When you make changes in the Windows Registry you normally can only make them for all users or the user account that is currently logged in. But what if you want to make them in another user account ? There is an easy way to do that by loading the Registry hive of the user into the Registry.

I read today that Windows Update would not work with the beta version of Internet Explorer 8. I did want to check it out for myself before writing about it and went to the Windows Update website which greeted me with the error message “The site cannot continue because one or more of these Windows services is not running”. The services mentioned were Automatic Updates, Event Log and Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS).

This article is going to list some of the best Usenet search engines that are freely available. The Usenet is considered by many a dark side of the Internet, something that those who know do not talk about and those who do not know don’t want to know about because it seems utterly complicated to begin with.

The terminology used by the Mozilla team is sometimes a little bit confusing. Could you for instance define the differences between add-ons, extensions and plugins ? The first two and the latter are different which is easy to explain. Plugins are installed by third-party applications while add-ons and extensions are installed by the user himself.

Dante send in this little tip and I thought I would share it with everyone. I have been writing about a program called USB Drive Letter Manager before which made it very easy to assign specific drive letters to USB devices. I mentioned that it is possible to assign drive letters to certain USB devices in Windows using Disk Management as well but did not comment on that further.

I just stumbled on to a very cool idea, a sort of picture research online community. The basics of PicAnswers is that you upload a photo, and ask a question related to it. If you visit the site you’ll instantly know what I mean. What might seem like a fun place at first, actually has [...]

The default Print Spooler directory is located in system32/spool/PRINTERS on the system partition. Changing that directory to another one can have several positive side effects. It could speed up printing if you move it to another hard drive which normally reduces the slow down users experience when printing documents. This is basically the same effect that you experience when moving the Pagefile to another hard drive.

Some applications that are running in the background are displaying an icon in the Windows System Tray to give the user faster access to the program’s options. While this option is useful for some applications it does look kinda ugly especially if a lot of icons are visible in the system tray.

Mails are sorted chronologically in Thunderbird by default but they are not grouped. Grouped means special folders for mails that arrived today, yesterday, last week, two weeks ago and old mail. This way of sorting mails is incredibly helpful for a better overview in my opinion.

I never understood why Windows only offered a Send To entry when right-clicking files and not a Copy To entry. The funny thing is that this Copy To function actually exists but is disabled by default. Not sure who had the glorious idea to disable it but it definitely does not make sense to me.

Windows loves to use virtual memory. Even if you set the value of virtual memory to zero it is still being used. It’s basic use is to provide additional memory if most of the RAM of the computer is already occupied. This virtual memory is taken from the hard drive from so called paging files. Most optimization articles suggest to use between one and three times of the amount of RAM as virtual memory.

I like going through top ten lists. I find it fascinating largely because it’s a comparison style. It is nice to check out how people rate events and other people, based on different criteria. Listverse is short for the list universe. It is a site of, you guessed it, lists. Of course, lists on the [...]

Whenever you hover your mouse cursor over a file or folder in Windows Explorer or the Desktop you will notice that a tooltip appears that lists some details about the current file or folder. the Information displayed are related to the file extension. If you hover the mouse over a Adobe pdf file the tooltip contains information about the author, title, date modified and size. Executable files however display information like company name and version of the application.

After my last post about the powers of PuTTy in conjunction with an SSH-enabled router, I started thinking about tutorials.

Only administrators are allowed to format and eject removable hard disks in Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional which could become a problem if you normally use a normal user account in Windows to increase system security or have to work on a system where you only have user access rights.

Since Martin constantly manages to cover all ongoing news regarding cryptography and security I myself planned on writing about “any time soon”, I had to look for other topics on the subject I could cover. So I decided to make good use of all the time I spend studying this kind of stuff and share this knowledge with you. And I would be very grateful, if someone could tell me in return how to defeat shirred fabrics with my sewing machine… but that’s a whole different matter.

If you set up some kind of SSH Connection on a windows computer over the past few years, be it to connect to the university’s network or to secure a line for an insecure FTP Transfer,you have probably encountered the program PuTTy on the way to salvation. It’s easy to use, free and OSSish powerful. What many people don’t know about PuTTy though, is what other powers aside from or better in addition to SSH slumber inside the little executable.

Many Internet websites have the habit to divide articles in tiny little chapters that sometimes require you to click ten or more times on next to read the full article. If you want to reread a part you have to click back to do so. I once again came by a website that used this technique, it’s Information Week and their article Top 60 Little-Known Technology Web Sites. Ghacks is unfortunately not in that list.

Considering how many people post videos on Youtube, I’m surprised I never thought of posting about this before. While Myspace has been customized to such an extent so as to make the average Myspace profile virtually unrecognizable from its earlier format, not many people have gone ahead and done the same to their Youtube profile. [...]

The business, RIAA, MAFIA, MPAA wants you to believe that putting content on the Internet is affecting sales of that content in a bad way, that companies sell less books, videos, movies, audio CDs because of pirates who download the media from the Internet. The funny thing is that more and more stories emerge that contradict this statement, one of these is the story about Pirate Coelho.

It is possible to create ringtones from any song you like with free tools. Yes, that’s right, you don’t have to pay a dime for software, the music or the ringtone. All you need is some time and patience. You do need several utilities to create the ringtones: Audacity, the Lame Encoder if you do not have it installed already, FLV Extract, a browser and a video downloader. I suggest using Firefox and the excellent Download Helper extension. Install everything, look at the Download Helper article that I wrote a few weeks ago if you have troubles installing the Firefox add-on.

I have explained in the first part of this article how a Windows user could create a list of all unsigned drivers of the system, the second part takes a look at a Windows system tool that verifies those drivers and makes sure that they are working correctly. This is great if you are trying to figure out if a driver is the source of a problem that you are currently experiencing.

There are two types of drivers in Windows XP, signed and unsigned ones. Signed ones have been verified and tested by Microsoft while unsigned ones have not. That does not have to be a bad thing though because the developer tends to test the drivers as well.

If you ever copied hundreds or even thousands of files from one folder to the other with both folders containing files of the same name you might have realized that there is a button missing when transferring those files. Windows asks the user what he would like to do when a duplicate file is found in the folder where he is copying the files into.

Windows XP and Windows Vista save username and password information for network resources and services like Windows Live on the hard drive of the operating system. If you want to check if and which usernames and passwords are stored with the option to remove some or all of them you can do the following.

The Recent Documents are a comfort function in Office 2007 products such as Word 2007 or Excel 2007 that displays the last 17 documents that you have opened in the applications. You can open that menu when you click on the big – some say huge – Office icon button on the top left corner of the screen.

I remember that several tweaking programs that emerged after the release of Windows XP changed the EnablePrefetcher in the Registry which supposedly should speed up application load time. I also read about that tip in many forums and just recently in a computer magazine that published the tip to change the EnablePrefetcher value to 4-6 to speed up the system.

Not enough server storage is available to process this command is a message that you can receive when you try to access a shared resource on a network. The Event ID: 2011 may also be written referring to the configuration parameter IRPStackSize. If the IRPStackSize is not present in the Registry the default value which may not be large enough for the server service to administer shared folders on some of the physical drives.

Not only are there hundreds of standard and common extensions we’ve already learned to recognize by heart by seeing them every day, there are also many specific and rare extensions we come across from time to time because as a matter of fact, every programmer can create extensions for his purposes. So how do we handle that?

Schools, libraries and even colleges like to restrict access to their public computers and some do not even have a link to an Internet browser although they might be connected to the net normally. This is done to get rid of those users who occupy a computer to chat on the Internet while its main purpose is to do something else, e.g. research books.

Microsoft seems to be under the impression that change is good and will not confuse users of a previous versions of their Windows operating system. It is interesting that they decided to change on elementary function in Windows Vista if you compare it to Windows XP: the Add/Remove Windows Components.

I once had to add a image into a Word document that had a black background which looked awful when printing the document. Microsoft Word comes with a few basic possibilities to alter graphics that are added which includes changing colors of the image and defining a transparent color for the image.

Today I had a problem playing a Region 2 DVD on my Region 1 DVD drive installed in Windows. I was asked to change the Region of my DVD drive to play the DVD movie and that I would only have 3 changes left become the change would become permanent. This was a relative new [...]

There is only one television in my house so there are times when programs clash. At such times, I often have to forgo watching my choice of TV show. This means that when I watch the show the following week, I’ve missed out on part of the story. My current problem is that my favorite [...]

Most people will be using Gimp, Photoshop, or Paint for their image editing tools. However, since I am not proficient in either one, I often look to simpler alternatives for my needs. My problem came about when I attempted to convert an Internet article to a Pdf file. I successfully captured two separate pages as [...]

Have you ever brought in a computer for repair to the friendly computer store next door or send your notebook to that big company that sold you it so that they could check what’s wrong with it ? Did it ever occur to you that the technicians that would check the computer could do more than just checking ?

I think this has happened to many of us before. There are as many passwords and user names to routers as stars in the sky and even if you’ve used one before, you’ll ask: “is it admin – admin, or admin – password, or user – admin?” Now you can stop wondering, since Routerpasswords has [...]

A friend of mine bought a new Samsung DVD burner and installed it on his system. The DVD burner would read discs without problems but did not burn a single disk. He was so puzzled that he called me and we agreed that I would take a look at his system and see if I could find the problem why the burner was not burning DVDs and CDs.

When you burn a CD or DVD in Windows, your DVD burner usually uses the DMA (Direct Memory Access) mode. Basically, this allows you to transfer large chunks of data onto your DVD, using as little CPU memory as possible. In other words, it helps you burn your DVDs faster. However, Windows has this weird [...]

This is a quick Windows tip that helps me from time to time when some windows in Microsoft Windows do not react anymore to user input and show that dreaded sand clock mouse cursor. This only works if Windows is still responsive. To shut down the Windows Explorer you need to hit Start > Shutdown (Turn off Computer on Windows XP) and click cancel on the shutdown dialog while holding the CTRL, Shift and ALT keys.

Cheryl emailed me this morning telling me that her password would not be accepted by Wordpress after registering a new account although she was sure that she did type it correctly. The message that would appear was always “Incorrect Password”. My first step of solving this problem was to change the password to “test” and try the login procedure again.

Most of my advertisers pay me in Dollar and I have to convert that revenue to Euro which is either done by the advertisement company (Google Adsense for instance) or by cashing in a Dollar check at my local bank (Tribalfusion). When I started blogging I received €850 for $1000 which was not an excellent conversion rate but good enough.

Most notebooks tend to run out of power quickly and most of the time in an inappropriate moment. What most users do not know is that every component in the notebook is using power even if you are not using it at the moment. This leads to the conclusion that disabling unneeded components would save power and thus prolong the work time.

Automatic Updates means that your computer will check periodically if updates for Windows XP are available and install the automatically if it finds any. The computer needs to be restarted after installing those Windows updates because some files can’t be exchanged while the operating system runs.

Every software that is installed using an installation routine will be added to the Add or Remove Programs Windows menu and can be uninstalled by any user who has access to this window. I’m going to explain a trick that removes the entry from the Add or Remove Programs window without removing the software itself.

Whenever you open the Command Prompt in Windows you are taken to a default directory which is usually your Documents and Settings \ Username directory. Most of the time you navigate away from it because you need to access files that cannot be accessed from there.

NTFS file systems have many advantages over FAT32 file systems that’s why I would suggest to convert existing FAT32 partitions to NTFS. Let me first explain how you can find out which file system is used by a partition / hard drive in Windows. Click on My Computer and right-click the hard drive or partition that you want to check. A window should pop up displaying the File System of the selected drive.

Setting up custom icons for your hard drives, cd, dvd and removable drives can be an excellent way of visualizing the contents of the drives. Windows offers a way to change icons of folders but no obvious way to change the icons of those drives. I would like to point out two possibilities that allow it to change drive icons in Windows.

Task Killer is a small but very useful Windows software which places a small icon in the system tray. Clicking that icon reveals all running processes, open windows and services in an easy to use interface. The processes give details about memory usage and name of course.

I spotted a huge process in my task manager today called MediaAgent.exe which used roughly 30 Megabytes of RAM. A quick check revealed that the process belonged to a OpenCASE Media Agent which I was not aware to have installed after all. My first fears that it was some sort of trojan, virus or spyware that managed to sneak into my system thankfully did not turn out to be true.