Microsoft has updated Windows PowerShell 1.0 for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and made new English-language installation packages available for download as of June 23, 2008. Designed to integrate with Windows Server 2003 SP1, SP2 and R2 (x86, x64 and Itanium-based) along with Windows XP SP2 (both the 32-bit and 64-bit editions) and SP3 (only 32-bit), the updated release of Windows PowerShell 1.0 does not target Microsoft’s latest Windows client. Windows Vista SP1 is ignored with the latest variant of Windows Power Shell available since January 30, 2007, the day that Microsoft also made available Vista RTM.
“Windows PowerShell is a new command-line shell and scripting language designed for system administration and automation. Built on the .NET Framework, Windows PowerShell enables IT professionals and developers control and automate the administration of Windows and applications,” Microsoft informed in the product’s description. “Windows PowerShell includes more than 130 command-line tools (called ‘cmdlets’) for performing common system administration tasks, such as managing services, processes, event logs, certificates, the registry, and using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).”
Users should bear in mind that the downloads contain just the English-language installation packages for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, and not any localized versions or the multilingual packs. Microsoft is currently hard at work on the successor of Windows PowerShell 1.0, namely version 2.0 which has only reached the stage of the second Community Technology Preview so far. At the bottom of this article, you will also find an embedded video containing tips and tricks of PowerShell, courtesy of Ben Pearce, a Premiere Field Engineer.
Windows PowerShell 1.0 English-Language Installation Packages and Windows PowerShell 2.0 CTP2 are available for download here.
and Powershell tips and tricks from microsoft
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Written by Jason on June 26th, 2008 with no comments.
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Registry Cleaning and PC maintenance software has got a bad name with so many ‘scareware’ products popping up on websites, telling you that your computer needs attention and offering to put it right. Woe betide anyone who takes up the offer and more often than not you’ll end up with a infected PC, or a bill for a piece of useless software. The other problems is that maintenance software often makes little or no difference, and don’t be misled into thinking they will somehow restore the performance on a terminally sluggish or cluttered machine, that just doesn’t happen in the real world. On the other hand, running a decent cleaner every so often can help to avoid problems later down the line, by removing redundant files and Registry entries, and one freeware utility I have been trialling recently seems to do a pretty good job. It’s called nCleaner Second and it covers a lot of ground, from scanning the Registry, to tweaking Windows settings and scanning Startup files. I’m still playing around with it but so far so good and the promise of it being able to free up an average of 2Gb of hard disc space certainly seems to be true. It’s small the download is on 875kB and remarkably fast, so see what you think, and I would be interested to hear your views, good or bad.
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Written by Jason on June 12th, 2008 with no comments.
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You often read or hear that you should always proceed with caution when working with the Windows registry. Although this is very true, you can help alleviate some of the jitters of modifying the registry if you understand a little more about it.
First of all, a little about the registry terminology, keys, and values are terms you should be able to differentiate between. In the most simplistic terms, values contain the specific data and values are organized into registry keys.
Creating a new registry key is a straightforward process. With the Registry Editor open (click Start, type Registry Editor in the Search field and press Enter) navigate to the location where you want to create the new key. Click the Edit menu, point to New and click Key. Conversely, you can delete an existing key by selecting the appropriate key and clicking Delete from the Edit menu.
Creating a new value is also fairly simple. Again, navigate to the appropriate key. Click Edit, point to New and select one of the different value types. Type in the name for the value and edit the data by double clicking the value. The type of data you include in the value will depend on the type of value you are creating. For example, a DWORD value will consist of a number.
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Written by Jason on June 8th, 2008 with no comments.
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Slow computer getting you down? Wish you could speed up your system so that games won’t crawl by like a slide show permanently set to slow? Well look no further! I shall share five easy steps that you can take to improve your system’s speed! Most of them are free of charge, and all of them should have some effect on your system. So without further ado, we begin with:
1. Remove spyware and adware from your system. Have you noticed recently that ads seem to pop up whenever you go to a Web page? Or that Internet speeds are about that of diseased livestock? Your system’s probably chock full of spyware. What to do? Well, thankfully there are several things you can do. First, download either Spybot-S&D or Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware, and run it. This should remove most if not all of the spyware and adware on your system. Neither of these are particularly robust, however, so we move on to:
2. Remove viruses from your system. Get yourself a decent virus scanner program. Big names include MacAfee, Symantec, or Norton. By the way it should be mentioned that virus scanners like the Big Three tend to be huge. Big, beefy programs that can chew up RAM faster than Dudley Dursley chewed up Harry’s birthday cake. If this is a problem for you, take a look at avast! avast! is a free virus scanner that can be downloaded, but be careful. Phishing sites love to pretend to be “free virus scanner software” and so you have to be careful. Yes, avast! is a respected name and is not a virus, but only if you actually download it and not some trojan.
3. Defragment your hard drive with the disk defragmentation tool, usually located in Start / Programs / Accessories / System Tools. This useful little program will improve performance by compacting your data so that your programs aren’t all located in tiny little bits. Some people might argue this point, saying that defragmentation doesn’t actually improve anything, but look at it this way: it never hurts at worst, and at best has a chance of improving your runtime! So where’s the loss?
4. Remove dust. Buy some cans of compressed air (yes I’m aware of the irony of purchasing a can of air. No, I do not wish to purchase any bridges today). Using this compressed air, blow the dust out of your system. That dust does your CPU no favors and a thick, liberal coating of dust tends to collect when you leave your computer running in a dirty room. Oh and by the way, after you’ve blown all that dust into the air, it’ll settle. All over your carpet. So you might wanna vacuum later. Just an idea.
5. Clean your registry. CCleaner is a good registry fixer that’ll fix all those broken things in your registry. By the way, don’t go mucking about in the registry without backing it up first. If you do not do this, then I cannot be legally responsible for any time rifts, space distortions, or world wars caused by unexpected changes made by CCleaner. That said, properly done, a registry change often helps in improving performance. Also check your startup programs: there are programs that are set to start as soon as Windoze boots, and this can cause Windoze to start up slower. Removing a few (AIM is a good one) might improve your startup process. You might keep your hair a bit longer, too.
One final bit of advice. Oftentimes I’ll see on PC-building Web sites people wondering why their computer is “running so slowly even though they have the best gear.” The word of advice? Check your PSU (Power Supply Unit). How far do you suppose you’d get if your car’s gas tank had a maximum capacity of 2 gallons of gas? Would you want such a car? Well, your “awesome gear” won’t get too far on a puny PSU either. If your computer’s operating much slower than you’d expect from your hardware, consider replacing your PSU with one that can actually handle your power-hungriest parts (usually your CPU and GPU). Calculators for what wattage of PSU you might need are all over the Web. Just to be safe it might be better to go 50 watts or so above the recommended, just in case you decide to add something else later.
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Written by Jason on May 5th, 2008 with no comments.
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Note: this content originally from http://mygreenpaste.blogspot.com. If you are reading it from some other site, please take the time to visit My Green Paste, Inc. Thank you.
A while back, there was a topic (Virtual Registry vs. "Real registry") in the Sysinternals Forums that brought up the question of how to set the virtualization-related flags of a registry key programmatically in Vista, rather than through the use of the REG.EXE tool's FLAGS switch. (For more information on the flags, see Mark Russinovich's article in TechNet Magazine, "Inside Windows Vista User Account Control"). Even before that topic in the forum, I had wondered how it was done but had not had a chance to explore. It didn't seem that many others were curious about it. That topic had resurrected the idea, but it quickly fell to the bottom of the list. I've finally gotten around to experimenting, and that leads to this write-up. I still don't see much in the way of this discussed anywhere, by searching for terms involved (data types, function param names, etc.), so hopefully this will help someone. (Keep in mind that there very well may be a reason Microsoft hasn't made this available through another, more direct API.)
In the referenced topic, I had gotten so far as determining that REG.EXE was doing its work through the use of NtSetInformationKey, an "undocumented" API in NTDLL.DLL.
NTSYSAPI
NTSTATUS
NTAPI
NtSetInformationKey(
IN HANDLE KeyHandle,
IN KEY_SET_INFORMATION_CLASS InformationClass,
IN PVOID KeyInformationData,
IN ULONG DataLength );
After a bit of plonking around in WinDbg, I've come up with the following following details. REG.EXE calls NtSetInformationKey, specifying a value of 2 for the InformationClass parameter. This parameter is of type KEY_SET_INFORMATION_CLASS, which wdm.h tells us is an enum:
typedef enum _KEY_SET_INFORMATION_CLASS {
KeyWriteTimeInformation,
KeyWow64FlagsInformation,
KeyControlFlagsInformation,
KeySetVirtualizationInformation,
KeySetDebugInformation,
MaxKeySetInfoClass // MaxKeySetInfoClass should always be the last enum
} KEY_SET_INFORMATION_CLASS;So the 2 for the InformationClass parameter would correspond to KeyControlFlagsInformation. WDM.H also suggests that this class has a type that one passes for the KeyInformationData parameter - KEY_CONTROL_FLAGS_INFORMATION:
typedef struct _KEY_CONTROL_FLAGS_INFORMATION {
ULONG ControlFlags;
} KEY_CONTROL_FLAGS_INFORMATION, *PKEY_CONTROL_FLAGS_INFORMATION;We have a basic idea of how to call NtSetInformationKey now. But what are the values that the ControlFlags member of KEY_CONTROL_FLAGS_INFORMATION can be set to? It would appear that the following (self-made) enum covers the pertinent flags - at least the ones REG.EXE FLAGS can handle (there may be more):
typedef enum _CONTROL_FLAGS {
RegKeyClearFlags = 0,
RegKeyDontVirtualize = 2,
RegKeyDontSilentFail = 4,
RegKeyRecurseFlag = 8
} CONTROL_FLAGS;The control flags are a bitmask, so you can OR them to set more than one.
Now that we have this information, what's left? We need to put it all together in a call to NtSetInformationKey. So, we need to get a pointer to the function in NTDLL.DLL. Then, we can declare a struct of type KEY_CONTROL_FLAGS_INFORMATION, set the ControlFlags member to be what we wish, and open a key to the desired location in the registry, that can be passed to NtSetInformationKey. In the end, we wind up with something like the following (error handling has been omitted):
typedef NTSYSAPI NTSTATUS (NTAPI* FuncNtSetInformationKey) (
HANDLE KeyHandle,
KEY_SET_INFORMATION_CLASS InformationClass,
PVOID KeyInformationData,
ULONG DataLength );
//...
FuncNtSetInformationKey ntsik = (FuncNtSetInformationKey)GetProcAddress(
GetModuleHandle( _T("ntdll.dll") ), "NtSetInformationKey" );
KEY_CONTROL_FLAGS_INFORMATION kcfi = {0};
kcfi.ControlFlags = RegKeyDontVirtualize | RegKeyRecurseFlag;
HKEY hTheKey = NULL;
RegOpenKeyEx( HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, _T("SOFTWARE\\Whatever"), 0, KEY_ALL_ACCESS, &hTheKey );
ntsik( hTheKey, KeyControlFlagsInformation, &kcfi, sizeof( KEY_CONTROL_FLAGS_INFORMATION ) );
RegCloseKey( hTheKey );
hTheKey = NULL;
The code above is the equivalent of invoking REG.EXE FLAGS HKLM\Software\Whatever SET DONT_VIRTUALIZE RECURSE_FLAGS. To clear the flags, just set kcfi.ControlFlags to RegKeyClearFlags (same as REG.EXE FLAGS HKLM\Software\Whatever SET).
Hopefully, this will prove useful to those that have wished to set these flags programmatically. In a future post, I hope to explore querying for these flags, ala REG.EXE FLAGS HKLM\Software\Whatever QUERY.
Note that this exploration was done on Windows Vista SP1. I would expect the content here to also apply to Windows Vista (no SP) as well as Windows Server 2008, but...
Written by «/\/\Ø|ö±ò\/»®© on April 27th, 2008 with no comments.
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