Windows Tools, Help & Guides

If you share your PC with others or let friends use it when they come to visit, you may find that settings get changed, files deleted, programs installed etc. without your consent. I used to use a program called Windows Steady State, which provided a mode to allow access without setting complicated policies to protect your settings. Thankfully in Windows 7, Microsoft have made this level of protection much more readily accessible. Learn, in this guide how to set up a Guest account, which is available in all Windows 7 versions, for infrequent users of your PC.

Please note two things before getting started:

1. You should not use a guest account if you have parental controls set on your children’s accounts.
2. You cannot use Guest mode in an AD environment.

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First off! You know you really ought to upgrade to Service Pack 3. Microsoft ended support for SP2 back in July, and stopped issuing patches for it.

Maybe you’ve had a bad experience with a service pack in the past. Maybe you just don’t like change. Whatever the reason, if you’re stubbornly clinging to SP2, but you need to apply a critical security update that requires SP3, there is a registry edit you can do that will make XP SP2 appear to be an SP3 machine.

Microsoft doesn’t support it, and you do it at your own risk, but here are the steps:

1. Read the rest of this entry »

This book is a gift from the Windows Phone 7 team at Microsoft to the programming community, and I am proud to have been a part of it. Within the pages that follow, I show you the basics of writing applications for Windows Phone 7 using the C# programming language with the Silverlight and XNA 2D frameworks.

Yes, Programming Windows Phone 7 is truly a free download, but for those readers who still love paper—as I certainly do—this book will also be available (for sale) divided into two fully-indexed print editions: Microsoft Silverlight Programming for Windows Phone 7and Microsoft XNA Framework Programming for Windows Phone 7. [Note from Devon: we should have these ready for order in December 2010.]

The second part of this book focuses entirely on Silverlight, and the third part on XNA 2D. For your convenience, the chapters in each part build upon previous knowledge in a progressive tutorial narrative, and hence are intended to be read sequentially.

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I must admit that I am a big fan of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). Since Microsoft has the most popular consumer operating system in the world, why don’t they take up the responsibility in releasing a security program for their users for free? Of course, I am aware that Microsoft has previously released a few – less noticeable security programs, like Windows Defender (pre-installed in Windows Vista/7 and will be disabled if the user installs MSE) and Windows Live OneCare (which was a paid subscription and discontinued), but most Windows users still prefer to use some free security software offered by third parties (and most of them are ad-supported), due to various reasons. Don’t be surprised that some of new PC users aren’t aware of the importance of a security product for Windows, and some don’t have security software installed (and they aren’t aware that they are exposed to the various threats during browsing), so it is pretty important (and I think it’s quite fundamental) for Microsoft to have a competitive in-house security program for all Windows users, for free of course, and the answer is Microsoft Security Essentials. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft have responded to a recent Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Release Candidate (or SP1 RC) leak by actually releasing it.

SP1 for Microsoft’s most popular Operating System brings plenty of bug fixes and enhancements.

Notable additions are Remote FX and incremental security updates and hot fixes.

Windows 7 SP1 RC can be downloaded via the Microsoft Website.  If you are already participating in the Beta go to Windows update and install the RC.
The x86 iteration of the SP is a heavy 514.7MB with x64 weighing in at a staggering 865.4MB.

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You might have seen it being used in some of the tips here on mintywhite. But what are BAT- and VBS-files, and what is the difference between them ?

The short version is that both kinds are small script files that can be used to execute functions or to do repetitive tasks. BAT is short for BATCH-file and is a very simple script-language from back then, when DOS was the ultimate PC OS. Some years later Microsoft decided (after much pun from the Linux, and Unix communities) to upgrade the functionality, thus creating VBS.

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