[TipJar] High and Snipe

Jun 23

ErinTipjar, Top of my head , , No Comments

At work, the Windows 7 workstation we were given came with a Trojan-esque gift: several instances of wscript.exe are running at startup and uses all available CPU processing cycles. Killing them off does not show any adverse effects (yet) but the graphical way is a bit time consuming as the machine is already slow at this point.

Below is the quickest way to snipe these instances using the lowest memory-guzzler tool in every Windows arsenal: the command line processor window. The only catch is that the wscript instances would require the kill command to be executed from an elevated command prompt as the Windows User Access Control (UAC) is active.
1. Press the Window key to bring up the startup menu.
2. In the Start menu search box, type “cmd”. The first entry highlighted is the program entry.

elevated cli

3. Press “Ctrl+Shift+Enter” to run the command in elevated mode. If UAC is really running, a confirmation prompt will be displayed for the command line processor.

elevated cli

4. Invoke the command “taskkill /im wscript.exe /f ” to kill all running instances of wscript.exe.

5. To validate if there are still instances running, run the command “tasklist | find “wscript” ” (omit the first and last double quotes). Nothing should be shown.

The exercise above can be adapted to quickly kill some errant processes without going through the task manager or resource monitor GUI clients. Be careful in what you kill for it might bite back. 🙂

[UPDATE] A colleague,Ron Emil Castro, has provided this trick on combining both in a script that will load up with administrator privileges upon startup for Vista/Win7 machines.

  • Create a batch script with the following code

CHOICE /N /C YN /T 15 /D Y
taskkill /im wscript.exe /f

The first command waits for 15 seconds to give the script enough time to run and the second kills it as specified in the script above.

  • Open the startup folder by right-clicking on the Start->All Programs->Startup item then selecting the Open option.
  • Create a shortcut to the batch script. Right-click on the shortcut and open the properties window. Select the “Run as Administrator” option under the Advanced section.

[UPDATE] The processes are because of an errant firewall checker script loaded by the domain policies. The alternate solution provided by the support team is to execute the C:\Windows\system32\wscript.exe binary and set the timeout to a low number (5 or 10 seconds). Use the recommendation at your own risk as this basically handicaps the execution of other scripts that would require more time than the set timeout.

Chicken all you can

Jun 11

ErinTop of my head , No Comments

Max’s Restaurant, which uses the slogan “The house that fried chicken built”, has brought back the unlimited fried chicken promo for a month. The promo starts on June 10 and will end after a month. This round is a bit pricier than the previous one (from 165 to 199), and will no longer be an all-day event but would be restricted to the 6pm-10pm slot. The package comes with a regular drink that can be converted to bottomless for Php25 more. Rice or roll will cost extra.

Neth and I were in SM Taytay at around 3PM today to do some groceries and ended up waiting for the promot to kick in. The queue outside of the Max restaurant started to form at about 5:45PM so I decided to fall in line. We got seated at around 6:15PM and promptly ordered for to chicken-all-you-can with bottomless Mountain Dew (of course) and 2 rice servings. I ended up with 1.5 servings of rice as Neth graciously gave half of her rice to me. 🙂

The chicken was as good as we expected although the refilling slowed down after the third piece. I guess that was the time when all of the tables in the place were now availing of the promo. All-in-all the slowdown and the checking of the crew asking if we want other stuff made us break the 20-minute barrier[1].

Overall, I had 5 pieces of chicken (roughly 1 whole chicken), 4 glasses of Mountain Dew, and 1.5 servings of rice. Neth had 3 pieces of chicken, 2 glasses of the Dew, and half serving of rice. Our total bill ended up as Php518. Not bad. 🙂

And some optional snapshots:

BURP!

[1] For those who don’t know, scientific studies have shown that a person’s appetite lasts only 20 minutes after the first swallow. This is the reason why slowly chewing and eating your food can help in maintaining or reducing your weight as the food intake will be less.