My Dell laptop wasn't able to use an external monitor after a week's vacation. The symptoms were: No response when pressing Fn+F8 to swtich displays. "No signal" on external monitor. Bring up "Screen Resolution" dialog, only one monitor is avaiable. Click "Advanced settings" in "Screen Resolution" dialog, Adapter Type displays "VgaSave". There's no "Display adapters" section in Device Manager . Solution: re-install the video display driver. My laptop came with Nvidia GPU so I reinstalled the Nvidia driver. Download the driver pack from Dell. The Windows 7 CAB file is about 1GB, which indludes all kinds of drivers.

Use the expand command to extract files from a .cab file: expand [-r] source [destination] [-d source.cab ... Option Description [-r] Renames expanded files. [destination] Specifies where files are to be expanded. If source is multiple files and -r is not specified, destination must be a directory. destination can consist of a drive letter and colon, a directory name, a file name, or a combination of any of these. [-d source.cab] Displays a list of files in the source location. Does not expand or extract the files. [-f:files] Specifies the files in a cabinet (.cab) file that you intend to expand. You can use wildcards (* and ?). source.cab Specifies the files to expand. source can consist of a drive letter and colon, a directory...

To identify the display driver info with the DirectX Diagnostic Tool included in Widnows 7 and Vista: Bring up the "Run" dialog with the Win button Type dxdiag and press Enter. Click the Diaplay tab.

My C drive was seriously fragmented with about 20% free space. So I ran the built-in Windows disk defrag utility. To my surprise it doesn't work at all! I tried to defragment multiple times and every time it comes back without doing much work. Then I realized that perhaps it didn't know how to get the job done and needed some help. Here's the list of things I did to help the defragmentor out: Relocate the paging file to a different drive and reboot. If the paging file ( pagefile.sys ) is seriously fragmented, it can't be defragmented, and in turn it blocks other files from being defragmented. If you only have one drive (C:), try to make it smaller or eliminate it entirely for...

On windows, display IPv4 routing table: route -4 print On Linux: $ route Kernel IP routing table Destination ... This works for both Linux and Windows (" -r ": display routing table, " -n ": display address and port numbers in numerical form): netstat -rn

tracert / traceroute reports the hops from the source to the destination host. On Windows: tracert www.google.com Tracing route to www... Linux example: # wait 5 seconds # 3 queries each hop # maxi...

Windows command line shell does not come with a sleep command. One trick is to emulate sleep using the ping command: C:\>ping /? Usage: ping [-t] [-a] [-n count... To sleep for about 5 seconds: @rem make sure to ping a non-existing IP, otherwis... If you have the Windows Resource Kit installed, it does provide a sleep command: C:\>sleep Usage: sleep time-to-sleep-in-s...

ProductivityPortfolio has an excellent explanation about Hibernate and Standby . To restate the key points: Standby Enters low power mode by cutting off items such as hard drive and monitor Computer is still running Data is stored in RAM for quick recovery You may lose data when power runs out Hibernate Computer is shutdown and is no longer consuming power Data is saved to hard disk Wake up is not as fast as from Standby, but may be faster than Power On. Additional Notes: Check the Power Options applet in the control panel to see if you can turn on Hibernate (in the following screenshot, Hibernate cannot be enabled since there's not enough disk space). To bring up the Hibernate option when shutting down, hold...

The easiest way to shutdown Windows XP with a shortcut is to create a shortcut icon on the desktop (or the Start menu, or the Quick Launch menu) and assign a shortcut key combination. Useful command line commands: Shutdown : shutdown -s -t 0 Restart : shutdown -r -t 0 Log off : shutdown -l -t 0 Hibernate : rundll32.exe PowrProf.dll, SetSuspendState Hibernate Command line options for shutdown : C:\> shutdown /? Usage: shutdown [-i | -l | -s ...

You can configure Windows XP such that when you press the "Power" button it goes to standby instead of showdown: From Start menu, bring up the Control Panel Double click the Power Options icon: In the Advanced tab, select "Stand by" for the option "When I press the power button on my computer".