Set Permissions for Shared Files and Folders

Sharing of files and folders can be managed in two ways. If you chose simplified file sharing, your folders can be shared with everyone on your network or workgroup, or you can make your folders private. (This is how folders are shared in Windows 2000.) However, in Windows XP Professional, you can also set folder permissions for specific users or groups. To do this, you must first change the default setting, which is simple file sharing. To change this setting, follow these steps:
•Open Control Panel, click Tools, and then click Folder Options.
•Click the View tab, and scroll to the bottom of the Advanced Settings list.
•Clear the Use simple file sharing (Recommended) check box.
•To manage folder permissions, browse to the folder in Windows Explorer, right–click the folder, and then click Properties. Click the Security tab, and assign permissions, such as Full Control, Modify, Read, and/or Write, to specific users.

You can set file and folder permissions only on drives formatted to use NTFS, and you must be the owner or have been granted permission to do so by the owner.

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Locking Folders

There are plenty of software which locks drives and folder to protect your confidential data. Why waste money on such tools when you can do it with a simple registry tweak? Here’s how: Caution: Before you attempt these tweaks, please make sure that you have a backup of your registry, just incase something goes wrong in the middle. Locking Folders: Consider you want to lock a folder named XXXX in your E:\, whose path is E:\XXXX. Now open the Notepad and type the following ren xxxx xxxx.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D} Where xxxx is your folder name. Save the text file as loc.bat in the same drive. Open another new notepad text file and type the following ren xxxx.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D} xxxx Save the text file as key.bat in the same drive. Steps to lock the folder: To lock the xxxx folder, simply click the loc.bat and it will transform into control panel icon which is inaccessible. To unlock the folder click the key.bat file. Thus the folder will be unlocked and the contents are accessible.

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This setting allows you to control which drives are visible in My Computer and Explorer. It is possible to hide all drives or just selected ones.

Open your registry (press win+r and type regedit , hit enter ) goto

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]

and find or create the DWORD “NoDrives” there by right clicking on explorer -> NEW -> DWORD value .

The “NoDrives” value uses a 32-bit word to define local and network drive visibility for each logical drive in the computer. The lower 26 bits of the 32-bit word correspond to drive letters A through Z. Drives are visible when set to 0 and hidden when set to 1.

If your not happy working in Hex, add these decimal numbers to hide the drive(s):

A: 1, B: 2, C: 4, D: 8, E: 16, F: 32, G: 64, H: 128, I: 256, J: 512, K: 1024, L: 2048, M: 4096, N: 8192, O: 16384, P: 32768, Q: 65536, R: 131072, S: 262144, T: 524288, U: 1048576, V: 2097152, W: 4194304, X: 8388608, Y: 16777216, Z: 33554432, ALL: 67108863

For example to hide drive A and drive D, you would add 1 (A) + 8 (D) which means the value should be set to “9″.

To disable all the drives set the value to “67108863″.

Restart Windows for the change to take effect.

Note: These drives will still appear in File Manager, to remove File Manager, delete or rename winfile.exe.

Registry Settings
User Key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\ Explorer]

System Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\ Explorer]

Value Name: NoDrives

Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value

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Top 15 Ways to Extend Your Laptop’s Battery Life

Laptops tend to lose their charm quickly when you’re constantly looking for the nearest power outlet to charge up. How do you keep your battery going for as long as possible? Here are 15 easy ways to do so.

1. Defrag regularly - The faster your hard drive does its work - less demand you are going to put on the hard drive and your battery. Make your hard drive as efficient as possible by defragging it regularly. (but not while it’s on battery of course!) Mac OSX is better built to handle fragmentation so it may not be very applicable for Apple systems.

2. Dim your screen - Most laptops come with the ability to dim your laptop screen. Some even come with ways to modify CPU and cooling performance. Cut them down to the lowest level you can tolerate to squeeze out some extra battery juice.

3. Cut down on programs running in the background. Itunes, Desktop Search, etc. All these add to the CPU load and cut down battery life. Shut down everything that isn’t crucial when you’re on battery.

4. Cut down external devices - USB devices (including your mouse) & WiFi drain down your laptop battery. Remove or shut them down when not in use. It goes without saying that charging other devices (like your iPod) with your laptop when on battery is a surefire way of quickly wiping out the charge on your laptop battery.

5. Add more RAM - This will allow you to process more with the memory your laptop has, rather than relying on virtual memory. Virtual memory results in hard drive use, and is much less power efficient. Note that adding more RAM will consume more energy, so this is most applicable if you do need to run memory intensive programs which actually require heavy usage of virtual memory.

6. Run off a hard drive rather than CD/DVD - As power consuming as hard drives are, CD and DVD drives are worse. Even having one in the drive can be power consuming. They spin, taking power, even when they?re not actively being used. Wherever possible, try to run on virtual drives using programs like Alcohol 120% rather than optical ones.

7. Keep the battery contacts clean: Clean your battery’s metal contacts every couple of months with a cloth moistened with rubbing alcohol. This keeps the transfer of power from your battery more efficient.

8. Take care of your battery - Exercise the Battery. Do not leave a charged battery dormant for long periods of time. Once charged, you should at least use the battery at least once every two to three weeks. Also, do not let a Li-On battery completely discharge. (Discharing is only for older batteries with memory effects)

9. Hibernate not standby - Although placing a laptop in standby mode saves some power and you can instantly resume where you left off, it doesn’t save anywhere as much power as the hibernate function does. Hibernating a PC will actually save your PC’s state as it is, and completely shut itself down.

10. Keep operating temperature down - Your laptop operates more efficiently when it’s cooler. Clean out your air vents with a cloth or keyboard cleaner, or refer to some extra tips by LapTopMag.com.

11. Set up and optimize your power options - Go to ‘Power Options’ in your windows control panel and set it up so that power usage is optimized (Select the ‘max battery’ for maximum effect).

12. Don’t multitask - Do one thing at a time when you’re on battery. Rather than working on a spreadsheet, letting your email client run in the background and listening to your latest set of MP3’s, set your mind to one thing only. If you don’t you’ll only drain out your batteries before anything gets completed!

13. Go easy on the PC demands - The more you demand from your PC. Passive activities like email and word processing consume much less power than gaming or playing a DVD. If you’ve got a single battery charge - pick your priorities wisely.

14. Get yourself a more efficient laptop - Laptops are getting more and more efficient in nature to the point where some manufacturers are talking about all day long batteries. Picking up a newer more efficient laptop to replace an aging one is usually a quick fix.

15. Prevent the Memory Effect - If you’re using a very old laptop, you’ll want to prevent the ‘memory effect’ - Keep the battery healthy by fully charging and then fully discharging it at least once every two to three weeks. Exceptions to the rule are Li-Ion batteries (which most laptops have) which do not suffer from the memory effect.

Bonus Tip #1: Turn off the autosave function. MS-Word’s and Excel’s autosave functions are great but because they keep saving regular intervals, they work your hard driver harder than it may have to. If you plan to do this, you may want to turn it back on as the battery runs low. While it saves battery life in the beginning, you will want to make sure your work is saved when your battery dies. Bonus Tip #2: Lower the graphics use. You can do this by changing the screen resolution and shutting off fancy graphic drivers. Graphics cards (video cards) use as much or more power today as hard disks Bonus Tip #1 to give caution about turning off autosave, tip #8 to change information about discharging batteries - thanks to all who pointed it out. Added Bonus tip #2, Tip #1 to add in clause in regards to Mac OSX, Tip #1 about the spinning of hard drives - thanks to all who pointed it out

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Locking Drives

We don’t usually prefer to lock our drives, but sometimes it becomes nesscary.

Say for instance you might have stored your office documents in D:\ and you don’t want your kids to access it, in such case this technique can be useful for you.

Please don’t try this tweak with your root drive (usually C:\ is the root drive) since root drives are not intended to be locked because they are mandatory for the system and application programs. Start & Run and type Regedit to open Registry editor Browse HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Policies\Explorer Create a new DWORD value NoViewOnDrive and set its value as 2^ (Alpha Number of Drive Letter-1) where Alpha number are simple counting of alphabets from A to Z as 1 - 26

For example: to lock C:\, Alpha number of C is 3 so 2^ (3-1) = 4 (decimal value) To lock more drives, calculate the value of each drive and then set sum of those numbers as value To unlock your drive just delete the key from the registry.

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How to make your Desktop Icons Transparent

Go to ontrol Panel > System, > Advanced > Performance area > Settings button Visual Effects tab "Use drop shadows for icon labels on the Desktop"

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Speed up your browsing of Windows 2000 & XP machines

Here's a great tip to speed up your browsing of Windows XP machines. Its actually a fix to a bug installed as default in Windows 2000 that scans shared files for Scheduled Tasks. And it turns out that you can experience a delay as long as 30 seconds when you try to view shared files across a network because Windows 2000 is using the extra time to search the remote computer for any Scheduled Tasks. Note that though the fix is originally intended for only those affected, Windows 2000 users will experience that the actual browsing speed of both the Internet & Windows Explorers improve significantly after applying it since it doesn't search for Scheduled Tasks anymore. Here's how :

Open up the Registry and go to :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current Version/Explorer/RemoteComputer/NameSpace

Under that branch, select the key :

{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}

and delete it.

This is key that instructs Windows to search for Scheduled Tasks. If you like you may want to export the exact branch so that you can restore the key if necessary.

This fix is so effective that it doesn't require a reboot and you can almost immediately determine yourself how much it speeds up your browsing processes.

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Install/Enable NetBEUI Under WinXP

If for some reason you need to install NetBEUI then follow these instructions.

**Note - You will need the WinXP CD in order to to this!

Support for the NetBIOS Extended User Interface protocols (also called NetBEUI or NBF) in Windows XP has been discontinued. If your configuration requires temporary use of NetBEUI for Windows XP, follow these steps:

To install the NETBEUI protocol:

- Locate the Valueadd/msft/net/netbeui directory on your Windows XP CD.Copy nbf.sys into the %SYSTEMROOT%SYSTEM32DRIVERS directory.

- Copy netnbf.inf into the %SYSTEMROOT%INF directory.

- In Control Panel, click Network and Internet Connections and then click Network Connections.

- Right-click the connection you want to configure, and then click Properties.

- On the General tab, click the INSTALL button to add the NetBEUI protocol.

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How to Convert FAT to NTFS file system

To convert a FAT partition to NTFS, perform the following steps.

Click Start, click Programs, and then click Command Prompt.

In Windows XP, click Start, click Run, type cmd and then click OK.

At the command prompt, type CONVERT [driveletter]: /FS:NTFS.

Convert.exe will attempt to convert the partition to NTFS.

NOTE: Although the chance of corruption or data loss during the conversion from FAT to NTFS is minimal, it is best to perform a full backup of the data on the drive that it is to be converted prior to executing the convert command. It is also recommended to verify the integrity of the backup before proceeding, as well as to run RDISK and update the emergency repair disk (ERD).

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For a Safer, faster XP Close Unwanted Services

To disable unneeded startup services for a safer, faster XP, use the "Services" Admin Tool (Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services). If you are a single user of a non-networked machine, you can disable the following items, with no ill effect.

Alerter
Clipbook
Computer Browser
Fast User Switching
Human Interface Access Devices
Indexing Service (Slows the hard drive down)
Messenger
Net Logon (unnecessary unless networked on a Domain)
Netmeeting Remote Desktop Sharing (disabled for extra security)
Remote Desktop Help Session Manager (disabled for extra security)
Remote Procedure Call Locator
Remote Registry (disabled for extra security)
Routing & Remote Access (disabled for extra security)
Server
SSDP Discovery Service (this is for the utterly pointless "Universal P'n'P", & leaves TCP Port 5000 wide open)
TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
Telnet (disabled for extra security)
Universal Plug and Play Device Host
Upload Manager
Windows Time
Wireless Zero Configuration (for wireless networks)
Workstation

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Slow Shutdown

Some people have noticed that they are experiencing a really slow shutdown after installing Windows XP Home or Professional. Although this can be caused a number of ways, the most clear cut one so far is happening on systems with an NVidia card installed with the latest set of drivers. A service called NVIDIA Driver Helper Service is loading up on start up and for whatever reason doesn't shut itself down properly. The service isn't needed and can also increase the amount of memory available to your system. Here is how to disable it.

1: Go into your Control Panel
2: Select Administrative Tools and then click on Services
3: Right click on the file "NVIDIA Driver Helper Service" and then select STOP.
4: To stop this loading up every time you boot up your PC Right click it again and select properties - then where the option "Startup Type" is shown - make sure it is set at Manual like we have shown in the image below.

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Rename as series of files

When you download photos from your digital camera, they often have unrecognizable names. You can rename several similar files at once with the following procedure. This also works for renaming other types of files.

1.Open the My Pictures folder. (Click Start, and then click My Pictures.) Or open another folder containing files that you want to rename.
2.Select the files you want to rename. If the files you want are not adjacent in the file list, press and hold CTRL, and then click each item to select it.
3.On the File menu, click Rename.
4.Type the new name, and then press ENTER.


All of the files in the series will be named in sequence using the new name you type. For example, if you type Birthday, the first will be named Birthday and subsequent files in the series will be named Birthday (1), Birthday (2), and so on. To specify the starting number for the series, type the starting number in parentheses after the new file name. The files in the series will be numbered in sequence starting with the number you type. For example, if you type Birthday (10), the other files will be named Birthday (11), Birthday (12), and so on.

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Using Remote Desktop

You must first enable the Remote Desktop feature on your office computer so that you can control it remotely from another computer. You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group to enable Remote Desktop on your Windows XP Professional-based computer.

To setup your office computer to use Remote Desktop:

Open the System folder in Control Panel. Click Start, point to Settings, click Control Panel, and then double-click the System icon.

On the Remote tab, select the Allow users to connect remotely to this computer check box, as shown below.

Ensure that you have the proper permissions to connect to your computer remotely, and click OK.

Leave your computer running and connected to the company network with Internet access. Lock your computer, and leave your office.

The Remote Desktop Connection client software allows a computer running Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 to control your Windows XP Professional computer remotely. The client software is available on the installation CD for Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Home Edition. The client software is installed by default on computers running Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Home Edition.
To install Remote Desktop Connection software on a client computer

Insert the Windows XP compact disc into your CD-ROM drive.

When the Welcome page appears, click Perform additional tasks, and then click Setup Remote Desktop Connection as shown below.

When the installation wizard starts, follow the directions that appear on your screen.

Once you have enabled your Windows XP Professional computer to allow remote connections, and installed client software on a Windows-based client computer, you are ready to start a Remote Desktop session.


To create a new Remote Desktop Connection

Open Remote Desktop Connection. (Click Start, point to Programs or All Programs, point to Accessories, point to Communications, and then click Remote Desktop Connection.)

In Computer, type the computer name for your computer running Windows XP Professional that has Remote Desktop enabled and for which you have Remote Desktop permissions

Click Connect.

The Log On to Windows dialog box appears.

In the Log On to Windows dialog box, type your user name, password, and domain (if required), and then click OK. The Remote Desktop window will open and you will see the desktop settings, files, and programs that are on your office computer. Your office computer will remain locked.

Nobody will be able to work at your office computer without a password, nor will anyone see the work you are doing on your office computer remotely. Note: To change your connection settings, (such as screen size, automatic logon information, and performance options), click Options before you connect.
To open a saved connection

In Windows Explorer, open the My DocumentsRemote Desktops folder.

Click the .Rdp file for the connection you want to open. Note: A Remote Desktop file (.rdp) file contains all of the information for a connection to a remote computer, including the Options settings that were configured when the file was saved. You can customize any number of .rdp files, including files for connecting to the same computer with different settings. For example, you can save a file that connects to MyComputer in full screen mode and another file that connects to the same computer in 800×600 screen size. By default, .rdp files are saved in the My DocumentsRemote Desktops folder. To edit an .rdp file and change the connections settings it contains, right-click the file and then click Edit.


To log off and end the session

In the Remote Desktop Connection window, click Start, and then click Shut Down.

The Shut Down Windows dialog box appears.

In the drop-down menu, select Log Off , and then click OK.

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Make a Fake Virus

step 1Creating the Shortcut
Step 1: Start at the Desktop. Step 2: Right click on desktop, go to New, then over to Shortcuts and click. Step 3: This widow should open. In the box type ( shutdown -s -t 60 -c "your message")


step 2Edit the Fake Virus
Step 1: Right click on the fake virus. Select Properties. Step 2: Go to the Shortcut tab. Click on "Change Icon". Step 3: If this window pops up click OK. Step 4: Select…


step 3What the Fake Virus does
Step 1: Double click on the Fake Virus. Step 2: A window pops up and says what you typed in for the comment and the time you set and starts counting down. Step 3: To abor…


step 4Alterations to the Fake Virus
Step 1: You can make it look like a My Computer icon by right clicking on the icon, click rename and name it My Computer and change the icon to the My Computer icon. ....

Try it..its really so Funny

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How to remove Windows XP's Messenger

Windows Xp,Messenger

Theoretically, you can get rid of it (as well as a few other things). Windows 2000 power users should already be familiar with this tweak. 

Fire up the Windows Explorer and navigate your way to the %SYSTEMROOT% \ INF folder. What the heck is that thingy with the percentage signs? It's a variable. For most people, %SYSTEMROOT% is C:\Windows. For others, it may be E:\WinXP. Get it? Okay, on with the hack! In the INF folder, open sysoc.inf (but not before making a BACKUP copy first). Before your eyes glaze over, look for the line containing "msmsgs" in it. Near the end of that particular line, you'll notice that the word "hide" is not so hidden. Go ahead and delete "hide" (so that the flanking commas are left sitting next to one another). Save the file and close it. Now, open the Add and Remove Programs applet in the Control Panel. Click the Add / Remove Windows Components icon. You should see "Windows Messenger" in that list. Remove the checkmark from its box, and you should be set. NOTE: there are other hidden system components in that sysoc.inf file, too. Remove "hide" and the subsequent programs at your own risk.

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Make Your Folders Private

•Open My Computer
•Double-click the drive where Windows is installed (usually drive (C:), unless you have more than one drive on your computer).
•If the contents of the drive are hidden, under System Tasks, click Show the contents of this drive.
•Double-click the Documents and Settings folder.
•Double-click your user folder.
•Right-click any folder in your user profile, and then click Properties.
•On the Sharing tab, select the Make this folder private so that only I have access to it check box.

Note
•To open My Computer, click Start, and then click My Computer.
•This option is only available for folders included in your user profile. Folders in your user profile include My Documents and its subfolders, Desktop, Start Menu, Cookies, and Favorites. If you do not make these folders private, they are available to everyone who uses your computer.
•When you make a folder private, all of its subfolders are private as well. For example, when you make My Documents private, you also make My Music and My Pictures private. When you share a folder, you also share all of its subfolders unless you make them private.

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