Friday 29 March 2013

How to Rename Internet Explorer to Firefox/Chrome Downloader


How to Rename Internet Explorer to Firefox/Chrome Downloader

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Now that Internet Explorer has officially dropped below 50% market share, it’s high
time that we rename it to a more fitting title: Google Chrome Downloader, or if you
prefer, Firefox Downloader.
Obviously this is a very stupid geek trick, and the reality is that Internet Explorer 9
 is a very capable browser that works well. But don’t spoil our fun!

Renaming Internet Explorer to Firefox/Chrome Downloader

The first thing you’ll want to do is open up regedit.exe through the Start Menu
search or Run box, and browse down to the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
Once there, create a new String key on the right-hand side, call it Window Title, and
 set the text to Chrome Downloader, Firefox Downloader, or something else entirely.
You should probably also open up the properties pane on any IE shortcuts and change
the General tab to the new text.
Next, you should change the home page of Internet Explorer to the Chrome
 or Firefox download page:

Awesome Results

Now that you’ve done the rename and closed all the IE windows, you can
 launch it again and see that the title is really changed everywhere, including Alt-Tab:













And even Task Manager:
If you’re the techie fix-it guy in your family, all you have to do is set this up on
everybody’s computer, and they won’t be confused again.

How to Recover Bit Locker Encrypted Disks Should You Forget Your Password


How to Recover Bit Locker Encrypted Disks Should You

 Forget Your Password

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If you followed our guide to encrypting your removable disks with Bit Locker, you will recall that we saved our recovery key to the cloud, which is a new feature in Windows 8. The first thing we need to do is go and retrieve that key, which can be done by heading over to this URL. At this point you will need to sign into your Microsoft account, the same one you signed into Windows 8 with.
Note that Bit Locker is only available in the Pro and Enterprise versions of Windows 8.
Since we are looking for the key we used to encrypt a removable disk, we may have many so we need to expand the device that we used to encrypt the removable disk. You can do this by clicking on the little arrow next to the name of the device.
Now that we have the key used to encrypt the drive, we need to actually use it. To do that, you need to open an elevated command prompt by pressing the Windows key to switch over to the Start Screen, then typing “cmd”. Once you see command prompt in the search results, right click on it and choose to run it as administrator.
The type the following:
repair-bde D: F: -rp 010747-002530-189948-266464-499609-493075-315183-432520 –F
You will need to replace D: with the letter of the encrypted drive and F: with the letter of a spare drive you want the contents of the encrypted drive to be saved to.Note: The drive that you are restoring data to will be formatted, so everything on that drive will be deleted.
When the decryption process is complete, open Explorer and head into the drive to which you restored the data. It should all be there now.
That’s all there is to it.

Thursday 28 March 2013

How to Reset Your Forgotten Windows Password the Easy Way


How to Reset Your Forgotten Windows Password the Easy Way

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Forgetting your password is never any fun, but luckily there’s a really easy way to reset the password. All you need is a copy of the Windows installation disk and one simple command line trick.

Resetting Your Forgotten Windows Password

Boot off the Windows disk and select the “Repair your computer” option from the lower left-hand corner.
Follow through until you get to the option to open the Command Prompt, which you’ll want to select.
First you’ll want to type in the following command to backup the original sticky keys file:
copy c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe c:\
Then you’ll copy the command prompt executable (cmd.exe) over top of the sticky keys executable:
copy c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe
Now you can reboot the PC.

Resetting the Password

Once you get to the login screen, hit the Shift key 5 times, and you’ll see an administrator mode command prompt.
Now to reset the password—just type the following command, replacing the username and password with the combination you want:
net user geek MyNewPassword
That’s all there is to it. Now you can login.
Of course, you’ll probably want to put the original sethc.exe file back, which you can do by rebooting into the installation CD, opening the command prompt, and copying the c:\sethc.exe file back to c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe.

How to Reset Your Windows Password Without an Install CD


How to Reset Your Windows Password Without an Install CD

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If you’ve forgotten your Windows password and you don’t have an install CD laying around, there’s no need to worry. Not only are there half a dozen complicated ways to reset the password, you can do it easily with the Offline Windows Password editor.
Of course, if you do have a Windows CD, you can reset your password the easy way with a simple trick.

Create the Boot Disk

You’ll need to create a boot disk using another PC. If you don’t have another PC, you’ll have to bug one of your friends to use theirs. First, you’ll need to download the boot disk from here:
Then download and launch ImgBurn, which is a really simple piece of software that helps you burn an ISO image to a disk. Note: if you have some other application for burning an ISO image, you can use that instead.
Choose the Source, click the burn button, and create the boot disk.
You could also create a bootable USB drive instead if you’d like, the instructions are on the Offline NT download site.

Resetting Your Windows Password

Boot your PC from the boot disk (you might have to adjust the BIOS to allow booting from the CD). You’ll be prompted at a couple of screens, which you can generally just hit the Enter key at. For instance, this screen asks if you want to select the first partition, and [1] is already selected, so just hit Enter.
The same thing happens at the next step, where you have to choose the path to your registry. The default is fine, so hit Enter.
Next you can choose whether to use password reset or some other thing, so just hit Enter for password reset.
Next you’ll be prompted whether you want to edit users or the registry. You want to edit user passwords, so hit Enter again.
And now, the first screen where you’ll need to do something other than hit the Enter key. In this case, you’ll want to type the username that you want to reset. In my case, this was “geek”, so I just typed that (without the quotes). Then hit Enter.
Now you’ll want to probably just blank the password, which is already selected, so hit the Enter key again (you can always change it once you’re back in Windows).
And now, you’ll have to save what you just did. So type an exclamation point to quit (or the “!” symbol), then type the letter “y” to save.
At this point it should say “EDIT COMPLETE”, and you can reboot your computer. You should be able to login without any problems—just make sure to go set a new password.

How to Use the New Task Manager in Windows 8


How to Use the New Task Manager in Windows 8

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The Task Manager in Windows 8 has been completely overhauled. It’s easier-to-use, slicker, and more feature-packed than ever. Windows 8 may be all about Metro, but the Task Manager and Windows Explorer are better than ever.
The Task Manager now manages startup programs, shows your IP address, and displays slick resource usage graphs. The new color-coding highlights the processes using the most system resources, so you can see them at a glance.

Launching the Task Manager

The Task Manager can still be launched in the traditional ways. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete from anywhere and you’ll see a link to launch the Task Manager.
You can also right-click the taskbar and select “Task Manager.”

Managing Processes

The Task Manager’s default interface lets you easily view and end active applications, without any clutter getting in the way. It shows both Metro-style apps and desktop apps.
Click the “More details” button and you’ll see much more information. Resource-usage statistics are color-coded – the darker the color, the more resources used.
You can expand an app to see its windows, if the app has multiple windows.
The list of processes is divided into three sections – apps, background processes and Windows system processes.
If you’re not sure what a processes is, you can right-click it and select “Search online” to search for it in your default search engine.

System Statistics

The Performance tab shows slick graphs of your system information. You can select either of the options at the right to see more information. The new interface shows much more information than the old Task Manager showed.
You can actually see your system’s IP address without digging through the Control Panel. This used to require a lot of clicks.
You can still open the Resource Monitor application in one click. It hasn’t been updated in Windows 8, but it shows even more information than the Task Manager does.

App History

The Processes tab only shows each process’s current resource usage. The “App history” tab shows how much CPU time and network bandwidth each Metro app has used, so you can identify the resource hogs.

Startup Programs

The Startup tab shows the applications that automatically start with your computer. Windows finally has a way to easily disable startup programs. Windows also measures just how long each application is delaying your startup, so you can make informed decisions.

Users

The Users tab breaks down your system’s resource usage by user account. You can expand a user’s name to view that user’s processes.

Advanced Process Details & Services

The Details tab is the evolution of the old Processes tab on previous versions of Windows. It doesn’t have a pretty interface – although application icons have been added. It exposes exposes advanced options not found on other tabs, including process priority and CPU affinity. (CPU affinity determines which CPU a process runs on, if your system has multiple CPUs or a CPU with multiple cores.)
The Services tab has been prettied up and now includes an option to quickly restart services.
You can click the Open Services link to use the Services application, which contains the advanced options you won’t find in the Task Manager.

The new Task Manager is a huge step up, both in features and presentation. It’s particularly exciting that average users finally have a way to manage their automatically starting programs.

How to Install IIS 8 on Windows 8


How to Install IIS 8 on Windows 8

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One of the first things Web Developers using ASP.NET will want to install on Windows 8 is IIS (Internet Information Services). Windows 8 ships with a new version of IIS, version 8, lets take a look at installing it.

Installing IIS

Keeping with Microsoft modular design of, uhm, everything these days, IIS in Windows is still an optional “Windows Feature”. To install it, press the Windows + R key combination to bring up a run box, then type appwiz.cpl and press enter.
This will open the Program and Features part of Control Panel, on the left hand side click on the “Turn Windows features on or off” link.
Now click on the Internet Information Services check box.
If you’re a developer you are going to want to expand it and explore the sub-components as well. By default it installs all the stuff needed to host a website, and you are probably going to need some of the more developer centric components as well.
After clicking OK, this dialog will appear on your screen for a while.
When its done, fire up your browser and navigate to localhost.
That’s all there is to it.