Scott Elkin

This problem has nagged at me for years.  Here is a batch command to delete files on a Windows 2003 machine.

Forfiles -pC:\backup -s -m*.* -d-5 -c "cmd /c del /q @path"

This will delete all files in my backup directory older than 5 days. To test it first, use this:

Forfiles -pC:\backup -s -m*.* -d-5 -c "cmd /C Echo 0x22@Path\@File0x22"

This will print out each file that you will be deleting.

Now playing: Lamb Of God – Terror And Hubris In The House Of Frank Pollard

I added this to my Reinstall Windows Todo List, but felt I should devote one blog on it because of its importance.

To put it simply, iTunes allows you to play or “authorize” your music on up to 5 computers. If you reformat your machine before “deauthorizing” it, you waste one of those licenses.

As a developer that wipes his two machines every 6 – 15 months, you can eat up licenses quick. On this last install, I happened to stumble on this while looking at my account in iTunes and seeing that I had 5 computers authorized. Being as I should only have two I knew something was up. I sent apple a support request at 11 AM on a Saturday stating:

Something great happens when you finally succumb to the inevitable fact that
you need to wipe your machine. That happened for me at 4 PM yesterday. Over the
last few weeks, I tried everything to speed it up, but no amount of defrag’ing,
deleting, uninstalling was doing it. But when you finally relent to what you
know has to be done, there is certain amount of calmness because you know your
frustrations will dissipate 24 hours from then. So I started my “Reinstall
Windows TODO List”:

1. List all programs installed by looking in All Programs menu and in
   C:\Program Files.

Since I installed SP1 here are the problems I am having:

1. MSN Messenger gives me 4 script errors each time I sign in: Line 373, Char
   2, Unspecified error, URL:

   http://t.msn.com/en-us/default.aspx?ver=7.0.0777&did=1

2. MSN Messenger will prevent me from using the ENTER key when sending a
   message. Once I restart it, it will work for awhile before it does it again.
3. When creating a new IIS website, it will set Scripts to “None” preventing
   Visual Studio to inter-operate with it. This is easy enough to fix in the home
   directory, once you know about it.