Tag Archives: windows

Windows knowhow

Windows: Changing the power plan or a single value in a sheme

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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.
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Virtualisation

Creating a virtual floppy disk image for Windows XP installation on VMware

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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 .
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Windows

Windows Tools

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Hi,

this is a list of the tools that I daily use with Windows.

System Tools

Sysinternalssuite – Process Monitor, Process Explorer, TCPView, psexec Tools => very useful

Regalyzer – Advanced Regedit for Windows

CPU-Z – Info Tool for detailed CPU/RAM Information

GPU-Z – Info Tool for GPUs

Microsoft LogParser – Analyse csv, tsv Logfiles, EventLogs…with SQL Commands

Erase Disks

Diskwipe – Disk Cleaning Tool for Windows

Eraser Portable – Disk Cleaning Tool for Windows

DBAN – Linux live CD to clean a disk

Network Tools

Microsoft Network Monitor

NVSPBind – command line tool to change network bindings/order

PuTTY – ssh client, ssh file copy….

KiTTY – fork of PuTTY with some additional features

Programming Tools

Microsoft Visual Studio Express for Windows Desktops – IDE for Windows

Notepad++ – Editor

PowerGUI – Powershell IDE

WinMerge – Compare Text files

Strawberry perl – Perl distribution with many modules and an included c complier to install and built modules from cpan

Virtualisation

VirtualBox – Running different Operating Systems as guests Find phone , with an installed extension pack you can passthrough USB2 devices.

to be continued…..

Michael