Install Android on VMware

If you are into the adventure of running Android on VMware, following the tips from this article may help especially for Android 8 and later. An additional note that I would add is about connecting to Internet after installation. The initial configuration of Android will ask for WiFi setup, just select Virtual WiFi as the network to connect (which is the Ethernet network on the host computer) and it would work.

How to Clean Install Windows 11

Many people are moving their PCs to Windows 11 by upgrading an existing install of Windows 10. However, in order to do that, you must have an activated copy of Windows 10 with its own product key on the computer in the first place. But what if you just want to throw Windows 11 onto an old or experimental PC, without having to install an activated copy of the prior operating system first? ….. (Read the whole story)

Windows Autologon

Autologon enables you to easily configure Windows’ built-in autologon mechanism. Instead of waiting for a user to enter their name and password, Windows uses the credentials you enter with Autologon, which are encrypted in the Registry, to log on the specified user automatically.

Autologon is easy enough to use. Just run autologon.exe, fill in the dialog, and hit Enable. To turn off auto-logon, hit Disable. Also, if the shift key is held down before the system performs an autologon, the autologon will be disabled for that logon. You can also pass the username, domain and password as command-line arguments:

autologon user domain password

Adding a User in Windows 10

In some situations, you may want to add a user (or an administrator) to Windows when all other accounts are having problems logging in to the system.

You may want to try Method 2 in this article. To add a user, use the ‘Net’ command followed by another command to add the user to the user group of your choice. When the system is restarted, the newly added user will be available on the log-in screen.

VMware Slow Network Performance

If you experience much slower network performance in VMware guests than that in the host, try the following tweaks which may help improve the throughput.

  • Edit the VMX file to use: ethernet0.virtualDev = “vmxnet3”
  • Edit the VM Settings for “Network Adapter” to use “Bridged” Network connection AND also checked the box to “Replicate physical network connection state”
  • On the guest, go into Device Manager > Network Adapter and changed the following “Advanced” settings for the vmxnet3 Ethernet Adapter:
    • Property Value
      • Jumbo Packet Jumbo 9000
      • Large Send Offload V2 (IPV4) Disabled
      • Large Send Offload V2 (IPV6) Disabled
      • Speed & Duplex 10Gbps Full Duplex

Blurry Text in TeamViewer

TeamViewer

If you are using TeamViewer to remotely control other computers, a recent software change (not sure if it’s TeamViewer, display driver or Windows 10 itself) caused the text to be blurry because of scaling. There is no parameter in TeamViewer that can control the window size, it is set by TeamViewer depending on the display resolution on the guest system.

A work around is manually extending the size of the window; the text will be crisp again once the height is dragged to increase by just a few pixels. A better temporary solution is making use of a small utility program called AutoSizer since it can set an active window to any size and/or position on the screen. One click to scan all the active programs will automatically change TeamViewer to a preset window size that won’t cause the display to be scaled.

Mini USB Wireless Adapter

If you encountered a problem of unstable connections with a generic mini USB wireless adapter, the following tweaking in its properties may resolve the issue.

Many of these adapters claim they will connect at Wireless-N standard. In many cases, the adapter will disconnect and connect randomly. The solution is to change its properties under device manager and limit it to connect at Wireless-B and Wireless-G. The speed is slower but the connection is much more stable.

Cannot Map Network Drive

If you encountered a problem accessing a network drive (through mapping in Windows) after an upgrade of firmware is performed on the router, the following could be one of the reasons that may have caused the headache.

In this case, the router is ASUS RT-AC68U. The network drive is a USB disk attached to the router. The drive is shared using Network Place (Samba) Share. After an upgrade of firmware, the “Device Name” was reset to a default value causing the accessing/mapping problem. Just update it to the custom name that was set before and the problem should be resolved.

VMware Workstation Graphic Settings

If you experience a video problem, e.g. intense flickering, after some system updates to a guest OS in VMware Workstation, try disabling the “Accelerate 3D graphics” option under Virtual Machine Settings –> Hardware –> Display –> 3D graphics. This may resolve the problem. If you use Media Player Classic (Home-Cinema) in VMware and cannot play videos, disabling this setting may also help too.

Fade-in / Fade-out using FFMPEG

The following examples show how you can use FFMPEG to do fade-in fade-out for audio and/or video.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf “fade=t=in:st=0:d=10,fade=t=out:st=10:d=5” -c:a copy output.mp4

The example above applies both fade-in and fade-out effects for video, but not for audio.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -af “afade=t=in:st=0:d=5” -c:v copy output.mp4

The example above applies fade-in effect for audio, but not for video. The parameters are pretty much self explanatory. A combination of different parameters can be used to meet your editing requirements.