Some Notes on the Machines

UltraDefrag still comes in its free open source version:

sourceforge.net/projects/ultradefrag/

as well as a newer, more developed paid version:

ultradefrag.net

I’m hoping to do better in the future, but for now:

https://www.pdq.com/blog/setting-up-dfs-in-your-environment/

To make a bootable USB stick for the HPE SPP (Service Pack for Proliant), which includes all firmware and drivers, one must use:

the HPE USB Key Utility for Windows

and it has to be a 16G or 32G USB stick. Larger won’t boot. Rufus and Ventoy also fail as of 2022-02-18.

One can do a basic test of TCP using Putty. UDP is another matter, one must have a server process and a sender. I found the simple sender and server written in Powershell here:

cloudbrothers.info/en/test-udp-connection-powershell/

to be excellent. In addition, if you want to know the identity of the process listening on a port, run this:

Get-Process -Id (Get-NetUDPEndpoint -LocalPort YourPortNumberHere).OwningProcess

I was shocked recently, when software for excellent photo management was needed. A whole lot of newer options involving web servers, cloud hosts, etc., but very little simple and powerful, and some standards of yore are gone. However. One is not:

XnView MP

XnView has been around for decades, XnView MP is their new thorough revision. I tested a pile of these things, and XnView MP is by far the best, features and speed and design friendly for both new user and the technical.

Here are the others I tested:

• Irfanview (has features, much less friendly)
• nomacs (lacking features)
• digiKam (too slow, crashy)
• jpegview (lacking features)
• FastStone Image Viewer (lacking batch resize)
• ImageGlass Spider (lacking features)
• ACDSee Photo Studio (expensive, overkill, bloatware)
• Various Adobe products (expensive and overkill, or free and lacking features)

If you have better, please do let me know!

As of very recently, Intel has divided its NIC support installs into two steps, one being driver, and the other being PROset, software which supports the driver and the hardware. Both are recommended. Here is the page for Windows 10:

www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/18293/intel-network-adapter-driver-for-windows-10.html

Was just shown these, how nice of them!

https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli

This removes all local admins from a machine’s Administrators group, except the built-in Administrator and “Domain Admins” if it’s on a domain.

$LocalDomain = $env:USERDOMAIN
$DomainAdmins = "$LocalDomain\Domain Admins"
$ComputerName = $env:COMPUTERNAME
$OEMAdministrator = "$ComputerName\Administrator"
Get-LocalGroupMember Administrators | ForEach-Object {
	$UserName = $_.Name
	"Found: $UserName"
	If (($UserName -ne $DomainAdmins) -and ($UserName -ne $OEMAdministrator)) {
		"Removing $UserName from local Administrators group."
		Remove-LocalGroupMember -Group Administrators -Member $UserName
		}
	""
}

When trying to get SVI contents out and vssadmin and diskshadow don’t work, this may:

wmic
(then it its own command prompt) shadowcopy delete

It will require “Y” and “Enter” to be pressed, it will do one at a time. One can also have it delete all noninteractively:

wmic shadowcopy delete /nointeractive

and in Powershell, one can run that noninteractive as a job:

Start-Job -ScriptBlock { wmic shadowcopy delete /nointeractive }

Some new data:

https://wiki.msp.exchange/troubleshooting/windows/windows_update/reset_windows_update_reboot_flag