Windows 10 Disabled services

Hello everyone!

My sister in law brought me her computer to be fixed last night as her WiFi was not working. Upon inspection I quickly noticed that her audio was also not working. I started the built in troubleshooter in hopes that Windows might be able to quickly fix it, but it returned an error stating that the Troubleshooting service was disabled ( I can't remember the exact name ) I moved to check out the EventLog to see if any error logs had been raised and I was greeted with a nice little error stating that the EventLog service was disabled. At this time I decided it was time to look at the services and find out what was going on. 

I opened the service manager and to my surprise everything, with just a very few exceptions, was disabled, not stopped or paused, but disabled. Well no wonder nothing was working right? So I asked her what changes had been made to her computer, and she told me that one of her neighbors had used it to install AVG because she told him she didn't have an Antivirus. 

I've never seen AVG, as crappy as it might have become now, do that. I went ahead and uninstalled it in hopes that this might resolve the issue. Unfortunately it did not. I looked around and I wasn't able to find a solution on this from Google, and wasn't able to find a one click solution either. 

I was able to find a list of all of the main Windows 10 services but nothing that I could use to quickly export and import, so I exported all of the services from my Windows 10 computer by using the following PowerShell command:  

   Get-Service | select Name, StartType | Export-Csv C:\temp\services.csv -nottypeinformation

Then moved the file to her computer using a thumb drive and "imported" it using:

   Import-CSV C:\users\UserProfile\Desktop\services.csv | %{Set-Service -Name $_.Name -StartupType $_.StartType } 

I rebooted her computer and now most of the services were then back working as they should have. I did have to turn on a few more manually but over all it was functional again. The only thing not working still was her WiFi, but I reinstalled her driver and that fixed that issue.

Well I hope that this might help someone having this issue out there. Also if someone has a fresh Windows 10 install and would like to provide a CSV file with their services ( My import returned quite a few errors because I had services that her computer did not have ) then I can upload it here. 

Kind regards,
Me.

Windows 10 Preview

Hello everyone, 

For the first time in my life I have a spare computer that I can use to test things on. So I signed up for Windows Insider and installed Windows 10 on my laptop which I have been using on the regular bases. I'm not much of a writer so I won't even attempt to do a full review on my experience, but I did want to comment on the quality of people that I have found on the Microsoft reviewing forums. 

The truth is that people are nasty. I went through quite a few posts and most of the posts was of people complaining and calling that Windows will be a failure. All because of the way that the UI looks. Instead of providing constructive criticism to help develop a better operating system we have people crying about the way that the task bar is, or the way the start menu looks, or the how the icons are flat! I mean come on people! We are all tech savvy here what does it matter what the system looks like as long as it works? 

Windows is quite frankly implementing some really good features not only on their desktop environment but on the server environment, and so what if it looks different? We shouldn't be using the system for how it looks but for what we can do with it. After all we can always hack our way to change the way things look. 

I do hope that people can change their outlook on how things are going with Windows 10. It will either be a success or a failure, and if its a failure its not like it was a few years back and we actually have options.

Kind regards, 
Me.

Regarding the Long Path

I shared my post regarding the Windows long path dilema on the /r/sysadmin subreddit and on G and quite honestly there was quite a reaction. Thank you everyone who took the time to read my article, and I wanted to share something that /u/elkBBQ shared

Source: http://www.xkcd.com/1459/

I had a good chuckle, but on a more serious note. I learned quite a few things from the /r/sysadmin community but I did want to clarify for those who still believe that this is a limitation in the file system (NTFS), but let me tell you it is not. NTFS actually handles up to 32k characters on paths; however, Windows is not able to use it because of a limitation in its API, and while there is some ways to force it like using Unicode and other ways to get around the issue (see link below) there is no office or really a 'good' solution.

I wanted to share the following Article that explains a lot on this issue. The article is written by Kim Hamilton of the BCL Team and as (s)he explains in an answer to a comment:

Diego,

We do need a solution in the underlying windows API, but this would most likely emerge as new APIs rather than changing the existing ones. We've discussed this at length on the longpath alias at Microsoft (yes, we have a whole alias devoted to the issue!) and there are no plans to change the existing ones, since it would break third party code that depend on MAX_PATH buffers on the stack.

We've discussed migration plans to enable those existing Win32 APIs not to enforce MAX_PATH but there are no clear solutions; this would need to be done very carefully to avoid breaking existing Windows-based apps.

The main reason I think we need new Win32 APIs is that \\?\ lumps together long paths and non-canonical paths, so you have to do tricks to get canonicalization on \\?\ paths. That sort of work shouldn't be pushed onto the callers just to achieve long paths.

Thanks,

Kim

Date: 13 Feb 2007 7:08 PM

Sadly in 2007 Microsoft believed this was an issue, and their team were working on a solution. It has been 7 years  and the issue still persists, and from what we know off there is no soon to come fix.

Kind regards to everyone,
Me.

PS. Below I'll post some of the most common work arounds for this issue:

Force Unicode: \\?\PATHHERE (please see the link above for details on how to use this method)
Con: Not widely supported

Map a drive or use subst to map a drive.
Con: Unfortunately the only way to get this to work would be to know the exact path. You'll have to map the drive to a subfolder that is close to the one that breaks the limit. Also doesn't play very well with scripting.

Someone (and I apologize I cannot find the user who posted this on the reddit post)  recommended to use VBScript; however, I do not posses this skill, so if someone could show us a way for this that'd be awesome!

Peter Kriegel pointed me to a PowerShell Module called  File System Security PowerShell Module 3.2.2 but I'm not familiar with it and haven't had a chance to look deep into it as to try to find out who they manage to make it work. Again if someone has some information that they can provide regarding the inner workings, or if indeed truly works I'd appreciate the information. 

Path is too long

I believe that I should let everyone know that once again Microsoft has not fixed the path is too long issue in his newest release Windows X.

I been deal with this atrocious issue every now and then when writing scripts that run against our file servers, and I must say its a real pain in the rear. I pray one day this will be fixed.

Good day to all.

Edit 9/16/2015: I'm not sure why the pictures are gone. I'll try to replicate the issue once again and repost them soon.

Edit 1/16/2016: I finally took the time to recreate the error and re-upload the picture.