PathPing > Traceroute

Thanks Chris, for telling me about PathPing!

PathPing is a network utility supplied in Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows XP and Windows Vista. It combines the functionality of Ping with that of Traceroute (in Windows: tracert), by providing details of the path between two hosts and Ping-like statistics for each node in the path based on samples taken over a time period, depending on how many nodes are between the start and end host. The advantages of PathPing over ping and traceroute are that each node is pinged as the result of a single command, and that the behavior of nodes is studied over an extended time period, rather than the Ping's default sample of four messages or Traceroute's default single route trace. The disadvantage is that, using the default settings, it often takes more than five minutes to produce a result.

PathPing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Use the -q number option to reduce the number of queries per hop if you're in a hurry, as the default is 100.

PowerShell: Get Information About Installed Applications Without Using WMI

From: How to Get Information About Installed Applications Without Using WMI by Alex K. Angelopoulos

In PowerShell, the simplest way to display the [Installed Applications] is to use the Get-ChildItem cmdlet (which has the alias of gci), then pipe its results to the Get-Item- Property cmdlet. (Get-ChildItem doesn’t retrieve information about the registry values contained within subkeys; it only lists the subkeys’ names.) So, the command that you’d enter in the PowerShell window would be

gci “HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall” |ForEach-Object{Get-ItemProperty $_.PSPath}

I changed the syntax a bit, and here’s what I prefer:

dir HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall | ForEach { Get-ItemProperty $_.PSPath} | Select DisplayName,InstallDate, DisplayVersion | Sort DisplayVersion, Installdate | Format-Table * -auto  

The ability to change the sort order is handy for software inventory(When was that app installed?) and version troubleshooting, and

| Format-Table * –auto

”AutoFits” column widths.