PCTips Box

One thing you got to hate with how Microsoft marketed Vista is that most of them came in bundled with new PCs that they didn’t even come with an installation disc. Since this is Vista (a Microsoft product), it goes without telling when the damn system would decided to f*ck you up big time. And since the only recovery option you have is with that installation disc, you know you’re in for something really messed up.

I have had such an incident when Windows was just messed up (desktop not showing up). Fortunately for me, my lappie came with Windows Vista Basic installation discs (a set of six CDs which I later then merged to one DVD) that contained the recovery center. It’s quite useful, I just wonder why them damned manufacturers wouldn’t spare a DVD for a lot of folks. (more…)

If you forgot your Windows password you will not be able to login to windows.

So what to do in this case ? Is there a way to reset the Windows password ? Answer is yes, there is a way to reset or change the password.

Let’s see how we reset windows password.

There is a convenient way to do it with a Windows NT password recovery CD which can used to reset the password for any account in Windows NT ,Windows 2000 ,Windows XP , Windows Vista.

Follow the below steps to rest your windows password: (more…)

Windows needs a pagefile on its boot partition that’s large enough for a debugging file called a memory dump. A dump file, however, contains highly technical information that’s useful only to system administrators and very advanced users.

A 2MB pagefile is enough for Windows to write out the minimum amount of information necessary to help an expert identify the problem. You can create a pagefile this small on your boot partition, and then add a larger pagefile on a different drive for code swapping to improve performance.

If you decide to make your boot-disk pagefile this small, you’ll need to follow these steps: (more…)

My tips explained how to set up a Vista machine to dual-boot between that OS and Windows XP.

But booting to XP on a dual-boot system has the negative side-effect of deleting any Vista restore points, in addition to all but its latest backup file, and a Registry workaround is required to prevent this.

XP dual-boot is not system-restore friendly

Ian Brown was the first to describe an unfortunate fact of dual-booting XP and Vista: (more…)

The Automated System Recovery (ASR) is one of the aspects in Windows Vista that has been evolved with the introduction of Vista Service Pack 1. A Windows application programming interface, ASR is designed to keep track of and record the configuration of disks and volumes on a system. In the end, ASR comes into play in cases of bare metal recovery scenarios. Ahead of restoring the operating system as well as the associated content including programs and data, ASR will take the disks and volumes to their original state. The Automated System Recovery will manage disks in accordance with Critical and non-Critical labels, depending on whether they do or do not contain system state or operating system components.

“ASR in Vista and Server 2008 is tightly integrated with the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and presents a writer interface, which is a significant change from Server 2003 and XP. During a backup the ASR writer reports metadata describing all the disks and volumes on the system. (more…)