30 July 2007 . April 15, 2021. Eric Rasmusen, erasmuse@indiana.edu This file is now at http://www.rasmusen.org/a/windows-rasmusen.txt These notes are Windows tips and tricks that I have found useful or thought might be useful. I wrote these for my own use and have not tried to make them clear for others, but some other people might like them. ********************************************************** PRINTING DIRCTORY FILE NAMES Get a terminal by typing CMD (for command line) in the start box at the upper right corner of the screen. Navigate to the directory you want. You don't have to type entire directory names: start it and then hit TAB and it will auto-complete. Then type dir > temp.txt and the filenames will appear in a new file called temp.txt in that directory. ********************************************************** MOVING A WINDOW WHOSE TOP GOES OFF THE SCREEN There is actually a way to control the window's position with your keyboard. This can be done by holding the Shift key and right-clicking the program's taskbar icon. Select Move from the menu that appears, and begin pressing the arrow keys to force the window to move position. ********************************************************** DELL PROBLEM OF AUTOMATICALLY RESIZING WINDOWS TO FILL THE ENTIRE SCREEN: Open Dell Display Manager by right clicking on a blank part of the screen and finding it on the resulting menu. Then click the screen with a big X on it. I found this answer at: http://superuser.com/questions/222597/how-to-disable-auto-maximize-resize-window-aero-snap-when-near-screen-edge ********************************************************** CLOSING A WINDOW ALT-F4 will clsoe a window if it is stuck because you can't click on the bottom of it because it is off the screen. CTRL-Z undoes the previous command. ********************************************************** WINDOWS UTILITIES. Good ones are up at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx ********************************************************** WINDOWS XP GENERAL SETTINGS Go to Settings-Taskbar and Start Menu-Taskbar. Check only Group Similar and Show Quicklunch and Show the CLock and Hide Inacive Icons. Do NOT check Autohide or Keep the taskbar on top. ********************************************************** REMAPPING DRIVE LETTERS SO THEY ARE STABLE Highlight My Computer. Right-click, and pick MANAGE. THen look in STORAGE, then DISK MANAGEMENT. Click on a disk, and pick CHANGE DRIVE LETTERS AND PATHS. Change to Z:, Y: , or other late letters. THen it will freeze there. After doing this, you can have a stable link on the desktop to a thumbdrive. ********************************************************** One of the many stupid things about Windows is that despite the overwhelming amount of useless stuff on the Control Panel, there is no way to see which programs start up automatically when Windows boots, or what different processes are for. Googling, I found a thread with a good post by Pete C. , who recommends the two programs Autoruns and Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel, both of which seem well-designed and easy to install. ********************************************************** STARTUP PROGRAMS You can view the starting programs by going to Run under the Start menu and running "msconfig" and going to its startup tab. By checking and unchecking the programs, you can determine what runs at the start and what does not. The programs listed there function separate of anything that happens to be in the Startup subfolder of the Start menu's Programs folder. ********************************************************** An Extended Example of Microsoft Windows Incompetence– Printing Deletion Windows is awesomely bad. How can as big a company as Microsoft do things so poorly? I do not mean that rhetorically. Rather, why don’t they spend a little more money and make a far better product, for which they could charge more? I suppose Bill Gates must be blamed– he controls the company, and he must not have a good feel for technology and so doesn’t understand why good design matters. There is not market corrective for the problem of a monopolistic leader who fails to see something imoprtant. This matters for policy purposes, because such incompetence only survives because of a government-granted monopoly— copyright and patent on software. Here’s an example, which I’ll list so I can use it as a standard reference. What matters is not that this is so important to operation, as that it shows such incompetence in design. I want to cancel all my print jobs, because one job is jamming the printer for some reason. Windows has a window that shows print jobs and supposedly allows the user to cancel any one of them, but as often as not, that command is ignored by the computer. Probably that’s incompetent design too, but let’s give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt– maybe there is some technical reason why some print jobs can’t be cancelled without restarting the machine. So I went to the Web. It turns out that there is a command line command to cancel print jobs: prnjobs -x. This is put onto one web page with various other commands. Point one: Microsoft hides many of Windows features in command-line commands that go unmentioned in its standard documentation. It would be easy enough to link them to the standard help, but MS doesn’t. Point two: Instead of using HTML properly, MS slaps together a bunch of commands onto one web page just like a computer manual, except without professional typesetting layout. There seems to be no way to cancel all jobs at once, though. The MS documentation instead says that the user must first find the job id of each print job that is to be cancelled, using a separate command, prnjobs -l. Point three: There ought to be a command to cancel all jobs at once. The prnjobs -l command fails, though. It turns out that you have to take the comamnd-line window to a special directory for the command to work, though the MS documentation doesn’t tell you that. It’s important to understand that running the printer utilities can be a bit tricky due to the terse rules governing command line scripts. Techrepublic, having billions of dollars less than Microsoft, but billions of brains more, tell us this: It’s important to understand that running the printer utilities can be a bit tricky due to the terse rules governing command line scripts. To begin with, the six printer utilities are located in the systemroot\system32 folder, which on most Windows XP installations is C:\Windows\System32. Now, even though this folder is listed in the path by default, you must actually change to this folder in order to run the utilities. And, since these utilities are designed to run from the command line, you’ll need to launch them from a command prompt, and you must run them using Windows Script Host’s command line script host (Cscript.exe). Point four: Windows only lets the command be issued after moving to a particular directory. Point five: The MS documentation omits this crucial part of the command. Even Techrepublic fails to note another problem: the actual command is not prnjobs, but prnjobs.vbs. Prnjobs by itself fails. You need to issue c:/windows/system32/cscript prnjobs.vbs -l c:/windows/system32/cscript prnjobs.vbs -x 4 (if 4 turns out to be the job number) Point six: The MS documentation gives the wrong command in all its examples. Point seven: Windows requires the suffix *.vbs, for no good reason. I should mention, too, that cut-and-paste doesn’t work in the DOS- style command-line window, even though practically always when I use it, I am typing in commands that need to be typed verbatim from some other source. Point eight: Windows blocks cut-and-paste into the DOS-style command- line window. And also: if you make a mistake,although a window comes up to tell you, you can’t simultaneously look at the help window for what to do and do it– you have to close the window first. (And remember–no cutting and pasting allowed!) Point nine: Help windows must be closed before you can use them. You presumed to have a photographic memory. Finally, the command doesn’t work. We’re back to where we started. I succeeded eventually. Disconnecting the printer’s power and USB failed to work. But I tried deleting some plausible processes in the Windows Task Manager and got the job deleted (I also deleted the printer’s operating process too, and had to get it started up again, though.)