10 winxp timesaver tips

1.Change the font Windows XP displays in Windows Explorer

Note: This tip is for both Windows XP Home and Professional. 

Windows Explorer and My Computer display the same font that Windows XP uses for icon titles on your desktop: 8-point Tahoma. If you want to change the font or font size used in Windows Explorer, follow these steps:

            1. Access the Display Properties dialog box by right-clicking the desktop and selecting the Properties command.

            2. Select the Appearance tab and click the Advanced button.

            3. Select Icon from the Item drop-down list.

            4. Use the Font drop-down arrow to select a font from the list.

            5. Click OK twice—once to close the Advanced Appearance dialog box and once to close the Display Properties dialog box.

You can see the new font by launching Windows Explorer or My Computer. If you don't like what you see, simply repeat the steps and select a different font.

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2.Prevent a shutdown of a Windows XP system

This tip applies to both Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional. Since editing the registry is risky, be sure you have a verified backup before saving any changes.

By default, at three o’clock every morning Windows XP’s Automatic Updates tool contacts the Windows Update site and automatically downloads and installs updates for your system. However, that can't happen if other people who use the computer shut it down at the end of the day. Fortunately, you can prevent anyone from shutting down Windows XP with a little registry tweak. Here’s how:

            1. Launch the Registry Editor (Regedit.exe).

            2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer.

            3. Right-click the Explorer subkey and select New | DWORD Value.

            4. Name the key NoClose and press Enter twice.

            5. Type 1 in the Value Data text box and click OK.

To enable the setting, close the Registry Editor and restart your system. Once your system restarts, you will not be able to it shut down by clicking the Shutdown button on the Start menu. This will prevent most users from inadvertently shutting down the computer.

When you do want to shut down your system, just access Task Manager by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete, then pull down the Shut Down menu and select the Turn Off command.

3.Off hours: Put your name in the Windows XP notification area

During those times when the urgent need for high-powered technical intelligence wanes a bit—especially on a slow Friday afternoon—try this fun trick and amaze your colleagues. Here’s how to make your “own” time by putting your name in the notification area:

1. Access the Control Panel from the Start menu. 

            2. Double-click Regional And Language Options.

            3. Click the Customize button in the Standards And Formats panel of the Regional Options tab.

            4. When the Customize Regional Options dialog box appears, select the Time tab.

            5. In the AM Symbol and PM Symbol boxes, you can replace that text with your name or whatever word you want, as long as it's no longer than 12 characters.

            6. To complete the operation, click OK twice—once to close the Customize Regional Options dialog box and once to close the Regional And Language Options dialog box.

You’ll instantly see your name appear in the notification area right next to the time.

4.Create your own special characters in Windows XP

Have you ever wanted to create your own font or maybe just a special character—for example, a character showing your initials for approving documents with your “signature”? You can easily create your own characters using a hidden Windows XP tool called the Private Character Editor. Here’s how:

            1. Press Windows + R to open the Run dialog box.

            2. Type eudcedit in the Open text box and click OK. 

            3. When the Private Character Editor launches, you’ll see the Select Code dialog box. Click OK.

            4. A user interface that looks and works very much like Paint will appear. Here, you can use standard tools to create your characters.

            5. When you finish, select the Save Character command on the Edit menu.

Once you save your new character, you can access it using the Character Map tool. Here’s how:

            1. Press Windows + R to open the Run dialog box.

            2. Type charmap in the Open text box and click OK.

            3. When the Character Map appears, select the Font drop-down list and select All Fonts (Private Characters).

            4. Select your character, click the Select button, and then click the Copy button.

You can now paste your font character into any document that you want. 



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5.Automatically generate and assign strong passwords in Windows XP

This tip applies to both Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional systems in either a stand-alone or peer-to-peer workgroup configuration.

Computer users consistently use very simplistic logic when creating passwords. For example, many of us choose meaningful words, personal dates, or a word commonly found in the dictionary because it makes the password easy to remember. These common practices cause us to sacrifice the security that passwords are intended to provide.

If you’re really at a loss when it comes to thinking of a strong password, you can let Windows XP create and assign a random password to your account. To let Windows XP generate your password, follow these steps. 

Warning: Before you follow these steps, please be sure that you are paying careful attention and are ready to actually use a password that might not be as memorable as you’re accustomed to! Also, you cannot use this tip on a Windows Server domain.

            1. Open a Command Prompt window and type:

net user username /random (username is your login account name)

2. Press Enter. Windows XP will randomly generate a secure password, as well as assign that strong password to your account. Windows XP will also display the strong password so you can remember it.

At your discretion, you may want to create a Password Reset Disk at this point. This disk will allow you to gain access to your computer in the event you forget your password. Here’s how to create the disk:

            1. Open the Control Panel and double-click the User Accounts tool.

            2. Click your account icon.

            3. Select Prevent A Forgotten Password under Related Tasks.

            4. Follow the instructions provided by the wizard.

6.Quickly gather MAC addresses in Windows XP with ARP

This tip applies to both Windows XP Home and Professional.

When securing a wireless Windows XP network, in addition to using Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) or Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption, you can use Media Access Control (MAC) address filtering.

When you enable MAC address filtering, the wireless access point or wireless router verifies that the network card in the computer requesting access has a MAC address in its filter list before allowing the computer to access the network. This means that you must first obtain the MAC addresses of each client computer. To do so, you might think that you have to manually visit each computer and use the Getmac command.

An easier way to gather MAC addresses is to take advantage of the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) command. Here’s how:

            1. From one computer, use the Ping command to ping each of the other client computers that will connect to the wireless access point or wireless router.

            2. Type the ARP command along with the -a parameter: 

Arp -a

When used with the -a parameter, the ARP command displays the ARP cache, which stores the IP and MAC addresses of the computers that most recently accessed the system—or in this case, those computers that responded to the Ping command.

7.Create an old-time monochrome command prompt in Windows XP

This tip applies to both Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional.

In what some may call the olden days, before there were fancy graphical user interfaces and RGB monitors, early computer monitors were monochrome, meaning that they displayed only one color on a black background. Monochrome monitors were available in three colors: green, amber, and white.

When you open up a Command prompt in its default configuration, it comes up in a white monochrome configuration with white text on a black background. If you’re like most command line users, you’ve changed the color scheme from the Color tab on the Command Prompt Properties dialog box to make the screen more appealing.

However, if you’re ever feeling nostalgic when working from a Command Prompt, you can change the settings on the Color tab to emulate the old green monochrome or amber monochrome monitors. Here’s how:

            1. Open a Command Prompt window.

            2. Right the title bar and select the Properties command.

            3. Select the Colors tab.

            4. Select the Screen Background button and select the black box in the color palette.

            5. Select the Screen Text button.

            6. To emulate an old green monochrome monitor, select the green box in the color palette, and then in the Selected Color Values panel use the spin button for the Green setting to move the number up to 255. Make sure that the settings for the Red and Blue remain at 0.

            7. To emulate an old amber monochrome monitor, select the green box in the color palette, and then in the Selected Color Values panel use the spin button for the Red setting to move the number up to 185. Make sure that the settings for the Green remains at 128 and Blue remains at 0.

8.Taking a fresh look at the Windows XP Task pane

This tip applies to Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional. 

If you’re like most Windows XP aficionados, chances are good that you prefer the Folders pane in Windows Explorer to the Task pane that displays by default in My Computer. As a result, you probably avoid My Computer or simply click the Folders button on the toolbar each time you open My Computer. If this is the case, you’ve probably never spent much time looking at the commands on the Task pane and may be missing many handy command shortcuts.

For example, how many times have you dug into the Control Panel to access Add/Remove Programs? If you use the Task pane in My Computer, you can simply click Add Or Remove Programs in the System Tasks section. And if you open a drive from My Computer, you will find another command that you frequently use in the Files And Folders section of the Task pane: the Make A New folder command.

When you select a folder, you can copy and move folders anywhere on your hard disk easily by selecting the Copy This Folder or Move This Folder command. When you do, a Browse dialog box will appear. This essentially serves as an alternate version of the Folders pane in Windows Explorer.

When you select a file, you can choose either the Copy This File or Move This File command and get the same Browse dialog box with a Folders pane.

9.Removing unused device drivers from Windows XP machines

When you install a device driver on a Windows XP machine, the operating system loads that driver each time the computer boots regardless of whether the device is present—unless you specifically uninstall the driver. This means that drivers from devices that you have long since removed from your system may be wasting valuable system resources.

Follow these steps to view and remove these unnecessary device drivers:

            1. Press Windows + Break to bring up the System Properties dialog box.

2. Select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button. 

            3. Click the New button below the System Variables panel.

            4. In the New System Variable dialog box, type devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices in the Variable Name text box and 1 in the Variable Value text box.

            5. Click OK to return to the System Properties dialog box and then click OK again.

            6. Select the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button.

            7. In Device Manager, go to View | Show Hidden Devices.

            8. Expand the various branches in the device tree and look for the washed out icons, which indicate unused device drivers.

            9. To remove an unused device driver, right-click the icon and select Uninstall.

10.Using the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility

Not able to remove or uninstall an application in Windows XP using either the Uninstall option or the Add/Remove Programs tool? Try using the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility. As long as you installed the application using the Windows Installer, this utility will remove all the folders, files, registry keys, and entries from your system and allow you to start over with a clean slate. 

Here's how:

                        1. Download the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility from the Microsoft Download Center .

                        2. Locate and run msicuu2.exe to install the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility.

                        3. Locate and launch the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility on the Start menu.

                        4. From the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility window, locate the application in the list and click the Remove button.

                        5. Once the application has been removed, click the Exit button to close the utility.

You can now reinstall the application

Enabling Remote Desktop on Windows Server 2008 Core Edition

You’ve installed Windows Server 2008 Core Edition, so now what? For most Windows systems, remote desktop protocol (RDP) is the key mechanism to administer the server. While there are not many things that can be done locally on a Core server, it is still beneficial to have access to a session locally on the system.

Determining how to do this is easy enough from Microsoft KB article 555964, but before we do this, we want to focus on the options involved. RDP connections are available in two modes for Windows Core servers: (1) only allowing other Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista connections or (2) permitting Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Vista connections. The difference is network level authentication (NLA), which Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 support. NLA performs the authentication through various features of the newer products before starting the Remote Desktop session and passing the display to the client. (For more about NLA and the other components, read this blog post by the TechNet Performance Team.)

Once you decide on a mode, it’s quite easy to implement RDP on a Core system. If you want to use NLA for RDP connections to Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 systems, enter this command on the Core server:

Cscript %windir%\system32\SCRegEdit.wsf /ar 0

To not use NLA and allow connections from all RDP clients, perform the step above and add this line:

Cscript %windir%\system32\SCRegEdit.wsf /cs 0

The server will accept RDP connections based on the mode selected. You’re done!

Note: The commands in this tip will also work on the full installations if you want to roll them into a build script.

some different ways on how to force Group Policy processing remotely

Updating Microsoft Windows Group Policy settings on the local machine is not so hard with a tool such as Gpupdate, but updating these policies on remote domain computers is not possible from within any Microsoft Management Console (MMC) by default or with any Microsoft tool available so far. In this article we will show some tricks, scripts and free tools that makes this task possible – and even easy – for the network administrator.

Introduction

Most administrators know the problem of forcing Group Policy (GP) processing on remote computers. After configuring an important policy of some kind, we would sometimes like GP processing to occur immediately on client computers. The problem is that by default, the so called background processing “only” happens every 90 to 120 minutes (randomized) – if we want to force updates to occur right away we are on our own. Of course there is a reason why policies do not just update every 5 minutes or ‘real-time’. The load on Domain Controllers and the network would simply be too much to handle in most environments. But, if a very important security setting at some point needs to be pushed to a large number of clients “right away”, it’s nice to be prepared for such a situation.
What we basically want, is to make it possible for the administrator (Admin), from a central location (Admin workstation), to update policies on Computer1, Computer2 and/or Computer3 – and the user policies for User A, B and C - whenever the admin finds it necessary. See figure 1.

Figure 1: The scenario
We do have the wonderful Gpupdate tool built in to Microsoft Windows XP and newer – and we had Secedit on Windows 2000 systems - but it is unfortunately so, that unlike the Gpresult command, both Gpupdate and Secedit only handle local updates. Of course, if we have a deployment system set up already, like Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS), we could use this system to distribute a small script that executes the necessary command for a group of users or computers.
If we do not have such a system on the network, we must try to be creative - because the alternative is to log on to all computers using tools like Remote Assistance, or sending an email to all users, to execute the Gpupdate command... So, let’s try to be creative then.

Issues

Before we get into more detail I just have to mention one common issue people have when trying to implement the methods mentioned in this article.
Firewall trouble:
Like with any other communication that is initiated from the network, packets that try to update policy settings on remote computers' will fail if the remote computers local firewall (like the one built in to Windows operating system from Windows XP Service Pack 2 and up) is not configured to allow such incoming traffic (from a given subnet, IP or whatever). The built in Windows firewall must be configured to allow the incoming traffic we want by using a Group Policy Object (GPO), so ironically, such a policy is the only one we definitely cannot force to firewall-enabled remote computers.
The policy settings that need to be enabled for all the mentioned methods in this article, is the following:
Computer Settings | Administrative Templates | Network | Network Connections | Windows Firewall | Domain Profile | “Windows Firewall: Allow remote administration exception”.
Other firewall devices between the central computer and the remote computers must be configured to comply with the above setting (see Help text on the mentioned policy in GPEDIT.MSC for port info etc.).
Administrator rights:
The user that initiates the processes on the remote computers must be a local administrator on those machines – or else it’s simply not going to work as expected.
After this is taken care of, let’s look at the free methods we have available.

Scripting

Scripts are free and shared heavily among IT professionals on the Internet – this is actually “Open Source” at its best. Microsoft has provided us with some built in opportunities to expand the capabilities of our operating systems (OS) and environments - in this article we will cover how these capabilities can be used in regards to updating GPs remotely.

Gpupdate & Secedit

First of all we should mention Gpupdate and Secedit, without those tools none of this would be possible. The scripts and tools mentioned here all assume that one of the tools exists on the remote client, depending on the OS version. As mentioned above, Secedit was delivered with Windows 2000 and Gpupdate took over from Windows XP and above, it has even survived the trip to Longhorn as it looks right now. In the following scripts I will focus on Gpupdate – we could check for OS version before calling either Gpupdate or Secedit, but that stuff can be added later without much work.
Gpupdate.exe resides in the “%windir%\system32” folder by default, so we don't need an absolute path to its location on the remote workstation. The tool can be called with a number of different switches:
Syntax:  Gpupdate [/Target:{Computer | User}] [/Force] [/Wait:] [/Logoff] [/Boot] [/Sync]

In the “do it yourself” HTML Application (HTA) and Windows Management Instrumentations (WMI) scripts we will focus on running Gpupdate without any switches – or with either “/Taget:Computer” (to update only computer related policies) or “/Target:User” (to update only user related policies). The other options could be included with some more work - but would we really use “/Logoff” or “/Boot”? This would mean that users could be logged off if required (software installation, folder redirection etc.) or the computer could even be restarted while the user is working. Is that really what we want? Anyway, we could just as well use tools like Shutdown.exe for that purpose – but my guess is that it’s not going to be popular out there (the users you know).

PsExec

The first method I’ll mention is very easy to implement and requires almost no scripting abilities. Why invent something that has already been invented, right? PsExec is developed by Mark Russinovich, the former owner of Sysinternals which was acquired by Microsoft in July 2006. It is currently available in version 1.73 and can be downloaded from Microsoft Technet here.
PsExec is ‘Heaven’ when talking remote execution, first of all because it does not require any agents installed on the remote computers. You need to specify a computer name and the command that should be executed as switches in a command prompt – that’s basically it! Behind the scenes a service is being installed ‘ad hoc’ remotely and removed again when the command has been executed.
A small tip is to place the PsExec.exe file in the “%windir%” directory, because then we don’t have to specify the complete path to this file when executing it from a command line etc.
To update group policies on the remote computer ‘Computername’ all we have to write is the following command: “PsExec \\Computername Gpupdate”. The user logged on to the remote computer will not see anything happening, but in the background Gpupdate will ‘refresh’ both user and computer policies and apply any missing settings. You would think that PsExec should run with the “-i" switch (interactive) to update the remote users specific user policies, but testing shows that this is not the case.

FLEX COMMAND

Well, the above mentioned method updates policies for a single user/computer only – how about updating an entire Organizational Unit (OU) by using PsExec and Gpupdate together? For that purpose I have created a “demo” script to show some of the possibilities we get with some ‘creative’ scripting. The script is called FLEX COMMAND and can be downloaded here. When opening the HTA file with a text editor like Notepad the code is revealed – no hidden magic or anything.
When FLEX COMMAND is started, it contacts the Active Directory (AD) domain of the computer it is executed on. Therefore it must be executed from a domain member – if not, no OU’s can be found of course.
Select an OU, whether computer objects in sub-OU’s should be handled, and if the tool should only handle machines that are “alive” (answering to WMI requests). The last thing to do is to insert the command line we want to execute on the local machine for each computer object found in the OU selected. The text string “{C}” must be included; this will be replaced by the name of the computer when the script is looping through the computer objects.

Figure 2: FLEX COMMAND in action
Let’s say that the OU “MyComputers” contains only 3 computers: Computer1, Computer2 and Computer3. The command we have typed in, “psexec \\{C} gpupdate”, is then translated into the following 3 commands: “psexec \\computer1 gpupdate”, “psexec \\computer2 gpupdate”, “psexec \\computer3 gpupdate” – all commands will be executed consecutively (if the computers are alive) and remote policies should be updated.
The tool could be modified to get the computers from a file (txt, csv, xls etc.), a database, a specific security group in AD, a manual selection from a list or whatever the need would be. The way the script executes the processes/commands could also be modified, but this demo script is mainly to show the possibilities we have.
The script is freely delivered ‘as-is’ for you to test, use and modify as you please - more info here.

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)

Ok, PsExec is nice, but do we have a “do it yourself” method so I can customize the solution to fit my environment? Yes, as a matter of fact we do! WMI is extremely powerful and pretty easy to handle after a few hours of studying. With WMI, a tamed firewall scenario and administrative rights in place, almost anything is possible in a Windows environment – even remote shut down, restart or execution of commands.
I have created another script for demo purposes, called OU GPUPDATE. This HTA script carries some different techniques “under the hood” – it’s actually just a small modification of FLEX COMMAND. First of all it looks up the OU structure in AD (the top dropdown list), it gives the user the option to hit computer objects in sub-OU’s too, to run Gpupdate with “/Target:User” or “/Target:Computer” or without any switches. Only computers that are “alive” (responds to WMI requests) will be hit by default.

Figure 3: Select what to update – user settings, computer settings or both
The script is freely delivered ‘as-is’ for you to test, use and modify as you please. The script can be downloaded here.

Remote scripting

Besides WMI, we have the option to use ‘plain’ remote scripting (VBScript). This must be enabled by setting one value in the HKLM part of the involved computers' registry databases, the script engines must be “remote scripting” enabled, and from that point the rest is pretty straight forward. The procedure is to copy a script file to the remote host (this script should perform Gpupdate as required), and afterwards send a VBScript command that executes the script file remotely.
Jeremy Moskowitz, a Microsoft Group Policy MVP, mentions this procedure briefly in his book “Group Policy, Profiles, and IntelliMirror for Windows 2003, Windows 2000, and Windows XP”, see his website.

RGPREFRESH

RGPREFRESH is a tool developed by Darren Mar-Elia. Darren is a Microsoft Group Policy Most Valuable Professional (MVP), see his website. His tool uses WMI behind the scenes and executes either Secedit or Gpupdate as needed on the remote host, with the command line switches selected by the user. These switches give you the same possibilities as if you were using the tool locally.
Darren's tool handles one machine at the time, but combined with a tool like FLEX COMMAND (as “wrapper”) the tool can hit an entire OU of a computer with a few clicks… Both RGPREFRESH and PsExec could also be combined with DSQUERY, FOR and other command line utilities to execute on more than one host at the time.

Figure 4: The RGPREFRESH options
The tool can be downloaded for free from this webpage.

Specops Gpupdate

Special Operations Software, Specops, is an international software vendor, offering management products enhancing Active Directory and Group Policy based technology. The company has released their own remote policy updating solution, and the best part is that it is completely free to use. The current version of Specops Gpupdate is 1.0.2.13 (2006-10-25) and the utility can be downloaded here. This tool not only brings the functionality we have developed in the above scripts, but also adds some more management features. Let’s take a look at this nice utility…
Installing Specops Gpupdate
Installing the MSI application is very easy; all it requires is the Active Directory Users & Computers (ADUC) MMC and the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0.

Figure 5: The install process is as simple as most MSI package installations (next, next, next)
After installing the MSI file nothing is changed in the GUI, only “Add/Remove Programs” tell us that Specops is installed. So we have to perform an additional task for the magic to appear…
Active Directory User & Computers extended
The first time Specops Gpupdate is installed in the AD Forest, a special command must be run:
“%CommonProgramFiles%\Specopssoft\Specops ADUC Extension\SpecopsAducMenuExtensionInstaller.exe” /add
This is not a schema update, even though you must be Enterprise Admin to run this. This update is completely reversible, just run it again with the “/remove” switch instead. What it does is to register so called “Display Specifiers” to extend the view from within ADUC.
When right clicking an OU or a computer object, four new options are added: Gpupdate, Restart, Shut down and Start. It’s possible to make a selection of multiple computers and OU’s by holding down [Ctrl] while left clicking the wanted objects.

Figure 6: ADUC MMC extended
If you are wondering, as I did, if the changes also apply to non-DC’s (or management computers ), the answer is: Yes! After installing the Windows Server 2003 Admin Pack Service Pack 1 Administration Tools Pack on a Windows XP Professional client, the .NET Framework 2.0 and Specops Gpupdate, the management console looked just as nice as on the DC and had the same features available.
The Gpupdate option
The first option we have is to perform a Gpupdate command remotely on the selected computers. After choosing Gpupdate we must confirm the selection, see figure 7, and select if we want to use the force option.

Figure 7
After clicking OK a dynamic graph is presented, see figure 8, and a status report on how the update went.

Figure 8
The Restart and Shutdown option
The next two options, ‘Restart’ and ‘Shutdown’ are both “nice to have” management features, right where we need them, in ADUC. We can force the restart or shutdown, specify the number of seconds the user will have to close any open applications and send the user a customized message. Scripting this is not that hard to do using WMI or sending Shutdown.exe with the proper switches – but with Specops Gpupdate we get this functionality for free, no additional work to be done.

Figure 9: The confirm restart dialog
The Start option
The last of the four options, called ‘Start’, is actually Wake on LAN (WOL) functionality built-in to ADUC. When selecting and confirming this, see figure 10, so called Magic packets are sent against the clients MAC address to make them boot. WOL must be supported by the BIOS of computers of course. Specops Gpupdate communicates with Microsoft DHCP servers in the enterprise to find the info needed to perform this process, so it’s only possible to wake DHCP clients and only in network environments with Microsoft DHCP servers deployed.

Figure 10: Confirm starting remote WOL enabled computers
By the way, scripting WOL is actually possible too, but showing how to do this is far beyond the scope of this article.



Thanks:

Jakob H. Heidelberg is an MVP: Enterprise Security, MCSA/MCSE: Security/Messaging, MCDST, MCTS, MCITP, MCT, CCNA, and a Certified Ethical Hacker, that works as a System Consultant for Interprise Consulting A/S, a Microsoft Gold Partner based in Denmark. Jakob is engaged as a writer at the largest Microsoft online community for Danish IT pros, it-experts.dk. He also writes on his own blog, and likes to catch up on as much new stuff as possible within the Microsoft world, but currently specializes in messaging, monitoring and security issues

useful and free Windows system tools for your Windows XP or Vista

useful and free Windows system tools

 IZArc

Not everyone distributes compressed files in the zip format - thankfully IZArccan read dozens of formats (including zip, of course). It's also handy at creating customised archives, with support for 256-bit encryption, self-extraction and splitting large archives for distribution in manageable chunks.

 File Shredder

Securely delete files from your hard drive, and cover your tracks by shredding the free space too with File Shredder, a simple, yet effective, data destruction tool.

 EASUS Partition Master Home Edition

EASUS Partition Master Home Edition is a freebie which enables you to not only partition without data loss within Windows, it also boasts partition and disk copy wizards too, making it easy to clone hard drives or quickly back them up.

 Autoruns

Windows' built-in msconfig tool is all well and good, but if you want complete control over what starts with your PC, then Autoruns, a free tool from The Artists Formerly Known As SysInternals, is an essential addition to your toolkit. You can delete as well as disable start-up items, plus access other start-up zones too.

 ISO Recorder

ISO Recorder is a fabulous tool which makes it easy to burn discs from ISO images downloaded from the internet (such as Linux distributions), but it's also able to back up uncopy protected CDs and DVDs to ISO format too.

DAEMON Tools Lite

Tired of constant disc-swapping or hunting for lost DVDs? DAEMON Tools Lite creates up to four virtual CD/DVD drives that can access disc image files (including ISO and IMG) as if you'd inserted the discs themselves. Oh, and it's quicker than accessing the real thing too.

 CCleaner

There's only so much crap that Windows' own Disk Cleanup tool can handle - if you want a tool that does a more thorough job, CCleaner is that program. Use its Registry cleaning tool with care, though.

 Free Registry Defrag

You can't rely on Registry cleaners to always get it right when cleaning out your Registry. Deleting so-called "problem" entries is only half the job anyway - Free Registry Defrag won't delete anything from your Registry, but it will compact and defragment the contents of your Registry files so they perform quicker. There's an element of risk with any Registry cleaning exercise - (visit regrecovery before you begin, just in case.)

Defraggler

Most defrag tools will only let you defrag entire partitions or drives; Defragglerlets you analyse your drive and then pick individual files and folders to defragment - perfect if you're running on a tight schedule.

Ultimate Windows Tweaker

Vista users casting a jealous glance at XP's TweakUI PowerToy can stop being envious: the recently released free app Ultimate Windows Tweakerpacks in over 130 tweaks into a single 380KB executable file - no installation necessary.

Change Text on XP Start Button

Step 1 - Modify Explorer.exe File

In order to make the changes, the file explorer.exe located at C:\Windows needs to be edited. 

Since explorer.exe is a binary file it requires a special editor. For purposes of this article I have used Resource Hacker. Resource HackerTM is a freeware utility to view, modify, rename, add, delete and extract resources in 32bit Windows executables and resource files (*.res). It incorporates an internal resource script compiler and decompiler and works on Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems.

get this from http://delphi.icm.edu.pl/ftp/tools/ResHack.zip

The first step is to make a backup copy of the file explorer.exe located at C:\Windows\explorer. Place it in a folder somewhere on your hard drive where it will be safe. Start Resource Hacker and open explorer.exe located at C:\Windows\explorer.exe.

The category we are going to be using is "String Table". Expand it by clicking the plus sign then navigate down to and expand string 37 followed by highlighting 1033. If you are using the Classic Layout rather than the XP Layout, use number 38. The right hand pane will display the stringtable. We’re going to modify item 578, currently showing the word “start” just as it displays on the current Start button.

There is no magic here. Just double click on the word “start” so that it’s highlighted, making sure the quotation marks are not part of the highlight. They need to remain in place, surrounding the new text that you’ll type. Go ahead and type your new entry. In my case I used Click Me!

You’ll notice that after the new text string has been entered the Compile Script button that was grayed out is now active. I won’t get into what’s involved in compiling a script, but suffice it to say it’s going to make this exercise worthwhile. Click Compile Script and then save the altered file using the Save As command on the File Menu. Do not use the Save command – Make sure to use the Save As command and choose a name for the file. Save the newly named file to C:\Windows.


Step 2 – Modify the Registry

!!!make a backup of your registry before making changes!!!

Now that the modified explorer.exe has been created it’s necessary to modify the registry so the file will be recognized when the user logs on to the system. If you don’t know how to access the registry I’m not sure this article is for you, but just in case it’s a temporary memory lapse, go to Start (soon to be something else) Run and type regedit in the Open field. Navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows NT\ CurrentVersion\ Winlogon

In the right pane, double click the "Shell" entry to open the Edit String dialog box. In Value data: line, enter the name that was used to save the modified explorer.exe file. Click OK.

Close Registry Editor and either log off the system and log back in, or reboot the entire system if that’s your preference. If all went as planned you should see your new Start button with the revised text.

Add Your name on taskbar

Heres a trick to add up ur name in place of AM and PM beside time and make urself to feel proud among ur group of frnds.
Its simple


Start -> Control Pannel -> Regional and LAnguage option ->

 Customize (beside English US) ->

Go to TIME tab -> Change AM symbol and PM symbol from AM and PM to ur name -> 

Apply -> Ok ...

IS it changed ??? Might be not ...Now go to time in taskbar and Double Click it to open "Date and time property" 

...Look place where time chnges in digital form i.e. 02:47:52 AM , click to arrow to cnage the AM or PM by selecting and press arrow. It will Show ur name or name that was entered by u,

 Apply -> OK

Thats it

Realtek High Definition Audio Driver for Windows 7

After I installed Windows 7 beta on my HP Pavilion DV6500, I was not able to use some of the audio features like the front headphone audio-out jack, microphone audio-in jack etc. This is because of the old Realtek HD Audio Driver which was not compatible with Windows 7.

Realtek has added support for Windows 7 and you can download the new version R2.16

Download Realtek HD Audio Codec Driver for Windows 7

This supports Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and other earlier OS for both 32-bit x86 and 64-bit x64 OS

They also have ATI HDMI Audio Device driver and 3D SoundBack which restores audio effects, including surround sound, reverberation, and spatial effects, for legacy game titles when running on Windows Vista.