Tag: How to

3 Dos commands that you need to know!

Paul3 Replies

DOS Rocks!

Direcotry of System or Disk Operating System (DOS) is one way the technology is good at fixing certian issues. I am going to talk about some that you might or may not know about.  Each command is good for those who are connected to through a network or network group.   If these system are on the same workgroup and are on the shared through the network this will help you in solving those really problems.   You’ll love these as much as I use them because they are really good at keeping you looking like a genius.

FSUTIL (Microsoft learn)

C:\fsutil volume diskfree \\(Shared drive)  

You’ll need to add the \\ as the shared drive or shared system that you want to know how much space is left on it if you need to know at a quick glance will this file or program fit on this drive.   It’s very useful for those times that you may need to keep track of the space.

QUERY (Microsoft Learn)

query session /server:computername

query users /server:computername

one of thse can be used to determine if there are users who might be causing problems by being logged in but aren’t actually doing anything on the system.   These users could be from a previous shift or might of been logged in for a while without any activity.  So this helps to know if a program or access is causing another user from not being able to do their job one way or another.  This is great tool for corporations where more than one users could be using the system at one time or another.

LOGOFF or SHUTDOWN

logoff [<sessionname> | <sessionID>] [/server:<servername>] [/v] (Microsoft Learn)

shutdown /l /r /m:(Computername)  (Microsoft Learn)

Each one of these commands does about the same thing but one reboots the system also because you never know when the remote system might need to be rebooted also after forcing the user to logoff.   So you can decide which one you might need to user remotely for a system.   You can even add in comments or tell the reason why the system rebooted with the shutdown command by adding  /d [p : u](Planned or Unplanned with a number 1-256) .   I will remind you to be cautious as to what you put down as the reason and you can even specifiy how long to wait before the system reboots by adding /t 0-256 MINUTES.   Each one of these command can be helpful for you when you are trying to solve some minor major issues with a system not working properly.

DOS is Powerful

Wheather you want to believe it or not, DOS can be a very useful tool for those who might need to fix issues with the system like windows and other issues that you might need help to fix certain issues that might arise on the system.   You can find some great useful tools at the DOS prompt but you have to be willing to learn it even more than most because it is so much like Linux.   I definately say old and new techs should know how to do this and use the dos prompt when you need to fix issues.  Do you have a favorite command prompt that you use?   Why not leave a comment and tell people about the command that you think is the most useful command?   I’d like to hear it and learn even more about the power of using the DOS prompt.

How The Last of Us – will win the silicon lottery!

Paul
Last Of Us Pt 1
My Screen of the Game

Understanding the Silicon Lottery

Whether you like it or not, that CPU or GPU you bought might not last the entire time you have it.   After all, You could have a slighly below average CPU from what others who have the same CPU are experiences.   There is a great Youtube Video on this that you should go check out.   Let me be clear that I think most of the people who are having issues with games such as this are those who have faulty CPU’s or GPU’s.   So a break down of what I have found out, most users who are using a K series Intel isn’t have much issues with the game.   Why’s that well the video tells you what I have always suspected those cpu’s are higher end and probably aren’t likely to fail as much due to the high demand of quality they are wanting out of the series.  Even in th discussions there are several post about who can run this game without issues.   I will admit I had to turn on V-Sync, DSS, and make a limit of 9 FPS to get my GPU not to be used at 100%.  This is something you should do too.   I also did notice some cutsceens (Cineramics) For the game did drop me back into Windows 10.   So I do not like that idea but it did   Even though people will probably blame the game for their GPU’s dying, but in truthfullness you should already be limiting just how much the system uses your GPU.

Gameplay for my Systems

I found this to be very rough to start up with since there was at least an hour that the system was using 100% both CPU and GPU.   It doesn’t help that you have to build the shaders and I honestly would like to know how much space those are taking up in bouth my Steam Deck and PC but I couldn’t find any information, I have found people asking the same question but I have yet to find a way to see just how much shaders are being stored on my systems.  That would be something I would like to know at a glance on my Steam deck.   I have 42gb on my 256gb NVME drive on my steam deck that just say other.  So why can’t Steam fix this for us.

System Specs:

  • I9-10859k on a Asus Prime Z590-P Motherboard  (240 Watercooled Rad)
  • 3050 Geoforce RTX GPU
  • 32 gb DDR4 4,300 ghz ram
  • NVME Hard drive

As you can see this isn’t beginner PC, I built this for my enoyment and thus I know a thing a two about keeping the system cool.   It was constantly getting hot while building the Shaders which took an Hour at the least and I don’t know why they would need to build the shaders in the first place.

The Game

Other than the problems I had, I really didn’t have to much else problems on my computer so far.  I’ve been playing the game on and off for the past few days and I’ve not seen anything else to cause me trouble.   Is that because I won the silicon lottery, that would be a good guess and I’ll probably say yes.  I’m not sure why others are having more issues, but I would be willing to bet it is because they are letting the game take over their Frame rates and cause more issues than they need to.

SteamDeck Play

I even tried it on my SteamDeck and it only could do 20 or 30 FPS on it and it was very intuitive playing it because there was always those times you just couldn’t keep up with the game play due to it stuttering and don’t remind me of the hour long shaders building for it.  Again that needs to be fixed, we shouldn’t have to wait an hour just to play the game, which I did just to not have any stuttering in the beginning game.   I still don’t get the idea of why this is necessary, I thought our systems could build shaders as we go or maybe build the shaders for the next part of the game and so on.   I am hopeful that they at least make the game a little more playable on the Steam Deck because it was something I would like to do more often.   I play Spiderman on it without much issue but The Last of Us just seams to be a little more harder for me to play on the Steam Deck.

Top 3 Useful Windows Commands for Desktop Support technicians

Paul

Windows 10 21H1

The Command Line

Most user don’t understand just how powerful the command line can be.  In tech, and also in my job I have to diagnose and troubleshoot several different types of issues.   I’m going to show you my top 3 commands that I use in Windows and why.  Not everything is straight forward but It will help  you understand why.   We’ll talk about these and why they are so useful and powerful.  Use these as you see feet but you will need to run the command line as Admin.   How to do that is simple, for most.

WINDOWS Key + S and type cmd but don’t hit enter.

Click on Run As administrator

Once you do that you will see the usual Command line windows appear.   We won’t go into detail about that but if you want to learn more about it.  There are several YouTube videos about it.  I’m not going to talk about those because other’s have but I will talk about the commands I use most often in my work.

Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM)

For any businesses that use their own images for windows or has a need to deploy Windows a certain this can be a handy little tool for when the image might need to be repair, or something might need to be added.    You can add and remove drivers to an offline image or you can do many different things to it.   However I will be talking about the repairing of the image because most of the time we have Hard drives that are mechanical and that can cause problems for the OS when the system get’s corrupt files or hard drive has bad sectors.   Each one of these scenarios can make it even harder for applications to work properly and that is why I use this with systems that have those types of hard drives.   My go to is always going to be this when I suspect the hard drive might be the cause of the issue.

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

You can run this command and see the progress but this isn’t the only command that helps with troublesome Hard drives.

System File Checker (SFC)

This is another good tool for those who might have issues with the system hard drive or even when you suspect something is corrupt.   I use this from time to time just like DISM for when there is something that isn’t right about the hard drive.   If you use this also with DISM you will see a noticeable improvement of your system response.   You will see that it will be quite handy for those times when you have to get data off the drive before it dies completely.

SFC /scannow

If you run this in command line and wait you will see if it finds bad files or it will tell you what it found.  It won’t be a very informative but it will help.

Check Disk Utility

The Windows Check Utility is the last one of the three that I most often. It helps to check sectors and to check the health of the system and also fixes most of the problematic issues of mechanical hard drives.  So when I says this it can be used on SSD and even NVME but it does his best job on hard drives that have spinning parts.   Most users don’t understand about the volatility of the mechanical hard drive.   So it is very useful to check the disk and make sure there are not bad sectors or fix bad area’s of the hard drive.  This one will need to be rebooted to allow it to be used to its fullest but it is a handy little command when you want to make double sure that you will be able to keep Windows running.

chkdsk [DRIVE] /f

You can tell it multiple drives or just the main drive which would be C: but be warned the bigger the HDD the longer it will take to scan it.  You will also need to reboot to have it do it’s job because it needs to un-mount the drive, if you choice to do the C: drive.   It has in the past helped me out in many different situations and that is why I use these three commands a lot for my job.

What are your favorite commands to use in command line or in Windows General.  I’d like to hear them and find out more useful commands that might help me in my job.   Why not leave a comment and let everyone know.

 

Getting my Movies my way is the best way.

Paul

film, video, streaming, button, watch, home, show, entertainment, electronics, control, games, room, animation, furniture, recreation, screenshot, Free Images In PxHere

Photo by mohamed_hassan from PxHere

Time to use my DVD collection

I’ve got a really big DVD collection that I want to be able to use when I want to use them.   I’ll tell you when we were at home for those two months, I should of done that then in 2020 but I didn’t think about it until now.   However that doesn’t mean it is to late to do it.  I have a plan for the my Steam Deck and this will allow me to do that.  Although gaming streaming and video streaming are two different beasts it still has some of the princples that you might not think of.   You will still need to stream through wifi or wired if you are trying to get the best quality.    My plan is to have my DVD’s available anywhere I go, so I even can play on my phone if I wanted to.   I’ve found this awesome streaming service that will do just that on the Steam Deck and any other device.   I’ve installed Plex.tv and created a server for myself.   I’ve got this old NAS (Network attached storage) that hasn’t been used very much.   I’ve been upgrading it lately for just this occasion.   I want to put all my DVD’s and Music on their to listen to or use as I wish.  You can buy a NAS for really small amount of money and add storage as you see fit.

What’s the Purpose

The Truth of the matter is, because I can and it can help with not paying for streamin services as much.  I can be more selective of which services I want to subscribe to and save money in the long run.   I can also buy cheap DVD’s and copy them onto my NAS with realtivity easy process.   The really hard part is the CopyProtection that the big names do to prevent you from do just this.   The problem is that we own these DVD’s and we have the right do what we want with them.  Also there a movies that I want to watch that aren’t either on the streaming service or would need to buy another subscription to another service.  There’s to many services and with the prices going up and I have this NAS hardly being used it should be used more.

Understanding the Basics

We’ll not going to talk about the ethics as much as you want but if you are curious how to do it, you can watch this video and learn something.   I’ll talk a little bit about the copy protection that can be hard to circumvent but can be if you really want to own your media.   The problem is that not all this works with but can be useful to understand.   The copy protection of DVD’s has been something that has plagued mankind since the dawn of the DVD.   They deserve their money for the making the movies and films.  Even TV shows should get what is owed to them but that doesn’t mean people haven’t pirated them around the world through other means.

Copy Protection Software

Here’s where it gets a little bit more interesting to some because if you are like me and have some movies in either DVD or Bluray.  You’re going to need these software to do what is necessary to get to the information you might need. I’ll say this much, use as your own risk or own use.  I will not be responsible for anything that might happen.

I’ll say this I’ve only used DVD Decrypter right now because it works with all that I needed but the others look promising and I will try them out later.  It’s up to you on which one you will want to use to decrypt those DRM heavy DVD’s or Blurays.   I think it all depends on which one will work for you and how you like to use them .  Each one has their own unique way of getting the files needed to copy the main movie file.   So it just depends on what you are looking to do.

Are you planning to do this?  What do you think it will be like when you watch movies on the Steam Deck? I plan to try it out on the steam deck and see how well Plex.tv does the only thing that is problem right now is that you need to buy the server software either monthly or lifetime to do it.  I am going to look into buying the Lifetime because I am really curious as to how well this will work outside of my house.   I also might buy a little Pi board and use that as my server because I can use less energy that way instead of using my tower to do the serving of the movies.  What’s your plans for yoru steam deck?  I’d love to hear your plans on what you want to do with yours.

My Upgrade experience with Steam Deck

Paul1 Reply

Steam Deck

Upgrading the 399$ Steam deck!

I won’t say that anyone can do this if you don’t know how to do it in the first place.  It however was realatively quick and easy.  So let’s start from the beginning, I did  talk about which storage hard drive cards would work with the Steam Deck, they call them NVME’s.   I got mine off of Amazon and it works really well,  I installed it in under 20 minutes.  The problem I had was having to redownload all my Games.  That took like 3 hours with it be connected to the dock, and that is no small feet.  I play Elden Rings, Spider-Man Remaster, Halo, Subnautica, Subnautica Below Zero and also Half-Life series.   Althought that was over 180 gigabytes, that is still really fast in my opinion, unlike downloading over wifi, connecting to a wired connection will always by my way to install games on the Steam Deck.

Some Caveats

Let’s talk about some of these small warnings.   If you haven’t backed up anything on the SSD than you will most likely loose them.  You can easily move files that you want to save to your sdcard, which also is very helpful in keeping backups.  You’ll also want to make sure to remove the sdcard before you try to open up the Steam Deck, or you will break the Sdcard.  I’ve done that at least one and it isn’t a fun experience buying a new one.   You’ll also want to install the recovery disk onto a USB-C drive if all possible unless you have a dock and then you can use the dock to reinstall the Steam OS.   The app that comes with installing the Steam OS didn’t require much from me other than making sure I knew it would delete all files on the NVME.  It was a new one so I wasn’t worried about loosing any data.  Also if you moved any files from the SDcard, unless I missed a step, you’ll most likely need to reformat the SD card to move files back to the SDcard.   I honestly think I missed a step because I should of been able to verify my integratity of the files and not have to download all these big games back, it however didn’t cause me too much grief.

Some Take Away

Knowing that if I had to replace the SSD it wouldn’t be much problems.   I did buy a 256gb NVME just because I found some for 30$ on amazon.  You can however install 1tb or 2tb when they become more availabe and cheaper.      It was way cheaper than buying a 512 on the Steam Deck website and I still can replace any part I might need to in the coming years.   One day I’ll buy a newer model of the Steam Deck with better hardware or updated hardware.   It however is going to be an interesting time to see what they come up with on the Steam Deck.  I simply love it and even use it at a desktop whenever I need to.  It will be a great international Travel accessorie instead of taking my laptop to browse the web or do what I might need to do on the go.   I’m in the process of looking for a good Mouse and keyboard setup that might be small and portable so I can do what I might need to do on the go.   Very Powerful and great little gaming device.  Have you upgraded yoru Steam Deck yet, if so what did you do with yours more storage or change the display to a better dislpay?  i’d like to hear what you might did to yours and let’s compare notes.