finding the last time a PC was started

If you want to find out the last time a Windows 11 PC was powered on, or shut down you can use the Event Viewer application.

Bring up Event Viewer by searching for it Windows. It will be preinstalled.

In Event Viewer, open the Windows Log menu and click on 'System'

Bring up 'Filter Current Log' from the Actions pane on the right. Enter '6005' in the Event ID field.

You can sort in the results by the date and time to find the latest time the PC was started.

Use 6006 as the Event ID to find when the PC was shut down.

Getting rid of those pesky .db files

The Litigation Support Tip of the Night for February 7, 2017 described how to remove thumbnail image files which could not be deleted through the normal right click process. Lately I have found when working in Windows 11 that the technique of deleting the files in the 'Content' view no longer works. I get an error message like this:

This week I was able to successfully implement the solution posted here by Anand Khanse which recommends a change in the Registry Editor. Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows and right click and select New . . . Key

Create a new folder named, 'Explorer' and then right click on it and again select New

. . . select the option for 'DWORD (32-bit) Value', and name the DWORD as DisableThumbsDBOnNetworkFolders

If you double-click on this file a dialog box will open which allow you to set the value data to 1

When I made this change in RegEdit I was able to successfully delete thumbnail .db file after I rebooted Windows.

As always exercise great caution when making changes in Registry Editor.

searching in Windows Explorer for file names beginning with a string

Don't miss that in Windows Explorer you can find any file names which beginning with a string by preceding the search with ~<.

So for example a search for: ~<fire

. . . will find any files which begin with the word, 'fire'.