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Sun, Mar 09, 2025 9:53 pm

Creating a bootable USB flash drive from an ISO file using Rufus

If you have an ISO file that could be written to a CD or DVD to boot a system, but wish to use it to create a bootable USB flash drive and wish to do so using software on a Microsoft Windows system, you can use Rufus. The developer is Pete Batard and his blog can be found at Pete's Blog; the GitHub page for the software is at rufus.

[ More Info ]

[/os/windows/utilities] permanent link

Fri, Feb 28, 2025 7:55 pm

Burning an ISO file to a CD or DVD on a Windows 11 System

If you wish to burn a .iso file to a CD or a DVD on a Microsoft Windows 11 system, you can do so by taking the following steps.
  1. In the Windows File Explorer, Right-click on the .iso file, then click on Burn, which appears above the file list.

    Windows 11 - ISO - Click on Burn

  2. If the appropriate CD/DVD drive does not appear in the "Disc Burner" field, select it then click on Burn (check the box first for "Verify disc after burning", if you wish to have the program verify that the disc can be read successfully after the iso file is burned to the disc).

    Windows Disc Image Burner

  3. When the iso file has successfully been written to disc, you should see "The disc image has been successfully burned to disc." You can then click on the Close button.

    Disc image successfully burned

    The disc will then be ejected.

[/os/windows/win11] permanent link

Mon, Jan 27, 2025 10:06 pm

Transferring files over an RDP connection

If you are connected to a remote Microsoft Windows system from another Windows system via the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) using the Microsoft terminal services client provided by Microsoft with its Windows operating systems, mstsc.exe, you can copy and paste files from one system to the other as you would from one directory to another on one of the systems. E.g., if I want to copy a file from a remote Windows 11 system to my local Windows 11 system, I can select it in the Windows File Explorer on the remote system and then switch back to my local system and go to the directory where I want to place it using the File Explorer on that system and then hit Ctrl-V, i.e, the Ctrl and V keys, to paste the file into that directory. You can use the same technique to copy a directory, i.e., you can right click on the directory and choose "copy" and then switch to the other system and navigate in the File Explorer to where you wish to copy the directory and then and use the paste function, e.g. Ctrl-V to copy

I don't know how well the technique may work on very large files or directories, e.g., ones that are multiple gigabytes, but I've found it works well at least for those several megabytes in size. I also have not tested what happens if you try another copy and paste operation before the first one has completed.

Related:

  1. Transferring Files Via the Remote Desktop
    Date: March 13, 2010

[/os/windows/software/remote-control/rdp] permanent link

Thu, Oct 03, 2024 10:32 pm

Starting the Windows Media Player (WMP) from a command prompt

If you wish to start the Windows Media Player (WMP) application from a command-line interface (CLI), such as a command prompt window, you can do so by entering the command "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" at a command prompt window (be sure to enclose the command within double quotes since there are spaces in the directory path). You might wish to do so if you are logged into one user account, but wish to open a movie or music file that is not accesible from the currently logged in user account. If you wished to run the program from an administrator account, you can open a command prompt window as an administrator or you can open a unprivileged command prompt window from the currently logged in account and then use the runas /user command e.g., runas /user:username "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" where username is the account name for the account from which you wish to run the program. E.g., runas /user:jane "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" to run the Windows Media Player with Jane's account privileges. If you need to run the command from a Windows domain account, you can use runas /user:domainname\username "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" where domainname is the name of the domain and username is the name of the domain user account. Once the Windows Media Player app is open, you can then hit the Ctrl-O keys (the Ctrl and the letter "O" key) simultaneously to open a window where you can then browse for audiovisual files in directories to which the other user account has access.

[/os/windows/software/audio-video/WMP] permanent link

Wed, Sep 25, 2024 10:17 pm

Viewing network connections on a Microsoft Windows system by protocol

If you just wish to see TCP ports in use on a Microsoft Windows system, you can issue the netstat -a -p TCP command at a command prompt. The -a parameter specifies all connections and listening ports should be displayed while the -p parameter can be used to select a protocol from TCP, UDP, TCPv6, or UDPv6. If used with the -s option to display per-protocol statistics, the protocol argument may be any of: IP, IPv6, ICMP, ICMPv6, TCP, TCPv6, UDP, or UDPv6. If you only wish to view IPv6 TCP ports in use, you can use netstat -a -p TCPv6. If you only wish to see currently established connections, you can pipe the output of the netstat command to the find command. E.g., netstat -a -p TCP | find "ESTABLISHED". Or, if you wished to see all of the TCP ports on which the system was listening for a connection, you could use netstat -a -p TCP | find "LISTENING". If you wanted to see connections to a particular port, e.g., 22, for Secure Shell (SSH) connections, you could use netstat -a | find ":ssh" , which would show the IP addresses of the remote systems connected via SSH, or netstat -a | find ":https" for HTTPS connections to web sites. If you wished to see host names rather than IP addresses, you could add the -f option, which displays a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) instead of an IP address for a remote system. E.g., netstat -a -f | find ":https". Since SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS use TCP rather than UDP transmissions, you don't need to add the -p parameter.

[/os/windows/network] permanent link

Tue, Sep 24, 2024 8:53 pm

Extracting files from a .jar file with the jar command

If you have a JAR ("Java archive") file and wish to extract the files contained within it from a command-line interface (CLI) on a Microsoft Windows system, you can do so by opening a command prompt window and using the jar xf filename.jar command, where filename.jar is the relevant .jar file, if you have the Java Development Kit (JDK) installed on the system — the JDK software can be downloaded for free from Oracle's Java Downloads page.

Minecraft uses .jar files for mods and if you wish to view the models (.json files), textures (.png files) within a JAR file used by Minecraft, you can use the jar xf filename.jar command to see those. If you copy the .jar file to a directory where you wish to extract its contents and then run the command from the directory in which the .jar file is located, you should see a directory named assets appear beneath which you can find blockstates, lang, models, and textures subdirectories. The .json files files, such as those you may see in a models/block subdirectory are JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files, which you can view or edit in a text editor, such as the Windows Notepad application. The .png files, which you may see in a textures subdirectory are Portable Network Graphics (PNG) files, which you can view or edit in graphics applications such as Microsoft Paint on Microsoft Windows systems. You can also use a tool such as Blockbench to work with the JSON model files and PNG images.

[/os/windows/software/games/minecraft] permanent link

Fri, Aug 30, 2024 3:01 pm

Starting the Windows Fax and Scan utility from a command line interface

If you wish to start the Windows Fax and Scan program, which allows you to fax or scan documents via a fax machine or scanner attached to a system running the Microsoft Windows operating system, from a command-line interface (CLI), you can do so by opening a command prompt window or a PowerShell window and typing the command wfs and then hitting Enter. There are a few command line parameters you can enter when staring the program from the command line. E.g., you can enter wfs /swtich fax to start the program with its faxing interface; wfs /switch scan is the alternative for starting with the scanning option. Without those, the application will start in the last used mode. For other possible arguments to the app, see Windows Fax And Scan Command Line Options?

[/os/windows/utilities] permanent link

Sun, Jun 30, 2024 9:12 pm

Determining the version of a PDF document

If you have a Portable Document Format (PDF) file and wish to determine the version of the PDF standard used for the document, that information is stored in the first line of the file. You can open the file with a text editor, such as the Windows Notepad application on a Microsoft Windows system and view the first line to determine the PDF version used for the file. You will see %PDF-x.y where x.y is the version of the PDF standard used in the creation of the file, e.g., %PDF-1.7 for version 1.7.

On a Microsoft Windows system, you could also open a PowerShell window (you can type PowerShell in the Windows Search field and click on the application when you see it returned in the list of results) and use the Get-Content cmdlet and the -First parameter followed by the number one. E.g.:

PS C:\> Get-Content "July 2024 Newsletter.pdf" -First 1
%PDF-1.7
PS C:\>

Related:

  1. PowerShell Get-Content equivalents to Linux head and tail commands
    Date: March 22, 2024

[/os/windows/PowerShell] permanent link

Fri, Jun 28, 2024 9:17 pm

Mirroring Disks with Windows Disk Management

I added two Western Digital 10 TB hard disk drives to a Windows 11 system. I wanted to have the second hard disk drive (HDD) mirror the first, which is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks 1 (RAID 1) configuration. You can configure Windows to mirror the drives using the Disk Management utility that comes with the Microsoft Windows operating system. To run the utility, you can open a command prompt with administrator privileges and then type diskmgmt.msc and hit Enter. You will then see a window showing all the drives attached to the system. In this case, the new 10 TB drives are shown as "unallocated", since they have not been partitioned and formatted yet.

Two unallocated drives

[ More Info ]

[/os/windows] permanent link

Sat, May 25, 2024 10:05 pm

Using MakeMKV for ripping DVDs and for other A/V tasks

If you wish to "rip" a DVD, i.e., create a video file on a disk drive from the DVD, one free program you can use on Microsoft Windows systems or Mac OS X systems is MakeMKV. The software can also be used to extract a video file from an ISO image of a DVD.

[ More Info ]

[/os/windows/software/audio-video] permanent link

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