{"id":947,"date":"2012-05-21T18:28:17","date_gmt":"2012-05-21T18:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/?p=947"},"modified":"2012-05-21T18:30:48","modified_gmt":"2012-05-21T18:30:48","slug":"speeding-up-case-processing-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/21\/speeding-up-case-processing-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Speeding up case processing, part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In my <a title=\"Speeding up case processing\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/2012\/04\/20\/speeding-up-case-processing\/\">older post <\/a>I talked about various things one can do to speed up case processing &#8211; this post is a quick follow up with some more hints; again, it is very Windows-centric.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s start with simple things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Use multiple computers with one keyboard and mouse &#8211; use <a href=\"http:\/\/synergy-foss.org\/\">Synergy<\/a> to control them<\/li>\n<li>Use multiple monitors<\/li>\n<li>Use VNC to peep at the guest system if you use VMware &#8211; it&#8217;s often faster<\/li>\n<li>Use <a href=\"http:\/\/virtualkd.sysprogs.org\/\">VirtualKD<\/a> to work faster with windbg\/vmware<\/li>\n<li>Rename tools &#8211; change long names to shorter e.g.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<ul>\n<li>grep -&gt; g<\/li>\n<li>strings -&gt; s<\/li>\n<li>hexview -&gt;h<\/li>\n<li>and so on and so forth<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<li>If you do the same task more than once, write quick and dirty batch files, scripts (bat, cmd, vbs, vba, powershell, autoit, etc.) and keep them all in a repository so you can always leverage the snippets; you don&#8217;t need to build libraries, simple copy&amp;paste is often good enough<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>example: if you often unpack SQLITE databases, avoid dumping the databases manually; write a batch file e.g. u_sql.bat and put there sth along the lines<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<pre style=\"padding-left: 90px;\">md unpacked\r\nfor %%k in (*.*) do echo .dump|sqlite3 \"%%k\" &gt; \"unpacked\\%%k.txt\"\r\n\r\nwhen ran, it will dump the databases into text files that can be easily grepped<\/pre>\n<ul>\n<li>another example: if you often unpack archives, avoid clicking the GUI; write a batch file e.g. u_arc.bat and put there sth along the lines<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<pre style=\"padding-left: 90px;\">md unpacked\r\nfor %%k in (*.*) do \"c:\\program files\\winrar\\winrar.exe\" -IBCK x -r -y \"%%k\" \"unpacked\\%%k\\\"\r\n\r\nwhen ran, it will unpack all archives into unpacked\\archive_name<\/pre>\n<ul>\n<li>Record macros and replay them (for mundane tasks &#8211; eg. if you need to fill in some stupid forms multiple times)<\/li>\n<li>Learn to efficiently use Excel, in particular:<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>keyboard shortcuts (go ahead, and try: CTRL+`, CTRL+1, CTRL+;, CTRL+SHIFT+8, CTRL+PAGE DOWN, CTRL+PAGEUP, and then go to Excel help and read about all shortcuts)<\/li>\n<li>Pivot tables (great for histograms and quick statistics)<\/li>\n<li>Excel formulas e.g. VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, CHAR, LEFT, FIND, etc.<\/li>\n<li>Useful functions like Copy Formulas, Copy with Transposition, Copy Values only<\/li>\n<li>Sorting and Advanced filtering<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<li>The same applies to Word<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>Learn about styles and stylesheets<\/li>\n<li>Avoid changing default settings<\/li>\n<li>Disable irritating functions<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<li>Avoid lower-quality software<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>You will lose time fighting with random crashes, badly designed UI, and lots of imperfections that steal your time; good (bad) example is OpenOffice &#8211; it is good for simple editing tasks, but it does not solve problems that MS Office solved many years ago and productivity-wise is way behind<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<li>Avoid tools that are NOT ready to be used immediately after downloading<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>The rule of a thumb is that you want to use the tool, not waste your time compiling\/fixing bugs, etc.<\/li>\n<li>If you are into research it&#8217;s of course fine, but if you want to do your work faster &#8211; AVOID wasting time on it; if it doesn&#8217;t compile, don&#8217;t try to build it and fix bugs<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<li>Set up environment to include paths to all your tools; if you run a tool and Windows Explorer pops up instead, you are doing it wrong \ud83d\ude42 and your PATH should be fixed<\/li>\n<li>Use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.voidspace.org.uk\/python\/articles\/command_line.shtml#pathext\">PATHEXT<\/a> to run scripts directly from command line w\/o specifying the interpreter<\/li>\n<li>Use Registry tweaks to disable animations, and other fancy stuff<\/li>\n<li>Autostart all the tools\/services you frequently use and kill all the tools you don&#8217;t use (be brutal with services.msc or autoruns)<\/li>\n<li>Use Registry tweaks to have a decent context menu that you use to quickly run some tool over the analyzed file e.g.:<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\\*<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 90px;\">as seen in the Regedit:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/contextmenu2.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-951\" title=\"contextmenu2\" src=\"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/contextmenu2.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"207\" height=\"147\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<ul>\n<li>HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\\exefile<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 90px;\">as seen in the context menu<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/contextmenu.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-950\" title=\"contextmenu\" src=\"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/contextmenu.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"263\" height=\"285\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s all for today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my older post I talked about various things one can do to speed up case processing &#8211; this post is a quick follow up with some more hints; again, it is very Windows-centric. Let&#8217;s start with simple things: Use &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/21\/speeding-up-case-processing-part-2\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[19,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=947"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":959,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947\/revisions\/959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hexacorn.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}