TIP – CHECK ON YOUR LAPTOP BATTERY.

Here is a little cool tip I found, that I thought I would share.

Although the battery life on most newer laptops is really high, it is always good to know if there is anything you can do to make it better or if there are any specific processes that seem to be consuming more than their share of CPU or resources, which translates to more battery consumption.

If you have ever dealt with managing the Power profile on your Citrix servers from the command line, you have of course used the PowerCfg command to set the system to the “High Performance” scheme (PowerCfg –S <SCHEME_GUID>), well, did you know that this little tool can also give you a lot of information on your systems settings and how your battery is doing!

This works beginning with Windows 7, so open up a command prompt and issue the command:

PowerCfg -energy

Give the system a minute and you will have a really nice, HTML report waiting for you in your profile folder! (CD %UserProfile%)

You should see the following output:

Looking at the report, you will see something like this…

If you look towards the bottom of the report, you will also see a cool stat, the amount of charge the last time you attempted a full charge, so you can see if your battery is dying.

Look for this:

Enjoy!
Aaron

REGEDIT COMPARE TIP!

I have been meaning to send this out for a while, but just haven’t gotten around to it. Anyway if you are like me you are spending a lot of time in the Registry, I find that I am constantly making a change to an application and tracking it with a tool (RegScanner, RegFromApp, etc.) but sometimes there is no substitute for just good ole eyeballing it. The problem is that usually you have loaded the Mandatory profile in under HKEY_USERS and you wind up scrolling up and down looking for the subtle change that the application made.

Wouldn’t it be nice to just load up another copy of the registry and place them side by side? Give it a shot, unfortunately, RegEdit is too smart for its own good and realizes that it is already loaded, so it just brings the running copy to the foreground.

Now try this, launch RegEdit again but this time, run RegEdit –M, and there you have it, multiple copies of the Registry editor running! Now you can place them side by side and have a good and proper look.

While we are on the topic of the registry, by now everyone should be familiar with the fact that in the 64-bit world all local machine 32-bit stuff winds up being placed in the Wow6432Node area of the registry, but if you want to really see the registry the same way a 32-bit app sees it, go to C:\Windows\syswow64\Regedit.exe and you will get the same 32-bit view that an application sees. Feel free to combine the two tips so you can verify that the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software really is the same as HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node running them side by side.

APPLICATION TIP : REPAIRING THE UNREPAIRABLE.

Here’s a quick tip which I find I need to use from time to time. I don’t know if you have ever run into this or not, but sometimes you wind up with weirdness in a particular application and you figure, what the heck, let me try to do a repair and see if it fixes it, but when you click on the application, it doesn’t give you that choice. Other applications seem to have the choice, what gives?!

Anyway, as it turns out there may be a good reason why the vendor doesn’t want you to attempt a repair, but other times a repair is just what the doctor ordered. So what can you do if you’d like to give it a shot? Simple, crack open your registry and navigate to the following location:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\<App Guid>

You’ll see entries for NoModify and NoRepair. Change either of these to a 0 and refresh the Programs window and….

Magic!

You can now change an installation or repair it. Keep in mind that the application still has to support these features, which you would think they don’t if the option is not there, but my experience has been that it always works.

If anyone comes across an application that barks at an attempt to be repaired, I’d be interested to know about it.

RENAMING MULTIPLE FILES.

Hello All,

Just in case you weren’t aware of this little feature starting in Windows 7/2008.  If you go to rename a file, (F2 for those looking for a quicker way than having to right-click and select Rename) you will notice that by default only the name and not the extension will highlight. At first I found this odd, then I thought it must be to protect people from accidentally changing the extension and messing up the associations. Safety aside, here is another benefit that it provides; if you ever need to rename multiple files that have the same name, but different file extensions, you can do it all in one shot now!

When would you need to do this? One example is in Citrix Provisioning Server. When you need to make a copy of a disk, you usually have three files of the same name (.lok [Locking file;not necessary], .pvp [vDisk Properties file], .vhd [The actual vDisk]) that you copy to a new name, rename them all and then import the disk. Have a look:

Highlight all files, press F2, change the first file to XAProd-v3

Presto!

All renamed.
Anyway, I thought it was neat,

DID YOU KNOW? MSCORSVW.EXE TIP

I just got finished installing the SQL 2005 tools and noticed that there was a process called mscorsvw.exe sucking up resources, around 90% of my CPU. My natural instinct would be to kill the process or reboot my machine which would probably deal with the issue, but I decided to give it a moment or two to see if it settled down. Anyway, eventually it did settle down, but it did remain in memory, so I did a little digging and found out the following information and found the following:

When mscorsvw.exe takes up resources, it is precompiling .NET assemblies in the background. Once it's done, it will go away. Typically, after you install the .NET Redist, it will be done with the high priority assemblies in 5 to 10 minutes and then will wait until your computer is idle to process the low priority assemblies. Once it does that it will shutdown and you won't see mscorsvw.exe. One important thing is that while you may see 100% CPU usage, the compilation happens in a process with low priority, so it tries not to steal the CPU for other stuff you are doing. Once everything is compiled, assemblies will now be able to share pages across different processes and warm start up will be typically much faster, so we're not throwing away your cycles.

This got me thinking that if it is still doing stuff in the background after I “finished” my install, then maybe my install really isn’t finished at all. I dug a little further and found that there is a way to force all of the remaining items to be compiled (or is that pre-compiled?) with a command called NGEN.exe. You can find this command in the C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727 (probably based on .NET version) folder. Go to this folder and from a command prompt issue the following command:

NGEN executequeueditems

then stand back and watch it go! In my case it ran for around seven minutes before it was done. I can now feel comfortable that my install is truly finished!

You can also use this command at anytime to see if there is anything queued up waiting to be executed:

NGEN queue status