Cleanup Windows Live Contacts

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Some of my friends now get Windows Phones and I think it is important to start right and get the best possible user experience.

Cleanup your Windows Live Account. All your Contacts are saved in the Cloud, using Windows Live, Google or Exchange. You can not save contacts on your phone or sync contacts between your Windows Phone and your PC without the “Cloud” as your middle man. I think the most people will not have Exchange Online account so I would recommend using a Windows Live account.

Now when you start your Windows Phone for the first time you login with your Windows Live account and this will sync all your Windows Live contacts to your phone. So you can make your life much easier if you have a clean contacts list.

Log-in to live.com and go to contacts.
Rename your contacts with their real names, this is important that Windows Live and the Windows Phone can merge accounts with other services like Facebook or Linkedin.
Add other services in your live.com account (Facebook and Linkedin for example)
Cleanup your Contact list. You can use a cleanup function:
This will merge Accounts and cleanup duplicates.
If you still have duplicate contacts you can combine them.

Powershell: How to export Windows Eventlogs with Powershell

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Powershell Header

This is a little dirty Windows Powershell script which exports or backups Windows Eventlogs. The script creates a .evt file which can be used with the Windows Eventlog Viewer.

# Config
$logFileName = "Application" # Add Name of the Logfile (System, Application, etc)
$path = "C:\temp\" # Add Path, needs to end with a backsplash

# do not edit
$exportFileName = $logFileName + (get-date -f yyyyMMdd) + ".evt"
$logFile = Get-WmiObject Win32_NTEventlogFile | Where-Object {$_.logfilename -eq $logFileName}
$logFile.backupeventlog($path + $exportFileName)

And with the next code it cleans up older exported Eventlogs.

# Deletes all .evt logfiles in $path
# Be careful, this script removes all files with the extension .evt not just the selfcreated logfiles
$Daysback = "-7"

$CurrentDate = Get-Date
$DatetoDelete = $CurrentDate.AddDays($Daysback)
Get-ChildItem $Path | Where-Object { ($_.LastWriteTime -lt $DatetoDelete) -and ($_.Extension -eq ".evt") } | Remove-Item

UPDATE: If you wanna clean the Eventlog after the export you can do that by using the Clear-Eventlog cmdlet. (Thanks to Michel from server-talk.eu)

Clear-Eventlog -LogName $logFileName

And here the whole “script”

# Config
$logFileName = "Application" # Add Name of the Logfile (System, Application, etc)
$path = "C:\temp\" # Add Path, needs to end with a backsplash

# do not edit
$exportFileName = $logFileName + (get-date -f yyyyMMdd) + ".evt"
$logFile = Get-WmiObject Win32_NTEventlogFile | Where-Object {$_.logfilename -eq $logFileName}
$logFile.backupeventlog($path + $exportFileName)


# Deletes all .evt logfiles in $path
# Be careful, this script removes all files with the extension .evt not just the selfcreated logfiles
$Daysback = "-7"

$CurrentDate = Get-Date
$DatetoDelete = $CurrentDate.AddDays($Daysback)
Get-ChildItem $Path | Where-Object { ($_.LastWriteTime -lt $DatetoDelete) -and ($_.Extension -eq ".evt") } | Remove-Item
Clear-Eventlog -LogName $logFileName

Powershell: Delete Files older than

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Thomas Maurer

This is a simple Powershell script which deletes Files older than some days. You can use it to cleanup old logfiles or other things. If you run the script the first time you can add the “-WhatIf” parameter after Remove-Item command.

# Delete all Files in C:\temp older than 30 day(s)
$Path = "C:\temp"
$Daysback = "-30"

$CurrentDate = Get-Date
$DatetoDelete = $CurrentDate.AddDays($Daysback)
Get-ChildItem $Path | Where-Object { $_.LastWriteTime -lt $DatetoDelete } | Remove-Item

If you need to delete files in subfolders too, you can use this script. This is the same script with the Get-Childitem parameter “-Recurse”.

# Delete all Files in C:\temp older than 30 day(s)
$Path = "C:\temp"
$Daysback = "-30"

$CurrentDate = Get-Date
$DatetoDelete = $CurrentDate.AddDays($Daysback)
Get-ChildItem $Path -Recurse ( | Where-Object { $_.LastWriteTime -lt $DatetoDelete } | Remove-Item