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

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Archive for the ‘Windows 8.1’ 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 »

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 »

Translating non-English error messages into English

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/08/06

For a long time, I’ve persuading people to install English versions of their operating systems (especially on server side) at least for some parts of their environment.

The main reason is that searching for English error messages gives you a much bigger chance of finding the cause than non-English ones.

I’m still standing by that recommendation, but life has become a bit easier because of these two sites that offer quite good translations of Windows Error messages in many languages to English:

I like the latter a bit more because of the overview, but the former more because of the catalog.

The way I landed there was because of a search for “Cannot SetData on a frozen OLE data object” which I bumped into for one of my C# .NET projects.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, C#, Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, 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 | Leave a Comment »

logparser – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/07/31

Thanks to Sebastian Gingter for pointing me at Logparser:

Logparser […] powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Windows operating system such as the Event Log, the Registry, the file system, and Active Directory. The results of the input query can be custom-formatted in text based output, or they can be persisted to more specialty targets like SQL, SYSLOG, or a chart.

Common use:

$ logparser [options] [SQL expression]

–jeroen

via logparser – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Posted in Development, IIS, Power User, Windows, 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 | Leave a Comment »

Saving MMC files as MSC and prevent the “save console settings” dialog.

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/07/24

Two tricks when creating MSC files that contain the snap-in configuration of the MMC (Management Console).

Normally you do this once:

  1. Start MMC
  2. Add some snap-ins
  3. Save your configuration as an MSC file

And then when you need that particular configuration, each time:

  1. Open the MSC file
  2. Perform some actions
  3. Close the MMC
  4. Answer No to this question:

---------------------------
Microsoft Management Console
---------------------------
Save console settings to [filename].msc?
---------------------------
Yes No Cancel
---------------------------

The trick around this last question is:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, 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, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

Windows < 8: User variables are not resolved correctly in Windows if they contain %APPDATA% or %LOCALAPPDATA%.

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/07/13

Older Windows versions than 8.x will not correctly expand %APPDATA% or %LOCALAPPDATA% in environment variables: User variables are not resolved correctly in Windows..

This even happens when the registry storage of the environment variables are marked as REG_EXPAND_SZ under these keys:

Basically there are four categories of Windows versions:

  • For Windows 10.x this is fixed.
  • For Windows 8.x and Windows Server 2012 R2, there are updates in KB2919355.
  • For Windows 7.x and Windows Server 2008 R2, there is a hotfix.
  • For older Windows versions, there is no solution.

–jeroen

via: User variables are not resolved correctly in Windows.

Posted in Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Vista | Leave a Comment »

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