Computer Productivity Hacks
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Command Line
- Mounting shared drives and connecting to remote resources is something you can easily do from the Windows GUI. With our quick guide to the command prompt, however, you can more easily automate large tasks.
- Quick super fast course in using the command line. It is intended to be done rapidly in about a day or two, and not meant to teach you advanced shell usage.
Windows Command Line
- Cmdlets are the heart-and-soul of Windows PowerShell, Microsoft's latest command shell/scripting language.
- Robocopy: A robust file copy command for the Windows command line.
- Each command is linked to more info about the particular command.
- The xcopy command is a Command Prompt command used to copy one or more files and/or folders from one location to another location.
Generate File List
- Example:
C:\Users\me\Downloads\MyFolder> dir /b > filelist.txt- (The text in orange shows the command used once you've navigated into the directory from which you want to generate the list of file names.)
- This tutorial contains several working answers for using Windows PowerShell to list files and folders.
- Works with cmd.exe, but doesn't seem to work with Windows PowerShell.
Folder & File Compression
- Example:
for /d %%X in (*) do "c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a "%%X.zip" "%%X\"
- To compress a folder without using any particular compression software.
Text Extraction
- Capture2Text enables users to do the following:
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
- Speech Recognition
- Lists several options.
- Extracts plain text from documents in all popular formats.
- Detexter is an app designed to extract text from PDF files.
Text Search
- Makes tools to search text content, including:
- FALCON - Text Search Java Project: JSON based text search Java Project
- HAWK - PDF Text Search Java Project: Taking initiative for Document Text Search
- Xpdf is an open source viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files.
- Windows installer: Short Programs/Scripts (Look for the xpdf3.exe / poppler.exe links in left sidebar.)
PDF Conversion
- Convert PDF to HTML without losing text or format.
Maintenance
Network Issues
- Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) in Windows just doesn’t seem to figure out the MTU for a given path. So Windows uses the default. For the most part this doesn’t affect anyone. But failure of PMTUD will result in some websites not loading correctly, having trouble connecting to normally reliable online services and general Internet weirdness.