In my last article (An Explanation of the Pros and Cons of Using RAID on Your Computer), we discussed the problem of heat build-up during the very hot Auckland summer months and how a RAID 5 configuration with 4 disks can sustain the failure of a single disk. RAID protections provide one part of what should be an overall strategy to protect your data and your computer from heat.

In this piece we divert a bit from our standard hardware/software fare and look at the computing environment as a whole. We will postulate that a tidy workspace is, in fact, a happy workspace and suggest a few tricks to make your work-space more productive and more comfortable.

The three biggest factors driving the design of my workspace are heat, noise and clutter. If I can minimise these three and maximize my computing power and productivity (all within family budget constraints, of course), I will have archived the objective.

The three primary physical components available for modification are the room, the cabinet and the PC (also referred to as the Box or Tower).

The Room:

The ideal design would be a copy of a corporate computer room with climate control, raised floor and glass interior walls. Your computers would be rack-mounted and networked throughout your house with a patch panel to distribute computer services to every room.

If you’ve got the resources, and your wife will let you do it – please do.

The rest of us are probably stuck with a home office which is usually a converted bedroom, and we don’t have a lot of latitude for change.

My office has several problems that affect my productivity.

• It gets messy
• It gets hot
• and It gets noisy

As I get older I find it more and more important to keep my resources organised. So much stuff had accumulated in my office that I was spending more time looking for a resource than I was actually using it. Problem area #1 was first on my hit list. It is also made up of several components:

• Tools and parts and papers lying about
• Wires connecting the various bits of equipment
• Three out of five times the part or tool I needed was elsewhere

Number 1 has been the easiest to tackle with a quick fix. I’ve instituted a “no shop work” policy and banned all of my “project” tools back to the workshop in the garage. Additionally, I’ve developed an exit strategy that requires me to tidy up the office each night so I can hit the ground running in the morning.

To reduce the clutter and improve the look of the room a good part of the project was dedicated to removing or hiding all the visible wires.

Capping:

Ok, I confess, this picture is a bit staged and I wish I’d taken more pictures of the mess before blasting through with a clean-up, but you get the idea and probably have a scene like this of your own very much like it.

Capping is a square pipe tacked against the floorboard with a snap-on cover. Just tack the 3-sided part against the wall where you need it, run the wire inside, and then snap on the cover. Not quite as tidy as running the wire through the wall, but you need special tools and know-how to accomplish that. Capping is sold in a variety of sizes.

A big advantage to capping is that the cover can be removed and the wiring reconfigured to meet changing conditions.

Under the Carpet:

Depending on the size of your wire and size of the gap between the carpet and the molding, a thin wire can often be hidden in that space. Speaker wire is a good candidate for this, coaxial wire less so.

The wire can be pushed into the gap with almost anything that isn’t sharp (don’t use a fork for example). A chopstick is my tool of choice, there are more dangerous options …

Whenever you need to go under the carpet, always stay as close to the wall as possible – even the thinnest speaker wire will produce a lump.

Over the Roof:

In some circumstances a wire on the roof might be the best plan. The wire obviously needs to be of a grade that can withstand outdoor conditions, and any joins require extra weather- and water-proofing. Just be sure to tack it down securly. The tacks (below) are a good option as is hot glue or silicon. Don’t want the wire making any noise on a windy night.

Exterior wiring will eventually need to extend back into a room, a terminating plate (like the one shown above) is easy to install and gives the work a professional look.

Power Leads:

Mounting a power board on the back of a unit or on a nearby wall can give the appearance of order and the excess cable can be gathered and secured above the floor with cable ties, rubber bands, whatever, but a word of caution here, don’t wind up a big length of mains extension wire and leave it on the floor – it becomes a magnetic coil, heats up and bursts into flames.

Power leads emit radiation that can interfere with voice, data and video communication. As a general rule it’s best to keep the two types of cable separate. If you must run the two together and you get interference on the com lines, investigate shielded com lines as an alternative.

Many power boards have mounting holes on the back side of the board. In my experience these holes are very hard to line up correctly. Instead I’ll drill through those holes as they seem to be located in positions that avoid any internal wires and mount the board with screws drilled in from the front. Be sure to counter-sink the holes so that the top of the screw is flush with the board face and doesn’t interfere with any plugs.

Vanity Panel:

Basically it’s a large sheet of material that acts to cover the ugly stuff behind it

If you’ve run wiring through your desk some wires may hang down and look at bit messy, you can tidy these wires behind a panel to hide them from view. If you put this panel on hinges or make it easily removable you will still have plenty of flexibility should an equipment change be required.

You can do the same thing with walls

an inexpensive noticeboard did the trick here. I re-wired the power lead on my “Cent-o-Meter” to feed directly into the box eliminating the plug, and pinned the USB lead on my Weather Centre behind the board so it doesn’t show up quite so much.

Capping on Steroids:

In my particular situation a large number of cables must be run from the desk where my keyboard mouse and monitors are to the computer cabinet where my 2 PCs live crossing a space of clear carpet about a metre wide.

The solution shown below is a section of white square box down pipe attached to the wall with 2 screws. The shot above gives some indication of the wiring that would otherwise be exposed. A curtain rod is used to thread the cables from one end to the other.

In this picture you can also see another important tool in cable management – the white tags indicating what is at the far end. They are a bit pricey – $4.00 (US) for a pack of 24 but they can save you time and frustration when you are tracking down a fault in your system.

Cable Tidies:

There is a variety of gizmos available to help you in this effort. Number one is a pieces of 2 – 4 meters plastic tube split down the middle, into which a special installation tool can placed that will enable you to cover and contain a collection of wires. One big wire is easier work with (and looks better) than a bunch of smaller wires.

Number 2 is simple and free, although perhaps best suited to storing unused cables.

Number 3 – This “handcuff” looking device works like one too to clamp a number of loose cables in a single large thread.

Number 4 – These holders are fixed to the desk or the wall and hold a group of wires in place.

Number 5 – Velcro. Fairly expensive, but very re-usable

And lastly, Number 6 comes from the garden store. It’s a simple spool of light wire with a built-in cutter at the base. Intended for flowers, the wire does a good job on quick, temporary jobs.

Having a clean and tidy workspace may not be for everyone – it requires a little more work and a bit of discipline and may not, in the end, enhance your productivity. I’ve worked under my new regime for about a month now and I think I’m a bit more productive, but I know it keeps my wife happy and I find thinking about going in to my office to work a more pleasant experience.

But I won’t claim a final victory now. As with the currently accepted scientific theory: it’s only true until it’s not. In our next episode we’ll look at heat and noise.

In our next chapter we’ll take a look the storage cabinet and modifications to the PCs – both designed to improve system cooling.

About Deck Hazen

A computer user since 1976, Deck enjoys testing new software and reconfiguring his equipment to squeeze the most out of it. "Computing has come a long way since those early days" Deck recalls "I get a real kick out of watching the industry grow - getting paid to write about it is just icing on the cake!"

Background: the Warning Signs

Summers can get pretty hot here in Auckland. The average temperature for this time of year is 24 degrees Celsius (that’s 75 degrees Fahrenheit to North Americans) with 99% humidity so it’s no simple matter to keep a computer cool.

Your computers resources are not infinite and each time a new program is called, a portion of the total resource is used and as we chew through the systems resource we eventually reach a point where the resources are no longer sufficient for the proper functioning of the system.

At that point many things can happen starting with “nothing” happening to a full on “Blue Screen of Death” forced re-boot.

In most cases no error message is produced, or the message that is produced has nothing to do with the actual problem that may be discovered later. What we notice is that the system starts acting “weird”. Commands don’t get executed, we lose icons, a simple file copy takes 3 times as long as it should … and at some point we make the decision to shut everything down and start again fresh with a reboot.

Some time ago (more than a year) I found that I had to re-boot my systems far more often on hot days than on cool days.

Eventually it dawned on me that at least some these faults might be the result of overheating.

I asked my wife if we could turn her sewing room into an air-conditioned computer room with hardware racks and a raised floor – but she said “No”. Women – go figure.

My fallback plan “B” called for the installation of more internal fans into my boxes, and while this seemed to alleviate the faults, it also made the room a lot noisier.

In an effort to reduce the office noise levels I had a cabinet built to house the four computers I had at the time. I included several ventilation holes that I hoped would be sufficient.

The result was a large desk-shaped oven. The multiple 6-inch vent holes weren’t nearly enough to extract the trapped heat so it just got hotter and hotter. I had to take off the cabinet doors and even the PC covers and direct a large office fan directly into the cavity to bring the operating temperature down to a safe level. In the end, for a time, the office was hotter and noisier than ever. (more about this in our next article)

I mention my heat problems because for a long time I attributed all of my “un attributable” faults to it. In particular, the one that bugged me the most was the loss of my RAID array.

The first time I noticed it was a bit of a shock given that the drive holds all my data and my “backups” discipline is a bit loose, but after some investigation and a few reboots it became clear that the array hadn’t disappeared, it had only failed to mount.

I’ve configured this PC with 2 partitions – the boot drive (“C:\”) is a separate physical HDD so the system boots up fine, it just has no second partition which is a virtual drive made up of 4 physical drive and combined by RAID to a single “D:\” drive.

No error message was produced and in fact, the report from the HighPoint RAID management system told me that the array was “Normal” apart from the number 2 disk running a bit hot.

In order to recover the folders I had to power down the box and reboot at least once, and sometimes more, to get the virtual “D:\” drive back on line.

I sent off a note to the HighPoint group via their support web page and got an email back saying their support guy was on vacation and gave me an alternate address to contact. No reply came back from the alternate email.

I used the support page to request an update on the status of my fault report and shortly thereafter I got an email saying that my trouble ticket had been updated. I logged back in to the support site only to find that the “update” was my own query asking them for an update.

Around this time I’d been posting my problem off to my various forums and one kind reader wrote me to point out that if I really wanted to back up a 1.5Tb RAID array, I’d need a 1.5Tb backup disk to do it. He was right of course, but it was a depressing kind of right – there is a good measure of fault tolerance built into the RAID software, but it is fault “tolerance” not fault “proof”. If you lose a second disk before you can replace the first fail, you will lose the array.

The lack of progress on this issue and a growing frustration with the supplier drove me to consider an article on “the failure of raid technology and its suppliers”. Fortunately a lucky-un-lucky break intervened.

“We had to destroy the village in order to save it”

Have you ever had an intermittent fault on a system that you couldn’t pinpoint, but you knew it was in a particular subsystem, so you just whacked the subsystem with a hammer to get the whole thing replaced?

Fortunately for me, fate held the hammer this time.

As disk failures go, the “head crash” (see Wikipedia) has to be one of the most dramatic. It’s a catastrophic hardware fault that occurs when a read-write head (works like the needle on a turntable) comes into contact with the surface of the disks platter which is spinning around at 7200 Rpm.

On February 1st, a noise that sounded very much like a high-speed dentist drill came screaming from my PC. Checking the RAID Management page I could see the number 2 drive had indeed failed. (I’ve put a sound file on my web site if you want to hear it Barracuda Head Crash.wav)

Securing a replacement drive (a Western Digital) I had a go at getting it integrated into my system but the first attempt failed miserably (“no available drive found”). After figuring out that the drive had to be formatted first it only took only a minute to install, and then another 8 hours to mirror the drive back in the array restoring my system to peak performance.

Since February 1, and with additional system cooling modifications, both servers have run well although I still can’t close the cabinet doors. My confidence in RAID technology is solidified, and I’m very happy to re-recommend a RAID 5 solution for any situation that requires a large logical drive for optimum disk utilization and data protection with a lower cost of ownership profile than simply doubling the number of disks.

One down, One to go

Bolstered by the success with the disk failure I pushed ahead for a solution to the disappearing drive problem and sent another email off to HighPoint. I got a note back directing me to their Chinese web site to download the latest drivers, BIOS, and web management tools. It sounded like a fob to get me off their backs, but those basic steps – even if they never seem to work, must be undertaken in order to move on to the next step.

On March 1, I found the driver, bios, and application files on their web site and they were, indeed, different from the ones I’d obtained earlier from their US web site (why didn’t they just update the US files themselves?)

I installed the 4 new files and I guess it must have worked — 4 or 5 reboots since the install and not a missing drive in sight!

I won’t claim a final victory however. As with the currently accepted scientific theory: it’s only true until it’s not.

About Deck Hazen

A computer user since 1976, Deck enjoys testing new software and reconfiguring his equipment to squeeze the most out of it. "Computing has come a long way since those early days" Deck recalls "I get a real kick out of watching the industry grow - getting paid to write about it is just icing on the cake!"

But wait, there is something you may try first … before shutting it down “ungracefully”…

Using RESMON

1. When the application locks up, click Start and type: resmon in the search box.
2. Right-Click the RESMON.EXE and run it as an Administrator .
3. In the CPU pane, find the process that’s locked up (it should be indicated in red).
4. Right click it and select “Analyze Wait Chain.”

If there are two or more processes shown, the one at the end of the list is the one that’s locking up your application. If it’s not a critical process (i.e., an essential windows or application component), you can check it and click “End Process.”

Depending on your level of luck, this should release your application and it will start responding again.

It doesn’t work every time, but it’s worth a try – Good Luck!

If you would like to know more about the Resource Monitor, check out this article by Rich.

About Thomas

Computer geek from the age of 7, which amounts to 30 years of computer experience. From the early days (when every computer company had their own OS) of DOS, Windows 1.0 through Seven...

The System Health Report is a great feature of Windows 7 that will help you find potential problems with your PC and point you in the right direction to a resolution. This report records details about your computer’s performance, resource usage, and more and includes diagnostic information about things that aren’t working with resolution suggestions.

Specifically, the report includes:

• Diagnostic Results (Warnings, Performance)
• Software Configuration (OS Checks, Security Center Information, System Services, Startup Programs)
• Hardware Configuration (Disk Checks, Systems, Desktop Rating, BIOS, Devices)
• CPU (Process, Service, Services, System)
• Network (TCP, Interface, IP, UDP)
• Disk (Hot files, Disk breakdown, Physical disk, NTFS Performance)
• Memory (Processes, Counters)

In this guide, we’ll cover the following:

1. How to run a system health check.
2. View the output of a system health check.
3. Research Issues.
4. Fix Issues.
5. Get help with reported issues.

Run a System Health Check

To run a system health check:

1. Press Winkey+R (Start > Run…)
2. Type perfmon /report and press Enter.

The report will now gather necessary information:

After one minute, the report will be available:

View the Output of a System Health Check

The output from a system health check can look a little overwhelming but it can be broken down into smaller chunks to see potential problems.

For the basics system checks part of the report, we see there are failures on:

• Security Center Tests
• System Service Tests
• Hardware Device and Driver Tests

The resources look good. If they don’t you can keep an eye on them by reading last weeks guide on resource monitor:

Now we’ve identified the issues, lets take a deeper look through the report.

Research Issues

As mentioned above, there are problems with the following areas:

• Security Center Tests
• System Service Tests
• Hardware Device and Driver Tests

Let’s see what’s up with the security center tests and hardware and device driver tests.

Failure with Security Center Tests

I had the following failure with the security center test:

The information tells me that Security Center has not recorded an anti-virus product:

I did some research online (as I have Microsoft Security Essentials installed) and found that I’m not the only one with this issue (a thorough read of the thread is quite entertaining as someone repeatedly tries to help but doesn’t understand the issue at hand.)

So, for the Security Center Issues, we’re in the clear (although, in the writing of this guide, we managed to stumble upon a glitch in MSE/System Health Checker.)

Fix Issues

Another issue was with Hardware Device and Driver Tests. This time we may have a real problem on our hand:

We see that a network device is disabled (which is on purpose, but let’s see how to fix this issue any way.)

To fix the issue with a disabled network adapter:

1. Click the Network icon in the notification area, and click Open Network and Sharing Center.

   

2. Click Change adapter settings.

   

3. Right click the disabled adapter and click Enable.

Get Help with Reported Problems

There are two good ways to get help with reported problems that you aren’t able to find an answer to with research:

1. Email the report to a friend.
2. Get help on Windows Forums.

If you choose to get help with reported issues, you should save the report to send to a friend via email or attach to a post in Windows Forums.

Save a Report

To save your report:

1. Click File > Save As…

   
   

2. Give the report a name.

   

3. Open the report with Internet Explorer (or your favorite browser) to make sure it works before sending:

Get Help with Issues on Windows Forums

Looking to get help from our friendly members of Windows Forums, check this guide for tips on how to get help: How to Get Great Help with Windows from Windows Forums.

About Rich

Rich is the owner and creator of Windows Guides; he spends his time breaking things on his PC so he can write how-to guides to fix the problems he creates.

In this guide, we talk more about Windows 7′s Resource Monitor. Previously, Angel Luis showed you how to determine if you need more RAM using Windows 7′s resource monitor. In this guide, we’ll show you what else you can monitor with Resource Monitor and help you interpret the data it gives.

Open Resource Monitor

To open Resource Monitor, either:

Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc and, when Windows Task Manager loads, click Resource Monitor…:

Or:

Click the Start button and click All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Resource Monitor.

View System Information with Resource Monitor

Resource monitor has five tabs:

1. Overview.
2. CPU.
3. Memory.
4. Disk.
5. Network.

In this guide, we’ll take a look at the information offered on the CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network tabs. The Overview is, surprisingly, an overview of these four tabs.

Resource Monitor CPU Tab

Much like Task Manager, the CPU tab gives detailed information on all processes using the CPU; however, the CPU tab also shows detailed information on the Associated Handles and Associated Modules of a process:

Associated Handles

Associated Modules

How do I interpret this data?

The key take home from this tab is to find processes that are using lots of CPU when you are low on CPU (or when CPU usage is abnormally high under idle usage.) Once identified, you can Kill the process (right click) and try opening it again. If the problem persists (and the usage is abnormally high), try reinstalling the software causing the high CPU usage or upgrading the latest (and in some cases a previous, less-bloated) version.

What’s a Handle?

A handle is a pointer to a system element such as a file, event, registry key etc.

What’s a Module?

Modules are programs or files used to support a process (like a .DLL — dynamic link library.)

Resource Monitor Memory Tab

If you’re running at 80%+ memory, you should identify and kill processes that are hogging up your system (running out of memory will slow down your computer a lot because you will start thrashing — storing data from memory on your hard disk to make more room for current processes.)

Here’s what the Memory tab looks like:

How do I interpret this data?

You should sort the data, by clicking the column heading, to find hard faults (a sign of failing memory) and by Working Set and Private to find the real memory hogs.

What is Working Set Memory?

Working set memory is the amount of physical memory currently being used by a process.

What is Private Memory?

Private memory is the amount of physical memory in use by a process that can’t be shared with other processes; thus, programs using lots of private memory can cause system problems as they require so much of your resources.

What if I see lots of hard faults?

If you see lots of hard faults, you should consider adding more memory as your system is writing current memory to the page file (due to low memory availability.) If you don’t see high memory usage but lots of hard faults, test your memory.

Resource Monitor Disk Tab

The Disk tab shows IO (input/output) activity on your hard disks. If your computer is slowing down, you may find it’s due to too much IO. A program you are using may be slowed down because it is waiting for information to be retrieved from disk (i.e. a photo album application that has to wait for photos to load) or because you are too low on memory and lots of the memory is being paged to your hard disk (see above for more information about memory thrashing.)

Here’s what the disk tab looks like:

How do I interpret this data?

Check the processes with disk activity and look for processes that stand out on disk reading and writing (i.e. the numbers are really high.) As you can see in the screenshot about, Snagit32.exe is reading and writing more than any other programs. In this case it makes sense because it was writing the screenshot I just took to disk. If, however, something like spambot.exe is reading lots of data, kill the process and run a virus scan!

Resource Monitor Network Tab

The final tab is the Network tab, which shows current network activity on your PC:

The Network Activity pane shows network connections and how much data is being sent. If you see a process on here that really shouldn’t be sending and receiving data (i.e. if Photoshop was sending data to Adobe servers, kill it and find out why it’s “phoning home” — yes, Adobe have done this before and were sending statistical data to Omniture.)

You can also see which programs have ports open. Notice the ports opened by Apple services. After investigating them, I found them all to be legitimate (if not a little invasive) connections.

How do I interpret this data?

Read the explanations above and look for either:

• Programs with abnormally high network activity.
• Programs with network activity that really shouldn’t be connecting to anything.

I’d then go to a search engine and find out why these programs are contacting other addresses through your network interface.

Well there you have it: a basic explanation of the goodness that comes from using Resource Monitor. What did I miss? For what purposes do you use Resource Monitor?

About Rich

Rich is the owner and creator of Windows Guides; he spends his time breaking things on his PC so he can write how-to guides to fix the problems he creates.

This time I’ll show you how to Hide important information inside a Notepad document.

It has been reported that this doesn’t work on FAT partitions, only NTFS.  But if it does – let me know.

Notepad is usually used to open and edit small text files or batch-files. What I’m sure you didn’t know is that it can also be used to safely (and securely) store important (read:Secret) information. The hidden text remains hidden from windows and any other resource unless you know it exist and what it is called.

To achieve this we create two notepad documents (text files) and hide one of them inside the other. One of the documents will remain visible, hiding the other one. Sounds Complicated ?

It’s not – Here’s how

1. Open the folder where you want to store your hidden document (I use c:\secret )
2. In the adress field (URL) type the following:
   


   notepad ShowThisFile.txt:HideThisFile.txt


   NOTICE the Colon [ : ] in-between the filenames?  That one is the secret.
   You can choose any filename you like – only make sure they are something you will remember later on.

3. Windows will now display an error, saying it cannot find the file in question.
   Click YES, to create the new file.
   
4. Type in your secrets, Save and Close the Document
5. In the folder you will now see one new document called: ShowThisFile.txt
   
   Open it – what do you see ? It’s blank!
   Type in some unimportant information so no one expects its to be a decoy.
6. Save the File and Close it

Anyone opening the file will only see the unimportant information that you typed in. Unless you know the Hidden Filename you will not be able to open the hidden part. So make sure it is something you definitively will remember.

Access the hidden part of the document

Opening the hidden part is not that difficult, but nothing is – once you know the secret.

1. Open the folder where you keep the document named: ShowThisFile.txt
2. In the adress-field, type in:  notepad ShowThisFile.txt:HideThisFile.txt
3. Voilá – the hidden part of the document is revealed, until you close the document.

Usable ??

Well, I don’t know how usable this function is, but I am sure you wish you had known about this one a long time ago, am I right ?

One last tip:  If you like, you can also do this using the Command Line Tool (cmd.exe).

About Thomas

Computer geek from the age of 7, which amounts to 30 years of computer experience. From the early days (when every computer company had their own OS) of DOS, Windows 1.0 through Seven...

Windows Guides’ Rating	User Rating	Compatible with
3.5 out of 5	Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.

PROS: Free. Low resource usage. Made for geeks at heart.

CONS: Still a little rough around the edges (got a couple of unhandled exceptions with the disk monitor.)

VERDICT: Give it a try and see if you like it!

PRICE: Free

VERSION REVIEWED: 1.00401

DOWNLOAD: SuperbarMonitor

Requires . NET Framework 3.5 (included in Windows 7.)

SuperbarMonitor Features

SuperbarMonitor (currently) monitors the following resources and settings on your computer:

• Battery Life
• CPU
• Memory
• Disk usage
• Volume

It displays them in your taskbar:

I’m sure more features are being added all the time like the ability to change the volume from the SuperbarMonitor.Volume monitor.

How to Use SuperbarMonitor

Download the latest zip file package and extract the files to a folder:

Double click on each monitor executable to launch it. Close a monitor by right clicking it and clicking Close.

What do you think? Is this something you’d use?

Download SuperbarMonitor

Download SuperbarMonitor

About Rich

Rich is the owner and creator of Windows Guides; he spends his time breaking things on his PC so he can write how-to guides to fix the problems he creates.

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.

You simply copy this .scr file into “C:\Windows\System32\”, then this screensaver will be available to select and configure like all the others.

Then you need to ensure that it will work with any user and not only Administrators. This you do by allowing access to a specific key in the registry.

Run the Registry Editor

When you have opened the Registry Editor, you goto;

HKEY_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMappings\Control.ini

Right-click on “Control.ini” and click Permissions.

In the Group or Usernames box, add Everyone, and then click Advanced.

In the next dialogue box, with “Everyone” selected, click on Edit.

Click the Set Value and Create Subkey check boxes to select them.

Click OK, and then click Apply and OK, and then click Apply and OK again.

Close Regedit

This causes the screensaver to work with any user that is logged on.

The last thing to do is to make sure the user does not change the screensaver to another one that will not perform the log-off function. This you need to set-up in the Group Policy Editor.

When you have opened the Group Policy Editor, you go to:

User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Control Panel -> Personalization

Set “Screen Saver Timeout” to 300

Set “Force Specific Screen Saver” to %SystemRoot%\System32\winexit.scr

Set “Prevent Changing Screen Saver” to Enabled

Set “Enable Screensaver” to Enabled

Close GPedit

Now, when the user has not moved the mouse or hasn’t typed anything in 5 minutes, the PC will be logged off automatically, allowing other users to make use of the network resources otherwise engaged.

About Spazz

Tired of seeing your icons constantly re-arranged ?

Every time you swap between screen resolutions, or turn on (or off) your dual monitor, you will most probably experience that you have to re-arrange your desktop icons.

Many of the applications for dual monitor have a feature for saving and restoring the position (and layout) of your Desktop Icons. But if you don’t already have this functionality at hand, then this is for you.

How to Add the Save / Restore Icon Layout functionality to your Context Menu.

As the 64-bit system will not allow you to register a 32-bit DLL (which is what makes this work), depending on your system (32-bit or 64-bit) you have to choose between the following options. If you are in doubt try the 32-bit version, and if that fails try the other one.

32-bit System

1. Download this file: Desktop Icon
2. Unpack it to a temporary folder, and move the file named:  LAYOUT.DLL to the System32 folder (c:\windows\system32)
3. Then Double-Click LAYOUT.REG to add some entries to your registry file

If you wonder about the LAYOUT.DLL file, don’t worry. It’s a free DLL provided by Microsoft  in the Windows NT Resource Kit. Originally designed for the “good old” Windows NT Platform (Windows 2000 etc.), but works on all Windows systems.

64-bit system

1. Download this file: dips64-setup (or from here: http://amip.tools-for.net/files/dips64/)
2. Run the EXE file to install it.
3. SHIFT + RIGHT-CLICK on your desktop to see the entries in your Context menu. You might want to click a few time before you actually see it – but it works

About Thomas

Computer geek from the age of 7, which amounts to 30 years of computer experience. From the early days (when every computer company had their own OS) of DOS, Windows 1.0 through Seven...

This guide does involve editing protected system files and you’ll need administrative permissions to complete it.  This has only been tested on a Windows 7 x86 machine.

Step 1.

We should start by covering our backs and allowing the modification of the necessary file.

Press the WinKey+R to open the Run dialog box.  Type cmd and click OK.

Type these commands in, hitting Enter after each one.

cd %windir%\system32

(Changes working directory to system32)

copy CardGames.dll CardGamesDEFAULT.dll

(Makes a copy of imageres.dll to the same folder)

TAKEOWN /F %windir%\system32\CardGames.dll && ICACLS %windir%\system32\CardGames.dll /GRANT Administrator:F

(Changes ownership to Administrator and allows full control of CardGames.dll)

The Customisation

Step 1.

Download Restorator 2007 from bome.com.  You can get a free-trial or use an alternative like ResHacker.  Restorator is highly recommended however.

Fire up Restorator and press Ctrl+O to invoke the open dialogue box.

Type in %windir%\system32\CardGames.dll and click OK

Head to the toolbar and click Tools > Grab Resources (Ctrl+Shift+G).

In the window that appears, match your settings to the one in the screenshot.  Specify your output folder and click Grab now.

Minimise Restorator for now.

Step 2.

This is where the fun starts!

Go ahead and open the folder of images you just extracted from CardGames.dll.  From here you can now customise the background with your preferred image editor (GIMP comes highly recommended by the members of Windows Forums).  The only backgrounds we’re interested in for now are the “BACKGROUNDSxxxxxX2.JPG. The X2 versions of the backgrounds are unsurprisingly, twice as large as the “BACKGROUNDSxxxxx.JPG”, therefore when we edit & save the “BACKGROUNDSxxxxxX2.JPG”, all we need to do it resize the image in your image editor to 50% of the pixels, Save As…, and overwrite the “BACKGROUNDSxxxxx.JPG” file.

The Replacement

Step 1.

So you’ve got the backgrounds and to where you want them to look.  Or, you’ve decided to completely replace the background.  If you’re completely replacing the background, decide on which one of the default backgrounds you want replace and resize the custom image according to the defaults size;  Note that with Felt, Brown Felt & Red Felt, the black borders in the image must remain.

Brown, Classic & Red Felt = 2048px x 1024px

Red Hearts & Green Nature = 1600px x 992px

Thumbnails = 94px x 98px

In either case, the images need ‘installing’.  In this example, I’ll be customizing the background Classic Felt and replacing Red Hearts.

Note that you can customise or replace any of the theme thumbnails in the same manner (BACKGROUNDSREDFELTTHUMB.PNG for example).  These are displayed in the Change Appearance dialog box in your card games.  (For the sake of keeping the guide as small as possible, we’ll concentrate on the backgrounds.)

Step 2.

Call back Restorator, expand the DATA folder and find your corresponding BACKGROUNDS\xxxxx(X2).JPG in the list.

Drag the image onto the appropriate item in the list.

You’ll know when something has happened in Restorator when you see a small arrow on the item.

I use Photoshop and after saving an image and dropping it into Restorator, its binary data appeared in the Resource Viewer.  Rest assured this doesn’t affect the actual background and is safe to save in this state.

Step 3.

When all of your changes have been made and you’re happy the correct images are in the correct place, go ahead and press Ctrl+S and quit Restorator.

All that is required now is to start-up a card game, press F7, change to the appropriate background (in this case, Green Felt or Red Hearts) and behold your pimped card game!

Return to Default.

To return to the default state all you need to do is close any open card games, navigate to %windir%\system32 in Explorer, delete CardGames.dll and rename CardGamesDEFAULT.dll to CardGames.dll

Want to apply a Mintywhite.com ThemePack to your Card Games?

See here for more info and screenshots!

About Stu