Cool Windows XP tips & tricks

April Fools' Day threats

2008-04-01T21:28:00.004+03:00

Its fun to make a prank virus, but getting the real thing is not so great. April Fools' Day is a good opportunity for hackers to spread viruses, as people will open suspicious e-mails more readily, thinking they're jokes. You should avoid any emails whose sender you are not familiar with, and remember: if something looks malicious, it probably is.

Here are a few latest threats from Symatec.com:

1. Multiple sites affected in IFRAME attack
Many popular sites have been affected by IFRAME injection attacks. Ensure that antivirus software is up to date and that all Windows updates are installed. More...

2. Exploit targeting MS08-014 flaw released
A public exploit for an Excel vulnerability has surfaced. Malicious Excel files may circulate via email, instant messaging and file sharing. The issue was patched in the MS08-014 bulletin -- ensure that Excel updates are installed. Use caution when handling email. More...

More at symatec threat explorer.

So keep a clear head when surfing and avoid anything suspicious.

By the way, all these links lead to virus sites!

(Got you scared didn't I? APRIL FOOLS!!! Hahaaa)

P.S. I'd never link to anything bad.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

How to make fake virus and error messages!

2008-04-01T06:15:00.001+03:00

Disclaimer: This a harmless joke. I take no responsibility, whatsoever, for the consequences.

There are several kinds of fake virus messages you can make. I will discuss 4 of them:

1. Fake error message

This one is by far, the easiest and all you have to do is to make a new text document with notepad, type msg * YOUR MESSAGE and save as anything.bat. As always, make sure that you select All files instead of Text Document.

2. Forced shutdown.
This will display a custom error message and start a countdown which will shut down the computer.

Right-click your desktop and create a new shortcut.
Paste the following code into the Location box in the Create Shortcut menu:
shutdown -s -t 30 -c "Your message here"
Replace 30 with the length of the countdown you want (in seconds) and place your custom error message between the quotes. Click next and name the shortcut to something the victim would be likely to click on such as "Internet explorer" or "My Documents", etc.

Next you'd want to change the icon. Right-click on the shortcut you made and click properties. Find the Change Icon button and click it. Choose a suitable icon for the name you chose earlier.

And that's all! Now you just have to sneak the shortcut onto the victim's desktop and run!

Note: to stop it, open Run from the start menu and type shutdown-a.

3. Endless Command prompt windows
This will open up a series of command prompt windows that will never end.
The basic idea is that there are two .bat files that open the other one when opened, so the other one opens the first one again and the windows just won't stop coming.

How to do this:
1. Fire up notepad and type: start 2.bat
2. Save it as 1.bat (make sure you choose all files when saving it)
3. Make another new text document and type: start 1.bat
4. Save it as 2.bat into the same folder as the other one.

All you have to do to start it is to click on either of them.

The only way to stop it is to wait for the windows to become so numerous that they are a group on the taskbar. Then you can use Close group to get rid of the bastards.

4. Fake Command prompt viruses
This is also a good way to make the victim believe that a worm is gnawing at their hard drive and that they can't do anything to stop it.

Open up notepad and type @echo off

To make text appear, type it after an echo tag.
To have the the commands wait for the user to press any key type pause

(Note: if you write pause >nul it won't display Press Any key to continue...)

To have a complete high-speed description of files in the drive of the .bat file, type dir /s
You can also initiate any other command we covered earlier, such as shutdown, error message, etc.

And why no include all of these in one fake virus?

For example:

I can't post the batch files here, as sharing .bat files over the internet is illegal.
Make sure you don't do anything stupid with these tips.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

How to move the cursor with your head

2008-03-31T19:16:00.008+03:00

This is probably one of the coolest things I've posted here so far. With any cheap webcam and a free piece of software from IBM, you can move your cursor, click, type text with an on-screen keyboard and much more - just by moving your head.

What you need:
1. a head (duh)
2. a webcam
3. Head tracking pointer by IBM

The download is easy, just fill out the form to create an IBM id and press download. You also need to extract the zip folder to any comfortable location.

How to use:
The program itself is very smart and will discover any webcams connected.
To start, connect your webcam and open the head tracker.

It needs quite a lot of light to work well, but not too much, or it won't tell your nose apart from the rest of your over-lighted face.

Tilt your head left and right 3 times and look straight at the center of the screen to let it find your nose position, which it will use to determine where you're looking at. You can repeat this at any time, if it starts tracking incorrectly. The pointer should automatically move to the screen center when it finds your nose shadows.

To move the pointer, gently move your head to look at the place you want it to go.
To click, stare at the same spot for approx. 3 seconds. Turn clicking on first from the Main menu to allow clicking. The menu also has buttons for double-clicking, right-clicking and for dragging and dropping.

You can also open the on-screen keyboard:
Start > All Programs > Accessories > Accessibility > On-screen keyboard

Although it will take some time to get used to, this hands-free alternative can be quite fun if you want a change.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

How to make an older program run in Windows XP

2008-03-30T10:16:00.002+03:00

When you want to run a program designed for a previous version of windows, right click on it, open properties and choose the Compatibility tab. Check the box for run this program in compatibility mode and choose the operating system it was made for. If you aren't sure, try them all and see which one works best.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

How to increase your internet speed

2008-03-30T09:08:00.004+03:00

By default, most systems have some bandwidth reserved for nothing. You can change this the following way: (Note: this only works in Windows XP Professional)

Open gpedit.msc from the run box in the start menu.
Navigate to: Local Computer Policy > Computer configuration > Administrative templates > Network > QoS Packet Scheduler
Open Limit Reservable Bandwidth
Check the enabled box and change the Bandwidth Limit to 0%.

Depending on your system, this might need a restart to start working.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

The ultimate Windows configuration tool

2008-03-29T21:36:00.000+02:00

This is called the Local Group Policy Editor and it lets you customize just about everything on your XP. This only comes with XP Professional, so the registry editor will have to do for Home users.
Go to run from the start menu and type gpedit.msc to open it.

Look around and see for yourself what this wonderful tool has to offer.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

5 tips to surf faster in the web

2008-03-28T15:18:00.005+02:00

These tips will show you how to surf the internet a lot faster.

1. When typing a web address into the address bar, just type the website and press Ctrl + Enter to add http://www. to the beginning and .com to the end. E.g. you want to go to google: type google and press Ctrl + Enter. It's as easy as that!
(Note: this only works with .com addresses.)

2. Use tabs instead of separate windows. This is a lot faster and doesn't mess up your taskbar.

3. Use Firefox. Firefox is a much safer than I.E. and is also a little faster. It has many useful plugins.

4. Press Ctrl and + to zoom in the text and Ctrl and - to zoom out.

5. If you can't find what you're looking for on google and yahoo, try a metasearch engine such as dogpile, which compiles results from most popular search engines.

Happy browsing!

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

How to change your IP adress

2008-03-27T22:25:00.003+02:00

If you get your IP blocked somewhere and you don't like it, then this can be pretty useful.

One way is to just turn off your router for some time, but most people don't have static IP routers and this won't help.

If that didn't help, then you have to renew your IP using windows' command prompt.

1. Type cmd into the run box from the start menu.
2. Type ipconfig into the command prompt. This will show you basic info about your IP address.
3. Type ipconfig /release. This will remove your current IP.
4. Type ipconfig /renew, and you will be presented with a new IP address!

You can also make a .bat program to execute these commands when opened.
To do this, open notepad and write all the commands on a separate line and save it onto your desktop as ip_renewer.bat. Make sure you choose All files when saving it.

It should be like this:

ipconfig
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
pause

(Tip: If you want to see your IP info and stop the renewer program from closing itself, type pause after the commands.)

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

How to capture a screenshot

2008-03-17T10:51:00.004+02:00

I'm surprised that many people don't actually know this, and reach for their camera to take a picture of the current screen image.

Most keyboards have a special button Prt Scr / Sys Rq on them. It's just to the right from F12. When pressed, it captures the current screen into a bmp image which can be pasted (Ctrl + V) into any image editing software. Even Paint will do.

The only problem is that you can only take one screenshot, if you take another, the previous one will be erased. The .bmp file also takes a lot of space and compressing to .jpg is better.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

Shortcut of the week: Changing text size in browser

2008-03-16T18:02:00.004+02:00

Tap Ctrl and + to make text larger or Ctrl and - to make text smaller.

PS: Sorry for no posts the last few days, my internet was down.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

How to speed up your PC: Display settings

2008-03-08T07:57:00.006+02:00

By disabling unneeded visual effects, you can speed up your windows xp pretty much.

How to change display effects:

Go to control panel from the start menu
Open performance and maintenance
Choose adjust visual effects
In the window that appears, uncheck any effects that you don't consider necessary, or just choose "Let Windows choose what's best for my computer"
Hit OK and you're done!

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

Speeding up your XP: Disabling unwanted programs at startup

2008-03-07T16:12:00.004+02:00

You probably need only half the programs that have been set to be loaded at startup. Having too many programs drastically slows down your startup. It's very easy to specify which ones you want to start automatically. It's wise to leave all the anti virus and system tools.

Here's what you need to do:

Go to Run from the Start menu
Open "msconfig" (without the quotes!) and click OK
In the windows that opens, choose the Startup tab
Make your choices by unchecking the programs you don't need to load at startup
Hit OK and restart your PC.
After starting a box appears. Check the option that the dialog box won't display at restart.

That's all!

Check back tomorrow for the next part, display settings.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

News: Internet Explorer 8 BETA released!

2008-03-06T20:41:00.004+02:00

A new beta version of Internet explorer was released this week at the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas. According to Microsoft, the browser will render the Acid2 browser test correctly and supports CSS 2.1. It also has various other bug fixes and improvements. In addition to IE8, Silverlight 2 and Expression Studio 2 (all in beta) were released.

Download

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

How to cheat in Windows Solitaire

2008-03-06T18:02:00.000+02:00

Open up Solitaire from Start -> All Programs -> Games

1. When clicking on the stack in the top-left of the game, three cards will come. To have them come one-by-one, press down Ctrl+Alt+Shift while clicking on the stack.

2. Instantly Win: Alt + Shift + 2

3. Illegal move. Drag any card anywhere and press Escape before you release it.

4. All cards up. Ctrl + A will move any cards up that can move to their suit deck.

Happy cheating!

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

Software Review: TuneUp Utilities 2008

2008-03-03T19:25:00.000+02:00

This is a very useful all-in-one computer performance and speed enhancing program. The interface is simple and easy to use, and it has basically everything you need to speed up your computer. It includes: defragging, registry cleaner, disc cleanup, repair wizard and much more. This definitely helped to speed up my pc and freed up a lot of hard disk space.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

What is the difference between Windows XP Home and Professional editions?

2008-03-02T19:10:00.000+02:00

The differences are not very big and casual home users will find XP Home Edition sufficient.

Windows XP Professional Edition has the following differences:

Administrative Tools in the Start Menu and Control Panel
Automated System Recovery
Boot Configuration Manager
DriverQuery
Group Policy Refresh Utility
Multi-lingual User Interface (MUI) add-on
NTFS Encryption Utilitiy
Offline Files and Folders
OpenFiles
Performance Log Manager
Remote Desktop
Scheduled Tasks Console
Security Template Utility
Taskkill
Tasklist
Telnet Administrator

XP professional also provides support for multi-processor systems (several CPUs), Dynamic Disks and Fax.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

Design your own icons

2008-03-01T20:50:00.000+02:00

This is very easy and gives your PC a customized look.

1. Fire up Paint from Start-All Programs-Accessories.
2. Press Ctrl + E and set the image size to 32 x 32 px.
3. Draw your icon or minimize a picture
4. Save as filename.ico
5. Right-click on a folder and open the properties window. Click on the customize tab an the Choose Picture button and locate your icon.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

Toggling autoplay.

2008-02-29T19:35:00.003+02:00

Autoplay is very useful, but can also be a security risk.

To turn it on or off:
1. Open gpedit.msc from the run box from the start menu.
2. Navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System
3. Find Turn off autoplay

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

How to show "Hibernate" on the shutdown menu

2008-02-29T19:06:00.005+02:00

For some reason, this isn't enabled by default.
To be able to view the hibernate option, just press shift in the shutdown menu and Standby will be replaced by hibernate. To switch back to standby, release shift.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks

How to make your XP look like Vista: Transformation packs (update)

2008-02-28T15:19:00.004+02:00

If you are not satisfied with just a Vista theme, installing a transformation pack will completely transform the computer. Your startup will look like vista, logon will look like vista and all the icons will be transformed into vista too.

Of course you will want the Vista theme as well, because the transformation pack doesn't change the theme.

A free Vista transformation pack for Windows XP

The original article covering themes and icon sets

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

Windows XP Shortcut of the Week: Alt+Tab - Switching between open windows

2008-02-27T20:54:00.004+02:00

Alt+Tab - Switching between open windows.

Hold down Alt and press tab repeatedly to select any open window.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

How to rename the Recycle bin.

2008-02-25T20:03:00.005+02:00

If you want a totally customized Windows XP, then renaming the Recycle Bin can be quite useful. You could rename it to trash, garbage [or pretty much anything you can imagine ;) ].

Follow these steps to rename the Recycle Bin:

1. Open up the Registry editor by typing regedit into the run box from the Start Menu.

2. Locate HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/CLSID/{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}

3. Change the registry value "Recycle Bin" To anything. (Remember to exclude the quotes!)

And you're done!
You may have to restart your pc to see the changes...

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

Cool Windows XP tips & tricks: How to enable fast user switching.

2008-02-22T16:59:00.001+02:00

User switching is the fastest way to switch to a different user account.
This lets you have several accounts logged in at the same time, but only one of them interacts with the keyboard, mouse, etc. and is open, while the rest continue to run open programs.

To enable fast user switching:

1. Go to Control Panel and click on user accounts.

2. Click the User accounts icon in the Control Panel icons section to open the User accounts window.

3. Click "change the way users log on and off"

4. Check the box "Use Fast User Switching"

And you're done! To Switch users, open log off from the start menu and click "switch user" or just press Windows Key + L.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

Cool XP tips & tricks: Disabling the Welcome screen

2008-02-20T23:59:00.005+02:00

This feature is very useful if you have only one user account on your computer. The bad thing is that you can't have it ask for a password.

To disable the welcome screen:

Open the Start Menu and select run. Type "control userpasswords2" into the box.
In the user accounts window choose the users tab and clear the box "Users must enter a name and password to use this computer".
Click OK and type your user name and password in the dialog box.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE

Cool Xp tips & tricks: Set sound to events

2008-02-20T23:59:00.004+02:00

It's fun to have a customized sound scheme. You can change the sounds that xp plays when you start your computer, log on, receive an error, etc. You can even record your own sounds.

To change the sound scheme:
Go to Control panel from the Start menu and click on Sounds, speech and audio devices.
Click on change the sound scheme.
Save your previous scheme if you want to and click on any event in the Program Events box to choose its sound.

More Cool Windows XP tips & tricks HERE