Some Geeky and extremely useless stuff...

Today I have some really geeky stuff... most of the information on this one... I am not sure where I would be using them... But we have been working with Microsoft technologies and windows operating systems for long... and I thought we ought to look into some of this stuff and at least know about them...

 

These are just compilations of stuff that I have come up over the years mostly during those frantic surfing sessions... they were lying somewhere in the corner of my machine... I was cleaning up my machine... looking for disk space in my 120 gig machine (can you believe it...!!!) and found them...

 

Too many software installed... and I still have that collection of games that Binoy gave me... I am working on it dude... working real hard... I wish I worked on my design patterns that hard.. anyways...

 

If you have .Net framework installed on your machine and if you go to C:\WINDOWS\assembly, what you see there is a lie. That directory isn't really a directory. look at the headings you have version, culture and public key token. Yeah it shows what's inside the GAC. its a shell extension. But it doesn't show you everything that's inside the GAC. If you really want to see what's inside the GAC in the explorer environment, fire up the command line and type in Subst G: C:\Windows\Assembly. This creates a new drive that maps to the mentioned directory path. Then instead of visiting the C:\Windows\Assembly, if you visit the G:\ you will see what's really in the GAC. The system doesn't really know that you enough to hide the real stuff that's inside the gac... stuff that's usually concealed... Talk about cheating the system... Har har...!!!

 

Now I don't really know how you can use this knowledge... But I am sure someone will find a way to use it... and let me know about it...!

 

There are some windows hot keys that we all know like the Windows + E keyboard button fires up the windows explorer and Windows + F fires up Search files and folders and so on. But there is more. There is a whole list here at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000378.html check it out guys. Not only that if you go to http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/WinKey-Download-887.html using winkey you might even be able to customize a couple of windows hot keys.

 

if you press Windows + R and type in wmic and hit enter you will see the windows management and instrumentation shell. it looks like the command line utility. WMIC is based on aliases. Aliases make the primary data provided by WMI available without having to understand WMI-specific concepts. For example, the processes running on the current system are available from the PROCESS alias. To view all of the processes that are currently running on the computer, type PROCESS in the WMIC utility. To list a specific process, type a command such as PROCESS WHERE (Description="explorer.exe"). To receive specific properties for the processes, type a command such as PROCESS GET Name, Handle, PageFaults. More information at http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/wmic.mspx?mfr=true

 

if you press Windows + R and type in netsh and hit enter you see the Netsh. This is a command-line scripting utility that allows you to, either locally or remotely, display or modify the network configuration of a computer that is currently running. Details at http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/netsh.mspx?mfr=true and some fun stuff at http://www.hanselman.com/blog/UninstallingIPv6SupportOnWindowXP.aspx also for networking geeks. Didn't make much sense to me though... I was just on one of those surfing sprees...

 

Some more crazy commands in the windows command line environment that I didn't know about. Not giving much details... Everybody should definitely check it out once though...

 

click Windows + R and type in the following commands and hit enter.

 

"fsutil" - file system manager
"eudcedit" - font building tool
"sfc" - scans system files and can repair or install the proper microsoft versions if corrupt
"driverquery" - list of all the device drivers running on your machine with their properties
"diskpart" - disk partitioning utility. Should be used extremely carefully
"openfiles" - lists all open files
"sc" - lets you manage services from the command line
"getmac" - gets the mac addresses

More commands at http://www.networkclue.com/os/Windows/commands/ this is real interesting stuff...

 

Regards,

 

Nilotpal Das

Consultant - Microsoft Technology Practice

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