In the Windows user interface, you
can certainly use your mouse to move around and find almost
anything that you might need.
But you can also start a number of utilities from the Run line.
This is where you can type in manually
exactly what you're looking for and run it directly
from the Windows interface.
You can get to this Run line by using the run/search capability
in Windows 7 or Windows 8, or you
can start a command prompt and run
the applications from there.
If you're running from the command prompt,
you can even add on additional options
to customize exactly what you're trying to run.
You would get to this command line
by starting the command CMD, stands for command.
This is where you can run a lot of utilities and programs
directly from Windows itself.
There are a lot of options from the command line
as you've probably seen in our previous videos.
If you really want to take advantage
of the power of Windows then you need to become very familiar
with the command line.
One utility that can really help you when you're troubleshooting
is a Regedit.
This stands for Registry Editor.
This is a big database that Windows uses called the Windows
Registry.
Everything that Windows does seems to go into this database.
This is used by Kernel settings, your device drivers
put information into this database, your services,
your applications, the user interface settings, almost
anything that has to do with configuration
settings in Windows is going to be found in the Windows
Registry.
Because so much is in this database,
you want to be very careful about the changes
that you're making.
So when you go into Regedit and you're
changing a specific set of configuration settings,
you may want to back up the Registry
or section of the Registry before you do that.
These sections of the Registry are called hives.
So you can back up a hive of information, make changes,
and if there's any problems, you can restore just that section
of the Registry.
To start the Registry Editor, we could of course
go through the Windows Start screen
and find the application that we're looking for.
But it's just as easy from the main screen
to simply start typing and the search box will appear.
I'll start typing Regedit.
And you can see that regedit.exe is the option the does appear,
and here is the Registry Editor.
The Registry Editor allows you to drill down
into different settings inside of the Registry.
You can see the hierarchy that's used in place.
And then you can make changes to the different settings that
are inside of the Registry.
Again, you don't want to make changes in here unless you know
exactly what you're doing, and usually the tech
note that you're reading will tell you
exactly where to go on the Registry,
and what configuration settings to make.
Our Windows services are these background applications
that are always running inside of our operating system.
We can get to the Windows Services screen
by typing in services.msc.
Alternatively, you could go to the Control Panel
under Administrative Tools and choose Services.
These services are very useful for understanding
what background applications might be running in our Windows
environment.
And if we're having a problem with one
of these services during the startup process,
we may want to go into this services applet
and begin enabling or disabling certain services
to try to find out where the problem might be occurring.
Also from the Services view, you can
tell what services rely or are dependent on other services.
This way you can see if there's one service that
might be causing many other services to fail
simultaneously.
MMC stands for the Microsoft Management Console.
This is a framework that you can use
to build your own management view with plug-ins that you
can add inside of this console.
You can add in a very specific set of utilities,
maybe it's one or two, or you can
have many different utilities listed inside
of the management console.
Let's start the Microsoft Management Console
by typing MMC and hitting Enter.
And here is our empty Management Console.
So we can now start customizing this console for our own use.
If we go to the File pulldown menu,
we can choose Add or Remove a snap-in.
And you can see all of the different snap-ins that
are available.
So let's choose Computer Management,
and we can say that we'd like this
to be managing the local computer,
but you could also have the snap-in managing
other computers as well.
Let's see, I want to also add in maybe disk management.
And again, it's for this computer.
And let's scroll down here to the bottom
and add services in here as well.
So now I've got three snap-ins configured and I'll click OK.
And now my snap-ins are right here on the menu.
I can easily access all of these different utilities
just by clicking around the Microsoft Management Console.
Makes it very fast to find what I need, and everything
is in one place for management of my system.
If you've been sitting in one building
and you've needed to manage a device that's
in another building, then you've probably
used Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection.
This is abbreviated with the MSTSC executable.
That stands for Microsoft Terminal Services Client
and it is effectively the remote desktop connection utility.
This allows you to access and view
what's on the desktop of another computer
simply by sitting at your desk.
This makes it very easy for troubleshooting and management
and in some cases you don't even need
to have a monitor connection on a separate device.
You can simply use remote desktop
to connect to that device whenever you need to use it.
On my network, I have an Active Directory
server that I'd like to manage, but it's in another room.
So we'll use MSTSC, which is our remote desktop connection.
And we'll connect to this device sgc.local.
I'll click Connect and it asks me for authentication.
So we'll put in our password, and now the screen
updates and shows me what's on the main screen of that Active
Directory server.
You can see I'm at the Server Manager
dashboard of this device.
And now I have local access to this device
as if I was sitting in front of the physical device itself.
So I can make changes, I can shut down,
I can restart and do anything else
that I would normally do as if I was sitting in front
of that physical server.
One thing that is a little bit different, as you can see,
there's a toolbar at the top for the remote desktop session.
I'm going to click the X to disconnect.
And it says, programs on the remote computer
will continue to run after you've disconnected.
That's what we would expect.
So we'll click OK.
And it will return me to the main screen
of my local operating system desktop.
Whenever you're working inside an operating system,
especially making configuration changes
or wanting to view log files, then you're
going to need a good text editor.
And Notepad is a text editor that
is included with almost every version of Windows.
You can load log files, view information,
you can make changes to the documents
and save them back again all by using this Notepad utility.
If you don't need to change the contents inside of a file
but you need to change the files themselves,
then you might want use Windows Explorer.
You can start Windows Explorer by simply typing in Explorer
at the Run line.
This allows you to view files, copy them,
you can launch applications from here.
Windows Explorer also makes it easy
for me to see resources that may be located across the network.
I can connect to a Windows share and see all of the files
it may be located on that device.
If you've ever sat down at an unfamiliar computer
and wondered what the software and hardware
configuration of this device might be,
then you might want to run MSINFO32.
This stands for System Information
and it tells you everything about the software and hardware
inside of this device.
From a hardware perspective, we can find out
memory information, DMA settings, interrupt settings,
conflicts between all of those.
We can also see what components might be installed.
Are their multimedia components?
What display drivers happen to be installed?
We might also want to look at print jobs that may be running
or what tasks maybe executing on this device as well.
And you can see all of that from the Windows System Information.
We can start System Information by typing in MSINFO32
and here is our System Information screen.
You can see that we have the categories of System
Summary, Hardware Resources, Components,
and Software Environment.
And we can click through and see all of the different settings
for those.
For the memory, you can see what's being used in memory.
If we go to our software environment,
we can view all the system drivers.
Makes it very easy to see exactly how this system is
configured and what the settings might
be for the different operating system components.
If you're trying to troubleshoot problems
with multimedia devices, you may want
to run DxDiag This stands for the DirectX Diagnostics Tool.
And this gives you a view of how the system is configured
from a graphics and audio and an input options perspective.
DxDiag also makes a very good diagnostic tool.
So if you wanted to check the display settings
or be able to listen to what output may be coming
from the system, you can run all of those diagnostics
from DxDiag.
As we're saving files to our storage devices,
our operating systems will segment those files
into many pieces and put them in different locations
on that storage device.
In order to improve the read and write time,
it might be useful to gather together
all of those different pieces and put them together
in one contiguous unit.
This defrag utility is specifically
designed for spinning hard drives.
Windows will not perform a disk the defragmentation on an SSD
because you don't have problems with fragmented
files on a solid state drive.
If you wanted to run the graphical version of the disk
defragmentation, you can go into the drive
properties of the device, and click Defragment Now.
You can also run the defragmentation process
at the command line without using the graphical user
interface.
You simply type the defrag command
and then the drive letter of the volume
you'd like to defragment.
When you start to the defragmentation application,
it will tell you exactly what the predefragmentation report
is.
And in this case, you can see that our drive
is 12% fragmented.
When it finishes the defragmentation process,
it gives you a report afterwards and shows the differences
between the 12% fragmented space before the defragmentation
and the 0% fragmented space afterwards.
When you make change to the Windows operating system,
everything usually works just fine.
But what if you were to make a change
and then your system stopped performing properly?
One thing that you can do is use the Windows utility System
Restore to change your Windows configuration
to go back in time to an earlier working config.
You can access System Restore upon startup
by pressing F8, going to the Advanced Boot Options
and choosing Repair.
If you're in Windows Vista, you can
click All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and access System
Restore from there.
In Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1,
you simply go to the Control Panel
and choose the Recovery option.
One thing to keep in mind with System Restores
is that this does not necessarily resolve any virus
or malware infestations.
The malware authors know that you're
using System Restore, so not only do they
infect your normal working configuration, they also
go back and infect all of your separate
restore points as well.
Let's have a look at the Restore settings
on this particular computer.
I'll start the Control Panel, and we'll select that,
and then we'll choose our option for recovery.
This will show us the advanced recovery tools where
I can create a separate recovery drive, open System Restore,
but let's configure System Restore.
On this system System Restore has not been configured.
I can click the Configure option to turn on the system
protection, and then I can set the Apply option
and it's going to use, by default, 5% of the drive
for these restore points.
And now any changes that I make to my system
will now be protected using this System Restore.
One thing you may have noticed is that your Windows operating
system will automatically update itself periodically
with the latest files and settings for your computer.
And this is by design.
It's using a utility called Windows Update.
It's going to provide you with bug fixes, operating system
updates, and security patches so that your system remains
as safe as possible.
Windows Update can be set for an automatic ,
installation this is the recommended setting so that
your system simply keeps itself up to date without any type
of user intervention.
You can also configure this to download the updates
but wait for you to decide when those updates should
be installed.
You can check for updates but not necessarily download
those updates.
This may be useful if you have a limited amount of bandwidth
available in your environment.
And of course, you can turn Windows Update off completely.
This is clearly not recommended in the Windows configuration,
so you will have to manually determine
when you check for updates, when they're downloaded,
and when they're installed all through a manual process.