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Questions tagged [windows]

Windows is the brand name for a series of operating systems from Microsoft. Current versions are Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, and Windows Server 2022. Instead of tagging a post "Windows", try to use a tag for a specific version.

Introduction

Windows is a family of operating systems developed by Microsoft. Originally a graphical add-on for Microsoft DOS, Windows is currently the market leader for operating systems on the desktop.

Today there are several branches of Windows:

  • Windows for desktops, notebooks, and tablets
  • Windows Server, for servers
  • Windows IoT, for embedded devices such as point of sale, kiosks, and signage

Tag recommendations

If your question is version-specific, consider using a version-specific tag.

17405 questions
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How can I connect to a Windows server using a Command Line Interface? (CLI)

Especially with the option to install Server Core in Server 2008 and above, connecting to Windows servers over a CLI is increasingly useful ability, if not one that's very widespread amongst Windows administrators. Practically every Windows GUI…
HopelessN00b
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Windows server last reboot time

How can I find a Windows server's last reboot time, apart from 'net statistics server/workstation'?
Sakthi
98
votes
5 answers

Windows Active Directory naming best practices?

This is a Canonical Question about Active Directory domain naming. After experimenting with Windows domains and domain controllers in a virtual environment, I've realized that having an active directory domain named identically to a DNS domain is…
Anton Gogolev
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97
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6 answers

How to delete cached temporarily credentials for a network share on a Windows machine without rebooting or logging off

This is more of a curiosity then a real problem, I am just to lazy to reboot or log off my laptop. I have connected to a network share on a Windows server with domain credentials from a non-domain Windows 7 machine, I didn't mark the option to…
ralz
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97
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18 answers

Why hasn't rsync caught on in the Windows world?

It seems that rsync is the de-facto standard for efficient file backup and sync in Unix/Linux. Does anyone have any thoughts on why it wouldn't have caught on in the Windows world? Why hasn't it become a universal 'protocol' for file sync?
jtalarico
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96
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6 answers

Boot and Install Windows from a USB thumb drive

Installing Windows from a thumb drive is vastly superior to burning a copy to a DVD which will fill some landfill somewhere with toxic stuff. Not to mention it's about 50x faster to install Windows from a USB Thumb Drive. How do you get the bits…
Omar Shahine
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95
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15 answers

How to fix PuTTY showing garbled characters?

Connecting from a Windows 7 PC via SSH to an Ubuntu server using PuTTY, I get some screen errors: I.e. it: "Double-draws" the selection inside Midnight Commander (MC). Other characters like line elements are drawn as the wrong characters (e.g. "â"…
Uwe Keim
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94
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6 answers

swap partition vs file for performance?

What is better for performance? A partition closer to the inside of the disk will have slower access times, and we must wait for the drive to switch between the OS and swap partitions. On the other hand, a swap partition bypasses all of the…
Bill Gray
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91
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6 answers

How to determine the hostname from an IP address in a Windows network?

My LAN has 50 Windows hosts. At the Windows command line I try ping to get the IP address of a running Windows machine. The question is how to get hostname of a specific IP address in the same Windows workgroup? Another question is how to know the…
billyduc
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90
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6 answers

How do you free up a port being held open by dead process?

A colleague of mine recently ran into a problem where a process that had supposedly died was still bound to a network port, preventing other processes from binding to that port. Specifically, netstat -a -b was reporting that a process named System…
Adam Rosenfield
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82
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7 answers

What is the Windows equivalent of Unix "whoami" command?

Is there a Windows equivalent of Unix "whoami" command? If so, what is it?
Kip
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82
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2 answers

How to configure a Windows machine to allow file sharing with a DNS alias

What process is necessary to configure a Windows environment to allow me to use DNS CNAME to reference servers? I want to do this so that I can name my servers something like SRV001, but still have \\file point to that server, so when SRV002…
Michael Ferrante
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79
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15 answers

Get list of AD groups a user is a member of

Suppose I have the user id of a user in Active Directory. I'd like to get a list of all AD groups in which that user is currently a member of. How can I do this from the Windows command line? I've tried the following: dsget user "DC=jxd123"…
JustBeingHelpful
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78
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8 answers

How does Windows decide which DNS Server to use when resolving names?

What algorithm does Windows use to decide which DNS Server it will query in order to resolve names? Let's say I have several interfaces, all active, some with no dns server specified, some told to determine it automatically, and some with it…
Artefacto
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Alternatives to Splunk?

I'm pretty impressed with Splunk, especially version 4. Pretty graphs, alerting (Enterprise only), and fast, accurate, searching. It's a great product. However, the cost just way too high to consider for full production use for our company. All we…
MichaelGG
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