Posts Tagged ‘remove’
Take Ownership of a File or Folder by Command in Windows
Taking ownership of files in Windows is necessary to edit or delete system or program files that you have no access to by default. There are multiple ways to achieve that goal, like doing everything manually through the Properties menu, applying a registry tweak or, as described here, executing a command in the Command Prompt. Note that taking ownership will not let you edit every system file. Windows has set precautions so that you don’t edit any of the most important files which may be helpful in some cases but can be really, really annoying in other.
To start off, you need an elevated command prompt which is simply a command prompt opened as administrator. In Windows 8 you can open that by right-clicking the bottom left corner of the screen and selecting Command Prompt (Admin). In Windows 7 and previous, search the main menu for cmd, right-click it and select Open as administrator.
You need two commands now: one to actually take ownership of the file or folder and one to grant yourself access rights. These are the two commands you will want to use:
For folders, use:
takeown /f folder_name /r /d y
icacls folder_name /grant username_or_usergroup:F /t /q
For files, use:
takeown /f file_name /d y
icacls file_name /grant username_or_usergroup:F /q
The commands basically only differ in a few switches that make the folder procession run recursively. If you want to edit only one folder instead of the whole recursive lot, remove the /r and /t switches from the commands. For more info on the commands, simply enter takeown /? or icacls /? into the command prompt.
If I wanted to take control of my Program Files folder, I’d need to enter the following:
takeown /f “C:\Program Files” /r /d y
icacls “C:\Program Files” /grant christian:F /t /q
Remove wireless connections in Windows 7
If for some reason, you have a wireless connection stuck in your system’s selection that doesn’t go away, it’s not that easy to figure out how to do so:
To remove such an entry,
- left-click on the connections icon and on Open Network and Sharing Center
- in the left pane, click on Manage wireless networks
- click on the network you want to remove once
- click on Remove network above the list
How to remove statusbar and menubar from VirtualBox windows (Linux)
VirtualBox machines usually have two bars in their window to make working with them easier.
These however are a great disturbance if you want to take screenshots of your machines – even if you select to leave the window border, the menu bars will still be on them.
To remove the bars, it only needs a simple terminal command. Open one and enter following (make sure that no virtual machines are running):
/usr/bin/VBoxManage setextradata global GUI/Customizations noMenuBar,noStatusBar
Next time you start a VirtualBox vm, there won’t be any menu bars. To restore them again, enter following into a terminal:
/usr/bin/VBoxManage setextradata global GUI/Customizations MenuBar,StatusBar
Remove global menu in Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment (Linux)
The default settings in the Unity desktop environment move a window’s control panel away from the actual window up to the top panel of the screen – this is called ‘global menu’.
Since that is a major change of paradigm and might hinder your workflow if you decided to switch, here is how to reverse the settings:
Open a terminal and enter following command:
sudo apt-get autoremove appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-qt
Afterwards you need to log out or reboot your machine. To enable it again if you should change your mind, just reinstall the packages:
sudo apt-get install appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-qt
Uninstall VirtualBox Guest Additions on Ubuntu and Windows 7
Ubuntu:
To uninstall VirtualBox Guest Additions on Ubuntu and similar operating systems, mount the virtual disk again that you used to install them – to do that, click on the Devices menu on the virtual machines top menu bar and select Install Guest Additions. If you get a pop-up about auto-start procedures just cancel it.
Now that the virtual disk is mounted, open a terminal and look for the contents of the disk in the /media folder.
ls /media
In my case, the disk is named VBOXADDITIONS_4.1.10_76795. This name may vary depending on the version of VirtualBox you have installed. Now uninstall the guest additions (don’t forget to adjust the path):
sudo sh /media/VBOXADDITIONS_4.1.10_76795/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run uninstall
Windows:
You can uninstall the guest additions just like any other program on a Windows machine: Click on Uninstall a program in the Control Panel and search for the version you installed. Select it and click on the Uninstall button above the program list.
How to delete saved passwords for network drives on Linux desktops
The majority of graphical environments let you choose to remember the passwords you enter somewhere to ease access to something but they usually don’t tell you how to delete them again. Most Linux desktop distributions have a tool installed where all your saved passwords for network drives are stored in that is called Passwords and Keys.
You can find the saved passwords right on the first
Remove left dependencies after application removal on Ubuntu/Mint Linux
Most of the people using Ubuntu or Mint will be using Synaptic Package Manager or Ubuntu Software Center to manage the applications installed on their systems (the former because of its light interface and ability to queue a whole lot of actions, the latter because of the user friendly interface). But while the two do an excellent job at installing, neither of them copes perfectly with removing the packages afterwards (USC does improve on that matter, but is still leaves traces in some situations).
The thing to use here is a simple command line utility to remove unneeded dependencies. Open a terminal and enter:
sudo apt-get autoremove
For more information, enter
man apt-get
Remove Driver Filters to Resolve Device Manager Errors on Windows 7
Sometimes the situation might come up where a device that was working flawlessly before will stop doing so, even if you try everything – replugging it, reinstalling its drivers, rebooting the computer – but nothing will help.
A possible cause for this is a driver filter that was either installed by any third party software or simply was corrupted. These can be part of any hardware driver and can intercept requests between software and driver (UpperFilter) or between hardware and driver (LowerFilter). Furthermore, there are two types of filter for each relation – device filters and class filters, where device filters work only for specific devices and class filters work for every device of a specific type, for example every bluetooth radio or every USB device attached to your computer. Those class drivers are the ones that usually cause the issues (if it is a filter issue) because on the software’s side, it makes more sense to address those to alter specific behaviours.
If you experience such an issue (which is commonly recognized by the Device Manager errors 19, 31, 32, 37, 39 and 41) it is possible to delete class filters in the registry. Before you make any changes there, it is highly recommendable to back it up. To do so, enter the registry by entering regedit into a Run… prompt and on the left pane, right-click the topmost key (Computer). Click Export and save the file to any location. The file you just created is a .reg file and can be imported into the registry again by simply double-clicking it.
To find the correct filters in the registry, navigate to the Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class key. This will have many subkeys all named like this: {36FC9E60-C465-11CF-8056-444553540000}. These represent the different classes of hardware, you can sport their type by the (Default) or Class values. The one above is for all USB devices:
Along with the other values, those keys contain the class filters if any are present. They are named UpperFilters and LowerFilters. If you have backed up your registry, look for the device giving you headaches and remove the class filters by right-clicking and deleting them.
This guide is only a solution to a possible source of errors and does not cover the whole range – if the problem persists, the source most likely lies somewhere else.
Uninstall USB Drivers on Windows 7
In the time you used your current Windows 7 system you undoubtly have plugged in a lot of different USB devices into your computer, most of them never to be used on it again. You will have notices that for every different device, Windows comes up with a message telling you that it automatically installs all drivers needed to use it.
That is perfectly alright, but what if you won’t use the device ever again? The drivers will remain on your hard disk in case you still need it. This is not optimal for two reasons – first: in no time, you will have a massive amount of drivers for different USB devices installed; second: drivers may be out of date the time you use your device again, even if you use it frequently.
Therefore, there is an option to uninstall or update your USB device drivers manually. Open a command prompt by searching for cmd and enter:
set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
This will set an environmental variable which can also be seen in Control Panel > System and Security > System > Advanced system settings > Environment Variables…. Afterwards, enter
devmgmt.msc
to open the device manager. This can also be done by right clicking Computer and choosing Manage, the device manager will be in the left column.
In the device manager menu, click View and enable Show hidden devices. If you now expand Universal Serial Bus controllers (USB) you will most likely have a bunch of transparent entries, which are all non present and/or hidden devices.
By right-clicking them, you can remove or upgrade their drivers if you need to. This can also be done will any other driver on the device manager and is rather useful for corrupted drivers, is to be handled with care however. If you don’t precisely know if you just selected a system component for uninstallment, better don’t do it.
Remove Arrows From Shortcut Icons on Windows 7
Upon creating shortcuts on Windows, the icons used for them are always tagged with an additional small arrow icon to indicate that the thing you have there is only a pointer to another file, not the file itself.
If, for esthetical or other reasons, you want remove those arrow icons, you can do that by choosing a transparent icon instead of the arrow to be displayed as indicator so that it won’t be visible anymore. To do that you have to apply a simple registry tweak:
Open the Windows registry by entering regedit into a Run… prompt and browse the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Icons
If the Shell Icons key does not exist, create it by right-clicking the Explorer key. Next, select the created Icons key and right-click the right pane to create a new String value. Name it 29 and assign the value C:\Windows\System32\shell32.dll,50 to it.
Afterwards close the registry and open a command line by searching for cmd. Enter the following commands one after another (Please note: the first one will close your explorer which means that your windows and taskbar will disappear. The last one is the command to restart your computer, which you need to do to apply all changes):
taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F
cd /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local
del IconCache.db /a
shutdown /r
After rebooting, the icons will be replaced. To revert the changes, simply remove the registry value and execute the commands again.