TinyBorders for Win8 replaced with Winaero Tweaker

I posted a while back about a nice little utility I use on all my Windows 8.x systems to reclaim those lost pixels from Win 8’s giant, padded borders.

It’s recently been replaced with a new tool, Winaero Tweaker, link: http://winaero.com/comment.php?comment.news.1836

A new feature with Winaero Tweaker allows you to change colors, which is nice when working with Windows Server 2012 R2.

If you try to change the color you’ll see this:

 

Winaero Tweaker launches with an error in Windows Server 2012 R2, but it doesn’t seem to affect the programs ability to change border size or color.

As you can see, I changed the color from cyan to a light purple, shown in the Winaero Tweaker page

 

 

 

 

TeamViewer + Windows 8.1+AMD switchable graphics = black screen

I use TeamViewer a lot, both for work (with a purchased license) and the free version for home.  Recently, on my home machine, a Dell e6540 whenever I’d connect to it, all I’d see was a black screen. Connecting to another laptop, a Dell e5520, was no problem.

One thing I thought could be an issue was the AMD switchable graphics, so I set the teamviewer_desktop.exe to use the more powerful AMD Radeon HD 8790M.  Made the switch and no luck.  So I asked Google, and found a superuser.com thread (http://superuser.com/questions/777492/teamviewer-other-screen-sharing-showing-a-blank-or-black-screen-to-remote-user)  that said to do the exact opposite, set teamviewer_desktop.exe to use the Intel graphics.

That was the trick, with teamviewer_desktop.exe set to Power saving, TeamViewer functions normally.

Go to the AMD Catalyst Control Center, then Switchable Graphics Application Settings.  If TeamViewer_Desktop.exe is not listed, click Add application and browse to your TeamViewer installation (default is C:\Program Files (x86)\TeamViewer) select Power Saving and click Apply.

Zwalisoft WOL Magic Packet Sender

For a while I’ve been using this free app to remotely start up my computers at home.  I set up a new server and wanted to migrate all the settings for this program to save reentering all the data.  It took me a while but I eventually found the profile.wol file that contained the user entered data.

On both my systems it was located in the C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\IsolatedStorage\StrongName.mtsk42papas0d4jmsd0oj30s2qisdzu1\AssemFiles

http://magicpacket.free.fr/

 

Windows 8 RSAT Available (again)

RSAT for Windows 8 is available for download again, after being offline since around August 11th.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=28972

 

Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool

The Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool is a great little utility I just discovered (its been around for years, but I never found it) when googling for a tool install Windows 7 from USB.  In short, you can easily take a Windows ISO image and quickly make a bootable USB flash drive to install Windows.

This is the first thing I’ve gotten from the Microsoft store and if this is the type of things they’ll have, I’ll definitely be a fan!

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool

 

 You can do it manually also (this is how I used to do it)

Start a cmd prompt as Administrator

Type “diskpart”, and press enter

Type “list disk”, press enter and find your USB drive (make sure you get the correct disk, since it will be formatted!)

Type “select disk #”, press enter– where # is the disk from step 3

Enter the following commands followed by enter

• clean
• create partition primary
• select partition 1
• active
• format fs=ntfs quick
• assign
• exit

Now from the command prompt, change to your mounted Windows 7 installation ISO or DVD drive.  If your ISO is mounted to V:, change to the V: drive.

change to the boot directory, “cd boot”

type “bootsect /nt60 x:”  where x: is the drive letter of your USB drive. You should get a “successfully updated ntfs filesystem message” if it worked.

finally, copy all the files from the DVD/ISO image to the USB drive.

Removing the status bar and standard buttons tool bar from the Remote Desktops MMC

Two things that have always bugged me with the Remote Desktops Administrative Snap-in was that there were no options on the menu to customize the view, specifically, the status bar and standard buttons toolbar. 

I’ve googled around trying to find a fix, then it dim 20W bulb went off in my head.  Look at a standard MMC console and make one how I want it and copy the config to the TSMMC file.

It was pretty simple.  The key line from the tsmmc.msc is:

<ViewOptions ViewMode="Report" ScopePaneVisible="true" NoStatusBar="true" NoStdButtons="true" DescriptionBarVisible="false" DefaultColumn0Width="200" DefaultColumn1Width="0"/>
    </View>

By adding NoStatusBar=”true” and NoStdButtons=”true” I was able to get more remote desktop “desktop”.

On my secondary monitor, my TS screen is now 1768×1000 vs. 1768×953.  Not a big deal on a 1920×1080 monitor, but 47 pixels on smaller screens makes a big difference.

TCP Tools: TCPing and Advanced IP Scanner

tcping.exe – ping over a tcp connection

tcping.exe is a small console application that operates similarly to ‘ping’, however it works over a tcp port. Not a terribly interesting concept, but I had trouble finding a windows utility to do this that I was happy with. There are now several different implementions of this floating around, written independently by different people. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Update: tcping now also speaks http. If the ‘-h’ flag is used, tcping will connect and attempt to download the given url over http in addition to opening the port.

→Download Here←

 

Advanced IP Scanner (Free Network Scanning Tool)

Advanced IP Scanner is a free, fast and easy-to-use network scanner for Windows. In a matter of seconds, this utility finds all the computers on your network and provides easy access to their various resources, whether HTTP, HTTPS, FTP or shared folders. With Advanced IP Scanner, you can wake up and shut down remote groups of Windows machines. If you use Radmin remote access software, you will also enjoy the improved Radmin Server detection and integration capabilities, which allow you to connect to any scanned machine with Radmin Server. →Download Here←

KBD Shortcut to access Control Panel–>System

I just found out about the sweet little winkey+pause short-cut that takes you directly to your System info page under Control Panel.

Great timesaver

Hyper-V configuration with hvremote.wsf

I wanted to set up a Hyper-V server for testing and keep if off the local domain.  My first attempt with a standard Windows 2008 R2 installation failed miserably.  I started down the manual configuration road from John Howard’s website and came to a dead end.  I then tried his hvremote.wsf script to finish, but apparently I really messed things up when I was manually changing stuff around.

I wiped the install and installed the free Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and started out with the hvremote.wsf script.  This time I was able to get things up and running pretty quickly.

The hvremote.wsf script should be included with the Hyper-V server.

Turning Aero back on in Win7

I have this cheapo web-cam that works great, but doesn’t get along with Aero in Vista or Win7.  When I forget and access it via IE on my Win7 box instead of a VM or via RDP on my server, it switches me back to the basic theme (yuck!).  Normally, all you need to do fix it is a) switch to another aero theme, then switch back, if that fails b) search “aero” and run the troubleshooter.  Both fixes failed me tonight.  I found the hack to enable Aero on a non-Aero system, but all I really need to do was:

net stop uxsms

net start uxsms

Bingo! Aero is back!  Original info from: Hack to force Aero