PC Advisor

Yesterday I had the following problem:

my Chrome browser crashed and my system began to crawl. I decided to kill the chrome process, but as multiple tabs have been opened, I would need to kill multiple chrome processes (each tab runs in a seperate process in Chrome). Loading the gui of the task manager in a very slowly responsive system and killing each process seperately was not a good option, so I decided to do the following:

• I opened a command prompt (start->run->cmd)

• Then I typed:

         taskkill /F /FI "IMAGENAME eq chrome*"

• And that was it. All processes named chrome have been killed with a single click.

But, let’s examine the parameters of the command:

 /F: force kill the process

/FI "IMAGENAME eq chrome*": use a filter and kill every process that has a name that begins with chrome.

for more information about the command, open a command prompt (start->run->cmd) and  type:

taskkill/?

Many times, when we want to back up some documents, we are searching the whole filesystem of the windows drive in order to locate, folders like my documents, my pictures e.t.c. Some other times we end up with a full windows partition, with no free disk space, just because our documents, that reside in My documents take a lot of space (the physical position of my documents in a windows installation is : x:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents, where username is our  windows user name and x: is the drive of our windows installation).

A good idea, in order to avoid the above problems and to better organize our computers is  to change the default location of my documents folder and put it in a separate folder in a partition different from our windows installation.

In order to do this one can follow the following instructions coming from Microsoft’s web site:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310147

Md5sum is a computer program which calculates and verifies 128-bit MD5 hashes. The MD5 hash functions as a compact digital fingerprint of a file. It is extremely unlikely that any two non-identical files will have the same MD5 hash. This means that when we download a file, we can validate the download by comparing the md5 hash value provided by the download location (it is usually stored in *.md5 files) with the md5 hash value calculated for the downloaded file in our computer. In order to calculate the md5 hash for a program in a Windows machine one can use:

Free, open source winMd5Sum from Nullriver Software.

For more info and downloads please visit:

http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/winmd5sum