Hello,
yesterday a customer had the problem that he wants an old printer, a HP LaserJet 5M, to get running on 15 Windows 7 clients. Unfortunately Windows has no driver on board and the manufactorer didn’t provider anyone.
For many old printers you can install a driver via Windows Update. Go to the Control Panel, Device & printers and add a new printer
Continue reading Windows 7 & Getting drivers for obsulete printers
This posts descripes how to change the power plan in Windows or a single option in a sheme from the Windows command line.
First of all start a cmd command shell with administrator rights.
To get a list of all available shemes run
c:\> powercfg /L
Existing Power Schemes (* Active)
-----------------------------------
Power Scheme GUID: 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e (Balanced) *
Power Scheme GUID: 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c (High performance)
Power Scheme GUID: a1841308-3541-4fab-bc81-f71556f20b4a (Power saver)
The most options to powercfg at the command line must be specified with the GUID. To set the “High performance” plan active determine the sheme GUID and execute
c:\> powercfg /S 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c
Query again und you see the other plan is active
c:\> powercfg /L
Existing Power Schemes (* Active)
-----------------------------------
Power Scheme GUID: 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e (Balanced)
Power Scheme GUID: 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c (High performance) *
Power Scheme GUID: a1841308-3541-4fab-bc81-f71556f20b4a (Power saver)
Let us supose we only want to modify a single option or value. For example, disable the “Allow hybrid sleep” value in sheme “Power Saver” and with AC power active. Then, you first have to query all of the content of a sheme, because we need the GUID as parameter for powercfg. The output is a long list of options, I redirect them in a temporary file, because in the file it is easier to search for the necessary GUIDs.
Continue reading Windows: Changing the power plan or a single value in a sheme
For VMware Workstation or ESX Server and other virtualisation Software it is sometimes necassary to have a virtual floppy disk file.
For example if you want to install Windows XP in a VMware virtual environment and you want to use a SCSI Disk at the virtual LSI Controller. Windows XP hasn’t any driver for this controller and therefore no harddisk ist found and the installation aborts. Solution is, creating a virtual floppy file, copy the driver to this and attach the file as virtual floppy to the virtual machine.
Note: In the vSphere GUIs you can only enlarge SCSI Disks online. For IDE Disks you have to do this at the ESXi host command line which is described here.
Best system for do this is linux, here for example debian. There are all tools which are needed, except two are missing, installed by default . Check if the dostools and unzip are not installed or get them via
apt-get install dosfstools unzip
Creating a empty floppy image with an 1,44MB FAT 12 filesystem is very easy. Name the file as you want. For VMware vSphere the extension .flp should be the better choice. Create the floppy by using the following command
mkfs.msdos -C /tmp/floppy.img 1440 -F 12
Floppy is now ready to take some files .
Continue reading Creating a virtual floppy disk image for Windows XP installation on VMware