Tag: command

Enhancing your Windows Vista User Experience

August 16, 2008 by Jason

I noticed that when you buy a new laptop, some of them, the desktop icons are too large and not proportional to its taskbar and startmenu. To change, press CTRL key and scroll your mouse down and up. Choose the size that is proportional and comfortable with you.

When I bought my laptop loaded with Windows Vista, the first thing that I have noticed is the RUN command in startmenu is missing. To put it back, Right-click in the taskbar -> Choose Properties -> Start menu tabs -> Customize -> scroll-down and check Run window.

Here’s a guide for changing the function of the Start menu power button. I always mistaken this one for shutdown, It goes to sleep rather than shutdown. If you enabled the Run command in start menu click it, if not just press WindowsKey+R. Type “cmd” and press enter. type “powercfg.cpl,1″ without spaces. Scroll-down and find these options ‘Startmenu power button’.

Turn-on Quick search, this is very useful when searching inside a folder. Read More»

Internet privacy cleaner

August 15, 2008 by Jason

Cleaning your internet browsing history becomes more important as it is a matter of personal privacy issue for most of us.

NVT Internet Privacy Cleaner is one of the freeware’s which lets you clean your internet browsing history.

This programs lets you clean your internet browsing history in a customised way as you can easily select what to erase and what not to erase.

It lets you erase the following things:

  • Downloaded Program Files
  • Internet Explorer Cookies
  • Internet Explorer Typed URLs
  • Internet Explorer Cache
  • Read More»

Top 10 Windows Built-In Command Line Tools

August 15, 2008 by Jason

For many Windows users, the thought of using the Command Prompt is either a scary experience or something that they will never need. But for some, the command prompt is a powerful tool that can be far more useful than many graphical tools available in Windows.

Being a System Administrator, I constantly use the command prompt, mostly because I access systems remotely and many tasks can be performed quickly with out the graphics over head (even though connecting via Terminal Server is very convenient).

So if you are an avid user of the command line, here are my top 10 built-in (non third party) command line tools for XP, Vista and WIndows server versions (remember these commands are not your typical tools, such as find, copy, move, dir, etc..).

1 – systeminfo – Have a need to display operating system configuration information for a local or remote machine, including service pack levels? Then systeminfo is the tool to use. When I need to connect to a system that I am not familiar with, this is the first tool I run. Read More»

Bypass the Windows Vista log-on screen on multiaccount PCs

August 13, 2008 by Jason

When you have more than one user account on a Windows Vista PC, every time you restart your PC you’ll see a welcome screen listing all the accounts on the machine. You’ll have to click one and then type in your log-on information in order to start using Windows Vista.

But what if, like many people, you use one primary account nearly all the time and use others only on occasion? You’d like to bypass the welcome screen listing all the user accounts and automatically log in whenever you start Windows Vista but Vista can’t seem to accomplish this simple task.

Actually, you can do it, as you’ll see in this hack. Follow it, and you’ll automatically log in on your primary account and then be able to switch to any other account when you wish:

1. At the Search box or a command prompt, type control userpasswords2 and press Enter. The User Accounts screen appears. Read More»

How To View The Contents In Firefox Cache Locations

August 12, 2008 by Jason

Do you know how many cache locations Firefox uses to store web pages and images?

It turns out there are three locations, known as device’s that makes up the cache used by Firefox. They are Memory cache device, Disk cache device and Offline cache device.

In case you are unfamiliar with the “cache”, it is a location that Firefox uses to store web pages, images, etc, that’s used to speed up loading and displaying web pages. So instead of downloading a page from a web site server, if the page has not changed, Firefox will check it’s cache and load the page if it exist.

Now, you may not care much about what’s in the cache, but if you are having problems and need to check the content of the cache, Firefox provides a command that will display all locations.

All you need to do is type the following command in the location bar (address bar) and press enter. Read More»

How to Install the Colorblind Applet on GNOME

August 06, 2008 by Jason

Color blindness, sometimes called daltonism, is mostly a color vision deficiency. Colorblind people can’t tell the difference between some chromatic colors and as far as I know there are no tools on Linux OSes that can help them distinguish the hues. I use Ubuntu, and the colorblind applet is part of the gnome-mag package, but for some reason (and I have no idea why) the developers didn’t include it in the distro. So, basically, we’re gonna recompile the gnome-mag package, with the colorblind panel applet.

The following tutorial was tested on Ubuntu 8.04.1 with GNOME 2.22.3. Anyway, we are interested in the gnome-mag package version, so you should check yours right now! How? Open Synaptic (System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager) and search for gnome-mag. You will see the version number on the ‘Installed Version’ column. Read More»

XP SP3 Can Kill All Update Installations

August 06, 2008 by Jason

Deploying Service Pack 3 directly on top of a fresh installation of Windows XP Service Pack 2 will kill all subsequent updates from Microsoft’s servers. The Redmond giant warned that integrating SP3 into the operating system straight after performing a new installation of XP SP2 via Windows Update will result in the failed implementation of any additional releases from Windows Update, Microsoft Update or through Automatic Updates. In this context, installing the third and last service pack for Windows XP onto a freshly-deployed copy of XP SP2 will virtually cut off the operating system from the life-line represented by the company’s updates, served either through WU, MU or AU.

“This problem occurs when the latest Windows Update client has been installed and then you install Windows XP SP3 before restarting the computer. This causes the new Wups2.dll file not to be enabled (registered). When Windows XP SP3 is installed, it does not detect the Wups2.dll file, and it sets the registry to point to the original Wups.dll file version that is included in Windows XP SP2 and Windows XP SP3. Because the registry files that correspond to the Wups2.dll file are missing, update installations are unsuccessful,” Microsoft indicated. Read More»

How to convert video to Apple’s iPhone

August 03, 2008 by Jason

Apple’s iPhone is likely to be one of the biggest gadget releases in 2007. It’s also unlikely to be sold with Apple’s iTunes Pro software so if you plan on converting your favourite movies or shows to your iPhone, you’re going to have to work it out yourself.

The reality is, however, you can start creating your iPhone video library right now because the tools already exist.

Although Apple has been reasonably scant on giving out the iPhone’s technical details, there’s enough information just from Apple’s iPhone website to help you create exactly what you need.

If you look at the technical specs of the iPhone, the Apple website says the screen is 480×320-pixels. Now if you read the fine print at the bottom of the screen it says “Up to 5 hours of battery life is based on H.264 1.5-Mbps video at 640-by-480 resolution combined with 128-Kbps audio”. Read More»

Tips for a well-behaved PC

July 25, 2008 by Jason

Save energy
Leaving your PC on wastes both energy and cash: running it overnight could cost you more than £100 a year. It’s time to stop sinning and make some savings.

Step 1: Click Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Power Options. If your system uses the High Performance power plan then you can save a little energy by selecting Balanced.

Step 2: Selecting Very low power delivers a real energy cut, but mainly by limiting the work your CPU can do, so it’s best used on laptops or PCs that aren’t running anything too intensive.

Step 3: Click Change plan settings for your plan. Windows Vista normally turns the display off after 20 minutes of inactivity; cut this to 10, perhaps set the PC to sleep after 20 minutes or so. Read More»

How to Create Symbolic Links

July 17, 2008 by Jason

What Is a Symbolic Link?

A Symbolic Link acts (and looks) like a shortcut but provides a transparent link to the target file at the file system level instead of within explorer.

Symbolic Links are used most for backward compatibility. It can be used to trick software into thinking its accessing files at a location where the files have been moved.

Create a Relative or Absolute Symbolic Link

Relative Symbolic Links: A relative symbolic link is a symbolic link that identifies the location of its target by its location. Read More»