No system is an island - Using Windows And Tech Step By Step

I wanted to transfer the entire collection of songs and movies from my ipod nano to Vista laptop.



Idump came to the rescue,it seamlessly copied all my stuff and also preserved the original files on ipod.
To use it,download it from here.

This is a nice freeware that gets the work done quickly.

Method to copy :

1.After downloading the exe from the website,copy it to the root of ipod.Obviously you need to have ipod connected to the PC :)
2.Run the exe file after it is copied to ipod.
3.Follow the onscreen instructions of idump and specify the target destination on PC where you need the stuff to be copied.
4.All done,enjoy!

Here is the link of good folks who have made idump.

Peace.

Recently I came across IBM's ad of "Stop talking,start doing".The content being a bunch of employees laying on floor and a surprised guy drops in and asks them what they are doing.The response he gets is "We are ideating".

Corporate conditioning is addictive.Even if you do a lot of work through out the day but leave at sharp 5 pm,you feel a sense of guilt inside.This is because of the typical old corporate mindset of coming in early and leaving late to move up the ladder.What happens ultimately is you tend to hang around in office even way after the business hours even if there is zero work to be done.

This seems to be changing very quickly though.The concept of "ROWE" which stands for Results Only Work Environment blasts away the old mindset like this website.

The bottom line in a ROWE is that no one cares much about how many hours or how or where you work,the only concerning output is the deliverables produced which is very much like being an entrepreneurial employee [Yes,I made that term right now :)].

So,in a nutshell - doesnt matter how,where,when you work,just get it done so everyone is happy without being a corporate drone anymore.

As Peter Gibbons from the movie Office Space puts it :

Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements.

Peace.

There are many useful commands and the shortcuts to invoke them in Windows.

One such widely overlooked but a sure time saver is the command history popup window from Windows command prompt.

As Windows users/power users/admins,we use command prompt to varying extent and yes it does get boring to type the command that we typed a few commands back :)

To avoid this,F7 comes into play as shown in the picture above.I wanted to type cls but it was already there before,so doing a F7 and going to the previous same command using arrow keys and then enter will do the job.This shortcut can be extremely useful when dealing with lengthy commands like say a psexec and then running a script on remote machine or a local one.

Hope this post has been helpful.

Peace.

It is quite a familiar scenario that helpdesk/tech support/systems administration folks need to see what is there on a remote box without using a remote viewer like VNC or using RDP (Of course I am talking about Microsoft Windows family here :) ).

Say like the other day when I wanted to refresh group policies on a desktop box without of course disturbing the user logged in there.

Here,PsTools becomes the swiss army knife of remote administration and management.Download it from here

Suppose I want to do a familiar gpupdate/force on a box sitting miles away from me(but on network and reachable) :
1.I will need to get to the remote command prompt.
2.Then,do the thing - gpupdate/force.

Here is a way that can be done :
From your local windows box,open command prompt and navigate to where the psexec tool is kept.One trick I use to avoid navigating to the PsTools folder in command prompt is to copy all the tools from there to C:\Windows\System32.

Then you can launch any of the tool from anywhere in command prompt.

General way to get remote command prompt is :
psexec \\computer-name cmd

Always ensure that the remote command prompt is of the machine that you want to do your stuff on(by typing hostname on the remote prompt).After all,there is no need to remotely reboot a box accidentally right?

I hope this article has helped to know the wonderful suite of PsTools,there are other utilities in that set which are quite helpful.Personally,I have found psexec a lifesaver many a times hence this post.(See my earlier post - Wonderful netsh).

Peace.