Disable F1 Windows Help and Support on Windows 8.1

One of the most useless things built into windows is the F1 help, unfortunately Microsoft doesn't make it easy to disable. I think I can say that I may have found the F1 help useful once, and that is probably pretty generous.

Below is a Powershell script which will disable the F1 help in windows. Basically, it takes control over helppane.exe and then renames it. Thankfully, if windows can't find the file, it will not through an error. If you want to restore the F1 help, just rename the executable back.

takeown /f c:\windows\helppane.exe
$acl = Get-Acl "C:\Windows\HelpPane.exe"
$rule = New-Object  System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule("$([Environment]::UserDomainName)\$([Environment]::UserName)","FullControl","Allow")
$acl.SetAccessRule($rule)
Set-Acl "C:\Windows\HelpPane.exe" $acl
Rename-Item "C:\Windows\HelpPane.exe" "C:\Windows\HelpPane1.exe"

This may work on other versions of windows, but I have only tested this on Windows 8.1.

Powershell Open A Windows Explorer Window And Select A File

Just a quick useful function that I have used a couple times and always forget about. If you have a script that persists a file to disk, you can open a Windows Explorer window and select the file with this function. This can be useful in desktop applications as well. I'll leave it to the reader to translate it to C# (it leverages straight-up .Net functions already).

function Show-InExplorer($file) {
 $explorerArgs = "/select, $file";
 [System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start("explorer.exe", $explorerArgs) | Out-Null;
}

NOTE: Dispite what people have said on several StackOverflow posts, I found that I had to have the comma after the /select.

A Couple AutoHotKey Windows 10 Helpers

With Windows 10 comes a bunch of new features and shortcuts. I have long been a fan of VirtuaWin, it's context menu driven virtual desktop paradigm is a bit of a hurdle, but it is easy to get used to. Windows 10 brings the concept of virtual desktops to the masses. It is pretty simplistic and has much room for improvement, but probably a good starting point.

Here are a couple tweaks that make navigating multiple desktop with your mouse.

; Show Task View, Wheel/Middle click on desktop
#IfWinActive ahk_class Progman
MButton::sendevent {LWin down}{Tab down}{Tab up}{Lwin up}
Return
#IfWinActive

; Move to the desktop left of the current desktop
$WheelLeft::send ^#{Left}

; Move to the desktop right of the current desktop
$WheelRight::send ^#{Right}

Windows 7 IKEv2 VPN "Verifying User and Password..."

I VPN quite often and recently something changed on my old laptop running Windows 7 which prevented me from connecting. I was able to connect using my laptop running Windows 8. After some hunting I came across this TechNet thread.

The fix ended up being very simple, but not intuitive.

1. View your network adaptors by going to Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network Connection
2. Right-click on the offending VPN adapter and click Properties
3. Click on the Security tab
4. Change the "Type of VPN" value from IKEv2 to Point to Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP)
5. Click OK

From the thread:

It seems that when this property is set to Automatic the WAN Miniport defaults to IKEv2 (and gets stuck if this is not the VPN type used).

Translated: it is a feature not a bug.

Now attempt to connect again. Short of other issues, it will connect successfully.

Synergy Desktop Path Error

I recently started working on a mobile project which afforded me the opportunity to flex my iOS development skills again. I installed the latest version of Synergy on my MacBook and my main laptop. I used the setup I had before which loaded correctly, but I started receiving this error which prevented me from connecting my Mac to my PC host.

ERROR: failed to get desktop path, no drop target available, error=2

Googling wasn't fruitful so I looked at the settings which looked as I expected. I finally tried unchecking the "Elevate" checkbox and clicked "Apply". The error went away and I was able to connect. "Elevate" should mean that the service will run in elevated/administrator mode. I found no events being raised in the event log and I believe I had the Synergy application successfully using the Elevate option in the past. Whatever the root cause was, not using the "Elevate" option fixed the issue.

For those that do not know about Synergy, it is an
application which allows you to share your keyboard and mouse with other computers over a network. I have been using Synergy for years and find is especially useful when I need to switch between multiple computers frequently.