Windows Tools, Help & Guides

What’s one of the most common ways to get unauthorized access to someone else’s computer – especially that of a friend or family member? By guessing the password!

Someone who knows you well may be able to figure out your password, especially if he can try different possibilities before hitting on the right one.

If you’re running Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate edition (or the equivalent edition of Vista), you can set your Windows account to temporary lock if someone enters the wrong password several times in a row.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’d like to convert your Windows Vista or 7 to make it look like OS X Snow Leopard, you can learn how in this guide. Here’s what we’ll cover in this guide:

1. Create a system restore point.
2. Patch your system files with UXTheme Multi-patcher.
3. Download Snow Leopard for Windows 7.
4. Take Ownership of Your Files.
5. Install Snow Leopard for Windows 7 theme.

Please note: this guide involves modifying system files and you should proceed with caution.

Read the rest of this entry »

In this post, I am going to show you how to find who is using your computer and for how much time. I can find at least three reasons why this can be very useful:

• You want to control the usage of your computer; maybe your children spend too much time in front of it—even when you are not home.
• You are running a server, with this I mean a computer that cannot be shutdown, and you want to know if it’s up and running.
• You want to control your own usage—sometimes is very useful to have statistic about this.

Some might say that using Parental Controls is easy to block the access to a computer at some hours, but we are not trying to block anything.

Read the rest of this entry »

Not too long ago we encountered some problem with our users that share PC’s in different locations on our network. Some users do not always log-off their PC’s when they have to go into the plant. Now from where they are on the network, they remote desktop into another workstation for a particular system developed in-house.

Now if a user does not log-off, this remote desktop connection stays logged-in and makes it so no-one else can use that PC. Therefore, I was tasked with finding a way to log a user off if there is no activity for a certain amount of time.

I searched on Google and couldn’t find any other solution except this one. This involves getting hold of the “winexit.scr” screensaver contained in The Microsoft Windows 2000 Resource Kit, or you can read about and download individual resources from this toolkit here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sooner or later you may face the problem of how to change the names of a large group of files. A case in point is a situation wherein you have a group of files – perhaps a group of episodes from a TV series that have been named correctly, but in a non-standard format – and you need to change those file names to conform with an accepted standard, for example, in the form of SXXEYY where XX is the season number and YY is the episode number, followed by the file type suffix. This code is often referred to as the “Sexxyy” standard.

The Files:

The original files may come from a variety of sources, many of them ad hoc and without regard for the standards, or perhaps named for a different standard (there are several to choose from).

Taking a download from the Internet, you might get a list of files that look like this:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to test a downloaded program but don’t want it destroying your data and sending your bank passwords to the other side of the world, you should probably test it in a safe environment that’s not connected to the rest of your home network. You can do this a number of ways; here are two suggestions:

• Download the program on a spare computer that’s not connected to the rest of your home network.
• Download the program in a virtual machine that’s isolated from your host machine.

If you don’t have a spare computer or want the convenience of testing without using a separate machine, you should use a virtual machine. In this guide, we’ll show you how to set up a virtual machine and how to isolate it from your home network so you can test software.

Read the rest of this entry »