Sunday, December 31, 2017

linux - Partitioning for Windows 7 and Fedora 11 dual boot

I am new to Linux and would like to install Fedora 11 on a notebook with Windows 7 already installed. Currently the HDD has 2 primary partitions (System Reserved and C:), some free space and an extended partition (D: with user data).


When installing Fedora, I would like to use a recommended partitioning scheme (/boot, swap and LVM for other partitions). However, since only 4 primary partitions are allowed, how do I fit everything onto one HDD?

windows - How to remap special keys on Asus laptop?

I have Asus M51Sn notebook, running Windows 7 (but also Linux, but this question is just about Windows). As you can see in the following image, it has five completely useless keys at the top of the keyboard. I want to remap such keys to useful things.


enter image description here


In this laptop, I have to use Fn+F5 and Fn+F6 to change the brightness, and Fn+F10, Fn+F11 and Fn+F12 to mute or change the volume. These actions are VERY cumbersome, as they need two hands to be pressed and I need to look at the keyboard to find where is the correct key. What I want is to remap the useless keys at the top (as seen in the previous picture) to change brightness and volume.


As I said, I need a solution for Windows 7 (I've already remapped the keys on my Linux system).


I have installed a program from Asus called ATK Hotkey, which is responsible for showing OSD messages about brightness/volume changes. However, this program is very bad, as it runs completely hidden from the user and has NO configuration at all. Not even configuration files, it has just a few EXE and DLL files, nothing more. It is so bad that the "open browser" key on my keyboard always launch Internet Explorer, even if it is not my default browser. If needed, I will happily uninstall this program if I find something better. (remapping keys to useful actions is much more important than OSD messages)


Things I've already tried


Uninstalling ATK Hotkey


Without ATK Hotkey, I can still change the brightness (as it is probably handled by BIOS), but Fn+F* keys don't change the volume anymore.


SharpKeys 3.0


SharpKeys 3.0 couldn't read any of the special keys on my laptop. My bet is that they aren't actual key presses, but instead ACPI events. Thus, I need a way to map some ACPI events to useful actions.


AutoHotkey


I've tried installing AutoHotkey and running a script to find scancode of a key. No luck, these special keys on my laptop don't appear to generate scancode or keypress events. (got this idea from a StackOverflow answer, too bad it didn't work for me)




Update, 4 years later: In 2014, that notebook broke and I stopped using it. In addition, I don't run Windows on my current notebook.

Using multiple displays on my DisplayPort laptop

I have a laptop (HP EliteBook) with a single DisplayPort on the side. I know for sure that with a HP docker station one can use two monitors with this laptop.


Anyway the docker station is somewhat expensive and this is an office laptop so I don't want to buy one for a laptop that isn't even mine.


When working from home I have two monitors: a recent HDMI one and an older DVI (I think DVI-I) one.


Is there any way I can connect both of them (even if they're different brands) to my laptop DisplayPort to use them in an extend-monitor configuration (so that they will appear as different parts of the desktop)?

Saturday, December 30, 2017

osx snow leopard - Cannot continue incremental backups after restoring from Time Machine

I recently restored a machine (running Snow Leopard) of mine from Time Machine and the restore went well. After restoring, I attempted to back up to Time Machine again (on the same external hard drive I have always used) and I noticed that Time Machine was deleting old backups for that computer. After some waiting, it gives me a message saying that there is not enough space on the disk to perform a new backup (it needs 237GB free but there is only ~200GB free). But I want the backups to be added to the previous ones like they have always been in the past.


What should I do? If there is no chance of me getting Time Machine to do what I want it to do, is there software out there that lets me manipulate my TM backups easily? It would really suck to lose all those previous backups just because I had to restore...

Windows 10 Low Memory Warnings when I have plenty of available memory


I have been having an issue where, if my system is up for a few days without being rebooted I will start getting warnings saying "Close programs to prevent information loss" and then a dialogue suggesting I close programs, which I can either cancel or hit "close programs" and Windows will force close some or all of the applications listed in the dialog.


I open task manager, and see that only around 30% of my memory is currently being used:


33% Utilization


When I open resource monitor to see how much committed memory is being used by specific applications, I still see relatively low memory usage:


Resource Monitor


I've had this problem for awhile and have struggled to find a solution. I've investigated causes like a driver leak by using poolmon, but never saw anything in poolmon that matched what others have described as red flags for a driver memory leak. What makes me particularly confused is why Win10 is telling me to close applications when I only have 33% of system memory being used.


Answer



Wild guesses here.


You have disabled your swap file, following someone's random "optimizing" advice.


You have an OS driver of some kind that wants a large block of consecutive physical RAM. But it can't get it because all of the physical RAM has been fragmented over time. And because the swap file is disabled it cannot do a RAM defragment.


Enable your swap file.


As I said, wild guess.


pdf - Print half page or a quarter page

I have a PDF which contains 4 powerpoint diapositives per sheet in landscape mode:



enter image description here



Is there a way to tell adobe reader to print half page for each paper sheet? I would like that Diapositive 1 and 2 stay in one A4 sheet, and Diapositive 3 and 4 stay in another A4 sheet.



I also have another PDF like the previous one, but diapositives are in another order:



enter image description here




Is there a way to tell adobe reader to print one quarter page for each paper sheet? So that Diapositive 1, 2, 3, 4 come each in a different sheet?

laptop - two external monitors

Can i run two external monitors from a dell 1525? I already use one connected via hdmi, and plan to connect another (if possible) via the same method - using an hdmi / vga adapter, as the 1525 only has a single hdmi socket. I have UltraMon installed. Any help much appreciated.

memory - How can I determine the fastest RAM I can put in my laptop ?


I would like to add some RAM to my laptop but I have one small problem: I would like to know what is the fastest speed I can put inside it.


I know from CPU-Z that I use DDR3 RAM:


One piece of RAM is PC3-10700 (667 Mhz) and the other is PC3-8500F (533 Mhz)


I use Acer Travel Mate 5742G if that's relevant. My Chipset is Intel Havendale/Clarkdale Host Bridge.


Answer



You laptop will take up to 8GB and the fastest speed it will take is DDR3 PC3-10600 .
You can buy it here >> http://www.crucial.com/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=E5A23A8EA5CA7304


Attempting to upgrade Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 10 and Receving a Black screen at 79%




I am running Windows 7 Home Premium on an Acer Aspire All In One Z3771.



The first time I attempted to upgrade to Windows 10 I did it through the automatic window on my computer as my upgrade had finally arrived. It stopped at 79% rebooted and never came back up, no mouse cursor, just a black screen. I rebooted and had no operating system. I did a factory rest and had to dl over 100 updates to get back to where I should be. I backed up everything, made a system image and a boot disc.



I have since attempted to upgrade around 20 times since then and at least now it restores my system. It gets through Copying Files and then moves on to Installing Features and Drivers, once that portion has completed to 100% It puts the overall Installation percentage to 79% reboots and goes to the black screen and stays. I reboot and it attempts to recover installation but always reverts to restoring my previous version of windows.



Things I have already tried: Clean Boot, Disabled all anti-virus, Scan disc, Defrag, used the windows media creation tool to install windows 10, unplugged my router during installation after dl windows 10.



What could be causing this? Are there any alternate ways of upgrading to Windows 10?


Answer




Maybe it is a a driver issue, Setuperr.log might provide a clue. It should be exist in %windir%\panther


Add MS-DOS boot option to Windows 2000

I've got an old laptop that is running Windows 2000 & Windows 98 in a multi-boot configuration. I need to add MS-DOS to that list of startup options.




I've already added a primary partition, formatted it for FAT16 and made it bootable, and installed MS-DOS 6.22.



My question is, how do I add my MS-DOS partition to the list of startup options?



More information:



My single hard drive has three primary partitions:




  • 0: FAT32 Windows 2000


  • 1: FAT32 Windows 98

  • 2: FAT(16) MS-DOS 6.22



Currently, the boot-up screen lists Windows 2000 and Windows 98 as options, with Windows 2000 as the default choice.



My boot.ini file currently looks like this:



[Boot Loader]
Timeout=30

Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT

[Operating Systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
C:\="Microsoft Windows 98"


I've tried adding the following line to the end of the boot.ini file, from an answer below:



multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows NT" C:\="MS-DOS"



However, it doesn't work. The third menu choice is listed as "Windows NT", and when selected, I get the following error:



Windows 2000 could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\system32\ntoskrnl.exe.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.


I've tried the following line:




multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\Windows="MSDOS 6.22"


That gives me the same "ntoskrnl.exe" error as shown above.



I've also tried this line in boot.ini:



C:\="Microsoft DOS"



All this does, when selected, is start my Windows 98 installation.



I'm currently using a boot CD to boot to MSDOS, but I would rather boot from the hard disk.

Friday, December 29, 2017

hard drive - Does a unused HDD have a longer lifetime than a used one?



Does a HDD lying in my desk degrade with age (or is its service life driven only by usage)?


If yes, are there publicly available statistics relating to any drive degradation when inactive for long periods, or engineering principles from which reliable estimates could be derived?


Answer



I don't know that there's data, but the general failure modes are spindle bearing wear and media damage - neither of which will occur in a powered-down drive of modern design (self-parking heads). As long as the drive is stored in an environment within manufacturer's specs, the drive should remain physically usable for decades. Stored data may fade over that time scale, however; if data preservation is the primary goal, it's probably sensible to connect the drive and perform a backup/restore cycle every year or so.


esys NoteBook SZ900P - Unable to load drivers during Windows 7 Setup through USB boot?

I have esys Notebook SZ900P, which was came with preloaded Ubuntu. Now i need to work on Windows so i am trying to install Windows 7 from USB Pen Drive but it prompt me to Load Drivers for CD/DVD drive device drivers



It is showing following message:




A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, CD, >DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now.
......
...





I am looking for it's ACHI Serial ATA drivers,It is upgraded hardware so windows 7 is not loading drivers for it.



Can anyone suggest me drivers for this laptop or download link for serial ata drivers for various Intel Chip set. I have searched alot for getting drivers and solution for it, but fails to get any.. Hope someone have some idea about these, so i thought to ask here to my other mates.



Please do not suggest this to me..



Thanks in Advance.

macos - How to set sending Account with keyboard shortcuts in Apple Mail (or Sparrow)

If you have more than one email account setup in Apple Mail or Sparrow, it's nice to be able to select the one you want to send a message from without having to use the mouse.


How can this be achieved with Keyboard shortcuts?


(Note that the method in http://tiptorial.net/tips/17-creating-a-keyboard-shortcut-to-set-the-current-account-in-apple-mail breaks because System Prefs messes with the menu title)

windows xp - auto refresh taskbar


How do I auto-refresh taskbar, or whatever it is called.
Auto-refresh so that when you kill a certain process, it is automatically updated. And the icon that corresponds to that process also disappears in the taskbar after you killed the process. Is there any registry trick that could do that? In windows xp of course


Answer



I don't think a registry entry exists, but it is possible programmatically. You can utilize that code into a loop that runs in the background.


Thursday, December 28, 2017

Windows 7 updates getting accumilated



I have a problem with my company PC which is running Windows 7 and is in active directory. Some administrative actions are disabled in it.




About 3 months ago, several system updates appeared and when I restarted the PC to install updates, one update got left behind. Every time when I shut down PC, this update gets installed. System doesn't report that the update failed, but it appears again and again in next shutdowns too.



After several days, another set of updates appeared. When I restarted the machine to update them, then there were two updates which never gets applied.



Few days back, another set of updates appeared. Now I have 4 updates which never gets applied.



How can I get these updates to install properly? or is there any other way to get rid of them? It takes a lot of time to shut down my PC because every time it tries to install these 4 updates.


Answer



Windows Update continually repeats same updates




Also in a command prompt do a >SFC /ScanNow to check overall file system integrity.



One method I have used before to address this problem, I stopped the insanity of the thing basically failing automated, To try and do the same update Manuel, and to learn what or why.



Find the KB# of the update, find that artical on microsoft site that tells about it. Read what it does and any pre-requisites it has. Read about what files it was going to replace. Read any interesting things that may be presented on how it Fails. Understand ~20% of what is going on (at least:-).
Then find the seperate installer package for that update, which can be made for deployers and can usually be found as a single item to manually download and install.



Why would the seperate update that manually installs work correct when the automated one fails? , could be related back up there to the First thing, the download cache was flawed. . Other clues exist within the MS information and data about a specific update, you finally have a way better idea of what is going on, and what may be failing because of changes you made, or software. It could be it is installing something that you dont even want or need, or does not even apply to your computer.



For any single specific update , just like installing any specific program, it helps (again) to discover the name of the update the KB#, then web search for that specific update number , here or on the rest of the web. That will also get you much better information , vses a general "updates are failing" (they do that). Even the above question could have included the KBnumber of the updates your specifically having troubles with.


partitioning - what's the changed situation with partitions on ssd?



i've heard it said- why partition with ssds



i'm wondering why they would say that. Is the situation different from with spinning disk style hard drives.




The reasons with spinning disk drives, were



-smaller partitions are quicker to defragment



-could be quicker to format (though there is quickformat!)



-organization separating data and system onto separate partitions, and can wipe the system partition.



I know somebody may look at those reasons and still not partition a drive. But I am interested in what the reasons are, with partitioning an SSD drive, how the situation differs if at all?




Somebody suggested why not buy a few small SSDs. Though surely the same logic would apply to partitioning non-SSD drives? And surely with either, one is limited by the number of SATA ports.



And is the issue of partition alignment something that is relevant to both SSD and non-SSD? i've only heard of it recently, in SSD times.


Answer



The reason for using a partitioning scheme would be to allow for the presence of a Master Boot Record. Since one is only needed on the first hard drive, subsequent hard drives can have only a single volume taking up the full disk.



Partition alignment isn't a big deal in platter drives since they're so slow regardless that it really won't make that much difference.


Wednesday, December 27, 2017

macos - How to use Seagate hard drive for both Mac and Windows

I recently bought a Seagate for Mac 1 TB external hard drive. When I connect to my MacBook through the FireWire, it works fine, but I also have media on my Dell laptop which is running Windows Vista. When I connect the hard drive to that laptop using the USB cable, Windows doesn't recognize it. What am I doing wrong?

How can I disable the automatic login of the last active user in Windows 8.1?


I'm running Windows 8.1 Pro with two user accounts, mine being a password-protected administrator and the other being a standard user with no password.


Now, when the latter logs in, shuts the computer down, and I turn it back on, I'm not taken to the login screen — instead, Windows logs me in as the standard user again. Seems like Windows 8 will automatically log in the last active user (unless, of course, that user has a password). I'd like to always see the login screen on startup, no matter who last used the computer.


(I've had this problem before and was able to solve it, but I can't remember what I did to made it work.)


There are a plethora of suggestions on the internet, but none of them actually worked for me. Here's what I tried:



  • In netplwiz, check the "users must enter a password [...]" box

  • In regedit, change the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\UserSwitch\Enabled to 1 (will only work once, resets after restart)

  • In gpedit.msc, add a script to do the above that runs every time someone logs off (as described here)

  • Use the "User List Enabler" tool that does the above (appears to do what it says, but what it does doesn't work in the first place)

  • In regedit, create a key called HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\DisableAutomaticRestartSignOn and set it to 1


By "doesn't work", I mean there's no effect at all.


I vaguely recall my previous solution having to do with lusrmgr, specifically, with removing some user from the Administrator group ... removing some user's (or group's) rights to change the UserSwitch\Enabled registry value perhaps?


I'd much appreciate any help, as this is really bugging me. I'd rather not set a password for the other account, or force logging in with Ctrl-Alt-Del, just for this reason.


Answer



Alright, I found the source that helped me solve the problem before, and I finally got it to work. :)


Here's my attempt at a definitive answer for everyone wanting to disable the auto-login in Windows 8.
For the solution that worked for me, see "preferred approach".


The easiest thing to do is to give every user a password, so they're not being logged in automatically. If they still are, you need to make entering a password mandatory: press Win+R, type netplwiz, and check the box that says "Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer".
You can also require users to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to login: in the "Advanced" tab of netplwiz, check the box that says "Require users to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete".


These two approaches are subpar for those who don't want their workflow disturbed, including me.


I learned about this from Steven's answer.


Press Win+R, type regedit, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System, and change the value of the dontdisplaylastusername key to 1. The same can be achieved using a security policy (see Steven's answer for details).


This is also not ideal for everyone in that it changes the way the login screen works: you'll have to type not just your password, but also your username, when logging in.


I got this solution from a Microsoft site.


It involved opening regedit, navigating to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System, and changing the value of the DisableAutomaticRestartSignOn key to 1.


It seemed to be just the answer I needed — only later did I realize, however, that it only applied to Windows Server 2012. (Which would explain why the key wasn't there in the first place, and why creating it had no effect.)


We're getting closer to my preferred method!


In regedit, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\UserSwitch, and change the value of the Enabled key to 1.


Now this would be the perfect solution — except the value resets every time you restart the computer, so this trick will work at most once.


Lots of sites suggest creating a script that runs during logoff and sets the value back to 1 every time. Here's how to do that:



  • Press Win+R and type gpedit.msc.

  • In the left column, navigate to "User Configuration" -> "Windows Settings" -> "Scripts (Logon/Logoff)", and double click "Logoff" on the right.

  • Click "Add..." and type the following:

    • Script Name: C:\Windows\System32\reg.exe

    • Script Parameters: add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\UserSwitch /v Enabled /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f



Source: http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-disable-automatic-logon-of-last-user-in-window-8/
That same site also provides a handy tool that will do that automatically for you.


Chances are this approach will work for you. It didn't for me, however, most likely because one of the accounts on my computer is not an administrator.


This last approach was one way to set the UserSwitch\Enabled key every time you logoff. Wouldn't it be even better, though, if Windows wouldn't keep resetting it in the first place?


This is the approach I ended up using, and that finally worked for me. I learned about it in an eightforums.com post by NiFu, which was immensely helpful to me.


Here's what to do, paraphrased from that post:



  • In regedit, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\UserSwitch.

  • Right click the "UserSwitch" folder and click "Permissions...".

  • Click "Advanced", then "Disable inheritance" and select "Convert inherited permission into explicit permission on this object."

  • Next to "Owner: SYSTEM", click "Change...", type Administrators in the box at the bottom, click "Check Names" to expand the name, and click "OK".

  • Check the box that says "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects".

  • Select "Administrators", click on "Edit", and make sure that "Type" is set to "Allow" and that "Full Control" is checked.

  • Select "SYSTEM", click on "Edit", set "Type" to "Deny", click "show advanced permissions", and make sure the "Set value" box is checked and all the other boxes are not. Also check the box that says "Only apply these permissions to objects and/or containers within this container".

  • Click "OK" and similar buttons until you're back to the first dialog you opened.

  • Now confirm you did things right: Click "Advanced" again, in the "Effective Access" tab, click "Select a user", type "SYSTEM", click "OK", and click "View effective access".

  • Verify that there's an X next to "Full Control" and "Set Value", and that all the other entries still have a green checkmark.


Now set the Enabled key to 1 again. This should be the last time you have to do that, as SYSTEM can no longer interfere now.
The next time you start your computer now, you should see the regular login screen with user icons and all, regardless of who last used the computer.


Phew. Hope this helps a few people who've run into similar issues. :)


Printing two pages per sheet, how to keep first page on the right side in OpenOffice?

I'm writing a book with OpenOffice 4.1.1 and I'd like to print sheets of the book for proofreading. The book uses page styles extensively and the first page is set to be the right page. I can select to print two pages per sheet, but that makes the first page print on the left, and once that happens, all right pages are printed on the left side and left pages are printed on the right side.


Here's what I've tried so far:



  • Booklet printing completely messes up the page order. I won't be
    stapling this into a booklet.

  • Changing the page order doesn't help


Is there a clean and simple way to do it?

windows 7 - Installer is asking about x86 and x64 - what are they?

I'm running Windows Vista 32-bit with 2 GB RAM. I want to install Windows 7.


The install is asking what architecture, X86 or X64. I was thinking it would be asking 32-bit?


What's going on?

data recovery - Why should we wipe disks multiple times?




There exists various ways of destroying the data on a disk. Even simple wipes differ, some disk utilities give these options:





  • Format (does not actually wipe)

  • Wipe 1 time with zero

  • Wipe 1 time with random bits

  • Wipe 7 times with zero / random bits

  • Wipe 14 times with zero / random bits



Are they implying that data can be reserved somewhere else instead of writing to the disk (even cache exists the data should go to the disk I think), or the disk is totally not trustworthy by providing such options?


Answer



First, it should be noted that these ideas apply more to Electromechanical Hard Drives due to how they work at an electrical level to store files vs. a Solid-state drive, and utilities like this might actually reduce the life span of a SSD (especially something like a cheap USB thumb drive made with low grade electrical components). The idea behind these utilities is to completely erase data on a disk as to make it unrecoverable from any means of data recovery methods (including low level scans).




When you save a file to a hard drive, the file is stored electromagnetically on the disk, this means a small charge is being held (magnetically) to maintain the state of those bytes across the various sectors on the hard drive. Retrieving the file from the disk is actually quite a complicated process, both at an electrical level and the software side. To this, most operating systems interact with the hard drive through the use of a file system, a part of which is something known as the file table, which keeps track of directory/file nodes, among various other things.



When you delete a file, some file systems won't actually remove the file from the disk (electrically), instead they will just remove the entry from the file table and leave the underlying bytes on the disk. This is why you can use some un-delete utilities to recover lost data. This holds true if you wipe a partition or do a quick format of a drive. The data is still there, even though you said to delete it, it's just the higher level links that point to where the data is on the disk that are removed. This is in part to save time and to spare the hard drives mechanical parts. Performing a normal format (vs. quick) has a similar effect to writing all 0's to the drive.



Most hard drives, have multiple layers of magnetic material to write to. So when you overwrite an area of the disk with new data, some of the old underlying data might have a chance to be around (magnetically), even though it's removed from the file table entries and there are new bytes written to that area, there are still some (expensive) methods of recovering some data (not all data, and not necessarily reliably, but a chance enough for people to try it).



To counter this paramagnetic effect, wiping utilities will overwrite the entire disk with 1's or 0's (to flip all bits on/off) and then possibly random data to ensure any underlying data is fully overwritten. It should be noted that there are various standards as to what is deemed appropriate for data removal from magnetic material by various entities. And there is some debate on whether you actually need to wipe any more than once with random data (or 1's/0's), and I won't comment on whether more is better or not as to avoid such a debate on here, but I will say that for the average user just doing the 1 time pass or a normal format is typically sufficient to destroy most of your relevant data (at least the average user won't be able to recover it).



However, if you truly want to destroy the data and not be paranoid, you would degauss the hard drive then give it a thermite bath.



Tuesday, December 26, 2017

archiving - wget Download webpage completely into one file and an assets folder


I am trying to emulate right-clicking and "Saving As, complete" in Chrome or Firefox. I tried this:


wget -E -H -k -K -p http://gizmodo.com

But that created a several folders, one for each domain that hosts resources. I also tried


wget -r -N -l inf --no-remove-listing -x http://gizmodo.com

Both from here, if anyone is interested. I also tried here, here, and here but none of those did what I wanted.


But that did not download all the dependencies. What I really want is what Chrome and Firefox do, which creates one index.html file, with all the dependency file paths modified to point to all the dependencies that sit in an 'assests' folder next to it.


I've also tried the wget manual, and can't find anything more than what it is already doing. Is this even possible?


Answer



From the WGET manual:


--no-directories (or -nd)


Do not create a hierarchy of directories when retrieving recursively. With this option turned on, all files will get saved to the current directory, without clobbering (if a name shows up more than once, the filenames will get extensions .n).


--no-host-directories (or -nH)


Disable generation of host-prefixed directories. By default, invoking Wget with -r http://fly.srk.fer.hr/ will create a structure of directories beginning with fly.srk.fer.hr/. This option disables such behavior.


--page-requisites (or -p)


This option causes Wget to download all the files that are necessary to properly display a given HTML page. This includes such things as inlined images, sounds, and referenced stylesheets. ...


--no-parent (or -np)


Do not ever ascend to the parent directory when retrieving recursively. This is a useful option, since it guarantees that only the files below a certain hierarchy will be downloaded.


--convert-links (or -k)


After the download is complete, convert the links in the document to make them suitable for local viewing. This affects not only the visible hyperlinks, but any part of the document that links to external content, such as embedded images, links to style sheets, hyperlinks to non-HTML content, etc.


Those options should help.


USB 3.0 flash drive doesn't work on USB 3.0 hub?


I purchased a Transcend 128GB USB 3.0 flash drive last month. It does not work on the two USB 3.0 ports on my computer, which has an ASUS Rampage III Extreme motherboard. The device doesn't even light up at all. Yet other flash drives (non-3.0) work fine on those ports. An Anker USB 3.0 hub that I just purchased works fine, too.


Plugging that Transcend flash drive into another USB port (2.0, presumably), it lights up and is recognized immediately.


What gives?


Answer



I did some more research and looked in my Device Manager. I did see one "USB Hub" or some such with an exclamation point on it. And some of my research suggested updating drivers. So I went to ASUS' site and downloaded USB 3.0 drivers, figuring it couldn't hurt, even if they were already installed.


It turns out they were not already installed. So my problem really just boils down to the fact that I didn't have USB 3.0 drivers. I just assumed that Windows 7 automatically downloaded and installed them when I changed out motherboards years ago. I guess that's what I get for trusting Windows 7.


So, let this be a notice for anyone else who might be having similar issues: Don't trust Windows 7's automatic driver installation. Download and install the drivers yourself for the USB 3.0 ports on your computer.


Sorry for wasting everyone's time for such a trivial issue.


windows 7 - Frequent BSODs... BIOS settings?


I've been getting very frequent BSODs after putting together my new setup...



  • Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2

  • Intel Core i5-760 2.8 GHz

  • G.SKILL Ripjaws 8GB DDR3-1333 SDRAM

  • OCZ Vertex 96GB SATA II SSD

  • Hitachi 1TB 7200RPM SATA II HDD

  • Sapphire Xtreme Radeon HD 5830 1GB GDDR5

  • OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W modular PSU

  • Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit


I've attached a screenshot, which shows that ntoskrnl.exe (a frequent cause, not shown in BSV) and ntfs.sys are causes for this BSOD. Settings I've changed in the BIOS are changing the SATA mode to AHCI from IDE, enabling hard drive S.M.A.R.T. capabilities and changing the primary graphics adapter to PCI Express.


However, I'm still getting these BSODs and can't figure out the issue. Right before a BSOD, everything slowly freezes up, programs become non-responsive and some problems close spontaneously.


What do these BSODs mean and what do I do to prevent them from happening?


enter image description here


Answer



I no longer have these parts, but the motherboard was defective and ended up dying.


partitioning - Windows Vista partition will not resize using normal tools. Any advice?



I have a 120GB hard drive split into two partitions (C and D). Windows Vista is installed on the C partition with most of my files on D.



As I am starting to run out of space within the C drive of my laptop I want to take 20GB of space from the D partition and add it to C, but after trying out the Disk Management application that comes with Vista I have been able to take space from D but not extend it to C. I've also tried using the command line but received an error once again.




I don't really want to have to reinstall everything again, and I've heard that many of the typical programs out there tend not to work so well with Vista. Is there any way to extend the space on C?


Answer



I would take a look at Gparted.



Gparted allows you to rearrange, shrink, grow and do many "funky" things with hard drives.



It may not work if you have a special setup or use Bitlocker/Full Drive encryption.


batch rename - Bulk Folder Renaming Powershell Script

The script below is used for Bulk Folder Renaming.


However I wanted to make this as a Generic Script so users can give input and use it accordingly.



  1. This script has 3 inputs

    • a) Enter the Source Folder path

    • b) Extension of the Files and

    • c) New File Name to be renamed



All are fine except the c) New File Name to be renamed


$Rename = input
$newName = '$Rename_{0:d6}{1}' -f $i , $extension # $rename input cannot be used here #

I think some thing wrong on the above line, is there any way to get this done?


Write-Host "Renaming Bulk Files" -BackgroundColor Green -ForegroundColor White
$Source = Read-Host "Enter the Source Path Of the Folder, Ex: D:\Test"
$SourceExtension = Read-Host "Enter the Destination File Extension, Ex: *.pdf or *.jpg"
$Rename = Read-Host "Enter the File Name to be renamed"
$i = 0
Get-ChildItem -Path $Source -Filter $SourceExtension |
ForEach-Object {
$extension = $_.Extension
$newName = '$Rename_{0:d6}{1}' -f $i , $extension
$i++
Rename-Item -Path $_.FullName -NewName $newName
}

windows 7 - Mouse sensitivity not being applied


I have two PCs, one running Windows XP SP3 and the other running Windows Embedded Standard 2009 (WES). WES is similar to Windows XP, I think.


Using TweakUI > Mouse > Mouse sensitivity, the default for the double-click sensitivity is "50". Testing this on the icon on the right (or in Control Panel > Mouse > Double-click speed), I can see that if I click on the far left of the icon, quickly move the mouse to the far right and click again (ie. a double-click spaced ~30 pixels apart) then a Windows double-click event is generated. Fine...but not what I want.


So I change the "Double-click" value in TweakUI to "2" and retest and now the clicks must be really close together to generate a double-click event. Great.


Problem is that on reboot, the value resets to "50" on the WES PC (but remains "2" on the XP box).


I found the relevant registry settings (which apply to Windows 7 and Windows 8, I think):


[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse]
"DoubleClickHeight"="4"
"DoubleClickWidth"="4"

and for the "Mouse sensitivity > Drag" setting, this is:


[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
"DragHeight"="12"
"DragWidth"="12"

On the WES box, the "Drag" setting is being faithfully saved, either using TweakUI or the registry...but the "Double-click" setting is resetting to "50", even though the registry continues to read "4"!


Any idea how to permanently set the double-click sensitivity to "2"?


Answer



It would seem either another (mouse) "driver" or third party software is perhaps overriding the Windows settings.


As per comments:



...the touchscreen attached to this industrial PC had put something into HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run which was stomping on the Windows settings.



Windows Store not recognizing Admin privileges



I'm trying to upgrade a new Dell laptop with Windows 8 to Windows 8.1. Using the default user logon created at initial boot, trying to upgrade to 8.1 via the Windows Store, I get the following error:





"You need to use an account with Administrator privileges to install
Windows 8.1, try logging in with the user account of an administrator
of this PC and trying the update again."




Putting aside the grammatical error of Windows Store, I can't tell why it is not recognizing admin privileges.



Doing a





"net localgroup Administrators"




lists the username in the group.



Creating an additional user with admin privileges to perform the install seemed to work but I don't understand why the original account didn't.


Answer



Creating an additional user with admin privileges to perform the install seemed the only workaround that I could find to install the 8.1 update.


How can I import a security template in Windows 7 using command line?

I would like to remotely deploy some specific change in Security Policies to several computers via remote console (SSH).
This is my just exported security template .inf file, extracted according (mostly) to these instructions :


[Unicode]
Unicode=yes
[Registry Values]
[Privilege Rights]
SeCreateTokenPrivilege = CRON
[Version]
signature="$CHICAGO$"
Revision=1
[Profile Description]
Description=PruebaCRON

It just adds the user "CRON" (homemade) to Local Security Policy snap-in to allow that user to 'Create a token object'.
When I try to import it in another computer (both Windows 7 SP1, 64 bits) doing this:


secedit /import /db secedit.sdb /cfg PruebaCRON.inf /overwrite /log MyLog.txt

... I get a warning message ("overwriting is dangerous, blah blah blah..."), I accept, and there is no error message, but nothing happens. There is no changes at all at secpol.msc.
The log file is a 2 bytes size, with no content (?).
Does anyone know how this command work, or any other method to import this simple change (just adding the user "CRON" to 'Create a token object') to Security Policies in Windows 7 via command line?

sd card - How to make sdcard (really) read only?


Like many people, I've always though that sdcard lock is physical protection. But I've just bought cheap sdcard reader which doesn't really care much about it. It made me realize that it's not physical protection and can be easily bypassed by infected OS. As it contains really important data - is it possible then to make sdcard REALLY read only medium? I've chosen memory card because I need storage easy to be destroyed physically and difficult to be destroyed programmatically.


Answer



SD Specifications Part 1 Physical Layer Simplified Specification, section 4.3.6 "Write Protect Management"



[...] It is the responsibility of the host to protect the card. The
position of the write protect switch is unknown to the internal
circuitry of the card.



So, an infected system could potentially ignore the write protection. I'd use something that can't be physically rewritten like CD-R or DVD-R if you need more storage. Dual-layer DVDs can have around 8 GB of usable space. Discs can be easily destroyed (just try to fold it in half, it'll break. You might want to wear safety glasses or something.)


Excel 2013 Macros/ sub procedures

After creating sub procedures, they are not considered part of the macro group. Why? How should a sub procedure be created so it is included in the list of macros?

active directory - Group Policy Object with Max Password Will Not Take Affect




We are having an odd issue with out AD. We have changed the password policy to be as follows:



Enforce password history 5 passwords remembered
Maximum password age
120 days Minimum password age 1 day
Minimum password length 8 characters


This policy has been in affect since before January of this year. Our users are still having to change their password every 42 days, though. I understand that the policy doesn't take effect until your password has been changed. Our users have changed their passwords a handful of times since the change.




On the server when I run net accounts I see the following:



Force user logoff how long after time expires?:       Never
Minimum password age (days): 1
Maximum password age (days): 120
Minimum password length: 8
Length of password history maintained: 5
Lockout threshold: 15
Lockout duration (minutes): 5
Lockout observation window (minutes): 5

Computer role: PRIMARY


Great! 120 days for Maximum Password! Now I check on a specific user with net user



User name                    Removed
Full Name Removed
Comment
User's comment
Country/region code 000 (System Default)

Account active Yes
Account expires Never

Password last set 5/5/2015 2:54:35 PM
Password expires 9/2/2015 2:54:35 PM
Password changeable 5/6/2015 2:54:35 PM
Password required Yes
User may change password Yes

Workstations allowed All

Logon script
User profile
Home directory
Last logon 4/9/2015 4:13:10 PM

Logon hours allowed All


Ok, perfect! 9/2 is 120 days after 5/5! This is typical, however. Before this user changed their password on 5/5 it was showing a date beyond 5/5 (when their password actually expired.




Today I found a new-to-me way to check a users password expiration. So I check this same user with this tool that uses Get-ADUserResultantPasswordPolicy to determine MaxPasswordAge (I was able to confirm it was going down the $accountFGPP -ne $null route by manually running Get-ADUserResultantPasswordPolicy. The function spits this out:



Password of account: SameUserAsBefore expires on: 06/16/2015 14:54:35


Wait, what? net user had said the password didn't expire until 9/2! When I ran Get-ADUserResultantPasswordPolicy on this user I found the root of the issue:



PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-ADUserResultantPasswordPolicy (Get-ADUser SameUserAsBefore -properties PasswordExpired, PasswordNeverExpires, PasswordLastSet)

AppliesTo : {CN=Domain Users,CN=Users,DC=REMOVED,DC=LOCAL}

ComplexityEnabled : False
DistinguishedName : CN=Default-#####,CN=Password Settings Container,CN=System,DC=REMOVED,DC=LOCAL
LockoutDuration : 00:30:00
LockoutObservationWindow : 00:30:00
LockoutThreshold : 10
MaxPasswordAge : 42.00:00:00
MinPasswordAge : 1.00:00:00
MinPasswordLength : 7
Name : Default-#####
ObjectClass : msDS-PasswordSettings

ObjectGUID : GUIDRemoved
PasswordHistoryCount : 3
Precedence : 1
ReversibleEncryptionEnabled : False


And here I am, dumbfounded as to why it's 42 days despite the Group Policy I have set which is enforced and linked at the domain level. It's set to apply to Authenticated Users. I have tried deleting this and remaking it in case the policy had become corrupt in some way.



Does anyone have any idea why the group policy isn't actually taking affect?


Answer




This issue has finally been solved! A whole new world of Windows Server has been revealed to me.



From Mec Beau and edited by Excellll:




By creating GPO on OU, This will not work for what you're trying to do. GPOs pertaining to Password policies can only be set at the domain level. However, In order to apply a policy to a subset of domain users then you need to use Fine-Grained password policies.



These can be applied at the group level, so you need to ensure all the users you wish to affect with this new policy are a member of the appropriate group.



To do this on a Windows 2012 domain, do the following from a DC .





  1. From the Start Screen type DSAC.EXE to start the Directory Service Administrative Center.

  2. Navigate to the System\Password Settings Container

  3. Right Click and select New or use New under the Tasks menu.

  4. Choose Password Settings

  5. Create a New Password policy either for a User or a group.

  6. Set its Precedence in case if u have multiple policies created, so lower the number higher the priority.




It's fairly self-explanatory from there.



Monday, December 25, 2017

Will there be no security updates for Windows Home Server 2011 after 12th April 2016?




For Windows 7 there will be extended support, but will there be one for WHS 2011? According to this tool there is none. Does this mean that there won't be any security updates anymore? So WHS 2011 is finally dead? I thought that because it is a server product it has a greater lifetime than Windows 7 for example.


Answer



Windows Home Server is a home product and unfortunately, it isn't covered by their extended support policy.



If there is no replacement product launched and enough users kick up a fuss, they may extend it - but, you can't count on anything beyond the official support lifecycle page you linked to.


windows 7 - Lost files on ext3 external drive

I have a 500Gb portable HDD that I formatted with ext3 to use with an NAS. Yesterday I was reorganizing the thing and dragged a folder with all my old photos, a few videos, old documents, etc. to a new folder I had created. Once it started moving the files it said there was over an hour remaining to move all the files, so I clicked the Cancel button. After I did that, the folder I was moving just disappeared.


I found a program called DiskInternals Linux Recovery that is supposed to be able to recover the info, but it won't work over my network. It just sees the HDD partitions on my PC. The only advice I have seen was to connect the external HDD directly to my PC, but in my experience if I do that my WIndows machine will start to reformat the drive as soon as I connect it. Is it safe to connect that drive to my Windows 7 machine? Is the DiskInternals program the best way to go, or should I try something else?

windows 7 - Stardock's LogonStudio doesn't change the login screen background?


I am using a Sony VAIO laptop (that comes with a custom login screen to begin with) running Windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit.


I am trying to use Stardock's LogonStudio to change the background of my login screen.


I can add new images to the program, but no matter what I use (preloaded or my own images), it never manages to change the login screen background.


Is there a way I can get this to work?


Answer



I have a VAIO as well and it looks like getting this to work requires a small registry edit:



  1. Go to Start->Run and type in regedit.

  2. Back up your registry using File->Export.

  3. In the tree on the left, navigate to the following key:


    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background


  4. Double-click on the OEMBackground key and change its value to 0.


  5. Click OK.


The logon screen background should now change as expected.


windows 8.1 - How do I see where a folder was copied from?




I have a folder copied from somewhere on my computer. However, I don't know where it came from. Where do I find out where it was copied from?


Answer



You can't, unless it was just moved there, by Windows Explorer. If moved any other way, you won't be able to (usually), but you can try pressing Ctrl+Z to try the Undo Move command. Again, it has to be the last thing you did, and only if done through Windows Explorer


Sunday, December 24, 2017

powershell - How do I turn my CSV formatting into a automatic "drag & drop" BAT file?

I'm outputting raw EDL files from Avid Media Composer which is essentially just text that needs re-formatting into the appropriate columns so it's easy to digest for the person receiving it. For security reasons the machines we use do not have internet connection so I'm trying to understand how I can achieve this without the use of third party tools or websites from the net.


The Raw .EDL file when opened in Notepad looks like this:


RAW EDL FILE


It's basically just a summary of the cuts used on the timeline and a the In/Out source and destination time codes involved. The example above is very small in size as a full EDL can have up to 1000 cuts (each numbered line being a cut).


I managed to format this manually with the use of comma separators. I achieved this by adding comma's and quotations so it looks like so:


FORMATTED FOR EXCEL


The end result when importing this into Excel is this:


RESULT IN EXCEL


I've also been trying to explore the idea of using Powershell by using Get-Content to try and parse the data i need into specific rows/columns but I'm a complete novice in this field so I'm not sure what i'm doing:


$Content = Get-Content "C:\TEST EDIT DECISION LIST.EDL"
$Content | Foreach {
If ($_ -match '[0-9]{1,6}$')

So i've managed to have Get-Content read the EDL file and the text within is retrieved fine. I then tried to apply the match operator to get it to identify the 6 digit numerical (000001) and the goal is to figure out how to send that to column 1 row 1 (but it doesn't want to run). I then need to get the operator to identify the next entry (GUIDE_VO) which would be alpha-numeric-symbolic with a maximum 32 character limit etc, so as to adhere to the formatting I've created manually for the rest of the line. I would need Powershell to rinse and repeat process this through every line in the EDL and compile a CSV for me.


My question is, how would I go about getting this EDL file to output to the CSV as per the manual formatting I've done? I'd like to make this possible a with a "drag and drop" bat file or similar workflow. The entries that appear in the raw edl are always in that specific order, with only the clip names and source files varying in what they say throughout all the data. The entry numbers also incrementally go up with every new line of data as well.


This is the raw text from the EDL File itself:


TITLE:   Untitled Sequence.01
000001 GUIDE_VO A C 12:36:54:21 12:37:06:19 01:00:00:00 01:00:11:23
*FROM CLIP NAME: SFX CLIP 1
*SOURCE FILE: GUIDE VO
000002 HORROR.COPY.01.MP3 A C 01:00:00:00 01:00:22:10 01:00:11:23 01:00:34:08
*FROM CLIP NAME: SFX CLIP 2
*SOURCE FILE: HORROR.COPY.01.MP3
000003 93_HORROR_DRONE.MP3 A C 01:00:04:15 01:00:08:08 01:00:34:08 01:00:38:01
*FROM CLIP NAME: SFX CLIP 3
*SOURCE FILE: 93 HORROR DRONE.MP3

Many Thanks in Advance for any help or suggestions from this amazing community!

Saturday, December 23, 2017

Asus Windows Vista Home Premium product key expired

I can't start my laptop in normal mode. It says that my product key is already expired and I need to type a new one. I have a product key on the back of my laptop, but it seems to be not valid. If I start it in safe mode it starts, but almost all of the programs are not functioning, and even when I insert a flash drive it won't work.


The recovery DVD doesn't work either.


Can you tell me how to repair it?

windows - Report disk usage through SMB server




I have an SMB server (4.5.12-Debian) with several hard drives (all NTFS) attached as my local network backup storage. I would like to be able to see the current disk usage (free space / total space) of the drives. For all i know it's not possible to show that in the Windows Explorer but a regularly updated file on the drives that tells their usage would also work.



I've tried using individual mount points for the hard drives but i still don't see a disk space bar in Windows Explorer ("This PC").



What solutions are there?


Answer



I solved this by using individual mount points and network share points in the Samba configuration and then using the IP adress to connect to the network storage, then map the network share point to a network drive.



Solution found in the comments of this post: Mapping a SMB share in Windows


windows - USB drive format, NTFS vs. FAT32



What are the pros and cons of formatting your USB drive in NTFS format or FAT32 format and vice versa?




Please highlight any advantages of one format over the other.



Keeping in mind I need to use the USB Flash drive on Ubuntu 13.04, Windows 7 and Windows XP.


Answer



NTFS (New Technology File System) is a proprietary file system developed by Microsoft Corporation, and hence you may have to install additional programs on Linux / Mac in order to view partitions formatted with
NTFS (like ntfs-3g).



FAT32 formatting is used to be recognised in all operating systems and there is a limit of 4 GB file in this case. I.e., you can't create a single file greater than 4 GB in FAT32 whereas you can create files larger than 4 GB in NTFS.



You can gain more insights via this link.



Batch File to Extract Text from the Middle of Log File Lines

In a UTF-16LE log file, I have lines like this:


[128 characters]APP_NAME=Samsung Magician&APP_KEY=[additional characters]&APP_FLAG=[single digit]

I want the APP_NAME (e.g., Samsung Magician) from each line where APP_FLAG=0. I can identify those lines thus:


FIND "APP_FLAG=0" "C:\[directory]\logfile.log" > D:\Progs1.txt

The next step is less clear. I'm having trouble extracting the desired text from the middle of those lines in Progs1.txt. It's easy in Excel, but this time I'd like to learn how to automate the process.


I believe the next step is to discard the first 128 + 9 characters from each line in Progs1.txt. Ideally, I wouldn't rely on the assumption that there will always be exactly 128 leading characters. Instead, I would use APP_NAME as the delim in a FOR loop. But it seems multiple characters are not permitted for that purpose.


I'm not yet at the point of trying to figure out the final step, discarding the text beginning with &APP_KEY, so as to leave only the app name as final output. If I could assume a constant number of underscores in each line, maybe I could use something like the Split String code. But I don't know if lines vary in the number of underscores used.


The question here is just, what command is best to produce a Progs2.txt output file in which each line begins with an app name (e.g., Samsung Magician)?

Downgrade From Windows 10 after Changing Administrator Password


After installing Windows 10, I changed my Administrator account password, losing my EFS-encryption on some system files according to this fine print which I didn't read in my haste to make sure I had a working password:
enter image description here


Now, I can't downgrade because it keeps giving me the error when trying to downgrade that I need to remove Administrator (even though I restored its de-activated state through "net user Administrator /active:no" command).
enter image description here


If anyone has any solution at all... I will try anything.


Answer



I'm not 100% sure if this'll work, but I think it is failing because it still finds the profile on your computer.


The following steps are for windows 8 (can't test it on 10 right now, but I bet they're nearly the same)



  1. Right click start button

  2. Select Control Panel

  3. Open System

  4. Choose Advanced System Settings

  5. Under tab Advanced, Frame User Profiles, press Settings...

  6. Select the user and hit Delete


Friday, December 22, 2017

memory - How to interpret the parameters in a DIMM datasheet?

I am trying to understand the internal layout of my DDR4 DIMM. Such as:



  • rank number

  • bank number

  • row/column of the memory array within a bank


According to intel customer script, the reported DIMM parameters are like this:
enter image description here


From this post I know that:



  • DR = Dual Rank

  • x4 means the DRAM chip has a physical channel of 4-bit width (please correct me if I am wrong about this.)


Then I searched for the part number M393A4K40BB1-CRC and found the Samsung Production Selection Guide. It says this for this part number:


enter image description here


And I found the datasheet. It says this:
enter image description here


So it basically says the DDR4 module M393A4K40BB1-CRC is made of DDR4 SDRAM component K4A8G045WB-BC##. And as I checked the pyhsical DIMM, it is indeed that componnet. But I simply cannot find this K4A8G045WB-BC## component in the previous componnet table. I think this is a doc error.


But anyway, what I really care about is how to the bank, row, column info from this sheet?


And how to interpret below parameters from the datasheet?


From the Component table:


From the Module table:



  • 4G x 72

  • 8Gb(2Gx4)*36

  • It seems x and * have different meanings. What's the difference?


ADD 1


According to the book Memory Systems by Bruce Jacob.


enter image description here


So it seems the x4 x8 represents the device width, which means how many arrays an independent bank contains.


The calculation is like this for the first row:



Capacity = 1 rank x 16 devices/rank x 4 banks/device x 4 arrays/bank x
4K rows x 1K cols = 1024Mb = 128MB


Device Desntiy = 4 banks/device x 4 arrays/bank x 4K rows x 1K cols = 64Mb



ADD 2


A quote from the above book:



...a x4 DRAM (pronounced “by four”) indicates that the DRAM has at
least four memory arrays and that a column width is 4 bits (each
column read or write transmits 4 bits of data). In a x4 DRAM part,
four arrays each read 1 data bit in unison, and the part sends out 4
bits of data each time the memory controller makes a column read
request.



Below diagram clearly illustrates how the column width and bank numbers are related logically.


enter image description here



Note that each of the DRAM illustrations in Figure 7.4 represents
multiple arrays but a single bank. Each set of memory arrays that
operates independently of other sets is referred to as a bank, not an
array.



And:



A system is composed of potentially many independent DIMMs. Each DIMM
may contain one or more independent ranks. Each rank is a set of DRAM
devices that operate in unison, and internally each of these DRAM
devices implements one or more independent banks. Finally, each bank
is composed of slaved memory arrays, where the number of arrays is
equal to the data width of the DRAM part (i.e., a x4 part has four
slaved arrays per bank).



enter image description here


When it comes to the memory jargons, there are so many confusion...

linux - Unmountable SD card (error -110)

I'm trying to access data unto my micro sdcard (using a SD card adapter) from my Linux system.



But each time I try I get nothing but an error into dmesg:





mmc0: error -110 whilst initialising SD card




Also I don't seem to see the device listed under /dev (nothing called mmcXXX at least), and fdisk -l doesn't show it up neither.



On the other hand Windows is able to detect the micro sdcard with its 3 partitions (this is my e-reader micro sdcard) only asking me to format the sdcard because it can't read from it, which seems normal to me as there are partitions which should be ext3/ext4 but it prevent me from accessing the sd card content.



I found a lot of links about the Linux error but can't figure out a way to bring the micro sdcard back to life or if it's permanently damaged.




Any thoughts on it ?



Thanks for your help

Install Windows 8.1 on Windows 8 Pro with Media center addon key



This question has been asked earler in this forum but a clear answer for the same is not yet available for the people who bought windows 8 pro upgrade




I purchased Windows 8 pro upgrade from Win 7 ($40 Win upgrade offer) also I got a free Windows Media Center Addon Pack key....



Currently Mys system is :



Windows 8 Pro with Media Center



After reading other questions i found that to install Windows 8.1 standalone i have 2 options




  • Windows Store


  • MSDN/Torrent iso download and use a defualt key to install



So i have with me :





I still have some questions :





  • Is Upgrade Possible as standalone or Store is the Only way for me??

  • Which OS to choose for upgrade from the ISO: Win 8.1 Pro or Win 8.1 Pro WMC ??

  • IF i Choose ProWMC how will i activate it as i have Only Pro Key with Addon Pack key of WMC

  • If I choose Pro will the addon pack key will work (although i never use it)



It would be really helpful if someone could guide me on this...
Thanks :)


Answer



You can upgrade to Windows 8.1 Pro and then use the WMC key after installation in the Add Features section.




The WMC keys you received last year work this year too.



Source: Personal experience


Theoretically possible to run two operating systems simultaneously?


A friend of mine asked a question that got me thinking. Is it possible (theoretically, I assume it hasn't been done) to run two operating systems simultaneously on the same computer? Not in the sense of multitasking in one window, but being able to quickly switch from one to the other without restarting. Could something low-level be created that would intercept system calls (or whatever needs to be done) to make each OS think it is running alone? Or hardware itself that would accomplish this?


I'm not talking about dual booting or using virtual machines, but actually running two OS's side-by-side.


Answer



Access to the hardware must be serialized for various reasons, and it is the hypervisor's job to handle this. That is why virtualization is the only feasible mechanism for this.


Windows 10 only boots after pressing the reset button


My PC is self-built and has the following components:



  • Intel i5 6600K

  • Arctic Freezer 33 E-Sports Cooler

  • MSI Z170-A

  • Radeon Sapphire Nitro RX480 8GB

  • Kingston 8GB DDR4 3000 MHZ RAM

  • Crucial SSD MX300 120 GB

  • WD Blue 500 GB

  • Toshiba P300 2TB


Since a few weeks, Windows 10 only boots when I reset the PC, after it was turned off. Restarting is fine. But when the computer was shut down, only a reset will make it boot. It shows the Windows logo, then nothing happens. The dots circling will not appear.


The Windows event log does show the reset as kernel power event, but beyond that, no information is being logged:


screenshot of kernel power event 41


My SSD has 87% of life left, according to the Crucial software:


screenshot of crucial smart status


I ran sfc /scannow 2x on an elevated PowerShell and it found a few files that were repaired (probably from the resets), but this didn't solve the issue. A following "turn it off and on again" showed the same symptom.


The only thing I changed recently, was to disable Hyper-V as a Windows feature. However, the Hyper-V switch is still present. The other thing I noticed, is that my wallpaper on the login screen is often gone and only a grey screen is shown instead. Not sure if that has anything to do with.


Answer



This was troubling me for a while, but after changing the power plan to "high performance", it went away. Seems like AMD cards have an issue with restoring their power state on other plans. What exactly caused it I still don't know, but I can shut down and boot now without having to reset.


Thursday, December 21, 2017

drivers - Impossible to disable touchpad/trackpad in Windows 10 which regularly causes bluescreens (SynTP.sys, HKKbdFltr.sys)


It seems to be a well known problem that bluesceens with message



DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL



are caused by touchpad drivers SynTP.sys und HKKbdFltr.sys. As I do not need the touchpad anyways (I use a mouse) I want to disable it, but it seems to be impossible.


It happens while working or gaming if I accidently touch the touchpad for whatever reasons.


Here is what I have tried to get rid of this:


a) Update the touchpad drivers to the newest version


Did not help anything - the touchpad keeps causing bluescreen at least if a mouse is connected.


b) Disabling the touchpad in the Windows touchpad settings


Obviously impossible - look at the screenshot:


Touchpad disable not available in Windows 10


c) Disabling the touchpad via the device manager


Disabling touchpad via device manager


Most devices can be deactivated or uninstalled on my notebook, but not the touchpad. You can only uninstall it.


I uninstalled:



  • Synaptics WBDI Fingerprint Reader

  • Insyde Airplane Mode HDI Mini-Driver

  • Synaptics SMBus Touchpad


As I think those drivers are touchpad related. I restarted my notebook and Windows automatically installs those again.


It seems like it is impossible to get rid of my problem causing touchpad that I do not need. Any help would be appreciated.


Answer



There are many posts to be found of people having the same problem
and many solutions, some of which I have listed below.


I can see that you have the option to uninstall the device.
The problem is that it will reinstall itself on the next reboot.
An idea for preventing the reinstallation of the device might be to follow the instructions on
this answer
to block Windows Update from updating the Synaptics device.


Another option you should disable (if you have it) is in
PC Settings, under Devices, Touchpad.
Disable the touchpad and
clear the "Leave touchpad on when a mouse is connected" option.


It might also help to go to Control Panel, Hardware and Sound,
Devices and Printers, Mouse.
On the "Device Settings" tab, clear the option
"Disable internal pointing device when external USB pointing device is attached" (again, if you have it).


On some Dell laptops, the setting to disable the touchpad is located in the Dell's support software : Open the Touchpad application in Dell Pointing Devices,
select the mouse and check the option for
"Disable Touchpad when USB Mouse present option".


A regedit answer advises to
go to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTP\Defaults,
and set the value of all string entries of the form PalmKms…, to 0.
These values determine the amount of ms that the touchpad stays disabled after keyboard input has been detected.


Another answer also advises
in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTPCpl to set the value of
RestoreAllDefaults to 0, and in
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTP\Install
the value of Delete User Settings to 0, and restart the computer.


Still another answer advises
downloading and installing an older driver from
here.
This apparently destroys the touchpad in some unclear manner.


memory - Can I use 1333 MHz and 1600 MHz RAM together?


I currently have 2x1GG 1333MHz DDR3 strips. I plan to purchase a further 2x4GG 1600Mhz strips. Will I be able to use both sets of RAM in my PC together? Will they both be limited to 1333Mhz?


Answer



Mixing RAM sticks of different timings may or may not work. Memory has a lot of other timings besides the MHz rating and if the memory controller cannot find a set of timings that both sets of modules supports then your computer may not boot or may act very weirdly.


Otherwise it may be that the different set work perfectly well together, in which case they will work at the highest speed supported by the slowest module. In your case this will be 1333.


So buying 1600 RAM that you intend to use with 1333 will be a waste of money unless the 1600 is actually cheaper, which wouldn't surprise me these days.


If you truly are going to get 2x4Gb strips, then you're not going to notice much difference between 8Gb and 10Gb. I'd just chuck the 2x1Gb and let the 4Gb sticks run at full speed.


microsoft excel - Automatically updating a workbook from another workbook


I have a master workbook which I use to store all the client information I have available but I also need to generate other spreadsheets (preferably in separate files) with sub sections of the data in the master spreadsheet.


Basically I want to set up a template that will automatically update as data is added, deleted or changed in the master spreadsheet. Up until now I've just been linking fields manually but that doesn't help when data is added to the master spreadsheet as you then need to add the links again by hand.


Does anyone have any suggestions for the best way to solve this problem at all? I'm using Excel 2007 if that makes a difference. I'm also open to the suggestion of using VBA to accomplish this but if there was an easier method it would preferable as this spreadsheet will have to maintained by people who do not know how to use VBA.


Answer



Have you tried using a pivot table ?
Particularly, if your master sheet data is set up using the list command, the slave sheets will update and add records whenever they're open or on command ("actualize all" in the pivot table tab).
Setting up the pivot table as you wish them to behave and format them is a bit of a pain on xl2007, but once it's done you won't have much to do in maintenance term.


hard drive - How do I get a report of HD smart data in FreeBSD 7.x/8.x


Is there a simple way to convince FreeBSD 7.x or 8.x to give me SMART data on hard drives? Preferably from the command line since I normally run these systems as headless servers.
I've been spoiled by Ubuntu desktop which reports hard drive SMART data via System/Administration/Disk Utility applet... but I'd rather not install Gnome on these FreeBSD systems if I can avoid it.


Answer



cd /usr/ports/sysutils/smartmontools/ && make install clean && rehash
smartctl -a /dev/ad0

windows 7 - Freeing up space on SSD


I have a 120GB SSD with basically only the system (Win7) installed on it and yet I'm having really hard time maintaining enough free space to install one game and leave the recommended 20% of space free. I have already:



  • disabled hibernation

  • disabled file content indexing

  • junction linked all the libraries to the HDD, redirected all the caches to the HDD (Spotify, Apple etc.)


I also have zero system restore files and I cleaned up the drive using the built-in cleanup tool.


Yet, I still have a total of 64GB occupied by the Windows [38.6GB], ProgramData [5.8GB], Users [5.4GB] and Program Files (x86 and the regular one) [10.8 and 3.9GB] folders which leaves me with ~30GB if I want to maintain the 20% of free space. What else can I do to conserve some space? All the tips I find online are either the ones I've already done or giving very little gain in terms of free space.


Answer



The Windows Installer folder is rarely used and doesn't benefit from residing on the SSD. Since yours is 13.6 GiB in size, consider moving it to another drive.


This should be just as easy as junction linking the libraries, as long as you remember that you need administrative privileges to remove a folder or create a junction in the Windows directory.


Accidentally deleted Windows 7 Boot sector / MBR

Accidentally run the following on system drive instead of USB.
OS: Windows 7. 1 system partition and 1 unformatted partition.
Now still haven't rebooted while writing this.
On C disk root can see BOOTSECT.BAK. Not sure if I only damaged MBR or also boot sector.




enter image description here



How to recover Windows 7 loader without Windows recovery disk, inside working OS?

disk space - Why do SSDs have weird sizes?



Why do SSDs have sizes like 240 GB or 120 GB rather than the normal 256 GB or 512 GB?
Those numbers make much more sense than 240 or 120.


Answer



While a lot of modern SSDs like the 840 EVO series do provide the sizes you’re used to like, the mentioned 256GB, manufacturers used to preserve a bit of storage for mechanisms fighting performance drops and defects.




If you—for example—bought a 120GB drive, you can be pretty sure that it’s really 128GB internally. The preserved space simply gives the controller/firmware room for stuff like TRIM, Garbage Collection and Wear Leveling. It has been common practice to leave a bit of space unpartioned—on top of the space that has already been made invisible by the controller—when SSDs first hit the market, but the algorithms have gotten significantly better, so you shouldn’t need to do that anymore.



EDIT: There have been some comments regarding the fact that this phenomenon has to be explained with the discrepancy between advertised space, stated in GigaBytes (e.g. 128x 10^9 Bytes) versus the GibiByte value the operating system shows, which is—most of the time—a power of two, calculating to 119.2 Gibibyte in this example.



As for as I know, this is something that comes on top of the things already explained above. While I certainly can’t state which exact algorithms need most of that extra space, the calculation stays the same. The manufacturer assembles an SSD that indeed uses a power of two number of flash cells (or a combination of such), though the controller does not make all that space visible to the operating system. The space that’s left is advertised as Gigabytes, netting you 111 Gibibyte in this example.


Wednesday, December 20, 2017

how to create a hidden administrator account in window 7?

i am working on Window 7 Home Premium. Many time i share my laptop with my friends. i want to create a guest account for simple working. i wish there should be some superuser administrator account, to which i can login using command prompt and do every administrator functions from my guest account. i dont want the login screen to show my administrator account. it should be a hidden account. does window 7 by default have any hidden administrator account.

windows - USB stick no longer recognised


I have an 8GB Transcend USB stick which - as of yesterday - is no longer recognised as such. When I plug into a USB port it shows as a new drive but clicking on the drive in Windows (XP) Explorer brings up the message "Please insert a disk into drive X:".


Looking at the drive Properties shows Type: Removable Disk, File System: Unknown, Capacity: 0 bytes.


Is there any way of rescuing this drive - more specifically the data on it?


TIA


Answer



Well, that's very interesting. I've just launched the Disk Management service in the Computer Management console and the USB drive is recognised and shown as healthy. I had changed the drive letter to Z a couple of weeks ago and I guess Windows Explorer, for some reason, hadn't recognised the change.


Anyway the USB stick is now shown in Windows Explorer (as drive Z), and PhotoRec now 'sees' the USB stick.


Thanks to all who responded.


laptop - FPS lags with new acer aspire 5755G

The title is kind of self explanatory, as my new laptop lags and has FPS drops. For example my FPS in Starcraft 2 hovers around 20 and constantly drops to 1 with low settings when I know it should run smoothly in high settings. I've updated my Nvidia driver, and set the preferred global settings to the 'High-performance Nvidia processor'. Here are some screen shots.


Screen Shot One -
Screen Shot Two -
Screen Shot Three


I'm not sure how to fix this problem, any feed back would be nice!

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

windows 8.1 - File size different between Explorer and Hard drives Properties

We have a MAC machine running on BootCamp for Windows 8.1 as well as the MAC. It's been runing for almost 1 year. We found that on the Windows side (C:\ - BOOTCAMP) that this machine is only 4GB free space out of 371 GB. So we are starting to troubleshoot to find out what causing this.


We checked on C:\ drive (including Hidden file/folders) and select all the files and right click PROPERTIES to see the size and we found is 306 GB. So we are missing 66 GB !!!


Any ideas what causing this?


BTW ... we are running Windows 8.1 and we backing up via File History to external network device. But we now the fact that if the machine is not connected to the network, it backup to local disk. Now, we did setup to cache offline 5% of the disk BUT could be this is the issue?


Thanks

windows - Batch find and copy files from a file list



I have a drive with several thousands of pictures on it. I've copied it all to another drive in which I've been organizing them slowly over several months. I've discovered a ton of corrupted files but found that the on the original drive, they aren't corrupted.



What I'd like to do is have a batch file that will read filenames from a text file and search the original drive for the filename, then copy it to a specified folder.



Since the original drive is unsorted, there could be duplicates so I'd like to copy all of the copies of that filename to the new folder. I have a script that might do it (see below) but it doesn't seem to be working because of the long filenames. For example, "2008-06-27 02.06.37.jpg" ... the script will search for "2008-06-27" instead of the full filename.



Any thoughts on how to fix this?




Here is my work that I have so far that's still not working as expected:



@ECHO OFF

SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION

cls

set dest=F:\ERRORS\recovered


for /f %%f in (F:\ERRORS\errorlist.txt) do (

set i=1

for /f "tokens=*" %%F IN ('dir /S /B /A:-D "%%f"') Do (

for %%N in ("%%F") Do (

set name=%%~NN


set ext=%%~XN

)

copy "%%F" "%dest%\!name!_!i!!ext!"

set /A i=!i!+1

)


)

ENDLOCAL

Answer



You should add the "TOKENS=*" to the FOR /F loop that reads from the file list to ensure that lines read from within the file list which have spaces between literal characters are not interpreted as a delimiter or new line thus cutting off the character string iterated at the space and not getting the whole line of characters you need it to loop through including any spaces before carriage return or line feeds.



@ECHO OFF


SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION
cls

set dest=F:\ERRORS\recovered
for /f "TOKENS=*" %%f in (F:\ERRORS\errorlist.txt) do (
set i=1
for /f "tokens=*" %%F IN ('dir /S /B /A:-D "%%~f"') Do (
for %%N in ("%%F") Do (
set name=%%~NN
set ext=%%~XN

)
copy "%%~F" "%dest%\!name!_!i!!ext!"
set /A i=!i!+1
)
)
ENDLOCAL






Further Resources




  • FOR /?




       tokens=x,y,m-n  - specifies which tokens from each line are to
    be passed to the for body for each iteration.
    This will cause additional variable names to
    be allocated. The m-n form is a range,

    specifying the mth through the nth tokens. If
    the last character in the tokens= string is an
    asterisk, then an additional variable is
    allocated and receives the remaining text on
    the line after the last token parsed.



hard drive - Leaving bad sectors in unformatted partition?

Laptop was acting really weird, and copy and seek times were really slow, so I decided to scan the hard drive surface. I have a couple hundr...