MWeber83s Tech Blog

I’ve become fond of a feature called ‘Snap’, and I’m sure you are all aware of this if you run Windows 7. The only problem I have is that it doesn’t work well with dual monitors. You can snap it to your far right, or your far left….but not the the inner border of your dual screens. Why doesn’t this work!?!?! Quick fix to this…

Select the window you’d like to Snap, Hold the Windows Key and Press the directional arrow directing it to the side of your screen you’d like to snap to.

Windows Key + Arrow Key –> or <–

You are Welcome.

I just found this easy write up to a problem I”ve been seeing alot lately. I was going to write my own but its easier to just post this link.

http://windows7themes.net/how-to-fix-mbr-in-windows-7.html

So for those of you that are ready to nuke your install because you dont know how to fix this…try this first.

I have faced the wrath of the *.wtv tonight. All I want to do is shrink my recorded tv shows down to something more practical. The problem is, no tool out there will convert a .wtv format to something else. I spent some time searching the web only to find forums of frustrated people that have no solution. There are some command line tools that can fix this, but people seem to struggle using it. There are convertors that ‘claim’ to covert, but fail quickly. After all this searching I discovered the magic of Windows 7 and the right-click.  Go ahead, click on your .wtv file and see what comes up. Windows 7 has a build in ‘Convert to DVR-MS’ function. Works slick, takes minimal time, and even shrinks the file just a bit.  This is great! Except I still need to convert 100′s of them.

Here is what you do. Browse to your C:\Windows\ehome directory and look for WTVConverter.exe (The tool behind the right-click menu item). Lets run this….

cd C:\Windows\ehome 
 .\wtvconverter.exe “C:\users\jimbob\Videos\*.*” “C:\users\jimbob\videos\coverted\” /ShowUI

Go ahead and change your paths to work correctly, and tweak as you need. This will covert as many files as you want back to the *.DVR-MS format. 

Once that is all complete I found a great free program to help covert them to any format you want, to take up less space or put on a mobile device. Check out Digital Media Coverter.

You are welcome. You just found a way to covert your files off of .wtv to the usable .dvr-ms. Now you can convert them in most third party apps to anything you want, WMV, MPEG4, etc.

EDIT

I have discovered that there is some major issues with the converter failing. I have found a tool that apparently fixes this issue, as well as helps with many other things. Worth checking out to say the least.

http://tinozplace.com/SpaceSaver.htm

So, you just wrote your first script. You type in “./myfirst.ps1″ and BAM, you recieve a message like this.

File C:\scripts\myfirst.ps1 cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system. Please see “get-
help about_signing” for more details.
At line:1 char:19
+ c:\scripts\myfirst.ps1 <<<<

What the heck happened? Well, MS has made it so secure that you can’t even run your own scripts. This is a little overkill in my book, but security nonetheless. So, how do you fix it? Easy. Simply type in the following..

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

There you have it folks. Done. From now on you can run any script you choose without it blowing up (assuming you wrote it correctly).

Have you ever wanted to move several VM’s at once, and skip a 1000 clicks in the process? Quick and easy string to do this…

Get-VMHost [Hostname] | Get-VM [*Name_of_VM*] | Move-VM [-location -datastore]

The string should look like this…

Get-VMHost 192.168.1.101 | Get-VM *TestVM* | Move-VM -location 192.168.1.102 -datastore LUN2

What this will do is simply select all VM’s that start with the name TestVM on my 192.168.1.101 host. It will then move them to my other host of .102 and move them to a new datastore named LUN2 as well. You can trim this down to fit your needs, like remove Get-VMHost to select guests across all of your hosts, or just use get-vm to move ALL of your guests.  This is just a quick and easy string that will help you manage shuffling around your guests.

One other tip I’d like to mention. Add [-whatif] to the end of this string the first time you execute it. It will execute it in a test state, so you know if it will work or not.

Welcome to my Tech blog. I am starting this blog as a beginner to PowerShell, and managing VMWare with it as well. I hope to shed some light to newcomers, and potentially intermediates as well. I just want to post what I learn, some tips and tricks, and any other great information I stumble across along the way to make it easier for others out there.

Check back frequently to see what kind of information I can bring out in the open.