Windows 8 Developer Preview

Microsoft has just released the Developer Preview of Windows 8 - which can be grabbed from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/home/.

I had a gander by installing it on a VM. The Metro UI looks quite good and I think it's great that most vendors are moving towards HTML5, CSS and Javascript based apps. (well.. at least they are mostly standardised and for once many giants of the industry are on common grounds). It's a shame that there is no common OS interface standard though. I would quite like to have my Gnome shell extensions work with little or no modifications on Windows 8. One could only dream I suppose.

One thing that drives me up the wall is the trend that OS developers seem to follow; not all users are high school kids who spend their whole time on social networks. Think of the power users dammit! I can't imagine having a very productive work flow on Windows 8. Hopefully I won't ever be forced to use it extensively - I have only just grudgingly gotten used to Gnome shell.

Yes, I am getting old.

Kill tasks in Windows through the command line

I received a frantic phone call from my Dad last night, who lives a few thousand miles away, across a few oceans. "My computer is not working. Something is wrong with my hard disk" - he said. "Fix it!". Although it was  flattering that my dad thinks that I could magically fix a bad hard drive from a few thousand miles away, it didn't sound quite right because he had just recently bought that machine. I will spare you my dear readers, of the painful 10 minutes that I spent talking in a very slow and calm voice to my dad to figure out what was really wrong. Eventually I managed to figure out that he was infected with the "Windows Recovery" virus. (http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/remove-windows-recovery).

Removing this infection is simple enough if you follow the excellent instructions from the bleepingcomputer guide above. However,  what can you do when you don't have physical access to the machine? Luckily the LogmeIn app I had installed sometime back was still running and accessible, so I could access the computer remotely. However, trying to download the rkill application to stop the virus was impossible because it was blocking all DNS requests out of the machine. The task manager was disabled by the virus as well, so pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del didn't work either. Restarting the computer in safe mode would cut off my remote access through LogMeIn. Asking my dad to press even a single key takes more than 5 minutes of explanations and several wrong attempts - so telling him what to do was not an option either.

The Solution:

tasklist

There is a little known command in Windows named tasklist, which does the same thing as the Linux ps command. Running the command on a command prompt will display a list of all running processes along with their PIDs. To kill any process, type tskill followed by the PID. For example, to kill PID 2476, type:

tskill 2476

Pretty simple, but very handy command for those sticky situations!