Reinstalling Windows XP on an ancient (well, vintage 2009) laptop recently, I suddenly remembered how much I hated the “Favorites” button that’s stuck on the favorites bar and shows you your favorites when you click it, just as the bar already does. This thing: While the rest of the crap, such as the favorites, the […]
These are apparently slowly disappearing from the intertubes. This is my attempt at archiving them. -> DOWNLOAD HERE <- Included PowerToys: Alt-Tab Replacement Task Switcher replaces the simpler Alt-Tab switcher with a more visual one which shows live window previews. CD Slide Show Generator generates a slideshow from photos burned to a CD. ClearType Tuner […]
Sometimes, you just want things brutally simple and stupid. I was searching for how to do this, and stumbled upon this post on SQL Server Central. Turns out the query listed there doesn’t handle databases with weird names, containing version numbers with “.” in them, for instance. Thus, I modified it slightly, adding brackets and […]
To enable timing of your query: SET STATISTICS TIME ON Time statistics provides output like this in the “Messages” tab of SSMS after running a query: (127 row(s) affected) SQL Server Execution Times: CPU time = 0 ms, elapsed time = 42 ms. To show IO statistics: SET STATISTICS IO ON ..which provides stuff […]
If you right click a database in SSMS and select Tasks => Take Offline, you might find yourself staring at this dialog for hours, if there are active sessions running queries on your database. Here’s how to force it to go offline, rolling back any current transactions. Replace [dbname] with the name of your database. […]
On a Windows machine, you can normally use Start => Run => control userpasswords2 to enable automatic login for a given user when the system boots. On computers that are part of a domain, this is not the case. However, while the functionality is removed from the user interface when you join a domain, it […]
The tempdb database often won’t just shrink when you ask it to, through SSMS or otherwise. Apparently, Sql Server holds on to it for its cache entries. To shrink the table anyway (and have the cache reload), this should do: DBCC FREEPROCCACHE DBCC FREESYSTEMCACHE (‘ALL’) DBCC SHRINKDATABASE (‘tempdb’, 0) Enjoy 🙂
This happened on a few machines I am responsible for, after the upgrade to Windows 10. You click “Start”, type “updates”, it suggests “Check for Updates” in the “Settings” app, you click <enter> and it opens an empty settings window with no search results. Great. After looking around for a while, I stumbled over the […]
So, you need the private key for a certificate on Windows, for some innocent snooping around with Wireshark, but someone marked it as not exportable. Now what? Cue Gentil Kiwi and his tool Mimikatz. The following commands will extract the certificates from the local store: crypto::capi crypto::certificates /systemstore=CERT_SYSTEM_STORE_LOCAL_MACHINE /export The password for the pfx files […]
I have my taskbar set to “Use small taskbar buttons” and “Never combine”, probably as much out of habit as anything else. This means that when I pin programs to the taskbar, opening one of them, suddenly making it display a title for one or more windows, will push any pinned programs to its right […]