Tag Archives: windows

Reading the Windows Registry from PowerShell

Reading the Windows registry from PowerShell can be a bit cumbersome, when all you wanted to retrieve is the value of an item under a key, at least with PowerShell version before v5. The Get-ItemProperty can be used to enumerate the items and their values under a registry key, but… Read more »

Useful PowerShell functions and snippets

This post contains a few (short) useful PowerShell functions and snippets, that you can include in projects and/or your profile, and some which showcase some peculiar solutions to problems in PowerShell. This one is for use in your profile, so you can see in Alt-Tab which Powershell console is running… Read more »

Speed up folders with many similar named files

This is a little known reghack: When Windows stores files in a folder on an NTFS partition, it still creates so-called 8.3 file names for compatibility with 16-bit Windows programs. When a folder has more than 4000 file entries, it becomes noticeable that access performance decreases. When the folder has more… Read more »

Balloon tips OFF in windows

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Want to get rid of those nasty balloon tips, hovering over the task tray? Here’s the registry command: reg add “HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced” /t REG_DWORD /v EnableBalloonTips /d 0 If you’d wish to re-enable them again, this is the code reg add “HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced” /t REG_DWORD /v EnableBalloonTips /d 1

Windows Explorer search for text in ALL files

windows explorer search

You are sure that the text files in a folder contain a certain string, but the Windows Explorer search doesn’t return anything! WTF? Maybe, the files just have an extension which Windows doesn’t recognize, and are therefore skipped. This is a hack to enable Windows Explorer to search in all… Read more »

Suppress printer warning popups on Windows Server

Want to get rid of the popups that appear on your Windows Print server when print jobs are to be retried? Type the following command in any command prompt window: reg add HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlPrintProviders /v RetryPopup /t REG_DWORD /d 0 And for those who want to enable them: reg add HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlPrintProviders… Read more »

CMD.exe recursion in batch: Deleting empty subdirectories

This article addresses one specific use case for recursion in batch: Recursively looping through a directory (also called a folder) and its sub directories. Normally, this is a pain, and it took me a while to come up with an algorithm that works. For recursion to work correctly, you need:… Read more »