Insane Theory - The blog of James Netherton » Windows

Windows Vista wireless network configuration with hidden SSID

James Netherton — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:58:32 +0000

I’ve been spending some time trying to get a Laptop running Windows Vista connected to a wireless network where the SSID is not being broadcast. I tried all kinds of different security settings but nothing was working. I then stumbled across the solution in this article:

Non-broadcast Wireless Networks with Microsoft Windows

When configuring the network ensure that the ‘Connect even if the network is not broadcasting’ option is checked. Can’t believe that I never thought of trying that – seems so obvious in hindsight!

Disable windows indexing service to prevent VMWare Fusion maxing out CPU

James Netherton — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 07:11:00 +0000

A while back I posted about disabling the automated Windows hard drive optimisation service in order to save CPU time and prevent parallels from grinding to a halt.

I’ve since switched to VMWare Fusion and have noticed that every so often, the VMWare process consumes 100% of the CPU even though Windows is idle in the background. I figured out that the culprit was the Windows indexing service, which kicks in when the OS is idle to index files.

Simply disable the indexing service from the Windows services control panel area and that should solve the problem. I haven’t seen any negligible effect of doing this so far, Windows searches are usually pretty sluggish even with the indexer turned on!.

Disabling hard drive optimisation on Windows

James Netherton — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:03:00 +0000

When Windows detects that the user has been inactive for a certain time period, it will execute certain optimisation tasks whilst there is plenty of spare processing power available. One of these tasks is to create a background process that will defragment and optimise hard disk drives. Depending on the drive partition type, Windows will spawn either dfrgntfs or dfrgfat to handle the optimisation.

I’ve decided to disable this process for Windows under my OS X Parallels bootcamp installation. Every now and then I’ll hear the hard drive spinning up and have a fair chunk of CPU get eaten away as the hard drive defragmentation process runs. It’s a real pain when I’m in the middle of coding, web browsing or anything else. So I’ve decided to disable the optimisation process altogether, as I don’t really care about my bootcamp install all that much. If it starts running really, really slowly, I’m happy to reinstall Windows.

How to disable drive optimisation:

1. Head over to the Microsoft Power Toys to download and install Tweak UI

2. Fire up Tweak UI and select the ‘General’ tree item from list of options

3. Uncheck ‘Optimize hard disk when idle’

4. Apply the settings

Clear Type Font Tuning For Windows

James Netherton — Thu, 17 May 2007 16:05:00 +0000

I can’t believe I never came across this before. I’ve wanted the nice smooth clear type font look in Windows XP for ages. I’ve seen it on various people’s computer screens but never knew how they were doing it.

After installing IE7 at work recently, the browser prompted me to visit this page. You have the choice between installing an ActiveX control, or, downloading a plug-in for the Windows Control Panel, which will let you configure clear type fonts.

Changing internet explorer user agent string

James Netherton — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 14:04:00 +0000

There are many reasons why you may want to change the default user agent string that Internet Explorer uses to identify itself. You can override the default user agent string by applying some modifications to the following Windows registry keys.

Start regedit and navigate through the tree to the following:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent

You may not have the User Agent key so create this as a child to the 5.0 key. Now create the following string values:

Compatible = Not compatible
Version = MyBrowser 1.0
Platform = Windows 2003
Default = Mozilla/5.0

This would change the following IE 7.0 user agent string:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1;)

To:

Mozilla/5.0 (Not compatible; MyBrowser 1.0; Windows 2003;)

You’ll need to close any open instances of IE and restart the browser before the settings take effect.

Microsoft has the most secure OS

James Netherton — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 09:03:00 +0000

According to Symantec anyway, as they released their 11th internet security report.

There’s a nice run down here . Needless to say it’s caused its fair share of controversy. There’s been some pretty intense flaming happening on a forum I belong to and the article has made its way onto Digg.

I’m just going to stay tight lipped and let everyone else fight it out

Windows taskkill

James Netherton — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 04:03:00 +0000

One thing I like about ‘nix systems is that it’s pretty easy to kill off specific or a list of processes via the command line using pipes and grep.

The Windows command line has the taskkill command:

Examples:
    TASKKILL /S system /F /IM notepad.exe /T
    TASKKILL /PID 1230 /PID 1241 /PID 1253 /T
    TASKKILL /F /IM notepad.exe /IM mspaint.exe
    TASKKILL /F /FI "PID ge 1000" /FI "WINDOWTITLE ne untitle*"
    TASKKILL /F /FI "USERNAME eq NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM" /IM notepad.exe
    TASKKILL /S system /U domain\username /FI "USERNAME ne NT*" /IM *
    TASKKILL /S system /U username /P password /FI "IMAGENAME eq note*"

So say you had multiple instances of notepad open. You could kill them all off using:

taskkill /F /IM notepad*

You can also use filters on things like image name, process ID and CPU time. For example, you could attempt to kill all process names that didn’t equal notepad.exe:

TASKKILL /F /FI "IMAGENAME ne notepad.exe"

Or kill all processes with id’s greater than 1000:

TASKKILL /F /FI "PID gt 1000"

Use the command sparingly and with caution of course