net send in Windows 7

Need to send a message to a computer on your network? In the days of XP and earlier you could use "net send" to pop up a message, but those days are gone. Luckily I've discovered a simple command to recreate the same effect in Windows 7 (and probably later versions as well). First, if you don't have PsTools installed you're going to want to. Specifically we're going to use PsExec, but having the whole suite is worth doing. After you download and extract it somewhere (why not c:\bin\ ?) you'll need to either open a command prompt in that directory, or add that directory to your path environment variable. Then it's as simple as:

psexec \\computer-name msg * /server:localhost "Your computer will self destruct in 30 seconds!"

Easy as pi! PsExec can also be used to do lots of other interesting things like remotely enable RDP. Take a look at the options for PsExec, as well as msg to get an idea about more possibilities. You'll likely find other useful PsTools too, now that you know about them.

Disclaimer:
Please use your new found power responsibly. I do not officially condone ANY April Fool's pranks or any other nonsense of the sort.

Get the attention of a remote user

I regularly use LogMeIn Rescue to provide remote support for users. Sometimes they stop paying attention while I'm working and when that happens I'll inevitably end up needing to get them to enter a password or otherwise interact with the computer. One nifty trick I use is to repeatedly set their volume using the Windows 7 volume control in the taskbar. The computer will beep each time you click a volume level as a test sound and a few times in a row will typically get someone's attention pretty quickly!

And if that doesn't work, there's always BreadFish

IE9 fails to install with error 3715

Having a bit of an unexplained error on a client using IE9 (don't ask) prompted me to attempt uninstalling and reinstalling it after all other attempts to diagnose the issue failed. Uninstall worked fine, but upon running the downloaded manual installer I was met with a generic error. I looked at the Microsoft troubleshooting advice which yielded no results, however on attempting to install from Windows Update I at least got an error code: 3715. A few searches yielded Technet articles like this one that mostly linked back to the same troubleshooting info.

On one of such articles I saw some advice related to clearing temporary files which didn't work but led me to start thinking about what else could be on the computer that could prevent the install. When I started IE8 for the first time after uninstalling 9 I got two popups regarding browser toolbars: Bing Bar, and Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. I decided to try uninstalling these, and sure enough after doing so the manual installer for IE9 worked flawlessly.

I'm not sure if my original problem is solved yet, but hopefully this post can help anyone else searching on this particular error, or other errors related to installing IE9.

High latency for hyper-v 2012 r2 VMs

I had just finished setting up a 5 NIC team to provide 5gbps to my shiny new Windows Server 2012 R2 Core with Hyper-V host when I discovered that the VMs had very high, and unpredictable latency. Not cool! I read a number of blog posts regarding settings of the physical NIC that could be to blame. The most common theme, as explained in this article is a feature called VM Queueing. It seems to be most common Broadcom NICs but also affects Intel. Looks easy enough to change... except in core. Luckily there are a few handy powershell cmdlets to handle this issue in Core. Confused by the exact syntax for Disable-NetAdapterVMQ, I searched google for this cmdlet and found this great blog post on the exact issue. At first I tried just disabling the VMQ on my NIC team multiplex adapter, but still had the issue. Eventually I ended up running ' Disable-NetAdapterVMQ “*” ' to disable the feature on all adapters. My VMs dropped 4 packets, but then came back up with <1ms ping. I gotta tell ya, I <3 <1ms :)

Windows Server 2012 slide login

Sick of that annoying touch-drag motion that makes sense on tablets, but not so much with a mouse that you are forced to perform before logging in to Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8? It turns out the spacebar will skip this screen. There's probably a way to disable the swipe to login on these newer versions of the operating system, but this work around seems efficient enough that I didn't bother looking for it.

Fix Office File Associations for All users

I ran into a strange problem today. I installed Office 2007 Standard on a Windows 7 machine in the same way as I've done hundreds of times. For some reason something went awry this time. Any user other than the admin user, which I used to install the program, had Wordpad set to open all Office documents. Admittedly I only tested three other user accounts but all indications were that this would affect everyone. Since the Default Programs in Windows are set on a per user basis I couldn't very well just fix the associations manually. Instead I found the solution in an under-appreciated comment on this thread:

"Running winword /r corrected a similar issue I was having." - appdce

winword in this case is of course winword.exe which is located in the Office12 directory (usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\winword.exe). Running this command once with an unprivileged user seemed to clear up the file associations for all users. Thanks appdce, wherever you are!

Ping with timestamp in Windows

Since I've had to look this up on a number of occasions I know others must too. It's a common problem: you need to leave ping running to catch elusive network failures but you need to know not just if but WHEN the network failed. There's as many solutions as there are threads but I feel that a program called fping offers the best solution to the timestamp problem (and a bunch of other nifty features as well). For instance unlike with normal ping simply redirected to a file, fping can log to a file while displaying console output. Nifty!