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

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Archive for the ‘Windows 9’ Category

What is Swapfile.sys and How Do You Delete It?

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/03/09

Windows 10 (and 8) include a new virtual memory file named swapfile.sys. It’s stored in your system drive, along with the pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys. But why does Windows need both a swap file and a page file?

In summary, the swapfile — swapfile.sys — is currently used for swapping out Microsoft’s new style of app. Microsoft has called these universal apps, Windows Store apps, Metro apps, Modern apps, Windows 8 apps, Windows 8-style UI apps, and other things at various points.

via:

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9 | Leave a Comment »

Finding out when your domain password will expire :: Active Directory :: Admin Tips :: Windows 7 :: Windows Server 2012/2008/2003/2000/XP/NT Administrator Knowledge Base :: KBase Tips :: WindowsNetworking.com

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/02

Here’s how you can find out when your domain password will expire.

net user %USERNAME% /domain

It figures this out for the current logon domain (so it doesn’t work cross-domain) but it is a great help, especially when filtering out just the password information:

net user %USERNAME% /domain | findstr "Password"

This can be done in a more complex way with dsquery or adinfo that are tools to query

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Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

Can I invoke Windows Update from the command line? – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/09/25

For my link archive: Can I invoke Windows Update from the command line? – Super User [WayBack]

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, 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 Server 2016, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

What’s got a vast attack surface and runs on Linux? Windows Defender, of course • The Register

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/26

Penguinistas, rejoice: Tavis Ormandy lets you fuzz Windows

Cool, as they now can fuzz Windows Defender and have Microsoft make it better so all Windows 8+ users can profit from it.

Source: [WayBackWhat’s got a vast attack surface and runs on Linux? Windows Defender, of course • The Register

Repository: https://github.com/taviso/loadlibrary

Via: [WayBack] WAT? – DoorToDoorGeek “Stephen McLaughlin” – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows Server 2016 | Leave a Comment »

17 years ago, C:\nul\nul crashed/BSOD Windows; now $MFT does for Windows < 10

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/26

Source:

History repeating itself: [Archive.is31607 – C:\nul\nul crashes/BSOD then, now it’s this:

Via:

All versions prior to Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 seem vulnerable.

So add $MFT to this list:

The following device names have been known to render a system unstable: CON,
NUL, AUX, PRN, CLOCK$, COMx, LPT1, and CONFIG$.

Oh BTW: history repeated itself this year too. With NUL

In short, Steven Sheldon created a rust package named nul which broke the complete package manager on Windows:

BTW: one of my gripes on learning new languages is that they come with a whole new idiom of their ecosystem: rust, cargo, crates, all sound like being a truck mechanic to me.

–jeroen

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Posted in Development, Microsoft Surface on Windows 7, NTFS, Power User, Security, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Defender, Windows Development, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

PatchCleaner just cleaned 10-20 gigabyte per Windows 7-8.x installation

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/15

PatchCleaner just cleaned out 10-20 gigabyte per VM for most of my Windows 7-8.x VMs. After that, the updates still worked fine.

So it indeed does:

Safely remove all orphaned patch and installer files from your windows installer directory in one easy click

–jeroen

Download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/patchcleaner/

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

Technology Chatting with Jack: SOLVED! – High CPU Usage of Microsoft Security Essentials

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/01

Details: Technology Chatting with Jack: SOLVED! – High CPU Usage of Microsoft Security Essentials

TL;DR:

if MsMpEng.exe uses a lot of CPU, it it to it’s own exclusion list.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9 | Leave a Comment »

Reducing the size of your Windows.edb (Search) and DataStore.edb (Update) databases

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/01/30

Windows Search: Windows.edb

If you use Windows Search (I don’t: I use Everything by VoidTools), your Windows.edb can grow ridiculously large. It is a single file, though it appears to be in two places because there is a symbolic link from C:\Users\All Users to C:\ProgramData :

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb
C:\Users\All Users\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb

This is how to reduce its size:

How to offline defrag the index

  1. Change the Windows Search service so that it does not automatically start. To do this, run the following command in cmd.exe:
    sc config wsearch start= disabled
  2. Run the following command to stop the Windows Search service:
    net stop wsearch
  3. Run the following command to perform offline compaction of the Windows.edb file:
    esentutl.exe /d %AllUsersProfile%\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb
  4. Run the following command to change the Windows Search service to delayed start:
    sc config wsearch start= delayed-auto
  5. Run the following command to start the service:
    net start wsearch

Notes:

  1. I did not perform the last 2 steps as I’ve kept Windows Search disabled.
  2. If you want to reduce the size of the C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Projects\SystemIndex\Indexer\CiFiles\ directory:
    1. Before step 1, choose what kind of Windows Search indexing options you want
    2. Between step 3 and 4, delete the directory

Windows Update: DataStore.edb

Windows Update uses the same database structure and is a single file:

C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb

This is how I reduced its size:

net stop wuauserv
net stop bits
esentutl.exe /d C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb
net start bits
net start wuauserv

Talking about Windows Update: you might also want to Clean Up the WinSxS Folder

–jeroen

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Posted in Everything by VoidTools, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, 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 »

permissions – recursively change owner windows 7 – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/10/27

Slightly updated the answer the /D Y part will recursively accept taking ownership when directory listing is denied in the permissions:

To fix really broken permissions, the best is to run these two commands one after the other:

takeown /F /D Y "C:\path\to\folder" /R
icacls "C:\path\to\folder" /reset /T

The first one will give you ownership of all the files, however that might not be enough, for example if all the files have the read/write/exec permissions set to “deny”. You own the files but still cannot do anything with them.

In that case, run the second command, which will fix the broken permissions.

via: permissions – recursively change owner windows 7 – Super User

–jeroen

Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows Development, Windows Server 2000, 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 »

Batch files to show the User/System environment variables stored in registry – via: Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/09/20

I wrote two tiny batch files that would dump the environment variables from the registry.

Various reasons:

  1. Environment variables can be stored in two contexts: System and User (SET will show them all at once and for instance combine PATH up to 1920 characters).
  2. Environment variables can be set to auto-expand or not, which you cannot see from a SET command (REG_EXPAND_SZ versus REG_SZ).

show-user-environment-variables.bat:

reg query "HKCU\Environment"

show-system-environment-variables.bat:

reg query "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment"

Filtered results:

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Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows NT, Windows Server 2000, 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 »