The goal of this blog is to show you a way to speed up a computer using basic software commands/programs. I use these daily and I have seen them work. Sometimes they don't sometimes they do.
Disk Cleanup
Disk cleanup is a powerful built-in tool that allows you to clean up temporary files and whatnots. It's a very surface-level tool. I tend to prefer tools like wise disk cleaner over this tool. In this tool you can clean up a full range of items:
Disk Cleanup has two modes. A mode for standard users and a mode for Admins. Of course, you have to have admin rights to run the admin side of the app. Disk cleanup starts in standard mode. You know it's in standard mode by the lack of options and the button with the admin shield on it called "Clean Up System Files".
Standard user Mode
Download Program Files
Temporary Interent Files (Edge and IE Only)
DirectX Shader Cache
Delivery Optimization Files
Recycle Bin
Temporary Files
Thumbnails
Clean Up System Files - Admin Mode
When you click the "Clean Up system files", disk cleanup restarts with more options. These options down blow. They include things like windows update items.
Windows update Cleanup
Windows update log files
Downloaded program files
temporary internet files (only edge and IE)
DirectX Shader Cache
Delivery Optimization Files
Device Driver packages
Language resource files
The Recycling Bin
Temporary files
Temporary windows installation files
Thumbnails
Wise Disk Cleaner
The next tool is a disk cleaner as well, but it goes much further than the basic standard disk cleanup. This tool is called wise disk cleaner by the company called wise. They also make wise registry cleaner and more. This software will clean out the temporary files of all of your browsers, your windows, cookies, and much more. It's repo of what it looks for is fairly large. What I like about wise is it is smart as well. It knows what can be dangerous and what is not. You can tell it to be dangerous as well.
Wise disk cleaner on startup.
All you have to do is click the scan and then clean up. It does everything for you. Along with the scan and clean-up, it also offers disk defragging for HHDs. The system slimming and advanced cleaner are tools for the more advanced user and I wouldn't recommend using them if you are new to computers.
I personally like that wise has a portable version in the portable apps platform and all versions have command-line switches as well. Here is more useful information:
After I run the disk cleaner, I run the wise registry cleaner on computers. Whenever a program installs, updates add to and so on with the OS, the registry gets junky. This junk often times has pointers to dead ends and other items that slow down the system. It is important to clean up those bad pointers, especially after a windows update.
What I like about Wise Registry Cleaner is it offers backing up your system with a restore point and a registry back before it does anything. They know that something bad could happen. The app also offers different scan types. Fast, Deep, and Custom.
Wise Registry Cleaner Start Page
The next example is a deep scan of a system I was working on.
Wise Registry Cleaner Scan
Wise Registry cleaner also has command lines like the disk cleaner. Here is some useful links.
This tool allows you to quickly find issues with your OS. Missing files, missing registry keys, and more. It validates your internal OS settings. The command has to be run as an administrator.
SFC /Scannow
SFC has much more flags that you can run, but I will not cover them in this blog. That's worthy of its own blog post. For more information, you can check out the Microsoft documentation here.
DISM Cleanup
Finally, you can use the DISM command to reach out to Microsoft itself and compare/repair your system. the /online flag tells dism to go online. The /cleanup-image opens up the cleaning process and the various commands after that repair different items.
dism /online /cleanup-image /checkhealth
This command checks the system for anything that might be corrupt or damaged. This one is a high level and it also checks itself. Basically lets make sure the tool works.
dism /online /cleanup-image /scanhealth
This command scans the system for missing files, damaged files, and much more based on the image from Microsoft. This one is much more in-depth than the checkhealth. This part takes some time and once complete, the system is ready for the next command.
dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
This command takes the list from scanhealth and the online repository and repairs the OS image. Without this command, nothing is getting fixed. It's also best to run this command last. If this process appears stuck at any point, that's normal. Let it do what it gots to do.
Final thoughts
I have come across lots of computers recently where office updates have damaged the OS and left thousands of useless files lying around. Completing these tasks has brought new life into those computers. It doesn't work all the time, but when it does, it's awesome. Out of all of the systems I have worked with the number one issue I see the most is age. Most slow computers are due to the fact that the computer is 10 years old trying to run the latest and greatest. My suggestion for those machines is linux.
I hope these little tricks will help you in your day-to-day IT endeavors.
With everything that happened with Facebook yesterday, I began to wonder where does my query goes when I type in facebook.com. So, I did a few things and found out. The first thing I did was resolve the name facebook.com to an IP address, or group of IP addresses in this case with the command resolve-dnsname.
Resolve-DnsName -Name facebook.com
Then from there, I used the site, ip-api.com to pull the location information of the IP address. This awesome little site gives you city, state, country, zip codes, and even the ISP information of an IP address.
$Info = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -URI "http://ip-api.com/json/$IP"
That's the base of the code that we will explore. It's very straightforward, but I want to clean it up some. I want to make a Get GEO IP information and a Resolve DNSname to Geo IP. I want it to all work together even if there is multiple IP addresses and hosts names. So, lets start off with the scripts and break them down. This will contain two functions for what we are wanting.
Get-SHDGeoIP
function Get-SHDGeoIP {
[cmdletbinding()]
param (
[parameter(Mandatory = $true)][ipaddress[]]$IPAddress,
[switch]$Complete
)
foreach ($IP in $IPAddress) {
$Info = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -URI "http://ip-api.com/json/$IP"
if ($Complete) {
$Info
}
else {
[pscustomobject]@{
IPAddress = $info.Query
City = $Info.city
State = $Info.regionName
Country = $Info.country
ISP = $Info.isp
}
}
}
}
This script is going to pull the geo information for us. We start off with the parameters. We are testing the parameters to see if the IP address is an valid IP address. We do that with [ipaddress]. This tests for both IPv4 and IPv6. We tell it to be a array of IPaddresses with the [] inside of it. [ipaddress[]]. Just for cleaner fun, I have a switch for a complete information dump. This way
Since this is an array of IP addresses, we will start a foreach loop for each IP address in the array. We start the foreach loop by grabbing the IP information. If the user selected complete, we just dump the information we gathered to the user. if they didn't select complete, we create a custom object with the IP address, city, state, country and ISP information.
The next function uses the previous function and combines it with Resolve-DnsName. We start off with a list of strings for our hostname parameter and our complete parameter. We start our loop like before of the host names. Then we use the Get-SHDGeoIP -IPAddress command with the Resolve-DnsName -Name and the link name. We then select the IP addresses which is an array. We place that array inside the Get-SHDGeoIP and bam, we have our information. Converting a hostname like Facebook.com to IP information.
With these two little scripts, you will be able to find quick information about a website and where it is being hosted. For example, this site is hosted in new jersey. I personally didn't know that.
There are 171,476 or so words in the English language. This doesn't include names or other items. Datamuse is a very powerful database of English words. It contains rhyming, like, anonymous, Synonyms and much more. What I like about this site is it has a simple API that can be stacked. You can find the API here.
What do I mean by stacked. Some APIs use the URL and gathers all the information from that. While others uses the custom header and body of requests. Datamuse uses the URL. It returns a nice json to work with as well inside its content area. Basically, it's my kind of API. The below API is an example of a url API. After words? each XX= has the word to query with. Each item means something different. The ML means, means like and the sp is spelled like. So we are looking for words that means like black and starts with the letter b.
https://api.datamuse.com/words?ml=Black&sp=b*
URL API's are super easy to work within PowerShell. The key is to make a string of what you are looking for. If you have a flag of $meansLike = Black. Then it will add the &ml=black to the string. Same as $Spelling="B*". It will add the &ml=Black&sp=B*. Then we just remove the first character of the string and we have our string. We do that with substring. Let's take a look at the full script.
The Script
function Get-SHDWords {
[cmdletbinding()]
param (
[string]$MeansLike,
[string]$SoundsLike,
[string]$SpelledLike,
[string]$LeftContext,
[string]$RightContext,
[string]$Topic,
[string]$NounModifiedByAdjective,
[string]$AdjectiveModifiedbyNoun,
[string]$Synonym,
[string]$Trigger,
[string]$Antonym,
[string]$KindOf,
[string]$MoreGeneralThan,
[string]$Comprises,
[string]$Meronym,
[string]$FrequentFollowers,
[string]$FrequentPredecessors,
[string]$Rhymes,
[string]$NearRhymes,
[string]$Homophones,
[string]$Consonant,
[switch]$Random
)
$actionstring = ""
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('MeansLike')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&ml=$MeansLike" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('SoundsLike')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&sl=$SoundsLike" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('SpelledLike')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&sp=$SpelledLike" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('LeftContext')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&lc=$LeftContext" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('RightContext')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rc=$RightContext" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('Topic')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&topics=$Topic" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('NounModifiedByAdjective')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_jja=$NounModifiedByAdjective" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('AdjectiveModifiedbyNoun')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_jjb=$AdjectiveModifiedbyNoun" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('Synonym')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_syn=$Synonym" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('Trigger')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_trg=$Trigger" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('Antonym')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_ant=$Antonym" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('KindOf')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_spc=$KindOf" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('MoreGeneralThan')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_gen=$MoreGeneralThan" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('Comprises')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_com=$Comprises" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('Meronym')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_par=$Meronym" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('FrequentFollowers')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_bag=$FrequentFollowers" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('FrequentPredecessors')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_bgb=$FrequentPredecessors" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('Rhymes')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_rhy=$Rhymes" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('NearRhymes')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_nry=$NearRhymes" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('Homophones')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_hom=$Homophones" }
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('Consonant')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&rel_cns=$Consonant" }
if ($Random) {
$Character = [char](Get-Random -Minimum 65 -Maximum 90)
$actionstring = "$($actionstring)&sp=$Character*"
}
$actionstring = $actionstring.Substring(1)
(Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://api.datamuse.com/words?$actionstring").content | convertfrom-json
}
The Breakdown
Ok, first notice that we have each of the items from the datamuse site as string values that can take input. None of them are mandatory. The first thing after the parameters is our blank action string.
Next, we start questioning the input like a youtube conspiracy theorist. We do that by asking if the bound parameters contains a key. If it does we add to the action string.
if ($PSBoundParameters.ContainsKey('MeansLike')) { $actionstring = "$($actionstring)&ml=$MeansLike" }
Here we are recreating the string by taking the value of the string and adding the &ml=$MeansLike. We do this for each parameter we use except for random. Random we just grab a random english word character and ask for a word that starts with that word. After we have created our action string we use our substring command to remove the first & from the string.
$actionstring = $actionstring.Substring(1)
Once we have the action string formatted right, we are ready to go. We use the invoke-webrequest command and we will grab the data. We will select only the content, which is in a nice json format. Then we will pipe that information into convertfrom-json to create a Powershell object.
Here we are looking for all the words that start with the letter L and that Rhyme with Pink.
Example 2 - Lash
Get-SHDWords -MeansLike anger -SoundsLike love | Where-Object {$_.tags -contains "v"}
Here are the results:
word score tags
---- ----- ----
lash 14742 {v}
In this example, we are looking for words that mean anger but sound like love. Some of the results will have tags. Items like means like and sounds like have tags that you can filter through. With this example, we are looking for verbs. So we look with the where-object command.
In this example, we get a random list of words that start with a random letter. Then we select from that list a random item. We do that with the get-random with a minimum of 0 and the maximum of the test count. Then we select the word. All that produced the word ominous.
Taking a step farther - Passwords
Let's take this one step further and make a two-word password. The first thing we want is a word. So we use the command Get-SHDwords again. We are going to use the word trust.
Here we generate 3 random characters. We then select our word, trust by putting it into the $One. We can replace our word by replacing the $One input. Then we get the second word with two. Get-SHDWords -Rhymes $One Then we grab just one of those words like before. This time we replace all the vowels with the character we generated at the beginning. Then we combine it all together. The first word, $One, the middle character, $characterMiddle, the second word $two, and finally the ending Character $CharacterEnd. Now we have an easy-to-remember password.
Datamuse offers even more options than what this script offers. Check them out and see what amazing things you can create.
I'm going to leave off here with a challenge this week. Can you write a poem using datamuse based off the word:
Do you have a zip file or an msi file that you need to embed into a powershell script for deployment. This is a quick and simple way to do this. The method is pretty sound and works most of the time. The larger the file, the more troubles the system has converting and converting back, so small files works wonders for this method.
The first thing we are going to do is convert a file into a base 64 string. This is done through the command Get-Content and the system convert method. Powershell 7 recently changed the command for this method and we will cover that first.
Powershell 7 Command
The get content changed the encoding flag to asbytestream flag.
This command will read the data as raw byte data which is needed for the System convert method. The Powershell 5 method users Encoding and then you select your type which is byte.
Powershell 5
$Content = Get-Content -Path $Path -Encoding Byte
These commands reads the data as raw information that will be used for the system.convert to base 64 string method.
Now we have an object of random-looking data like before. We need to write those bytes to a file we do that with the System.IO.File write all bytes method. We will need the outfile location. and the object we created earlier to complete this task.
[system.io.file]::WriteAllBytes($OutFile,$object)
This will create the file you embedded into your powershell script.
Use Case
Encrypted Passwords
Let's secure a password file and key file inside our embedded script. First, we are going to create the key for out password file.
Now we build the script with these two pieces of information. We recreate the files from the script and then pull them in like before. Here is the key code:
Now we have both files needed to receive our password, let's convert that password using the key from before. We get the content of the .key file with get-content. Then we use it when we convert to secure string the password file. Pushing all that information into a new credential object for later use in something like a nextcloud download. Then we remove the files as we don't want that password getting out there.
Let's say we need to embed an MSI file. For example, we have a custom Open DNS MSI that will auto setup the Umbrella client on an end user's computer. The first thing we want to do is convert that msi file to the base 64 string like above.
Here we are using the powershell 5 code to convert the msi into a string and pushing it out to our clipboard. Now we need to place that information into the script. This is what the script would look like:
As you can see by the size of the base64 string, that seems like a large file. Surprisingly that's only 11kb in size. The larger the file the more code will be present and the chances of buffer overload increases.
Scripts
What kind of person would I be without giving you a function or two to make life easier on you. Here are two functions. The first converts the item to base64 string and copies it to your clipboard. The second converts a base64 string to an object.
This little script logs public IP address changes. The original design was to email out. I'll make sure to point out when and where to put that code. So the idea is simple. It checks to see if it's public IP address has changed using an invoke-webrequest. If it has changed, it checks to see if a log has been made. If it has been made, it updates the log, if it hasn't been made, it creates the log. Then when the IP address changes back, it backs up the logs and stops. Lets take a look at the script.
The Script
Param (
[string]$IPAddress = "Your IP Address"
)
$IP = (invoke-webrequest -Uri "http://ifconfig.me/ip" -UseBasicParsing).content
If (!(Test-Path C:\temp)) { New-Item -Path "c:\temp" -ItemType Directory }
if (!($IP -like "$IPAddress")) {
if (!(Test-Path c:\temp\IPTrigger.log )) {
#Email Code Goes Here
$Datetime = (Get-Date).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd_HH-mm")
"Datetime,IP" > c:\temp\IPTrigger.log
"$datetime,$IP" >> c:\temp\IPTrigger.log
}
else {
$Datetime = (Get-Date).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd_HH-mm")
"$datetime,$IP" >> c:\temp\IPTrigger.log
}
}
else {
if (Test-Path c:\temp\IPTrigger.log) {
$Datetime = (Get-Date).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd_HH-mm")
Copy-Item -Path c:\temp\IPTrigger.log -Destination "c:\temp\IPTrigger_$($datetime).log.bak"
Remove-Item -Path c:\temp\IPTrigger.log
#Email Code goes here with attachment of the log bak.
}
}
The Breakdown
We grab the IP address from the Paramters. This way you can have the script called Public-IPChecker -IPAddress Something from your task scheduler. After we get what the IP Address should be we get what It is with the Invoke-webrequest command.
There are a hand full of sites that grabs the IP address for you. I personally like Ifconfig.me because it places the IP address as the content. Thus no sorting through the HTML to get the IP address.
Next we ask if it's the IP address. Then we ask if the log has been made.
if (!($IP -like "$IPAddress")) {
if (!(Test-Path c:\temp\IPTrigger.log )) {}
}
If it doesn't exist, we create it by getting the DateTime into a file friendly format. and Piping that information into the log file along with the current IP address.
If the IP addresses do match then we test to see if the log file is there. If it is there we create a bak of the log file and remove the old one. This is when you can send an email saying it's back up. If it doesn't exist, we do nothing.
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