From the category archives:

Tools

Turn Windows 7 into a wireless access point

February 26, 2010

For years now I have been able to share my Verizon wireless connection with friends and family using my Apple running OSX. Linux can do this too.
It has not been possible with Windows until now. Microsoft has added some features to 7 that allow a wireless card to be put into promiscuous mode and [...]

Read the full article →

Find drivers for an unknown device

January 13, 2010

The worst thing about a format and reload is that sometimes, it is impossible to find all of your drivers.
Usually I have lost the driver disks. If it is a “White Box Special” that I built from NewEgg…well I will have no idea what components I put into it.
I have found an excellent solution – [...]

Read the full article →

Get notified when a service fails

January 5, 2010

No matter what company I have worked for, there is always a Windows service that crashes once in a while – like clock work.
The problem: The service that crashes is important, does real time processing, and must always be active.
I came up with a quick and easy way of getting notified when your [...]

Read the full article →

An easy move from XP to Windows 7

November 27, 2009

I was contacted a few weeks back by Laplink. They gave me a free license of their PC Mover to try out.
Usually, I throw these requests away, but I have used various utilities from Laplink since the early 90s (Anyone remember those Laplink cables!?), and I really like this company. Still…it is a risk [...]

Read the full article →

Send mail from your bat files

November 17, 2009

Two weeks ago, I wrote about backing up a remote windows machine using Remote Desktop.
One thing lacking from this solution is email notification. How do we know if the backup job started? Or finished?
There is a free and open source tool that can be used to solve this problem, it is called blat. It consists [...]

Read the full article →

Date and time stamp in your batch files

November 11, 2009

Update 11-12-2009: Looks like I made a typo. The date should be extracted with this line:
%date:~-4,4%%date:~-10,2%%date:~-7,2%
I have updated the article below, and thanks to Jim.G for noticing it!
There has been some activity recently in an old 2007 post I wrote about creating a date and time stamp in your batch files.
Well, the [...]

Read the full article →

Windows 7 – Why your computer won’t go to sleep.

October 28, 2009

I have been playing around with the powercfg utility built into Windows 7, and I came across an interesting command line option:

powercfg /requests

What it does is list the reasons why your computer failed to go to sleep. I had the sleep function enabled on my desktop PC, and I noticed when I came back after [...]

Read the full article →

Free Tool – Suspend from the command line

September 22, 2009

I have a system task schedule that wakes up my system at night, runs a few backup processes…and then shuts the computer down.
What I really wanted it to do was to suspend, or hibernate. That way I can get back into my computer quick when I come back in the morning.
After searching around, I found [...]

Read the full article →

Monitor Network Traffic

July 27, 2009

Last week I wrote about a free tool from Microsoft for synchronizing files. I asked you if you had any tools that made your life easier – my inbox was filled with suggestions.
One of the free tools that really caught my eye was Microsoft Network Monitor. I have been using Ethereal for a long time. [...]

Read the full article →

Free file sync tool from Microsoft

July 22, 2009

I had lunch last week with my good friend Brett. We were talking about synchronizing, and backing up files. I went on a long rant about how much I liked robocopy.
After I finished talking about robocopy, he told me about SyncToy from Microsoft. SyncToy? I had never heard of it.
The one drawback with robocopy is [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries