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Thu, Mar 05, 2026 3:30 pm

Disabling Skye automatic startup

I found Microsoft's Skype for Business application was automatically staring on a Microsoft Windows system where it was not being used. Microsoft retired the product on May 5, 2025, replacing it with Microsoft Teams, and is no longer providing security updates or bug fixes for the software. Though Microsoft ended official support for Skype for Business Server on October 14, 2025 and is no longer providing cloud service for the product, companies that installed their own servers can still run it locally. If there is a need to retain the software on a system, but no need to have it start automatically when the system boots, one can stop it from starting whenever the system is rebooted by taking the following steps:
  1. Open the program and then click on the gear icon near the top, right side of the window.

    Skype for Business Options

  2. Choose Tools and Options.

    Skype for Business

  3. Uncheck the option for "Automatically start the app when I log on to Windows" under the Personal options to prevent the program from restarting automatically upon a login to the system, then click on OK to apply the change after unchecking that option.

    Skype for Business Personal Options

[/os/windows/software] 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

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

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

Fri, May 17, 2024 3:10 pm

View RDP Firewall Rule using PowerShell

If a Microsoft Windows system is running the Microsoft Defender Firewall, firewall software that comes with Microsoft Windows systems, you can check on whether connectivity is allowed on a particular network port from a command-line interface (CLI) using PowerShell. You can determine whether the Windows Firewall is active on a system from a command prompt using the command netsh advfirewall show currentprofile. If the value of "State" is "ON", then the Windows Firewall is active on the system.

C:\>netsh advfirewall show currentprofile

Domain Profile Settings:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
State                                 ON
Firewall Policy                       BlockInbound,AllowOutbound
LocalFirewallRules                    N/A (GPO-store only)
LocalConSecRules                      N/A (GPO-store only)
InboundUserNotification               Enable
RemoteManagement                      Disable
UnicastResponseToMulticast            Enable

Logging:
LogAllowedConnections                 Disable
LogDroppedConnections                 Disable
FileName                              %systemroot%\system32\LogFiles\Firewall\pfirewall.log
MaxFileSize                           4096

Ok.


C:\>

You can check on whether the firewall is permitting connectivity on a particular network port, e.g., TCP port 3389 for the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), from a PowerShell prompt, which you can obtain by typing powershell in the Windows "Search" field at the bottom of the screen and then clicking on Windows PowerShell when you see it returned by the search function. At the PowerShell prompt, you can issue the command Get-NetFirewallPortFilter | Where-Object { $_.LocalPort -eq 3389 } | Get-NetFirewallRule. If you wished to check on whether firewall connectivity is permitted for some other protocol, substitute the port used by that protocol, e.g., port 22 for Secure Shell (SSH) connections.

[ More Info ]

[/os/windows/software/security/firewall] permanent link

Mon, May 06, 2024 10:31 pm

Stopping automatic updates to Microsoft Paint and other Microsoft Store apps

When I sat down at a system running the Microsoft Windows 11 operating system on Saturday, I saw a message stating that Microsoft Paint had updated itself automatically. I had at least a dozen Paint windows open where I had posted screenshots over the past week for things I wanted to check later. I had not saved those Paint windows; I had anticipated going through them on Saturday, extracting information I wanted to keep from some images and then closing the windows and saving others. But I found the update had just closed them all without any prompt asking whether I wanted to save them and without saving the images. So I lost all the information from them irretrievably. Certainly, I should have saved the images in those Paint windows or used some other graphics application that automatically saves the contents of windows for that application or at least won't automatically update itself without saving any unsaved work, but I'm still irritated at the mindset of Microsoft developers regarding not caring about the impact to users if users have unsaved content in Microsoft applications, in addition to being irked with myself for not saving the information. I do use Paint a lot for simple graphics tasks, such as cropping and resizing screenshots, and I don't want it updating itself without warning when that may lead to a loss of information I haven't yet saved. You can determine when a Microsoft Store app was last updated and turn off automatic updates for apps obtained from the Microsoft Store, though you have to turn off the auto update feature for all apps, since there is not a way to do it only for a particular app, such as Paint.

[ More Info ]

[/os/windows/software/graphics/mspaint] permanent link

Mon, Mar 18, 2024 8:47 pm

Removing admin rights from programs running in a Sandboxie sandbox

Sandboxie is a free and open-source program that runs on systems using the Microsoft Windows operating system that allows you to run other programs in a secure sandbox. If you wish to run programs in Sandboxie without the programs having administrative rights, even if you are running Sandboxie from an account that is in the system's administrator group, you can do so by editing the Sandboxie configuration file, Sandboxie.ini. The file will usually be in the C:\Windows folder on most systems running a Microsoft Windows operating system. Sandboxie will first look for its configuration file in C:\Windows, but if it doesn't find the file there, it will then look in the Sandboxie installation folder, which will usually be C:\Program Files\Sandboxie or C:\Program Files\Sandboxie-Plus. When it finds an instance of the file, it will not check other locations. There is a DropAdminRights setting that can be used in the file. If you set the value to y for a sandbox, then any programs running in the sandbox will have administrative rights stripped from them, i.e,. the security credentials used to start the sandbox won't include membership in the Administrators and Power Users groups. If you are running Sandboxie from an account that is not an administrator account, then the setting won't have any effect.

[ More Info ]

[/os/windows/software/security/sandboxie] permanent link

Sun, Aug 13, 2023 6:42 pm

CDisplay Installation File

While installing software that my wife uses on a new PC, I discovered that the developer of CDisplay, David Ayton, died in 2003 and the program is no longer maintained. The application allows one to display comic book archive files, which are files with an extension of .cbr, cbz, .cbt, or .cba — those files are renamed RAR, ZIP, TAR, or ACE files. Since the website where I obtained the software almost two decades ago, www.cdisplay.me, no longer exists, I've placed a Zip file containing the installation program on this website at CDisplay 1.8.1 so that others who might need a copy of the software can access it.

[/os/windows/software/comics] permanent link

Mon, Nov 15, 2021 10:23 pm

Converting a transparent PNG file to GIF in Corel PSP X4

I wanted to convert a transparent PNG file to a transparent GIF file for placement on web pages in an area on the pages that had a black background. I could have modified the code for the pages to use the PNG file that had been provided to me, but I thought I could easily convert the PNG image I had been provided, which was an image of stylized white text on a black background, to a GIF image and just replace the old GIF image on the site with the one I had recently been given. Since I use Corel PaintShop Pro X4 for image editing, I thought I could just use its "save as" feature to resave the file in the GIF format. But when I saved the transparent PNG file as a GIF file expecting transparency to be maintained by clicking on File, selecting Save As and then choosing GIF as the new format for the file, I found that transparency was not maintained in the GIF file. I was able to produce the GIF file I needed by the following steps, however.

[ More Info ]

[/os/windows/software/graphics/corel/psp] permanent link

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