How to Create your own Run Command ?

I talk a lot about Windows, and using the “Run” command is a large part of it. It is a simple and easy method of accessing programs quickly. If you happen to want to make a shortcut to an application your own way, guess what, you can!

Let’s do it:

Step 1: Go to “Start,” “Run,” (told you we use it a lot) and type regedit.

Step 2: Navigate to the following:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Apps Path

Step 3: Create a new folder/key under Apps Path. (Right-Click Apps Path and click “New,” “Key.”)

Step 4: Title the new folder/key the name of the application, e.g. firefox.exe.

Step 5: Right-Click the default string value (the thing automatically created in your new folder) and click Modify.

Step 6: Change the value to the path of the executable you are attempting to run. E.g. C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe.

Step 7: Create a new “String Value” by right-clicking under the default value (the thing we just edited) and select “New,” “String Value.” Name it Path and enter the value as the same path you previously entered.




Step 8: Done! Now, all you need to do is go to “Start,” “Run,” and type the name of your command!

Forgotten Ubuntu Password – Reset within minutes

Forgotten Ubuntu Password – Reset within minutes

If you’ve ever forgotten your password, you aren’t alone… it’s probably one of the most common tech support problems I’ve encountered over the years. Luckily if you are using Ubuntu they made it incredibly easy to reset your password.

All it takes is adjusting the boot parameters slightly and typing a command or two, but we’ll walk you through it.

Reset Your Ubuntu Password

Reboot your computer, and then as soon as you see the GRUB Loading screen, make sure to hit the ESC key so that you can get to the menu.

Root Shell – Easy Method

If you have the option, you can choose the “recovery mode” item on the menu, usually found right below your default kernel option.

Then choose “Drop to root shell prompt” from this menu.

This should give you a root shell prompt.

Alternate Root Shell Method

If you don’t have the recovery mode option, this is the alternate way to manually edit the grub options to allow for a root shell.

First you’ll want to make sure to choose the regular boot kernel that you use (typically just the default one), and then use the “e” key to choose to edit that boot option.

Now just hit the down arrow key over to the “kernel” option, and then use the “e” key to switch to edit mode for the kernel option.

You’ll first be presented with a screen where you can find this written “ro single”

You’ll want to remove the “ro single” part with the backspace key, and then add this onto the end:

rw init=/bin/bash

Once you hit enter after adjusting the kernel line, you’ll need to use the B key to choose to boot with that option.

At this point the system should boot up very quickly to a command prompt.

Changing the Actual Password

You can use the following command to reset your password:

passwd

After changing your password, use the following commands to reboot your system. (The sync command makes sure to write out data to the disk before rebooting)

sync
reboot –f

I found that the –f parameter was necessary to get the reboot command to work for some reason. You could always hardware reset instead, but make sure to use the sync command first.
And now you should be able to login without any issues.

How Safe is Your Computers ?

Security Facts about an average computer user

• 70% users Install a lot of softwares or games which he finds interesting.
• 80%of the user are not ready to update their system with latest patches.
• 60% of the user don’t know if there system is secure.
• 70% user don’t know how to find if the system is really secure

So how do you find if your system is secure and patched with latest patches and updates. Security System Analyzer (SSA) is a tool designed to check your system for the latest security updates. This tool can scan your system and find out the vulnerabilities about the missing patches and updates and provide you a link from where to get.

Features of SSA

1. Finds security vulnerabilities and the missing patches for windows.
2. Gives a direct link to possible patches to be used to remove the security hole.
3. Supports Windows 2000, XP, Vista.
4. One click to get the information about latest security vulnerabilities and others.
5. Generates HTML reports which makes view easy and can be exported.

Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL) is an international, information security, community standard to promote open and publicly available security content, and to standardize the transfer of this information across the entire spectrum of security tools and services. OVAL includes a language used to encode system details, and an assortment of content repositories held throughout the community.

How SSA works?

This software completes the whole process in 3 steps:

1. Representing configuration information of systems for testing;
2. Analyzing the system for the presence of the specified machine state (vulnerability, configuration, patch state, etc.)
3. Reporting the results of this assessment

Resources

• Download: ssa-setup.exe (9.9 MB)
• Documentation: ssa-manual.pdf

How to Change IP in a ONE Minutes.....

This article will help you to change your IP address within a minute. Just follow the following step and you will be thru.

1. Click on "Start" in the bottom left hand corner of screen
2. Click on "Run"
3. Type in "command" and hit ok

You should now be at an MSDOS prompt screen.

4. Type "ipconfig /release" just like that, and hit "enter"
5. Type "exit" and leave the prompt
6. Right-click on "Network Places" or "My Network Places" on your desktop.
7. Click on "properties"

You should now be on a screen with something titled "Local Area Connection", or something close to that, and, if you have a network hooked up, all of your other networks.

8. Right click on "Local Area Connection" and click "properties"
9. Double-click on the "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)" from the list under the "General" tab
10. Click on "Use the following IP address" under the "General" tab
11. Create an IP address (It doesn't matter what it is. I just type 1 and 2 until i fill the area up).
12. Press "Tab" and it should automatically fill in the "Subnet Mask" section with default numbers.
13. Hit the "Ok" button here
14. Hit the "Ok" button again

You should now be back to the "Local Area Connection" screen.

15. Right-click back on "Local Area Connection" and go to properties again.
16. Go back to the "TCP/IP" settings
17. This time, select "Obtain an IP address automatically"
tongue.gif 18. Hit "Ok"
19. Hit "Ok" again
20. You now have a new IP address

With a little practice, you can easily get this process down to 15 seconds.

P.S:
This only changes your dynamic IP address, not your ISP/IP address. If you plan on hacking a website with this trick be extremely careful, because if they try a little, they can trace it back

Disable XP's splash screen

The Windows XP splash screen is designed to hide all of the behind the scenes boot information that is ordinarily never needed to view. However, if you need to troubleshoot a startup problem, it may be necessary to view this information to determine the trouble. To find out, you can disable the splash screen by making a small change to the Boot.ini file. Follow the steps below: Press [Windows][Break] to open the System Properties dialog box. On the Advanced tab, click the Settings button in the Startup And Recovery section. In the Startup And Recovery dialog box, select the Edit button in the System Startup section. The Boot.ini file will open in Notepad; locate the line that ends with the /fastdetect switch. Position your cursor right after the parameter, press the spacebar, and add the /SOS switch. Save the Boot.ini file, and close Notepad. Click Cancel to close both the Startup And Recovery dialog box and the System Properties dialog box. Restart the system. When the system restarts, the splash screen will no longer appear. You can observe some of the operations that Windows XP performs during the startup stage. To revive the splash screen, simply repeat the above steps to edit the Boot.ini file and remove the /SOS switch.

Speed Increase Your Cable Modem or DSL in XP

This tweak is for broad band cable connections on stand alone machines with WinXP
professional version - might work on Home version also. It may also work with networked
machines as well.
This tweak assumes that you have let WinXP create a connection on install for your
cable modem/NIC combination and that your connection has tcp/ip - QoS - file and print
sharing - and client for Microsoft networks , only, installed. It also assumes that
WinXP will detect your NIC and has in-box drivers for it. If it doesn't do not try
this.
· In the "My Network Places" properties (right-click on the desktop icon and choose
properties), highlight the connection
then at the menu bar choose "Advanced" then "Advanced Settings". Uncheck the two
boxes in the lower half for the
bindings for File and Printer sharing and Client for MS networks. Click OK.
· From the Windows XP CD in the support directory from the support cab, extract the
file netcap.exe and place it in a
directory on your hard drive or even in the root of your C:\ drive.
· Next, open up a command prompt window and change directories to where you put
netcap.exe. then type "netcap/?".
It will list some commands that are available for netcap and a netmon driver will be
installed. At the bottom you will
see your adapters. You should see two of them if using a 3Com card. One will be for
LAN and the other will be for
WAN something or other.
· Next type "netcap/Remove". This will remove the netmon driver.
· Open up Control Panel->System->Dev Man and look at your network adapters. You
should now see two of them and one will have a yellow ! on it. Right-click on the one
without the yellow ! and choose uninstall. YES! You are uninstalling your network
adapter, continue with the uninstall. Do not restart yet.
· Check your connection properties to make sure that no connection exists. If you get
a wizard just cancel out of it.
Now re-start the machine.
· After re-start go to your connection properties again and you should have a new
connection called "Local area connection 2". Highlight the connection, then at the menu
bar choose "Advanced" then "Advanced Settings". Uncheck the two boxes in the lower half
for the bindings for File and Printer sharing and Client for MS networks. Click OK.
· Choose connection properties and uncheck the "QOS" box.
· Re-start the machine.
After restart enjoy the increased responsiveness of IE, faster page loading, and a
connection speed boost.
Why it works, it seems that windows XP, in its zeal to make sure every base is covered
installs two separate versions of the NIC card. One you do not normally see in any
properties. Remember the "netcap/?" command above showing two different adapters? The LAN
one is the one you see. The invisible one loads everything down and its like your running
two separate cards together, sharing a connection among two cards, this method breaks
this "bond" and allows the NIC to run un-hindered.

Slow Boot When NETWORKING......Solutions......

On some XP Pro installations, when connected to a network (peer-peer in this case),
the computer boot time is over 1:40. The system seems to freeze after logging in and the
desktop may not appear or will freeze for a minute. As timed with the utility,
Bootvis.exe, the problem was with the driver mrxsmb.dll, adding over 67 seconds to the
boot time. Turning off and restoring file and printer sharing eliminated 65 seconds from
the boot time.
· Alt-click (or right-click) on Network Places > Properties.
· Alt-click on Ethernet Adapter connection > Properties.
· Un-check "File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks" > OK.
· Reboot.
· If you need file or printer sharing, repeat the above, re-check the box and re-boot
again.
Easy Way to Adjust LargeSystemCache
Normally, the tweak I've seen asks you to go into
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management and change the
value to either O or 1 to the adjustment the LargeSystemCache.
However, in Windows XP, all you have to do is:
· Right-click My Computer.
· Select Properties.
· Click Advanced.
· Choose Performance.
· Click Advanced again.
· Select either Programs or System Cache under Memory Usage.
Programs = 0 for the registry tweak equivalent
System Cache = 1 for the registry tweak equivalent
· On NT Server (in this case XP), the Large System Cache option is enabled, but
disabled on Workstation. The two different settings effect how the cache manager
allocates free memory. If the Large Cache option is on, the manager marks all the free
memory, which isn't being used by the system and/or applications, as freely available for
disk caching.
· On the flip-side (with a small cache), the manager instead only sets aside 4MB of
memory for disk caching in an attempt to accelerate the launch of applications. Or in a
more technical approach, if enabled the system will favor system-cache working sets over
process working sets (with a working set basically being the memory used by components of
a process).

How To Disable Facebook’s New Chat

Anyone here got pissed of Facebook’s New Chat? Of course everyone.. even me. This new Facebook chat way is awful since it doesn’t show all your friends and takes a lot of space from your screen. Most of our Facebook readers wants to get rid of this new chat way on Facebook so we’re here to deliver a very simple way to do that.

No, it’s not about “Hide Sidebar”, we’re not silly. We’ve got 2 scripts for Mozilla Firefox and Chrome users to allow you to disable Facebook’s new chat with just few clicks on your mouse.

Mozilla Firefox users: First install this add-on followed by installing this script to get back your old Facebook chat. Just give your browser a fast restart after installing the script.

Chrome users: You don’t need an add-on. Just install this script and restart your browser to view changes.

Didn’t get it? Take this! You can also try using this link to use Facebook’s popout chat. 

Got your solution?

Mac OS X Lion's Arrives Tomorrow

Hot on the heels of Apple’s stellar earnings release comes some more big news: the next version of its Mac operating system, OS X Lion, is coming tomorrow. The announcement was made (rather nonchalantly) by Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer during the earnings call, which is currently ongoing (you can find our notes from the call here.

Lion’s imminent arrival doesn’t come as a surprise — Apple had previously announced that it was coming in July, and many of the rumor sites pegged the launch date as Wednesday (there are also many rumors that the OS will be launching alongside updated Macbook Airs and Mac Minis, and possibly displays updated with Thunderbolt support).

Lion is shipping with a low, $29 price-tag — thought it isn’t technically shipping, at least as far as physical boxes are concerned. Instead, Apple will be distributing the update as a download via the Mac App Store, weighing in at around 4 gigabytes.

SMS Backup: An Android App. to Backup your Text Messages on Your Gmail Account

If your mobile phone has limited capacity for storing SMS text messages or if you are looking to delete all the old text conversations from the phone but still preserve them somewhere, here’s something for you to consider.

SMS Backup, as the name suggests, is a free app for Android mobile phones that can copy all SMS messages from the phone to your Gmail account with a click. It can save both your incoming and outgoing messages to Gmail.

To get started, first enable IMAP in your Gmail account available under Gmail Settings –> Forwarding and POP/IMAP –> Enable IMAP. Next launch the SMS backup app on your phone, enter your Google account credentials and the will immediately copy all existing text messages to a new folder /label in your Gmail account.

 

The best part is that as new text messages arrive, or you send one, the app will automatically save them to Gmail in the background without you having to do anything.