So, the machine auto-activates Windows 10 Home Edition at install time. No prompts, no nothing. You insert the generic upgrade key, and it throws an unhelpful error message back at you: Error code 0x83FA067 means exactly the same thing, as does 0xC004F069. This probably surprises nobody, but trying again, as the above message suggests, will […]
Cheap Windows 10 capable devices often come with very limited internal storage space. To make use of this, it is of course crucial that Windows itself takes up as little space as possible. To combat the bloat, there’s a little known feature in compact.exe, the built-in disk compression tool, that compresses the operating system itself, […]
I recently reinstalled one of these cheap-ass, but surprisingly well built for the price, “ultraportable” laptops. Here’s the WiFi driver to get you started, and the remaining drivers that were not available from Windows Update. Enjoy.
Working with multiple screens, I often use several windows in Visual Studio. For a while now, I’ve been annoyed by all the miscellaneous windows forcing themselves on top so I couldn’t open a browser on one screen and switch to the code on another screen without the window on the browser’s screen popping up to […]
Some hypervisors for virtual machines do not properly support sending a fake system time to the guest operating system, thus making Windows guests display the wrong time if their timezone is set to anything except UTC. This happens because Windows, by default, keeps the system clock set to the local time. This is stupid. The […]
Mostly a note to self, original source here. SELECT TOP 10 SUBSTRING(qt.TEXT, (qs.statement_start_offset/2)+1, ((CASE qs.statement_end_offset WHEN -1 THEN DATALENGTH(qt.TEXT) ELSE qs.statement_end_offset END – qs.statement_start_offset)/2)+1), qs.execution_count, qs.total_logical_reads, qs.last_logical_reads, qs.total_logical_writes, qs.last_logical_writes, qs.total_worker_time, qs.last_worker_time, qs.total_elapsed_time/1000000 total_elapsed_time_in_S, qs.last_elapsed_time/1000000 last_elapsed_time_in_S, qs.last_execution_time, qp.query_plan FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats qs CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(qs.sql_handle) qt CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan(qs.plan_handle) qp ORDER BY qs.total_logical_reads DESC — logical reads […]
Just a short note to self here, as the process is fully documented at Microsoft’s website (local archive here). The command to use is: C:\windows\system32> redircmp ou=mycomputers,DC=contoso,dc=com Of course you have to customize the location to fit your domain.
I was recently debugging a case where a customer’s installation was hanging due to a database lock. The issue turned out to be that the database was not set to a default transaction level of READ COMMITTED SNAPSHOT, which the product expects. Regardless, while troubleshooting the issue, I stumbled upon a very useful SQL query […]
Cygwin stopped being compatible with Windows XP in 2016. Following this post on stackoverflow, you can find the setup files and a (very slow) mirror that’s compatible. I made my own, considerably faster, mirror of the last Windows XP compatible Cygwin release, at http://cygwinxp.cathedral-networks.org/ The mirror date is 2016-08-30, the 30th of August 2016 AD. […]
Repurposing an old developer machine to run some light VM’s, I was tasked with getting Hyper-V Server running on the Asus Maximus V GENE motherboard. Simple enough. Download Hyper-V for free from Microsoft, format a USB stick with FAT32, put all the files from the .ISO on the stick, install. Diskpart Cheat Sheet 1) Open […]