The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

  • My badges

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,839 other subscribers

Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category

Downloading a file from the Windows console without first installing a command-line tool

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/10/09

Note that the below methods likely will cause security warnings if a Windows machine has been properly configured, but in most cases at least one of them works.

  1. using cURL (Widows 10 and up)
    curl --url https://speed.hetzner.de/100MB.bin --output %TEMP%\100MB.bin
  2. using [Wayback/Archive] certutil | Microsoft Docs (at least Windows 7 and up; needs UAC elevation)
    certutil.exe -urlcache -split -f https://speed.hetzner.de/100MB.bin %TEMP%\100MB.bin
  3. using PowerShell (at least Windows Vista and up)
    powershell.exe -Command (New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('https://speed.hetzner.de/100MB.bin','%TEMP%\100MB.bin')

I think it works for all versions of curl, certutil, and PowerShell though I did not have anything older than up-to-date Windows 7 (having PowerShell version 3) and recent to test on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, .NET, Batch-Files, CommandLine, cURL, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Development, Windows Vista | Leave a Comment »

Some links on LaunchTM.exe, as I had been unaware Windows can use it to launch TaskMgr.exe

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/10/04

A while ago I learned that since Windows 8, sometimes it uses LaunchTM.exe (which is not even on Wikipedia) to start TaskMgr.exe.

I could find little information about the why, so here are some links with information on when LaunchTM.exe is used (which is confusing) and what command-line parameters TaskMgr.exe can get (also confusing as the order of parameters matter):

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »

Yes, Windows user names can contain spaces

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/10/02

I forgot what triggered me querying for [Wayback/Archive] can windows user names contain spaces – Google Search.

Boy I was surprised that the answer is yes.

Following that I was totally not surprised that:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »

Windows 10/11: Skip Security Questions When Adding Local User

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/30

Based on [Wayback/Archive] Windows 10/11: Skip Security Questions When Adding Local User, [Wayback/Archive] Remove Security Questions when setting up Local Account in Windows and others:

  • if during initial Windows 10/11 setup you add a user with a password, then it will ask you for 3 security questions
  • if you do not want these 3 security questions:
    1. leave the password blank when adding the user
    2. after first logon, press Ctrl-Alt-Del and change the password from blank to an actual password

Via [Wayback/Archive] windows 10 skip security questions – Google Search.

–jeroen

Posted in Authentication, Power User, Security, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

NTFS Sparse Files For Programmers

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/25

Need to check this out some day: cs.exe compiled from [Wayback] sparse.zip which you can download from [Wayback/Archive] NTFS Sparse Files For Programmers

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in C, C++, Development, NTFS, Power User, RoboCopy, Software Development, Visual Studio C++, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

Thread by @LetheForgot to @SwiftOnSecurity on Thread Reader App – Windows boot recovery

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/23

[Wayback/Archive] Thread by @LetheForgot on Thread Reader App:

What we did was use the advanced restart options to launch the command prompt, skip the bitlocker key ask which then brought us to drive X and ran “bcdedit /set {default} safeboot minimal“which let us boot into safemode and delete the sys file causing the bsod.

Not scalable at all but let us get vital systems running while we try to solve the bootloop en masse

Don’t forget to renable normal booting afterwards by doing the same but running “bcdedit /deletevalue {default} safeboot

Just in case another event like the 2024 Crowdstrike debacle happens.

--jeroen

Posted in Encryption, Power User, Security, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Hopefully by now the choco client will be more resilient and informative about Chocolatey maintenance windows (and maybe even about any disruptions mentioned at status.chocolatey.org)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/19

Reminder to check-out of the 2015 issue mentioned in the tweets below has been had any progress.

At the time of tweeting, choco has no notion of [Wayback/Archive] status.chocolatey.org which would be very helpful to point to in case of errors on time-outs on chocolatey server calls especially if it could interrogate and inform of maintenance windows and outages when things fail on the client side.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Shadow IT has entered the chat – got caught running scripts again : sysadmin

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/05

Shadow IT has entered the chat

Many companies have hardly any idea how many scripts are being used by their people to get the chores of day to day work done.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

What to do when suddenly some or many .nupkg became zero length and Chocolatey thinks none of them are installed?

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/04

A few years back I suddenly had almost all my .nupkg files that Chocolatey uses to track installed software become zero sized.

So I posted a question at [Wayback/Archive] Need help restoring .nupkg files having zero size · Discussion #2765 · chocolatey/choco which got this answer:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

With the newest PowerToys version, the Microsoft teams shows they forgot about their CUA heritage

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/30

The most recent Microsoft Power Toys version binds to Alt + Spacebar which indicates the Windows team has forgotten about the CUA (Common User Access) heritage.

[Wayback/Archive] PowerToys bring fun tweaks to Windows 10 and 11 • The Register

And that tells us something else, too: that none of the Microsoft developers involved in building and releasing this tool are old-style keyboard warriors, because since Windows 1.0 in 1985, Alt+space has been the keystroke to invoke the window-management menu. From Windows 2 onwards, the leftmost button on every Windows title bar even looked like a space bar, to remind you. So to maximize a window, it’s Alt+space, x; to minimize, Alt+space, n; to resize with the keyboard, Alt+space, s, and so on.

Via [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on X: “Stealing Alt+Space for a Power Toy, the Microsoft @Windows team has forgotten about its CUA heritage.”.

--jeroen

Posted in Hardware, IBM SAA CUA, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »