My boss is a bit more tech savvy than your average management employee and he also reads my website periodically and so he assumes, quite incorrectly i assure you, that I am always running Window Hider and misconstrues and frantic keyboard mashing when he enters the room as me attempting to hide things from him. Which got me thinking that while a key combo to hide/unhide your windows is a good idea it is also a bit noisy.

My solution to the problem was to add a “hot corner”. What that means is if you move your mouse to the upper left hand corner of the (primary) screen it will also trigger the hide/unhide mechanism. This is a much quieter and stealthy operation. This can of course be disable by a check box and it does nothing to interfere with the key combo to hide/unhide. Anyways not much else to it so I present you with

WinHider1.1

Made a couple small revision to owexec at the request of  readers.  PSEXEC has a flag that allows you to reference a local file and have PSEXEC copy it over to the destination which is kinda handy.  So I added the -copy flag to owexec.  If you add -copy to the command line then it will find the file on the local computer and copy it over to the admin$ share on the destination computer.  Then execute it from there.  Not a terribly necessary flag but it can be helpful.  The second update is the flag -nowait which just makes it not ask you to press a key at the end before exiting.  Enjoy.

owexec page

As requested via the tip line, a command line app to adjust the volume of a computer.  The general use for this is to copy it over to a computer and run it using psexec or owexec.  Then it is just as easy as doing the command

setvol <volume percent>

For example “setvol 100″ or “setvol “10″.   The program will accept just about anything on the command line, try to convert it to a number and set the volume with it.  Passing nothing will set the volume to 0 and passing strings has unpredictable results but will not error.  Also, this adjusts the Wave volume slider not the master slider so it is more difficult for the layman to fix the problem.

Download setvol here

You may not know this but when you use PSEXEC to start a process on another persons computer the process belongs to you.  This has some interesting side effects as well as a few concerns.  First off the big concern is that since now the user has, in their control, a window of say Internet Explorer with your permissions attached to it, they can now browse to any network share you have access to with that window.  As a domain admin that is kinda scary.  So what we need is a way to run a process remotely as the user that is logged in locally.  I spent a bunch of time a few months back researching this and had built a solution for an application I wrote and then I promptly forgot about it.

However yesterday someone came across this site by searching “psexec run under currently logged in account” which got me thinking about it again, I figured if other people out there are interested I should take the code I have and make it useful for others, so I did.  I went ahead and wrote a PSEXEC like program that I lovingly called OWExec that allows you to start a process on a remote system in the context of one of the users logged in currently.

This program bears some explaining so I went ahead and made it its own page here, follow the link to download and for instructions on use.

Welcome back folks, So I told you about monitoring processes but sometimes using a script isn’t so easy.  So I bring ProcessMonitor a tool for monitoring the new processes as they launch on your computer.  It monitors the processes and adds them to a list in a text box.  Most recent at the top.

Download Here