Windows Tools, Help & Guides

On a brand new system (freshly installed) Burning CD’s and DVD’s in Windows 7 is a very fast and enjoyable experience. Then something happens, you suddenly experience that Windows 7 takes for ever to complete a burn session. Some have experienced it taking up to 2,5 hours to complete a DVD. Which would mean a transfer rate of about 370 kb pr. second. where about 4,500 kb pr. second  (15-17 minutes) is considered slow.

What happened ?

There can be a number of reasons, but what you experience might be that your computer (or the device controller) has switched from DMA-Mode to PIO-mode.

Say what?

I’d thought you’d say that. Before we get into how to fix it – let’s look into what DMA and PIO are. Read the rest of this entry »

New to using the command prompt? Check out the Windows Command Prompt Beginner’s Guide

Many guides on this site require you to run commands on the command prompt. This guide is written to show you how to open the command prompt. Specifically, in this guide, you’ll learn:

• How to open a command prompt in Windows.
• How to run the command prompt as an Administrator.

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Back in Windows XP you had a feature called Active Desktop to easily take care of features such as using a webpage as your wallpaper. This has been taken off Windows since Vista and there is no inbuilt program or utility that will let you add an RSS slide show theme. So you have to do some manual work to get it working. I’m sure that wont scare you off, now does it ?

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One of my colleagues asked me recently if it is possible to prevent a certain group of people to use certain PC’s on our company network. If you have a domain set-up, it is quite easy, provided your set-up is done well.

My meaning of “if your set-up is done well” does not refer to how well your server software has been installed or anything of the sort. I refer to how well you have grouped your users in the active directory. We created groups for each level of user in our organisation, so it was quite easy for me to block a particular group of people from using certain workstations.

In this case, I was asked to prevent the Electrical and Instrument guys from using the PC’s allocated to the Mechanical Foremen, as the Electrical & Instrument guys has their own PC’s to work from.

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Some days ago I wrote a post about Hacking InPrivate Browsing, there you find useful information about how to find traces left by Internet Explorer using InPrivate Browsing.

Incognito Mode in Google Chrome, Private Browsing in Firefox, and InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer are, in essence, the same. This feature restricts the information that browser stores while using the internet. What information are we talking about?

• History: If you enter a web page, information about the site, title and URL, as well as when that page was entered is saved.
• Cookies: Many sites need to track information about the user, for example a set of books on a library site. One way to achieve this is using this famous files, named cookies that store the information in user’s computer.
• Cache: If you enter more than once on a website, the browser don’t need to download all components of that site every time. It’s clear that these programs need storage  and a way to organize the files.

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So here’s the scenario.  You already have a working Windows 7 x64 installation on your system and you need to install x86 for testing purposes.

You left your Windows 7 x86 DVD at a friends house and your PC doesn’t support booting from USB.  You’re out of luck right?

UPDATE: You can download the RTM versions of Windows 7 Ultimate, Professional, and Home Premium here (64/32-bit available.)

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