The Windows and Windows Software Megathread

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wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Upside would be if you completely bork your system and want to just do a flatten/reinstall you wouldn't lose stuff you've got on other partitions.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2010 00:22

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 21:58

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Casao posted:

1) You're artificially limiting your space FOR NO REASON. That alone makes it dumb, because you gain no benefits on Vista/7 and you've limited your partition sizes. Vista and 7 allow you to do a fresh install without formatting, so the benefit you listed is moot.

If I get superspyware 2011 (I don't because i'm smart :smug:

) I'd prefer to format before my reinstall, but keep all my pornography without restoring from tape. seems like a valid reason to me. dunno, it's an awful lot of spergin about partitions.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2010 00:59

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Xenomorph posted:

We have a whole mess of Dell PowerEdge and PowerVault servers. Right now, most are running Windows.

Is there some program that will read the temps from these systems so we can easily view them on a webpage? (without logging into the Dell OpenManage program on each individual system)

dell it assistant or whatever it's called now (dell management console maybe?)

# ¿ Mar 7, 2012 18:17

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Steakandchips posted:

I love AirVideo. It allows me to watch all my movies that are stored on my NAS at home while I am on the go, by live converting on my Windows desktop and streaming on to my iPhone from anywhere.

However, there is no desktop client for AirVideo for Windows.

Can anyone recommend an alternative to AirVideo (both a Windows server and Windows client) that will live convert and stream (obviously to the Windows client).

like above poster said plex works pretty well and even pulls in metadata, but if you want just simple airvideo-type stuff, Orb works (or at least did a year ago when I used it last). It's not actually a desktop client (it uses a web interface), but it works in windows.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2012 17:48

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Thermopyle posted:

You install the Plex client on your laptop, desktop, phone, toaster. It connects to Plex Media Server via your home network, or the internet. If you're on your home network, PMS streams the full quality if possible, and if you're out and streaming over the internet PMS transcodes it automatically while adjusting for available bandwidth.

orb does the same thing as far as transcoding and all that - the difference between orb and plex is that plex does the fancy metadata stuff and has a full client program, whereas in orb you're navigating folders through the web. Plex is the better product but if you're on different computers fairly often Orb can be handy.

Xenomorph posted:

I have a VPN connection question.

You might just need to enable NAT on the public interface in the RRAS console, under NAT/Firewall...

# ¿ Mar 30, 2012 20:44

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Fangs404 posted:

Got a fun question. I've got a friend that's inherited a Windows Server 2000 workstation at work, and he's got an issue.

The C partition on the virtual disk is almost completely full, and the other partition on that same virtual disk is also pretty close to full. He's wondering if there's a way to grow the virtual disk, preferably from partition F. You guys have any idea?

you're not going to be able to expand a virtual disk without redoing the RAID configuration and destroying all data (unless it's on a SAN or something but i'm guessing it's not). You could move D's data to another drive, delete the D: partition, and use GParted or something similar to expand the system partition.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2012 17:28

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

why the hell do .net updates (especially to 3.5 and 4) take so goddamn long to install? Our users have some patience but when their laptops sit there taking 30 minutes to install updates at the end of the day it wears thin and I can't blame em.

# ¿ May 31, 2012 15:45

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Morganus_Starr posted:

Yes, the forward lookup zone I have has the appropriate www A record. https://www.contoso.com works. The www record resolves to the intranet web server fine.

The issue is the DNS entry for contoso.com - http://contoso.com is of course resolving to the IP address of the domain controller since the domain controllers have (same as parent folder) entries in the zone. What is the best way to set this up so contoso.com resolves to the IP address of my web server? Like I mentioned above, everything I'm reading online mentions that in AD, it's normal behavior for your DNS servers to make (same as parent folder) entries in the forward lookup zone, and that you shouldn't remove those A records.

i'm pretty sure you can't, because other services are going to use \\contoso.com for various things and those need to go to the DC's. You could do something like install IIS on the DC's and make the default site redirect to https://www.contoso.com, but something about IIS on a DC unsettles me.

This is why you usually see domains setup with a different TLD, contoso.local or something.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2012 23:09

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Anyone have a recommendation for some local file replication software? We're migrating our huge file server from our old SAN to our new one, and we'd like to minimize downtime as much as possible. What we'd like to do is run a full backup normally, restore that backup onto the new SAN, and then use some sort of replication software to keep the two in sync until the time we flip the switch and move the shares.

We could use robocopy, but the share is huge and robocopy will take a long time to traverse the entire structure looking for differences since its last run. We'd prefer something like DFS-R or DoubleTake, where something looks at the NTFS change journal and makes changes on the fly. Unfortunately both those products work over networks only, not between local disks.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2012 16:16

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Mak0rz posted:

I have a folder of pictures I want to back up. Most (but not all) of the pictures are 4000 x 3000 or perhaps bigger. Is there something I can use that will scan the folder and batch-resize them if they are bigger than a threshold size?

EDIT: It has to scan subfolders too, but I would imagine that any tool that scans folders will also scan subfolders anyway.

Irfanview can do batch operations like that

# ¿ Jan 10, 2014 23:27

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Avast's plugin seems to have started to screw with Chrome's ability to load pages (some, but not all). Other browsers work fine, and when in incognito and the plugin is disabled (or just disabling the plugin in normal mode) everything works normally too. Anyone else seen this?

# ¿ Feb 18, 2014 04:19

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Sir Unimaginative posted:

It's not quite that Chicken Little bad, because that little 350 MB chunk on the platters is primarily a recovery partition. I don't know how vital it is to the boot process, though, since the SSD is selected as boot. You might very well need both drives in, not just one, to get from a cold PC to a working Windows environment, and would certainly need both for stuff like System Restore.

But yes, he hosed up by leaving other drives connected for the install. Even so, the SSD not being the top entry in the drive-map stack means it's not connected to where it should be physically. (You'd probably notice this in the install environment too, if you did a custom install.)

It holds boot configuration and the BCD, so if it's not there his system isn't going to boot (it's marked as the active partition). It also holds bitlocker-related stuff for people who use that sort of thing. However, being on a slower drive is not really going to slow it down - on boot, computer will read the BCD (which isn't very big), BCD will say "load my OS off of C:\", and Windows will load from the SSD all fast-like. So it'll maybe be a couple microseconds slower on boot, and once running won't make a difference at all. You should be able move that data with something like EasyBCD or Windows Startup Repair if you want to get it onto your actual system partition.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2015 18:45

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

runoverbobby posted:

I dunno. When I deleted the old system reserved partition and expanded F:\ into the unallocated space, I thought it would just create one contiguous unit, but I guess it doesn't work that way. If the Windows stuff on C:\ looks ok then I'll probably just reformat the HDD and post in one of the storage threads if I need help since it's not really a Windows issue at that point.

Yeah you should be fine. You could test by disconnecting the big drive, but from that picture it appears you've got everything in place.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2015 22:54

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

I can't get Steam to be searchable in the start menu. It always shows up in pinned apps and does not appear under the Steam group in All Apps. If I unpin it from the start menu, it totally removes the shortcut from C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Steam. If I create a new shortcut anywhere under C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs for it, it'll pin itself but won't show up in the correct location under All Apps and won't show up when I hit the start button and type steam. I've tried reindexing under Indexing Options, no dice. Anyone have any ideas?

Edit, fixed it - created a new user profile and copied the new user's C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\TileDataLayer\Database directory over to the messed up user

wyoak fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Jun 1, 2016

# ¿ Jun 1, 2016 01:27

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Fiskiggy posted:

The start menu. Of course 99% of the time you only want to hit Start and start typing, which works great until it doesn't for no discernible reason. Afaik there's no fix for the Settings/Control panel Frankenstein but I think people just got used to it since you might not recognize how absurdly shoddy it looks and feels unless you've used another OS lately.

For my issue I didn't have to overwrite core components with third party software, I had to overwrite core components with other core components. Clearly this is good.

I just noticed a bunch of metro apps are broken (Photos, Windows Store, etc). Apparently because I use display scaling (when I have my computer going through my TV), something screwed up and Windows didn't grab all the components it needed to run so they flat don't work anymore. Hopefully some update will reenable them in the future. Or not, the photos app is the only reason I noticed it and there's a billion ways to view photos.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2016 00:46

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Windows 10 does seem faster than 7 but my measurement metric is "how do it feel" so it's not exact by any means. Boot times are way faster, even on SSD, but we're probably talking 5 seconds vs 10-15 seconds so it's not the end of the world either way.

Search is definitely better than in 7 but still can be janky. Everything isn't really a replacement for Windows search - Everything searches filenames only, Windows should be indexing the contents of your files (depending on the type). Everything is really really good at what it does though and I like it. Metro apps randomly stop working and fill my event logs with rubbish but I'm using it on a desktop so I don't really care.

I love the Office ribbon now (and the Explorer ribbon is leagues better than the old menu system) but it certainly takes getting used to. Um...DX12 is probably cool if you play games and have a rad video card.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2016 16:43

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

bobfather posted:

If you have local admin, why can't you just assign the computer to have a static IP from Windows' network settings? Especially if you pick the IP the DHCP server has already assigned you, it should be effortless to keep that address.

Not all DHCP servers / clients will do arp lookups before assigning or accepting an IP address so you could wind up causing an IP conflict, but if it's a Windows shop he should be fine. Network guy might get annoyed though.

I am curious how RDP from home to work is working, hopefully there's a VPN in there he's not mentioning.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2016 17:21

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Has anyone ever had an issue where a previously working SATA disk shows up in the BIOS but won't show up in Windows? Yesterday I installed a USB 3.0 expansion card in my system and managed to pull out the SATA cable to the disk while the case was open. When I noticed the drive was missing, I shut down, found the missing cable and reseated it, but it still didn't show up in Windows (looked in disk management, not there, device manager didn't list the drive, diskpart didn't show it either). BIOS saw the disk correctly though, make and model.

While I was messing around I managed to bork my MBR completely. The recovery environment (Windows 10 USB) saw the drive correctly, and I reinstalled Windows and my new installation sees it correctly as well. Disk diagnostics don't show any problems. It's fixed now but I bet I didn't need to reinstall Windows to fix it, just wondering if anyone has ideas on what I could have looked at.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2016 18:53

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Eletriarnation posted:

There is a VPN, yes. I don't know what the DHCP server is, and I don't want to assume it's something it's not and get IT pissed at me. I already considered the possibility of asking them for help directly but this is a bit out of scope so I wanted to see if I can solve it with my own resources.

Seems like this is possible although it may take a bit of tinkering to get there. I'll look into it.

Your system's IP changes while it's on? That's really strange - in a normal setup, when the client already has a DHCP address and it's time to time to renew it's lease (half of the lease time for Windows) it should talk to the DHCP server and agree to renew that IP.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2016 20:08

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

It was down to the fact that the people making gadgets that weren't already malware were writing really bad code that was generally vulnerable to MiTM and code injection (the Blackhat presentation showed them mitm'ing a gadget that was available in the MS gallery). Gadget usage was pretty low anyway so MS decided the attack surface wasn't worth it.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2016 14:03

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Depends on your threat model, Bitlocker is very good if you're worried about your hardware getting stolen but pretty much worthless if you're worried about bits getting stolen in transit or off a cloud provider or having your "My Documents" folder uploaded by some malware (and yeah that ignores whether or not the malware is keylogging or otherwise watching for decryption keys)

# ¿ Nov 14, 2016 17:52

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

M-Discs are (supposedly) way more durable than the other physical options, and yeah Windows 10 should be able to write to the discs just fine.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2017 22:34

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

MZ posted:

Yes, only Stereo shows up, but I know for a fact it doesn't only accept stereo signals.... hmm....

Alot of TV's advertise that they only accept stereo input via HDMI, even if you're running ARC or another audio out through the TV back to a 5.1/7.1 system. I was able to fix it in my setup with an EDID spoofer - it's a little box that sits in the middle of the HDMI chain and advertises what you want.

If you're running HDMI direct to a 5.1 reciever then IDK, probably a limitation of the card/drivers

wyoak fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Feb 28, 2019

# ¿ Feb 28, 2019 21:52

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

xzzy posted:

Firefox is also a small enough share of the browser market that some sites straight up don't work for it either. iCloud.com is the biggest one I can think of as an example, the Notes app won't load.

might be a plugin problem? Notes works fine on iCloud for me, running 71.0 64 bit on Windows 10

# ¿ Dec 20, 2019 15:39

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

edit: better suited for enterprise thread

# ¿ Apr 22, 2020 20:13

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Medullah posted:

What's the go to for ripping a disc to ISO and mounting it these days? ImgBurn was my go to, but it seems to have become abandonware at this point.

Windows can mount ISOs natively now, ImgBurn still works for creating images afaik

# ¿ May 1, 2020 16:42

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Wow, blast from the past, I'd forgotten about bin/cues....anyway, I've got ImgBurn on my Win10 machine for some reason and it does seem to work still, abandonware or not

# ¿ May 1, 2020 16:50

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

ChesterJT posted:

Any ideas on phantom three-dings repeating while the pc is idle? Google searches just relate to the bios and startup error beeps. Not tied to any action or user input, just sitting there and three dings. Could repeat every couple minutes over the course of an hour then nothing for five days.

Some apps are running so I thought maybe a low memory error but task manager says otherwise. I also thought maybe some hardware was failing but assumed the bios startup would detect that first.

Mail maybe?

# ¿ May 18, 2020 16:27

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Elgato has does have an iOS (and I'd presume Android) app available, it's not free but it's alot cheaper than buying the hardware if you've got a tablet or phone you could use

# ¿ Oct 5, 2020 18:28

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Yeah I definitely can't speak to the android version, but I use the iOS version with the new MS Flight Sim and it works pretty well for that very specific purpose

# ¿ Oct 5, 2020 18:32

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

git add and commit every five minutes?

# ¿ Dec 10, 2020 22:30

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

Jotform or Google Forms or something similar would probably be the easiest but might not be free depending on your use case

or I guess you might have reservations on having the data stored on 3rd party servers too

# ¿ Jun 21, 2022 18:59

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 21:58

wyoak: Feb 14, 2005; a glass case of emotion; Fallen Rib

i use iDrive. I can't speak to if it's the best and its UI reminds me of the early 2000's in not a great way, but it backs my stuff up and lets me restore it reliably and lets me choose my own encryption key

# ¿ Aug 16, 2022 22:17

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