How to Remove Old and Useless Drivers in Windows

I had a problem where I needed to delete a device driver that had been installed so that I could install a replacement. I found How to Remove Old and Useless Drivers in Windows and the process was roughly:

  • Win + X: Windows PowerShell (Admin)
  • SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1
  • Win + X: Device Manager
  • View -> Show hidden devices

You can then look for the old driver and remove it.

Running notepad.exe as Administrator

Man, back on Windows for my new studio computer ‘verve‘. Needed to figure out how to edit C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and that was certainly more difficult than it needed to be.

In the end I used “Method 3” over here to add an “Open in Notepad (Admin)” item to my shell context menu:

  • Open regedit
  • Navigate to: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell
  • Add a new key ‘runas’ under ‘shell’
  • Change (Default) to: Open with Notepad (Admin)
  • Add a new key ‘command’ under ‘runas’
  • Change (Default) to: notepad %1

Mounting Windows SMB share from Debian Wheezy

Configuring an SMB mount from my Linux box to my Windows box. This was helpful.

Basically:

# apt-get install cifs-utils

Then create your credentials file:

# cat > /root/amanda.smbpass  <<EOF
username=jj5
password=SECRET
EOF

Then edit /etc/fstab and add:

//amanda.jj5.net/Users  /media/amanda cifs defaults,noauto,credentials=/root/amanda.smbpass 0 2

Then create /etc/network/if-up.d/mount-amanda like this:

#!/bin/bash
mount /media/amanda

And make sure it’s executable:

# chmod +x /etc/network/if-up.d/mount-amanda

Mounting can also be done from the command-line:

# mount -t cifs -o username=jj5,password=SECRET //amanda.jj5.net/Users /media/amanda

100% Apache-Compliant REQUEST_URI for IIS and Windows

I had a problem with the REQUEST_URI server variable not being available in my PHP app when running under IIS on Windows. I followed these instructions to fix the problem: 100% Apache-Compliant REQUEST_URI for IIS and Windows.

I had to download and install ISAPI Rewrite 3 and Request_URI for IIS 1.1 which I installed into PHP by editing my php.ini file with this line:

 auto_prepend_file = C:\Program Files\PHP\request_uri.inc

Enabling Windows SDK 7.1 in Visual Studio 2008

I was having a problem where Visual Studio was saying that “windows.h” could not be found after having installed the Windows SDK v7.1. I found this article which said to update the path in “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\CurrentInstallFolder” in the registry. So I did that, and now everything is working.