Pressing Windows M might be an alternative although it does not minimize all open windows. It was for instance not able to minimize XMPlay, my music player. Fortunately it is not complicated to recreate the Show Desktop shortcut.

Create a new text document and add the following lines of code to it:

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

Save it as “Show Desktop.scf”. Double-click the file to check if it is indeed minimizing all windows. You should at least have one window open to see the effect.

Right-click your task bar and uncheck the Lock The Taskbar entry. Now drag and drop the Show Desktop.scf file to your quick launch bar. Once that is done right-click the task bar again and lock the taskbar again.

Open the command prompt by pressing Windows + R, typing cmd and hitting enter. Type the following line and hit enter at the end:  set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 ; Once this is done open your device manager from the control panel and enable the option to view hidden devices in the View tab.

This ensures that all hidden devices that have not been removed in the device manager will be listed and you can see if someone else added a external hard drive, usb stick or similar devices to your system. Great way to find out if someone spies on you or copied files from your system while you were not there.

It can be easily countered by removing the device from the device managers list.

I did this by moving the profile to my encrypted hard drive. The hard drive is encrypted using True Crypt and the profile can only be accessed if I provide the security key to decrypt the hard drive. Other means are theoretically possible as well, use a portable device that has to be plugged in before you can use the profile.

Moving a profile to another location is not difficulty at all. Close all instances of Firefox and locate your profile folder. This is usually in Document and Settings under Application Date, Mozilla, Firefox, Profiles of the user who is logged into windows currently.

Move the complete folder to a different location. Open up profiles.ini afterwards (located in Firefox in Document and Settings). Change the path= parameter to the new location of your profile and change the parameter IsRelative=1 to 0.

Restart Firefox to see if the changes have been made. If all your bookmarks for instance load fine the changes have been successful. If that is not the case double-check the path parameter in profiles.ini.

You need to locate the file iTunes Library.itl on this computer which is usually stored in username\My Documents\My Music\iTunes. You need to share the folder iTunes. To do this right-click the iTunes folder and select Sharing and Security  from the context menu. If there is no Sharing and Security entry you will have to enable simple file sharing by clicking on Tools and selecting Folder Options.

Click on the view tab and activate simple file sharing in the advanced settings (scroll down). Enable the options ‘Share this folder in the network’ and ‘Allow network users to change my files’ in Sharing and Security.

The final step would be to start iTunes on the other computer and hold down the shift key which will open a menu during startup. Select Choose Library and select the iTunes Library.itl file from the main computer.

That’s it. You can now access your iTunes configuration from the second computer as well and all changes made will be global. You can repeat the process if you have more than two computer.

This tips might also be useful to those users who use an old computer with Windows Vista. My Vista installation is using about 430 megabytes of Ram in default state with only one instance of Internet Explorer 7 running as well. The following paragraphs contain a list of changes that I made and their effect on the system.

• Disabling the Sidebar
• Changing the Design to Windows Classic
• Changing the Background image to one color
• Disabling the Windows Firewall and Bitdefender

Those changes alone dropped the ram usage by 60 megabytes to 370 with one Internet Explorer window open. There are many settings that can still be tweaked to gain even more performance, for instance removing unnecessary services and indexing. I will take a look at those in the coming days.

The question of course remains why you would like to change to Vista if you disable everything “new” that Vista offers. I personally think that it introduces lots of gimmicks that freeware on XP offered for years. And if it is security that you want you should take a look at Linux instead.

You may choose to always show the status bar or only on activity, you may hide all toolbars that are currently installed including the google and stumbleupon toolbar if they are installed on your system. The same can be done for the tab bar and the windows taskbar. Now, whenever you move your mouse over an hidden item (such as the menu bar) it becomes visible and you can interact with it normally.

The direct opposite of hidding certain items can also be configured which would be show always. If you can’t live without the tab bar and status bar you can select to have them always on. They never hide when you press F11 and go into fullscreen mode.

This application can benefit users with older displays and users who like to have all the information present on the screen.

Most of the tips can be classified as core tips, everyone should use them to make his system more secure. I know its a lot to read and pc magazine has the nasty habit to divide the article on lots of pages, probably to increase page impressions. If you are interested head over to pc magazine and read the article.

Update: The PC Magazine site has divided the tips into dozens of pages which make it annoying to read. Here is a tip to make it somewhat more comfortable to read.

See the print icon and text at the top of the article? when you click on it you will see that chapter’s text on one page. While that still does not list all security tips on a single page, it nevertheless reduces the pages that you need to access to eight, which is a lot less than before.

Keep in mind that the guide has been posted in 2005, and that a lot has changed security wise since then. The network and wireless section for instance suggests to enable the WPA protocol and not WPE. While that was a feasible thing to do in 2005, it could be disastrous today. The article mentions WPA2 but does not recommend it as it is “benign overkill for home users”.

You can still learn something about security from the article, but I would recommend to double-check what is being said before you implement it on your computer.