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 7’ Category

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How to pin either a Shortcut or a Batch file to the new Windows 7, 8 and 10 Taskbar and start menu? – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/04/29

This nailed it: way easier than all the alternatives involving VB scripts, registry keys and Group Policy Editors.

  1. Create a shortcut to your batch file.
  2. Get into shortcut property and change target to something like: cmd.exe /C "path-to-your-batch".
  3. Simply drag your new shortcut to the taskbar

Source: [WayBack] How to pin either a Shortcut or a Batch file to the new Windows 7, 8 and 10 Taskbar and start menu? – Super User

The trick is step 2. After that you can modify back your shortcut to just the batch file.

–jeroen

Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7 | Leave a Comment »

OSK: How to turn off auto start On-Screen Keyboard on Windows 7 64 bit? – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/04/27

Steps based on [WayBack] How to turn off auto start on-screen-keyboard on Windows 7 64 bit? – Super User.

  1. Turn down the volume of your PC
  2. Run “Control Panel”
  3. Choose “Ease of Access”, then “Ease of Access Center”
  4. Click “Use the computer without a mouse or keyboard”
    • If you forgot the sound settings, and they are at max: the narrative voice will probably deafen you
  5. Uncheck the “use on-screen keyboard” box
  6. Press “Apply” or “OK
  7. Close the “Control Panel”

I got in this situation when I selected the “On-Screen Keyboard” (often abbreviated to OSK; it is serviced by OSK.exe) on the logon screen in the “Ease of Access Center”. After that it would launch after each logon, even after I disabled it on the logon screen.

Back then I needed it because the VM ran on a Mac under Virtual Box which by default not only takes the left Command key, but also messes with some of the other left modifier keys.

The password for a new user I had to logon with needed the modifier keys, so it appears that the logon screen settings during the very first logon get copied to the user profile.

Turning them off on the logon screen does not copy them to the profile again:

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Chocolatey and TLS since early 2020

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/03/19

I was upgrading a few older systems that had been off-line for quite a while.

When installing Chocolatey, I bumped into this error:

C:\bin>"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
Exception calling "DownloadString" with "1" argument(s): "The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel."
At line:1 char:1
+ iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocol ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [], MethodInvocationException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : WebException

So I tried [WayBack] chocolatey “The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel.” – Google Search

Results indicated TLS 1.1 support was removed early February 2020 from Chocolatey because of security reasons, which impacts the installation on older systems:

Note [WayBack] Chocolatey install Error: The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel – Stack Overflow with a temporary workaround for Microsoft Windows Server 2016:

Looks like the security protocol changed:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

–jeroen

Posted in Chocolatey, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2016 | Leave a Comment »

Fixing “one or more critical volumes is not having enough free space” also known as 0x81000033 during Windows backup

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/02/03

If you get this error:

Backup and Restore failed and you receive the following error message: The backup did not complete successfully. Check your backup: Windows Backup skipped backing up system image because one or more critical volumes is not having enough free space.

then you are dealing with error 0x81000033 which usually means your SYSTEM RESERVED partition is full, but might happen on other volumes you are backing up as well.

Windows tries to trick your mind, as the error actually indicates the disk you make your backup to, but in fact it is about one or more of the disks you are backing up.

Most often, this is the hidden partition SYSTEM RESERVED (sometimes called System Reserved):

The SYSTEM RESERVED partition (~100 megabyte on systems originally installed with Windows < 8 and ~350 megabyte afterwards) contains files relating to boot, recovery and BitLocker drive encryption. You find more information about it here:

The minimum free size for volumes when using Windows backup are these:

  • volumes less than 500 megabytes: 50 megabytes free space
  • between 500 megabytes and 1 gigabytes: 320 megabytes of free space
  • more than 1 gigabytes: at least 1 gigabyte of free space

That was indeed the case on my disk:

Freeing space on the System Reserved volume

A quick search for 0x81000033 reveals space issues usually are about the USN Journal which you can configuring using fsutil.

Even though the documentation doesn’t tell, fsutil accepts not just a drive letter as VolumePath, but also a VolumeName. [WayBack] 1_multipart_xF8FF_3_WolfC07.pdf (Chapter 7 of “Troubleshooting Microsoft Technologies: The Ultimate Administrator’s Repair Manual“) gets that right:

volumepath … specify the path to a logical volume (drive letter, mount path, volume name).

So you do not need a drive letter to disable the USN journal, the volumename suffices.

This volume name is the unique NTFS identification for a volume: [WayBack] NTFS Curiosities (part 2): Volumes, volume names and mount points – Antimail

You can find the volume name inside PowerShell by using Get-Volume | Format-List, then on an administrative command prompt running this:

fsutil usn deletejournal /D \\?\Volume{b41b0670-0000-0000-00e8-0e8004000000}\

In my case this wasn’t enough, so I had to assign a drive letter to see that there was a snapshots directory in the root:

Deleting that directory solved the problem.

Related articles:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

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

How to change the User Account Control (UAC) level in Windows | Digital Citizen

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/11/18

Based on, but much shorter than, [WayBack] How to change the User Account Control (UAC) level in Windows | Digital Citizen which summary is

How to change how UAC prompts are shown in Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. How to disable UAC when you no longer want it turned on.

  1. Run UserAccountControlSettings.exe
  2. Pull the settings up to the highest one
  3. Confirm

–jeroen

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

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