tasklist and taskkill in Windows: Find and End Processes from CMD
Resolve a PID to a real process with tasklist, filter by service, session or memory, and end it cleanly with taskkill - including process trees and remote hosts.
Tag sysadmin
How to find and log off RDP sessions in Windows with quser and qwinsta
Use quser, qwinsta and rwinsta to list RDP sessions on a Windows server, spot disconnected ones blocking new logons, and log them off from the command line.
setspn in Windows: manage Service Principal Names and fix Kerberos SPN conflicts
setspn reads, adds, and deletes Service Principal Names (SPNs) on Active Directory accounts. An SPN is the identifier Kerberos uses to match a service — a SQL instance, an IIS app pool, a file share — to the account that…
dsquery and dsget in Windows: command-line Active Directory queries
You need to find every disabled user account in the Sales OU, and you are logged on to a Server Core box where the ActiveDirectory PowerShell module is not installed. You could install RSAT, or RDP somewhere else, or run…
Windows Command Aliases: DOSKEY Macros in CMD and Aliases in PowerShell
If you come from Linux, you expect aliases to just work — type alias ll=’ls -la’, press Enter, done. Windows has the same concept, but it lives in two separate places depending on which shell you are in: CMD has…
netsh command in Windows
netsh (Network Shell) is a command-line scripting utility built into Windows that lets you configure and inspect virtually every aspect of networking from a terminal — no GUI required. It operates through a context hierarchy: you enter a context like…
How to find what is causing high CPU usage on a Windows server using Performance Monitor
The server is slow. Users are complaining. You open Task Manager and see CPU sitting at 90% — but Task Manager only shows a 60-second window and disappears the moment you close the RDP session. To find what is actually…
How to read CBS.log in Windows: what SFC and DISM actually tell you
Every time you run sfc /scannow or DISM /RestoreHealth, Windows writes a detailed record of what it found and what it did to C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. The terminal output gives you a one-line summary. The log gives you the full picture: every…
DISM in Windows: repair the Windows image when SFC can’t
DISM — Deployment Image Servicing and Management — is the tool you reach for when sfc /scannow reports corrupted files it cannot fix. Where SFC checks and repairs individual system files, DISM works at a lower level: it validates and…
sfc /scannow in Windows: what it does, when it works, and when it doesn’t
System File Checker — sfc — scans Windows protected system files and replaces damaged or missing ones from a cached copy. It is usually the first repair tool you reach for when Windows starts behaving unexpectedly: random crashes, applications that…