Today started like any other day at work. I sat down, logged into my PC and was greeted by the thrashing sound of my hard drive. I’ve come to realize that the bottleneck in my work PC is by far the hard drive. I don’t need any bench marking software, I simple try to access a file or two. Sometimes, I simply open windows explorer and wait.

I finally got so disgusted I fired up procman and dug through the activity to find the culprit.

I had to scroll down to the bottom of a couple thousand lines of activity before I saw a clear pattern, but lo and behold what I saw was incredible!

There were literally thousands of disk writes to my pagefile - and all I had done was log in!

The bizarre part was that the files being read and written to the swap file were files I was not touching.

I saw that the process performing all this thrashing was something called “ccmexec.exe”. I’d actually never heard of this process, but after some quick googling I discovered its the exe for the SMS Agent service.

This service (the  Systems Management Server service) performs an indexing or cataloging of all the files on the disk so that windows update will have the latest info on versions of OS files that may need patching. Sounds great, but I’m not sure it’s worth the cost considering the downtime and aggravation I experience waiting for this thing to chew through my 150GB drive.

My first instinct was to disable the service in the services control panel applet, but I figured that the corporate IT staff would eventually get a tad upset when they realized my system didn’t have the latest patches installed because I disabled the service.

So, I was faced with my own kobayashi maru scenario : I was ineffective while this thing chewed threw my file system, but I couldn’t disable the service without sending up corporate red flags that I was a bad citizen.

Then I hit on a solution - a scheduled task to ensure the service did run, just not when I was busy working. I actually used two batch files, one for each task of starting and stopping the service.

Open up notepad (or your text editor of choice), and type the following:

net start CcmExec

save the file as “SMS Agent start.bat”

Now, start a new text file and enter:

net stop CcmExec

save the file as “SMS Agent stop.bat”

Note: you can also replace “net” with “sc”, to use the newer Service Control manager command line tool.

Then, set the startup type of the SMS Agent Host service to “Manual” in the services control panel applet.

Next, create a scheduled task to run after hours that runs the “SMS Agent start.bat” file, and another task that runs the  “SMS Agent stop.bat” before you get into the office.

The best of both worlds - you remain productive and a good corporate citizen (after hours)!

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After a wee bit O’ overzealous registry cleaning last week, I had a minor panic. Well, a picture being worth a 1000 words, here’s what I saw when I opened windows explorer:

The good news (I suppose) is that I knew the instant I hit the Delete key that I had selected the wrong key. The bad news was that I had no way of finding out what key that was.

So, I did some Googling for various permutations of “missing windows explorer folder treeview” and eventually stumble upon the following registry edit:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}]
@=”Explorer Band”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}\InProcServer32]
@=”C:\\WINNT\\SYSTEM32\\SHDOCVW.DLL”
“ThreadingModel”=”Apartment”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}\Implemented Categories]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}\Implemented Categories\{00021493-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}]

I saved that to a new notepad document, saved it with an “.reg” extension and double-clicked it. Voila, my missing treeview returned!

It sure beats reinstalling the OS for something so simple.

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I love the Thunderbird email client. I use the portable version on my thumb drive, but one thing has always bugged the hell out of me when I use it: whenever I delete an email that I have opened in a popup window, Thunderbird automatically opens the next message. Most of the quasi-official entries on the forums state that this is the default behavior, and how 90% of email users use the app anyway, so there is no simple check box for disabling the “feature”.

I must be an odd duck then, because it is most certainly not how I use my email client. I distinctly remember disabling the annoying feature in older versions of Outlook Express. Well, I am the type who will not be denied. I go through great pains to get around such roadblocks - out of principle alone!

So I went digging and found many dead ends, and tips & tricks pages that proved to be unrelated. A lot of forums suggest things like adding the delete button to the toolbar, but that only works if you delete it from the main window. I want to read the email first, then delete it. Reading, closing (clicking the “X”) then deleting seems more tedious than necessary.

Then I found this handy add-on. Only one problem: it was for pre 2.0 versions of Thunderbird. The solution: How to hack the add-on to make it work in 2.0+.

Open the install.rdf file, and locate the MaxVersion key:

Then change the 1.6 to 2.1, like so:

and voila!

Sweet!

It’s worked great ever since, and I no longer curse Thunderbird. For automatically advancing to the next message, anyway.

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My PC was behaving sluggishly the other day. I tried to be patient, but had to fire up the task manager when I could bear it no longer. That’s when I noticed great gobs of my swap file allocated to “SVCHOST.EXE”:

The problem is, SVCHOST is a catch all windows service container. Meaning, many windows services run under the same instance of SVCHOST. How was I going to figure out which services might be the culprit?

Enter the tasklist command.

Tasklist displays info about running tasks, including SVCHOST.

Simply running tasklist at the command prompt displays a laundry list of all running processes. This wasn’t going to do it, so I ran it with the “/?” switch to try and find how to narrow the info…

/SVC Displays services hosted in each process.
/FI filter Displays a set of tasks that match a given criteria specified by the filter.

Looks good so far, now I need to know what filter to apply:

Filters:
    Filter Name     Valid Operators           Valid Value(s)
    -----------     ---------------           --------------------------
    IMAGENAME       eq, ne                    Image name

OK, this gives us:

“C:\>tasklist /svc /FI “IMAGENAME EQ SCVHOST.EXE”

But it seems the filter is case sensitive, because when I run that command, I get this:

INFO: No tasks are running which match the specified criteria.

So, switching to lower case gives me what I want:

“C:\>tasklist /svc /FI “IMAGENAME EQ svchost.exe”

Image Name     PID        Services
=========== =====  =======================
svchost.exe     744        DcomLaunch
svchost.exe     844        RpcSs
svchost.exe     888        AeLookupSvc, AppMgmt,
                                    AudioSrv, BITS, Browser,
                                    CryptSvc, dmserver,
                                    EventSystem,lanmanserver,
                                    lanmanworkstation, Netman,
                                    Nla, RasMan, Schedule,
                                    seclogon, SENS,ShellHWDetection,
                                    Themes, winmgmt, wuauserv
svchost.exe     928         Dhcp, Dnscache
svchost.exe     976         LmHosts, W32Time
svchost.exe     1772       Net Driver HPZ12
svchost.exe     1816       Pml Driver HPZ12
svchost.exe     2424       TermService
svchost.exe     3312       TapiSrv
svchost.exe     2688       W3SVC

From there, it’s just a matter of shutting down or restarting each of the services listed under the process id 888 ( I got this from taskmanager).

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While performing a disk cleanup recently, I had cause to locate and delete any empty folders under a root folder. I knew there had to be a batch file command to accomplish this, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was!

Enter Google.

five minutes of some keyword searching with surgical precision and piecing together commands yielded my solution.

DIR /AD/B/S | SORT > FOLDERLIST.BAT

How It Works.

The Dir command is the familiar directory list command that comes standard with all versions of Windows since 95. The magic is in the switches:

/A Displays files with specified attributes.
When applied to the “D” attribute, it returns directories
/B Uses bare format (no heading information or summary).
/S Displays files in specified directory and all subdirectories.

SORT is an often overlooked command for, you guessed it, sorting. Here, the results of the Dir command are piped (”|”) into the SORT command as input. The result of the SORT command is then redirected from the command prompt to a file called FOLDERLIST.BAT.

Kick it up a notch.

Now that you’ve created this list, say you want to automate the deletion of each entry in the list. This is where pumping the output to a “.bat” file comes in. Open the bat file in textpad, or notepad, or your text editor

For example:

Typing:
DIR /AD/B/S | SORT > FOLDERLIST.BAT

in my C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC folder yields the following results:

Next, open the file in a text editor, word, or open office and replace the beginning of each line with the RD command followed by a space and a single quote. Like so:

This should give you the following:

Notice how each line now begins with “RD “” This is the old DOS Remove Directory command. Don’t worry, it only removes empty directories. But you still need to add an ending quote to each line. This is where Word or Open Office is handy. You can do another search and replace, but this time search for “^p” (new paragraph) and replace with ““^p” (end quote and new paragraph).

Save the file, and you’re all done except the double clicking.

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