / Repeater Cable, fed it through the cable ducts and added these devices to my VM:

Now I can print my 36mm x 89mm Dymo 99012 (or compatible) labels again (:

–jeroen

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

Restore music and video from iPod: the iPod_Control\Music folder

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/10/09

When you’re not a frequent iTunes user, and recycle computer systems, then every once in a while you will get you in to a situation where you have Music on your iPod, but not on your PC any more.

Whereas iTunes is great at putting music on an iPod, it cannot get it back.

There are numerous paid tools to get the music from your iPod, but doing it manually is not that hard. Below are a few links to get you started, but they all come down to this:

  1. Your iPod has a hidden folder called iPod_Control in the root
  2. Inside the iPod_Control folder is a folder called Music
  3. Inside the Music folder, there are folders named with letters and numbers like F00
  4. Each numbered folder has media (music, video or even photos!) files with a strangely encoded name like B00N.mp3 or 3DUN.m4v with supported media extensions including mp3 m4a m4p jpg gif tif m4v mov.
  5. The media files contain meta data with song, artist, album, etc.

The steps to copy them back

  1. Do not erase your iPod when opening it in iTunes!
  2. Ensure you can mount your iPod as a disk (the “enable disk use” option in iTunes)
  3. Mount your iPod as a disk in Mac or PC
  4. Ensure you can view the hidden files
  5. Copy the Music folder including all subfolders to your Mac or PC
  6. Unhide the Music folder and all Music and Music/F* folders inside it using this chflags trick from Unhiding Unix Directories | Apple Support Communities:
    1. chflags nohidden Music
    2. chflags nohidden Music/F*
  7. Add these to your iTunes library and have iTunes re-generate the correct filenames from the meta-data

Some links explaining this in more detail:

–jeroen

Posted in Apple, iPod, iTunes, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, MacMini, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9 | 2 Comments »

Pruning your Windows 7+/Server 2008 R2+ installations and huge files in %windir%\Logs\CBS

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/10/02

This applies to at least these versions when you run them under at least VMware Fusion or Workstation:

  • Windows 7
  • Windows 8
  • Windows 8.1
  • Windows Server 2008 R2

Often this folder get huge: %windir%\Logs\CBS (normally C:\Windows\Logs\CBS)

I’ve successfully compressed the content, but even though it is text, they don’t compress that well.

Some reports indicate you can safely delete them when there is nothing wrong with your system nor with Windows Update:

So that’s what I’m going to try next.

Later: done the below on an UAC (Administrator) command prompt.

Cleanup CBS via [WayBack] Gin answering at [WayBack] windows 8 – Why is CBS.log file size 20 GB – Super User::

net stop TrustedInstaller
del %windir%\Logs\CBS\CBSPersist*.*
net start TrustedInstaller

Then I did this to cleanup the C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb file via [WayBack] Gin at [WayBack] windows 8 – Why is CBS.log file size 20 GB – Super User:

net stop wuauserv
net stop bits
esentutl.exe /d %windir%\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb
CleanMgr
reboot

The reboot will restart the stopped services.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008 R2 | Leave a Comment »

windows – Find out whether an environment variable contains a substring – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/09/25

Very smart case insensitive way answered by jeb:

if NOT "%foo%"=="%foo:bar=%" echo FOUND

–jeroen

via windows – Find out whether an environment variable contains a substring – Stack Overflow.

Posted in Batch-Files, Console (command prompt window), Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

How to automate Adobe Acrobat XI Standard to re-compress a lot of PDFs? – via: Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/09/21

A while ago I asked compression – How to automate Adobe Acrobat XI Standard to re-compress a lot of PDFs? – Super User.

Back then it saved about 80% of the total file size. Very substantial.

Recently I needed to convert another (smaller, but still substantial) bunch of PDF documents and saw I forgot to post the solution here:
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Adobe, Adobe Acrobat, Everything by VoidTools, Power User, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »

Batch file to open a specific TCP port in Windows 7 / 2008 Server and up

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/09/18

Thanks to the answer by Kevin Richardson on How to open ports on Windows firewall through batch file, I wrote this batch file that uses the add command of the Netsh AdvFirewall Firewall Commands which requires Admin privileges to run:


:: open port (first argument passed to batch script, second argument is description)
:checkPrivileges
net file 1>nul 2>nul
if '%errorlevel%' == '0' ( goto :gotPrivileges ) else ( goto :getPrivileges )
:isNotAdmin
:getPrivileges
echo You need to be admin running with an elevated security token to run %0
goto :exit
:isAdmin
:gotPrivileges
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Open Port %1 for %2" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=%1
:exit
::pause
exit /b

view raw

open-firewall-port.bat

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

–jeroen

via: How to open ports on Windows firewall through batch file – Stack Overflow

Posted in Firewall, Infrastructure, Microsoft Surface on Windows 7, Power User, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2 | Leave a Comment »

A few links on modifying Windows console (cmd.exe) appearance and behaviour (registry settings, commands, etc)

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/09/14

For my own link archive:

Modify cmd.exe properties using the command prompt – Stack Overflow.

On:

  • mode con: cols=XX lines=YY
  • HKLM and HKCU keys Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\CompletionChar with values like CompletionChar and PathCompletionChar

windows – How to change Screen buffer size in DOS Command Prompt from batch script – Stack Overflow.

On setting the cmd.exe parameters through the registry

  • values like ScreenBufferSize and WindowSize
  • setting the values from the .NET Console class with properties like WindowWidth, BufferWidth and BufferHeight

Microsoft Windows XP – Configure the command prompt.

On setting it through the properties for your console prompt.

For Batch – Where is CMD.EXE options stored?.

On setting the registry values for various console window titles.

–jeroen

Posted in Console (command prompt window), Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Introducing the new Microsoft Remote Desktop Preview app for Mac – Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services) Team Blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/09/11

During the last update of Microsoft Remote Desktop for my Mac, I noticed there is a beta available with a feature very familiar for users of visionapp – ASG-Remote Desktop: it allows you to manage common credentials.

Note the uncommon URLs of both the beta page redirect and the download:

In the mean time, I learned that “Microsoft has acquired HockeyApp. This is a tremendous opportunity to continue to provide developers with the best app development tools and users with the best app experiences.”, but the aka.ms is new to me. Anyone knows what it is about? A successor of go.microsoft.com/fwlink redirects?

New Mac OS X beta of Microsoft Remote Desktop announced.

New Mac OS X beta of Microsoft Remote Desktop announced.

I’m keeping an eye on this, as future features interest me much: Multiple monitors, Clipboard redirection, Remote Desktop Gateway, Remote Resources (RemoteApp and Desktop Connections), and Azure RemoteApp preview.

BTW: I wasn’t aware Remote Desktop made it this many platforms yet, as I’m mainly a Windows 8.x/7, Mac and Android user, but here you go:

  1. Windows 10 Universal Windows platform (Preview).
  2. Windows 8.1.
  3. Windows Phone.
  4. iOS.
  5. Mac OS X.
  6. Android.

–jeroen

via:

Posted in Apple, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, MacMini, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User, Remote Desktop Protocol/MSTSC/Terminal Services, Windows | 1 Comment »

ICA client keyboard shortcuts

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/09/07

Too bad the Citrix Receiver remaps the keyboard shortcuts in a way that keyboards without a numeric keypad is a pain.

First of all, it was a bit tough to find the shortcuts, and I have not found a way to modify them.

Here is what I did find:

Read the rest of this entry »

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

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