Guides and articles

Practical guides for system administrators — Windows, PowerShell, Active Directory, networking, and infrastructure.

Guides, Batch scripting, Powershell, Windows command line

How to restore the old right-click context menu in Windows 11

Windows 11 introduced a redesigned right-click context menu with a simplified layout and hidden advanced options. While it looks cleaner, it often slows down administrative workflows because many common actions are now behind the Show more options layer.

For system administrators and power users, this adds unnecessary friction. This guide shows how to restore the classic Windows 10-style context menu, explains what changed, and provides safe ways to switch between modes.

Windows command line

How to customize colors in Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal lets you define color schemes once in settings.json and apply them to any profile. For administrators who spend hours reading PowerShell output, event logs, and SSH sessions, a well-configured scheme is not cosmetic — it directly affects how…

Guides

How to sync game saves to the cloud on Windows using mklink

Many games store save files in a fixed local path with no built-in cloud sync option. If you reinstall Windows, switch machines, or simply want an automatic backup of your progress, the standard workaround is to move the save folder…

Guides

How to move AppData folder to another drive on Windows

Some applications write gigabytes of cache, logs, and profile data to C:\Users\John\AppData — with no built-in option to change that location. On systems with a small SSD boot drive, this fills up quickly. The standard solution is to move the…

Guides

How to list all symbolic links on Windows

Symbolic links and junctions are invisible in normal directory listings — they appear as regular folders or files in File Explorer and most tools. When auditing a system, troubleshooting a broken path, or reviewing a server you inherited, knowing where…

Guides

NTFS links on Windows: symbolic links, junctions, and hard links compared

Windows supports three distinct types of filesystem links: symbolic links, directory junctions, and hard links. They look similar from the outside but behave differently in ways that matter — across drives, across reboots, under backup software, and under deletion. This…

Reference

How to delete a symbolic link on Windows without deleting the target

Deleting a symbolic link or junction on Windows is not the same as deleting a regular folder — and using the wrong command will remove the target data, not just the link. This is one of the most common and…

Powershell

Base64 encoding in PowerShell: encode and decode files and strings

PowerShell can encode and decode Base64 natively using the [Convert] .NET class — no external utilities, no temporary files with PEM headers. Unlike certutil, PowerShell produces clean RFC 4648 Base64 that is directly compatible with web APIs, Linux systems, and…

Troubleshooting

“Deleting a user account deletes this identifier” — what this warning means and what to do

When you try to delete a local user account on a Windows computer joined to a domain, you may see a warning that stops many administrators in their tracks. The message warns that deleting the account will permanently remove a…

Guides

How to rescan storage on an ESXi host

After making changes to your storage infrastructure — adding a new LUN, modifying iSCSI or Fibre Channel zoning, connecting a new NAS share, or removing a stale datastore — ESXi hosts do not automatically detect the updated storage state. A…