tasklist and svchost.exe stuff

Came across something that I've often wondered about today.
Why do you always have lots of svchost.exe processes running when you look at task manager?
Well I've just worked out how to find out what they are, which could be very useful in the future if I have to try and fix someones spam-ridden pc again.

The tasklist command prompt tool lists all the running processes on your pc, in a similar fashion to Task Manager, however the strength comes in the parameters you can give it.

typing:
tasklist /SVC

shows the list of processes, with the names of the actual process not just the filename, very useful for identifying unusual processes, it will also tell you what svchost is really running. Useful.

Updating an SQL Table using a join

Today I needed to update one of the tables in my database replacing the value in one field with a derived value from another table. A quick search on the internet turned up this useful post from Ben Nadel


Essentially the statment required is as follows:

UPDATE A
SET DestinationField = B.SourceField
FROM TableToUpdate A
INNER JOIN TableToReadFrom B
ON A.JoinKey = B.JoinKey

How to stop infuriating windows system beeps?

from the command line, type:
net stop beep

and what if for some strange reason you actually want to turn them on again? You guessed it..
net start beep

Hiding a user name from the welcome screen in Vista and Windows Server 2008

I've been setting up a new database server with Windows Server 2008 DataCenter Edition and I have added users to run specific tasks with restricted permissions, such as filesharing or SQL Server users. I didn't want these accounts to appear on the initial Log-on screen when the system booted but there was no obvious way to hide specific users from this main screen in User Settings.

After trawling the net for a while I came across a great post from Brett Maytom detailing how to disable these users in Vista here. This works for me perfectly in Windows Server 2008.

New blog site

Hello.
This is my first venture in to the blogsphere and I hope that it will be the first of many. For the past few years, I and my colleague Dan have come up against quite a few programmer related difficulties for which we have either devised workarounds for or managed to overcome.

We plan to use this blog to act as a memory bank for what we have done, so that we can call on it next time we need to do something similar and to share our experience and hopefully offer solutions so that other people trying to do the same things as we have can find it a useful resource as well. We have made use of other people's blogs and newsgroup posts to aid us in the past and feel like we ought to put something back in to the online community.

The core of this blog is likely to be Microsoft .NET or SQL Server related. But we have also done a lot of Microsoft Office VBA and automation of other software from .NET to control Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Acrobat, Microsoft Office, SAS, SPSS, MatLab and MapInfo amongst others. Hopefully we'll be able to help other people trying to do the same thing.

I'll be back with a more techie post soon.

Matt