Windows

PowerShell Slow to Load and AutoFill

I had this problem on a server for a while – when first launching PowerShell, it would take ~20 seconds or so to accept input. Also, when pressing tab to auto-complete a command, it would again take ~20 seconds to start, like it was freezing. These were one time problems when launching PowerShell, after that it would work fine until a new session was launched.

A lot of searching didn’t help me work it out, so I logged a Microsoft case. After a few task manager executable dumps, they worked out the delay was on a path I had in an environment variable. Somehow in my account’s user variable, I had a github desktop path that was mapping to a network share, using a PC name that was decommissioned (e.g. ;\\pcname\c$\Users\AdamFowler\AppData\Local\GitHubDesktop\bin.

I expect that this name was timing out, and PowerShell was waiting a while before giving up. In case you have the same symptoms as me, check the environment variables – user variables paths if it’s only your account affected, or the system variables if it’s all users. Click on the path value, then click edit, and remove anything that shoudn’t be there (take a backup of the text if you aren’t sure, it’s easy to put back in if you keep a copy).

To get to Environment Variables, depending on the OS version, get to System Properties, the Advanced tab, and then the Environment Variables button:

Hope that helps someone else with the same problem!

Enabling Dictation in Windows 10

Dictation is a pretty cool feature in Windows 10. Press Winkey + H, and up comes a small prompt in the middle of your screen telling you it’s listening – you can start talking, and your words start appearing wherever your cursor is.

Not only that, but you can give commands like a light version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking such as ‘delete test’ to delete the last word ‘test’. Or ‘Select the next three words‘ to highlight them – basic cursor management you’d normally need a mouse for.

A managed Windows 10 computer however, may not have all the components required to use Dictation, and a user may not have the access to download the speech packs themselves.

I hit a problem where Dictation would say ‘Download a Speech package for dictation’, but clicking that link would take me to settings and show that it was already installed. An admin of the PC doing this however, would somehow trigger a component to install and Dictation would work fine.

An admin of the PC doing this however, would somehow trigger a component to install and Dictation would work fine.

Under the user context, going to the Speech settings would show all the options as greyed out and blank:

After raising this with Microsoft Support, this was the method we found to make it all work:

These are the components that I required for Dictation:

• Language Basic component
• Language Text-to-speech component
• Language Speech component

These components are available to download via the “Windows 10 Features on Demand Pack 1” which you can find in your MSDN My Visual Studio downloads (the latest being version 2004). You’ll probably need a subscription for this.

Features On Demand are also available via Windows Update but this may not help you if you have a WSUS server.

The resulting ISO, e.g. en_windows_10_features_on_demand_part_1_version_2004_x64_dvd_7669fc91.iso will contain a separate .cab file for each feature. From this, it’s then a matter of using the DISM tool to inject each feature into Windows 10:

Dism /Online /Add-Package /PackagePath:F:\Microsoft-Windows-LanguageFeatures-Basic-en-au-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~.cab 

Note you can add multiple packages to the above command, so could do all three with a single line. If you want to know what packages are already installed on a Windows 10 device:

Dism /Online /Get-Packages 

Privacy

There’s one big other catch with Dictation. You’ll need to enable ‘Online speech recognition’ which leverages Microsoft cloud based services as part of using Dictation.

If you’re running a computer that’s logged on under a Microsoft account, everything you say is being captured. You can view this data here and choose to delete it:

https://account.microsoft.com/privacy/activity-history?view=voice

I’m still clarifying how this works in other scenarios, and will update this blog post if I find out any more information.

If as a company, you’ve decided and accepted this scenario, you can toggle the option on for users using this registry setting:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Speech_OneCore\Settings\OnlineSpeechPrivacy

HasAccepted DWORD

0 = Off

1 = On

Maybe you won’t need to do any of the above at all – but it’s worth understanding what’s out there, and if you understand and accept the privacy aspect; and if you do, then promoting it to your userbase as a potentially big timesaver… especially for those 1 finger keyboard typists!

It’s also worth nothing that several Microsoft 365 products include Dictate inside the app, more about that here.

HEIC and HEIF Files Can’t Be Viewed on Windows 10 & 11

If you haven’t come across these file formats already, you probably will soon. Created by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and adopted by Apple amongst others, it’s looking like a replacement for the old JPEG image format.

The format was added in iOS11 and created when doing things like taking a photo. Early on the files were being converted back to JPEG in many situations, including OneDrive Photo Roll syncs.

I expect something else has changed recently, as I’m seeing the files turn up over email from other parties where I’d never seen them before. If I find out more I’ll update this post.

.HEIC and .HEIF files ‘appear’ to be the same thing, but at this stage I can’t clearly find information explaining if there’s a difference, and if so what that is.

These files can’t be natively opened on Windows 11 or earlier, but there’s a few options you have to view them.

OneDrive

If you have access to OneDrive or OneDrive for Business (which doesn’t take much, a free Microsoft account will do), you can copy these files into OneDrive, right click and ‘View Online’. Via your browser, you can then view the image in OneDrive without any extra software required. However, Microsoft documentation currently does not list the formats as being supported, and I’m also asking questions about this in a few areas. (Update 3rd March 2020 – Microsoft updated this page after I asked :) )

Windows 10 & 11

The native Photos app was supposed to have support for this as per these Insider Build notes. I’ve tested on a few different PCs including a fully patched standard Microsoft build laptop, and Photos doesn’t recognise the files. I’ve been told the support of the files needs the two Windows Store apps, and that matches my testing:

HEIF Image Extensions

HEVC Video Extensions from the Device Manufacturer

Both are created by ‘Microsoft Corporation’ so they’re not third party, and both are free. Once installed, HEIC and HEIF files work everywhere I’ve tried, including in the native Photos app.

There is also a paid HEVC Video Extensions version from Microsoft that costs $1.45AU, I’m not sure why you’d need this one over the one ‘from the Device Manufacturer’.

Frustratingly, the ‘HEVC Video Extensions from the Device Manufacturer’ app doesn’t seem to be available to add in Windows Store for Business, but the HEIF Image Extensions is. I’m asking around to try and have that resolved, if I can find someone to listen to me :) (Update 3rd March 2020 – this probably won’t change anytime soon for licensing reasons)

Converting

One final option is to convert a HEIC to JPEG. Here’s a quick guide using Linux via a Debian WSL image, installed from the Microsoft Store (thanks Purana for the tip!)

I’ve got a lot of unanswered questions in the above, but hoping this at least helps others that might get stuck in finding a working solution in the meantime.

How to Automate FTP Uploads with PSFTP

Many vendors and companies still transfer data via FTP. It could be transactional data, user data, or a myriad of other things. Hopefully they’re using SFTP or FTPS (which are different ways of achieving secure FTP transmissions) rather than FTP, for similar data transfer security reasons on HTTP vs HTTPS.

A common use case I come across, is user management. Uploading basic user data like names, email addresses and employee numbers so a vendor can update records in their cloud based product for your staff to use. If you’re using a cloud service and don’t have user automation sorted – then ask them how you can achieve it – it’s much more enjoyable to set up automation, than do repeating mindless tasks.

Assuming you have details on what to send and where, you’ll need to work out how to automate FTP uploads. Note that this is a much less secure method – you’re saving the password in plain text. Alternatives do exist such as what’s demonstrated in this YouTube video below using a Public Key and Private Key Pair, but require the ability to create a .ssh folder on the FTP server. I’d rather do it this way:

Getting the other end to do what you want isn’t always possible in the real world, so you need to consider the risks if you need to save a password in plain text somewhere (saved in a Scheduled Task as you’ll see below). They’re obtainable if someone can get onto the server (or a backup of the server, or connect to Task Scheduler remotely), which should be heavily locked down anyway, and the password for this might be saved in a password database those same staff members have access to anyway.

If those credentials were obtained by another party, what could they do? If the FTP site cleans up the data instantly that’s uploaded, then they could potentially upload whatever they wanted. Look at a worst case and decide if you’re comfortable with having the account credentials saved this way, or need to find another approach.

Again, consider these risks, try to implement the most secure method you can, and raise any concerns with management/your boss. Assuming this is a scenario where you can’t do it more securely:

Instructions

First, you’ll need software. I use PSFTP – part of PuTTY, a free and open source solution. Download the full installer, as there’s a few components of PuTTY we need.

Next, you’ll need the login details of the FTP site:
Host: e.g. sftp.contoso.com
Username
Password

Open a Command Prompt, navigate to the location that contains sftp.exe and type:

sftp username@host -pw password

You’ll probably first be prompted with a message saying ‘The server’s host key is not cached in the registry’ with some details on the fingerprint. If you’re sure you’re connecting to the right server, you can say ‘y’ to ‘Store key in cache’. Once saved, you won’t be prompted for this on the same computer/user.

At this stage, we’re just making sure you can sign in and get past the key stage. If this works, you’ll now need to work on a batch file to pass through all the commands you want to do.

In this example, I’ll be going into a folder and uploading a file. Open notepad and type your commands, which you can first test in your active connection:

cd inbound
mput filename.csv
quit

Pretty simple stuff. Save your notepad file (we’ll call it batchfile.txt), and if you haven’t already disconnected from your SFTP session, do so with the ‘quit’ command.

Connect back to the SFTP site, but this time we’ll specify the batch file to rin after connecting:

sftp username@host -pw password -b batchfile.txt -batch

I’ve also added -batch on the end to specify it’s an automated batch job – this will cause SFTP to exit on a prompt, rather than be running forever waiting for an input. You can try without -batch first if you want to test and see the prompts, but you’ll need to run this command manually rather than triggering from a Scheduled Task.

If this works as expected, great! You can automate the SFTP task – the final step is to schedule it to run, which I usually use the native Scheduled Tasks in Windows to do.

If your scheduled task is running under a different account than what you tested with, then you’ll need to do that initial host key saving – easiest way is to launch Command Prompt as that user, and connect to the FTP site.

Default Printer At First Logon via Group Policy

Deploying a network printer via Group Policy is pretty easy. In Group Policy Management Editor, you go to User Configuration > Preferences > Control Panel Settings > Printers and right click to create a new Shared Printer. Configure the options which are pretty straight forward.

Something doesn’t go right though, if you use the option ‘set this printer as the default printer’. The printer won’t actually be set as default for the first login. As it’s set to Update though, this will get fixed next time Group Policy runs.

However, if you have the Action set to ‘Create’, it only gets one chance to set the default printer – at the time of creation. That fails, and it doesn’t get a chance to set the default printer again.

Why does it fail to set the default printer at first logon? You’ll see an event viewer application error like this:

The user ‘HP Printer’ preference item in the ‘Define Printers {XXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}’ Group Policy object did not apply because it failed with error code ‘0x80070709 The printer name is invalid.’ This error was suppressed.

There’s a clear Microsoft Support Article that explains why – in summary, Windows isn’t ready yet to change something on the printer between the time it creates the printer, and then tries to make it default as they’re two separate actions.

However, we can work around this by deploying a registry entry that sets the default printer. This 11 year old article is still correct in that it shows the registry value to change:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows

REG_SZ - Device
Value - \\adamfowlerit\printer,winspool,Ne04:e

Setting this via registry as an ‘Apply once and do not reapply’ with any other logic matching your printer deployment policy, should end up with the printer as a default on first logon.

This is a problem that’s been around for many years, but the first time I’ve hit it!

Also, if you’re wondering what the ‘Ne04’ part means, it seems to be some sort of counter which goes up for each time you install a printer.