No system is an island - Windows tips and tricks for all.

Will the game run on my system?

2009-11-14T22:20:00.000-08:00

There are few things more frustrating than buying a game which seems to meet all the requirements of your system and then not being able to run it.

This is where a neat website - Can you run it? comes in handy,in fact you can just select any game title that you wish to run and check if it can run well on your system or not.
Although it is fairly accurate in it's assessment,it can show games as unplayable based on not meeting of single criteria like say needing a 2.5 GHz processor instead of having 2.2 GHz.However if more than one component are reported as below requirements,one can safely assume that the game will not run smoothly or even run at all.

Handy tool for filtering out system requirements though,all online.

I tried an assessment for COD4 - Modern Warfare and reported specs were above recommended,funnily other games like Assasin's Creed were shown as unplayable just because processor speed was off from recommended by few hundred MHzs.

It is still a useful tool to give an overall benchmark regarding particular game's performance on your system.

Happy gaming.

How to always run programs with admin rights in Vista

2009-09-12T22:09:00.000-07:00

Most applications need administrator access to ensure they run smoothly in Vista.
I had explained why this is required in an earlier post of mine.

A simple way to make sure admin access is granted to a specific application everytime it runs is by just changing it's privilege level.

To do this,right click on the desktop icon of that application,here I am using The Journal application as an example.

Go to Compatibility tab and select the setting "Run this program as an administrator".

Once activated,the application will now always execute with admin rights.

Cheers.

Scheduling Windows tasks from the command prompt

2009-07-25T00:28:00.000-07:00

Tasks,processes,commands can be scheduled in Windows through Task Scheduler.
But is it possible to do this through few lines using the command prompt?

This is where the "at" command is useful.

Administrator access is needed to schedule,modify or delete tasks using the "at" command.

Suppose the box needs to be shutdown at 7 pm today,this can be done by simply typing
at 19:00 shutdown -s

This will add this particular task in scheduler's queue which can be listed by typing just "at".
I recommend to first check the queue using this command to make sure there are no previous similar jobs queued to avoid conflict.

What if some files need to be copied from one folder to the other at a specified time automatically?
Again "at" is to the rescue.

To copy all files from the Documents folder to the Somedata folder at midnight, type the following line, and then press ENTER:

at 00:00 cmd /c copy C:\Documents\*.* C:\Somedata

If you want to delete scheduled tasks from the queue,issue the at /delete command,just issuing /delete will remove all scheduled jobs.

at 1 /delete deletes task with id 1
at 2 /delete deletes task with id 2
at /delete will delete all pending tasks

Feel free to try out the various nuances of at as it can be very quick and powerful to automate routine tasks.

Cheers.

Viewing and editing macros in Excel 2007

2009-06-26T23:50:00.000-07:00

Office 2007 makes a complete overhaul of user interface from previous versions of Microsoft Office.

In Excel 2007,editing and viewing spreadsheet macros is now under a Developer tab group which is not enabled by default.

Here is how to enable the Developer tab which gives access to macros settings :

Open Excel 2007.

On top left,click on the Office button (yes that is a new shiny round button not present in previous Office versions)

Select Excel Options,in the Popular tab,check the Show Developer Tab in the ribbon option.

Once done,there will be a Developer tab in the main spreadsheet UI from where excel macros can be coded,viewed,tested and so on.

Cheers.

Turn off DEP in Vista

2009-06-26T00:04:00.000-07:00

Data Execution Prevention (DEP) monitors programs and how they run from system memory,this results in many applications getting blocked by DEP in Vista.

It can be turned off or customized as per liking,the quickest way to turn on/off DEP is through the almighty command prompt.

Launch command prompt with administrator rights and type the following :
bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOn

This turns on DEP for all applications,not fun at all when you can't install any program after this command is executed :)

To turn off DEP,which is usually the case especially when games that run on XP without a glitch suddenly stop working on Vista (Manhunt comes to the mind) :

bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff

In both the above commands,a restart will be necessary before the changed DEP settings can come into effect.

Enjoy.

Migration from Windows Mail to Outlook 2007

2009-05-02T06:19:00.000-07:00

Migrating emails from Windows Mail to Outlook 2007 is quite straightforward.

To move all messages from Windows Mail to Outlook 2007,open Outlook 2007(Start > Run > outlook).

Go to File > Import and Export.

Select Import from another program or file.

Select Outlook Express 4.x,5.x,6.x or Windows Mail.

If you have multiple email accounts configured,there will be an option to select each of them (can't select all of them at same time).

Once the migration starts,associated password with each email account will be required and the messages will be moved to Outlook 2007.After it is complete,the entire folder structure as in Windows Mail will now appear in Outlook 2007 along with all emails.

The one major disadvantage is lack of compatibility of mail rules between Windows Mail and Outlook 2007 due to which the Windows Mail rules won't work in Outlook 2007.

Happy emailing.

How to view all Task Manager processes

2009-04-22T08:21:00.000-07:00

Task Manager in Vista by default only shows processes by current user.

To see processes from all users,launch Task Manager (Start > Run > taskmgr)

Administrator access will be needed in order to view all processes.

Navigate to Processes tab and simply check the option "Show processes from all users"

Before :

After :

Notice how various processes related to different Windows components have now appeared in task manager,this becomes very useful during troubleshooting Vista.

All done.

Booting Windows in safe mode automatically

2009-04-02T23:10:00.000-07:00

There are times when one needs to use safe mode in Windows either to remove malware or fix some corrupted system files and so on.

Here,it can be annoying to keep hitting F8 on every restart just to get into safe mode for troubleshooting as missing that will start Windows in normal mode.

Msconfig helps in making Windows boot in safe mode always.

In Vista :

1.Go to Start > Run > msconfig.

2.Select Boot tab and check the Safe boot option with sub option as Minimal.

3.Click Ok and select Exit without Restart option.(The settings will be applicable only on the next restart).

4.Restarting Windows with the above settings will now directly launch safe mode.

5.Remove the check mark on Safe boot to reverse these changes once work is done in safe mode.

Happy troubleshooting in safe mode.

Cheers.

How to open excel spreadsheets in different windows

2009-03-21T00:16:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Excel by default launches different Excel sheets within the same window.

This is often time consuming when there are multiple sheets involved as each one needs to be minimized and then restored again.Arranging sheets side by side is useful only to an extent but not much.

A simple setting can make different Excel sheets open in different windows which becomes very convenient when using multiple monitors.

To do this,launch excel (Start > Run > excel.exe)
Go to Tools > Options > General.

Check the "Ignore other applications" option.
Close excel and relaunch.
Different spreadsheets will now open in different seperate windows.

Hope this has been a useful post.

Using web query in Microsoft Excel

2009-02-28T00:51:00.000-08:00

I am no Excel buff but this application has some really neat features which we normally aren't aware of during general use.

What if I want some data to be stored in Excel sheet from a web page and then regularly update that data from the internet?

It can be done in a jiffy within Excel using the Web Query option.

Open Excel (Start > Run > excel.exe)

Go to Data > Import External Data > New Web Query.

This will open a browser within Excel (it is IE),go to website (here I am using finance.yahoo.com) and select the tables that you want to import using the yellow arrow button.

Selected tables here will be tick marked and once done,hit the Import button.

This will prompt for data placement(the cells where you want the data to appear),select as appropriate and voila - all the table values from webpage are in Excel.

Now,whenever updation is needed,right click any of the imported table cell and select Refresh Data.

This will update the data after fetching it from the website source.(Basically,the web query will run again and import the data.)

There are macros which can also automate the refreshing of data,I will post more on that after some time.

Happy Exceling.

Peace.

Using Morning Coffee Firefox add-on

2009-02-09T06:08:00.000-08:00

Some Firefox add-ons are pretty cool.
Morning coffee is an add-on that basically stores sites that are frequently visited as a list and slotted as per weekdays.This eliminates the daily chore of opening the same websites in multiple tabs again and again daily.

Download the add-on from here.Using it is very simple and effective too.Once installed,the coffee cup icon will show up in Firefox navigation panel.

To add websites that should open as per scheduled weekdays,click on the coffee cup icon and select Configure.

This brings up a window where all websites can be added as per preferred weekly schedule.

All done.

How to reset Windows Mail

2009-02-02T06:13:00.000-08:00

Recently Windows Mail started freezing whenever I wanted to reply to or compose new emails.

This can be fixed by resetting Windows mail registry settings.

Let's take a look on how to reset that setting and bring back Windows Mail back to normalcy.

Close Windows Mail if it is running.

First we need to back up the associated registry key of Windows Mail.
Launch registry editor (Start > Run > regedt32) with admin privileges and drill down to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Mail

Select export and store the key.

Once done,delete it.

Launch Windows Mail,this will make a new key with clean settings.

Most of the Windows Mail problems can be fixed by this method,although a backup of the key being deleted is a must.

Happy emailing.

Creating new partition in Windows Vista

2009-01-24T05:04:00.000-08:00

Windows Vista comes with in-built partition creation which makes it possible to make new partitions on fly from Vista.This takes care of basic partitioning needs without purchasing any extra application.

Say if we have Vista installed on a single disk with no partition,we can shrink this single disk so as to have a new partition without the use of any external partition sizing utility.

With administrator privileges,go to Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc

Select the volume that needs to be shrinked (i.e from which a new partition needs to be created).
Right click and select Shrink Volume.

Specify the size (this will be restricted based on the current disk space utilised on current volume and also size of paging file and other system parameters in case the system volume is to be shrinked).

Select Shrink.
Once complete,there will be a unformatted volume created,format it as per choice (NTFS/FAT32) and label it.

All done.

How to run DOS applications on Windows Vista

2009-01-16T21:29:00.000-08:00

Some things are addictive no matter how old they get,like playing DOS based games for instance.

Have you ever wondered how will good old DOS run in Windows XP/Vista boxes?
There is a cool free utility that allows you to do just that.It is an emulator of sorts which provides you all the retro DOS features in your shiny new Windows.

It is named DOSBox and the best thing it does is the ability to run really nice DOS games under Windows,all that for free.Let's take a look on how to go about installing and configuring it.

Download it from here first.

Run the setup with administrator privileges,installation is quite visual.Once installed,you can see a desktop icon like this :

Double click to run the application,there will be a familiar good old DOS console :

To run any DOS application,first we need to mount a drive in DOSBox which contains the executables.The following command gives the correct syntax to do that :

intro mount

Here,I am mounting a folder which has Mortal_Kombat arcade game as a drive in DOSBox.
The game folder resides on D Drive on my Vista machine,I am assigning it drive letter G in DOSBox,the full command looks like this :

mount g d:\Arcade\Mortal_Kombat

I will verify that the G drive is listed correctly with the specific folder :

All done,now just like in good old DOS days,type the executable file name to launch the program in full glory of DOS by navigating to the mounted drive - g: in this case.

To quit DOSBox,simply type "quit" to close the shell.

Playing DOS based games kind of brings back old memories,doesn't it?

Peace.

Prevent Vista from automatic restarts

2009-01-09T21:39:00.000-08:00

To fix an error,you should first know the error and then find out what causes this error.

System errors in Windows occur all the time(the pretty blue screens of death).The default settings Vista (or even XP) is configured with is to simply restart on own.

While this is a common way of troubleshooting errors,not all system errors can be fixed by a simple reboot.It is important to get details of errors when they happen so they can be analyzed.

To prevent Vista from auto-rebooting whenever a system error happens,navigate to Start > Settings > Control Panel > System > Advanced Settings.

Select the Startup and Recovery tab and uncheck the automatically restart option.Click OK to save the changes.

Doing this will ensure that Vista in event of a critical system error will come to a halt which in turn helps in seeing the error (error codes/description in case of blue screen).

Hope this has been an informative post.

How to activate screensaver easter eggs in Vista

2008-12-23T01:50:00.000-08:00

Vista comes with a lot of easter eggs and some of them use screensavers to get activated.

Remember the cool swirling colorful screensaver in Mac OSes?

This same type of screensaver (Aero screensavers in Vista) can be set as a desktop background using the easter eggs.

I will show the most common ones in Vista.Do note that the activated easter eggs will lock the access to Windows desktop (with desktop icons vanished)and they can be terminated anytime using the Alt + F4 key or from task manager by ending the associated .scr process.

Open command prompt (Start > Run > cmd)with administrator privileges.
Go to Windows\system32 directory.

Type the following each for a different easter egg:

1. ribbons.scr /p65552
2. aurora.scr /p65552
3. bubbles.scr /p65552
4. mystify.scr /p65552

The interesting thing here is when this is done on a dual display system with extended desktop.The primary display will have the easter egg active while the secondary display will still have the original Vista wallpaper.

Feel free to mess around with these eggs,they are very cool.

Peace.

Configure 32-bit Vista to recognize more than 4 GB RAM

2008-12-20T05:17:00.000-08:00

Windows Vista 32-bit version shows less than 4 GB RAM installed when in fact that capacity is actually installed due to 32-bit architecture limitations.

It is not necessary to expect that if you install more than 4 GB RAM in Vista,it will provide better performance because it can't see more than the above limit by default.If you really need to leverage more,than use the 64-bit Vista versions for better performance.

Anyway,the amount of RAM that can be recognized by 32-bit Vista can be changed by the in-built bcdedit command.BCDEDIT - Boot Configuration Data Store Editor is what was boot.ini in earlier Windows versions.

To change the memory capacity to more than 4 GB,use the following command from command prompt with administrative privileges:

bcdedit /set PAE forceenable

Successful output will show operation completed successfully.

What this command does is enable Physical Address Extension (PAE) within the boot config store to see more RAM present in Vista.

To reverse the command,simply type at command prompt :

bcdedit /deletevalue PAE

For more technical info on this,this Microsoft KB article is the place to be.

Hope this has been an informative post.

Transform Vista into Mac OS X

2008-12-19T21:53:00.000-08:00

There are some great themes for Windows Vista but one really cool theme is the Vista to Leopard transformation pack.

Download it from here.

Installing it is quite straight forward.Once the setup is downloaded,run it.

Accept the license agreement and select All the options for the best possible effects of the OS X transformation pack.

Once setup is complete,reboot Vista once.The start and shutdown screen in Vista will now be that of Mac OSX.

To apply the theme,right click on Desktop and select Personalize > Theme.

Select VistaOSX theme and apply the changes.

Notice that how the Vista wallpaper changes to that of Leopard and the dockable bar appears just like in OS X.

The Windows logo is now replaced with Apple logo (yes it is the same Microsoft Windows,just the theme has changed :) ).

Enjoy.

Using Performance Information and Tools in Vista

2008-12-19T21:28:00.000-08:00

Windows Vista comes with a handy set of tools for diagnosing and troubleshooting system problems.This is under the "Performance Information and Tools" section.

Wouldn't it be handy if we can glance at all the system issues in one go and can immediately correct them?

Vista provides this capability of reporting existing system problems and also fixes them on own be it an outdated driver or some system settings that are not compatible with the system.

Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Performance Information and Tools.Click on the Advanced Tools link.

Notice the Performance issues tab there.This will have all the problems that exist in Vista and which can be fixed in a jiffy.

Here Vista has reported display settings as sub-optimal.Clicking on the problem will pop up a dialog box with a very useful event viewer link pinpointing the reported problem that helps in tracking down the exact error in Vista.

This feature saves a lot of troubleshooting time as well as ensures that all reported problems can be fixed on own by Vista like a self tuning system.

Hope this has been an informative post.

Peace.

Using Core Temp to check CPU temperature

2008-12-13T21:10:00.000-08:00

Processors generate a lot of heat and this can be a reason for many computer problems like random restarts,abrupt shutdowns and so on.
The overheating becomes amplified in case of dual processor systems and hence it is essential to at least have some kind of tool that reports the processor temperature.

Core Temp is a very small yet quite handy tool for this purpose.It reports the temperature of each individual core in each processor in your system real time and is completely motherboard independent.

Using it is as simple as it can get.Launch the executable file of Core Temp and notice how it displays the temperature of cores in a system :

Just like all reporting tools,the information can be logged for future references and the tool can be customized by going to Options > Settings.
Select the Enable Logging option and save the changes.

This will now generate a csv file in the directory where Core Temp is installed named Temp Log.csv

The visual indication of core temperature can be directly found in system tray with blue and red digits which are the reported temperatures of core.

Feel free to give Core Temp a try,it is quite useful.

Peace.

How to configure telnet in Windows Vista

2008-12-08T22:25:00.000-08:00

Windows Vista by default doesn't come with Telnet service installed.

If you use remote login extensively to connect to a Vista system,I would recommend SSH for that as it is far more secure than telnet which doesn't encrypt communication between client and server.

Installing telnet(client as well as server)in Vista is quite a straight forward process.By default,if command "telnet" is issued in Vista,you will see an error message like this :

In XP,Add/Remove Programs used to install many services like IIS etc which by default didn't come installed.

To install telnet on Vista,go to Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows features on or off.This will need administrative rights.

Here select both - telnet server and client.An information box will pop up after this indicating that the selected services are getting installed on Vista :

Once installed,type telnet at the Windows command prompt and this time,it will show the console for telnet connections.

We have installed telnet client as well as telnet server.However telnet server service needs to be started from services console so that incoming telnet connections are accepted by the Vista system.

Go to Start > Run > services.msc and select Telnet,right click on Properties and hit the Start button for the service to start.

We now have configured Vista to accept inbound Telnet connections(server) as well as to connect to other Telnet supported devices(client).

All done.

Hope this has been an informative post.

How to release and renew IPv6 address in Windows Vista

2008-12-08T21:55:00.000-08:00

Till Windows XP,there was no extended support by default for IPv6,only for IPv4 addresses (those are 32-bit in length like 10.10.1.1,255.255.255.0 and so on).

With Vista comes the in-built support for IPv6 addresses (these are long ones with 128-bit length like 2002:c058:6301::c058:6301)which can't be removed unlike in XP. So if we want to renew or release dynamic IP addresses depending upon their type like whether they are IPv4 or IPv,we can do that quite easily thanks to the cool set of IPv6 commands that come bundled with the ipconfig tool in Vista.

Finding which commands works with IPv4 or IPv6 in ipconfig is easy.
Go to Start > Run > cmd and in the command prompt,type ipconfig/?.

This will display all associated commands that can be used with ipconfig :

Note the commands with 6 as the suffix - /release6 and /renew6.
These take care of IPv6 addresses in releasing them and reassigning them in case the system takes dynamic IPv6 addresses from a DHCP server.

For dynamic IPv4 addresses,the good old commands - ipconfig/release and ipconfig/renew still hold true,the new command above are only for IPv6 dynamically assigned addresses.

Peace.

How to install Roboform add-on in browsers

2008-11-28T21:58:00.000-08:00

Roboform is an automated application to fill web based forms and it can be easily installed as an add-on to browsers to manage and fill forms efficiently.

To install it,go to this add-on link for Internet Explorer.

The same link can be reached by selecting Tools > Manage Add-ons > Find more add-ons in Internet explorer.

Click on the download link and save the setup.

Once done,launch the roboform setup.

In customizing the setup,select the option 'Install adapter that allows Roboform to work in Firefox',this will install roboform in Firefox as well.

Now comes the important part of entering a master password which controls access to all the stored data in roboform.

Make sure that a good easy to remember password is used here.

Once the setup is complete,the roboform add-on will show up in Internet Explorer as well as in Firefox.

All done installing roboform.

How to use Putty to connect via SSH

2008-11-18T08:55:00.000-08:00

In earlier posts,I had shown how Windows Vista can be setup as a SSH server.

Now,let's see how we connect using ssh to this configured server.

For this,any ssh client will do,Putty is highly recommended and it is free.

Get the entire pack of Putty for Windows which supports most of the connection types from here.

Install it with administrative privileges and launch the Putty terminal.

Enter the IP address or the host name of the system that you will connect to using Putty.Since we want to access via ssh,the option SSH is selected as connection type,note that port number automatically changes to 22 once this is selected.

Once the IP/host name along with the connection type is entered,it is better if we save this as a session so that going forward we can simply load this session.Here,this is saved as AVP-BOX.

To connect,hit OK.

The following warning message should show up when connecting for the first time :

This ideally should come only when you are connecting to the remote system for the first time because the subsequent logins will have the physical address of the system (the network card which accepts the connections) cached in the client machine's registry.

This warning also pops up after say a network card of the server is changed thereby changing the original physical address which needs to be cached again on the client system.Anything apart from this can be a potential MITM attack scenario.

The login prompt will ask for the user name and password (ideally administrative privileges),once correctly entered the prompt shows up and you are now managing a remote system via ssh using Putty.

To close the connection,type exit at the prompt.

Enjoy.

Using task manager in Vista for managing services

2008-11-15T20:52:00.000-08:00

Windows Vista task manager is greatly improved.It comes with useful additional features of managing services and also of file tracking based on the services running.This proves helpful if we want to manage services directly and see their application/system files from task manager instead of going to (Start > Run > services.msc) routine.

Launch task manager (Right click on taskbar and select Task Manager or by Start > Run > taskmgr).Click on Services tab and this will show a list of services (stopped as well as started).Those services whose PID columns are blank instead of a number are the ones that are stopped or simply see the Status column.

Suppose I want to start the service netlogon.

I will right click on service and select Start Service,this will now start showing a PID as the service is now running.

Tracking down a service is also quite simple,right click the service whose info is needed and select Go to Process.
Here I use EvtEng service to track down it's process and then use that process info to see where the files are really located for this.

This will track that service to it's associated process which helps us to know which application or which system function is owning that process and hence the service.

Once the process window is opened with the tracked process,right click on Go to File which will open the actual path of application along with the highlighted file that owns the process.

This is a great way to troubleshoot errors where you can't seem to know which process is doing what but tracking its files will give a clear view on how to go about fixing it.

Hope this has been an informative post.

Peace.