Showing tag results for Tips/Support

This is sort of the reverse of Why is my CPU usage hovering at 50%?, but the answer is the same. When I run a CPU-intensive task, the CPU percentage used by that process never goes above 50%, and the rest is reported as idle. Is there some setting that I set inadvertently which is preventing the program from using more than half of the CPU? My ...

Into Windows Media Player (version 9 if you're keeping score at home), I type the URL of an MP3 file (poor man's podcast) and get the error message "The download of the specified resource has failed." On this dialog there two buttons: Close and Web Help. Close closes the error dialog, of course. Web Help does nothing. Turns out the real prob...

When you are connected to a workstation via Remote Desktop, the "Turn Off Computer" option changes to "Disconnect". But what if you really want to turn off the computer, hibernate it, or put it on stand-by? Note: These tips work on Windows XP, but there is no guarantee that they will work in future versions of Windows. One way to do this is ...

The purpose of quotation marks is to allow a character that would normally be interpreted as a delimiter to be included as part of a file name. Most of the time, this delimiter is the space. The function uses a space to separate the program name from its arguments. Most programs separate their command line arguments with a space. But the environm...

My frequent bicycling buddy Ari Pernick wrote a couple of articles over on the Windows Network Development blog on the topic of the file, which appears to have gotten a bit of attention lately. This past weekend, I joined Ari and another friend in a ride along the Upper Loop of the annual Tour De Peaks bicycle ride. I'd never done this ride b...

Although the redirection operator traditionally appears at the end of a command line, there is no requirement that it do so. All of these commands are equivalent: All of them echo "A B" to the file "C". You can use this trick to avoid the redirection problem we discussed last time. We saw that writing inadvertently interprets the "2" as p...

If you want to put the string "Meet at 2" into the file "schedule", you might be tempted to use If you try this, however, you'll see the string "Meet at" on the screen and the "schedule" file will be blank. [Typo fixed, 10am] What happened? A digit immediately before a redirection operator modifies which stream the redirection operator appl...

The magic characters like <, >, and | in command lines like are interpreted by the command interpreter ; they aren't built into the function. (This is obvious if you think about it. That command line created two processes; which one should return a handle to?) If you pass a command line like this to , it will merely run the program w...

The command processor comes with a mini-calculator that can perform simple arithmetic on 32-bit signed integers: Note that we had to quote the shift operator since it would otherwise be misinterpreted as a "redirect stdout and append" operator. For more information, type at the command prompt.

The folks on the logon team wish me to remind you that the ForceAutoLogon setting does more than just log on an account automatically. They've had to deal with large numbers of people who set the key without really understanding what it does, and then getting into trouble because what they get is not what they expected. In addition to logging on ...