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PC Refresh service – your computer renewed

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These days a PC that is a few years old will most likely still be quite capable of useful work, but might be held-back by particular components or original specification that can be easily updated. This is especially true for work-horse systems used for web access, database or document processing – rather than high end media work or gaming systems which do generally benefit from the latest processors & technology.

An internal spring clean with battery or main drive replacement or memory boost might be all that’s required to rejuvenate your system for a few more productive years at a fraction of the cost to buy new.

Tips & Tricks

Epson XP-3200 new printer problem

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After trying to set-up a new Epson Expression Home printer for a client and failing to get any usable printouts from the control panel I then connected directly by USB to a Windows 11 machine. Using the downloadable configuration tool the black prints became dense enough to read. After a couple of nozzle cleans and a head clean the black improved slightly more but the nozzle check report showed the colours were still full of gaps. The Epson support line advised me to then carry out multiple head cleans & nozzle checks in succession. My client intervened and started the return process. I cannot remember ever having this amount of set-up difficulty with a new printer to get to the output of printed sheets. Printer drivers and connectivity would not be such an issue as this involves so many combinations of products.

Epson Expression Home XP-3200
Tips & Tricks Utility Software Windows Commands

Using OpenSSH and SSH on Windows

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Secure Shell software allowing connections between clients and servers for remote administration.

Related Powershell Commands:
Check the installation status
Get-WindowsCapability -Online | Where-Object Name -like 'OpenSSH*'

Start the service
Start-Service sshd

Change the service startup behaviour
Set-Service -Name sshd -StartupType 'Automatic'

Add/Install the service
Add-WindowsCapability -Online -Name OpenSSH.Server~~~~0.0.1.0
Local Tunneling allows a port on your local client machine to act as a port on the remote server.
Jump to remote tunnel at 7m 43 secs
Useful Commands to show the logged in user account etc:

tasklist /s <pcname> /fi "imagename eq explorer.exe" /v

wmic /node: <pcname> computersystem get username

wmic /node: <pcname> computersystem get manufacturer, model, username

Or locally:
wmic computersystem get manufacturer, model, username

Change the Network Hostname (Requires Admin account)
Using CMD
wmic computersystem where name="%COMPUTERNAME%" rename "NewName"

Use Powershell and CMD to switch between sessions on either command line  

Using Powershell
Rename-Computer "NewName" -Restart
Tips & Tricks Windows Commands

Windows cURL on the command line

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Command line and scripting tool for transferring data with URLs see the website Curl.se

curl -L -A "Mozilla" http://website.com

This follows re-directs and uses a dummy header to anticipate 406 Not Acceptable errors then returns the page content, you can use a full header string to represent other browsers

This YouTube video is presented by the cURL creator

Windows Batch Files Windows Commands

Windows Robocopy command common usage issues problems & gotchas

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Enclosing the source or destination in double quotes allows the use of paths with spaces in the folder names but DO NOT end with a trailing backslash ‘\’ as this will be interpreted as an escape character.

When using the task scheduler to run a robocopy command script be aware that using the account credentials of the logged-in user may be necessary for access to network drives referred to by the command. An administrator account may not have the necessary permissions.

Syntax
      ROBOCOPY Source_folder Destination_folder [files_to_copy] [options]

      ROBOCOPY "M:\" "X:Destination Folder\" DON'T USE EITHER OF THESE

      ROBOCOPY M:\ "X:Destination Folder" THIS WORKS