Quick and easy, with a small caveat or two… Continue reading “PowerShell: Connecting to a Virtual Machine”
PowerShell: Test a File Is Locked
A nice, short function this one;
<# .SYNOPSIS Tests if a file is locked. #>
function Test-FileLocked
{
param
(
[string]$FilePath
)
try { [IO.File]::OpenWrite($FilePath).close();return $false }
catch {return $true}
}
Tales From IT: I Don’t Want To Win If They Don’t Lose
IT projects past a certain size get quite complex. They have a lot of moving parts and often those parts have to be aligned correctly and at the right time to make everything work. In turn, that means you need the various people to pull together to make sure the project as a whole delivers. Sometimes the team doesn’t succeed but normally everyone is pulling in the same direction. There is no “I” in team! Etc Etc
There are exceptions. In one place I worked the IT departments were actively trying to push each other under a bus. Think ‘Game Of Thrones’ with RAID arrays.
It made delivering the project…. interesting. Continue reading “Tales From IT: I Don’t Want To Win If They Don’t Lose”
What does your computer hear when it listens without you knowing?
A lot of people are worried about computers listening in to what you’re doing. Some of the people’s points are valid, while others come across as totally paranoid. But what does your computer hear in the background?
I left my copy of VoiceAttack going after I finished playing Elite without realising it. I didn’t have my mic on but it was live on my desk. VoiceAttack uses the speech recognition system built into Windows and this is what my PC thought I was saying… Continue reading “What does your computer hear when it listens without you knowing?”
Just How Long Does It Take To Install Windows 10 – and get a usable machine?
Everything was peachy; my laptop was up-to-date, ready for the LAN party. Preparation wins the day!
But who wants an easy life? I needed a working laptop in a few, short hours. Time to install Windows 10 on a clean, new hard-drive! Continue reading “Just How Long Does It Take To Install Windows 10 – and get a usable machine?”
PowerShell : Get Folder Size on Disk, One-Line Command
I mentioned in the last part that you should be able to get the sizes of sub-folders within a folder with Measure-Object and Group-Object. So I had a bit of a tinker as an intellectual exercise and I worked up a one-liner that works. Ish. As I mentioned previously, this won’t automatically add the size of each sub-folder to the parent folder (so in the results you’d get C:\Source as 10 KB and C:\Source\Sub as 100 MB, for example).
Still, it was pretty interesting to hack it together. The command and a brief explanation follows.
Continue reading “PowerShell : Get Folder Size on Disk, One-Line Command”
Run Command Shortcuts for Administrative Tools
Where has all my disk space gone?
25% of the disk gone! The game’s afoot!
50 GB of disk space missing doesn’t sound like much, but when it’s on your 220 GB SSD it’s a fair old chunk of change. I had my suspicions that the space of all the folders and files didn’t add up to the usage figures on the disk and after a few Powershell shenanigans I was proved right.
