Everything about OS

Hackers have got very active lately and they’re always trying to get peoples’ accounts. They have various tools and software to help them guess passwords. A good password is both strong and memorable. Here are some tips to create one:

1. Include both uppercase and lowercase letters in random places. Example: Instead of fishyfish, type fiShyfIsH or something similar.

2. Include numbers. This is very important, as with a password containing numbers, it is a LOT harder for a hacker to guess it. To make it easier to remember, you can use your birth date or age, but put the numbers in random places! Example: fiSh8yfIsH3

3. Include spaces and symbols. This can make the password harder to remember, but also helps to decrease chances of it being found out. Example f_iSh8yfis@H3 (Note that at this stage it is virtually impossible to GUESS the password. Hacking tools will be needed.)

4. Another good way to create a memorable, but quite strong password, is to mix two random words such as dog and plane -> doplagne

By adding all the things above, this can be a great password.

5. Never, ever use a same password for several things. If one database is hacked, then your other(s) will be gone as well. A great way to keep all those passwords is to get a Password Manager program and assign one password to access all of the others. Here’s one of the best pieces of free software for that.

Alright. After I showed you how to make your XP look like Vista, some people asked me to post a guide to making your XP look like Mac OSX. Leopard, to be precise. There are two ways to accomplish the OSX look: the easy way - with a transformation pack, and the hard way - manually. I will, of course, show you how to do this the easy way, but if it for some reason doesn’t work for you, email me or comment and I’ll teach you to do it all manually. So here’s how it’s done the easy way:
Step 1: Get a transformation pack.

The best Mac OSX transformation pack for Windows XP is probably FlyakiteOSX. The creator’s website itself is worth the visit, but if it doesn’t load in your browser, get Firefox, and here’s a download link.
Step 2: Install

Run the installer and when you get to the following screen, MAKE SURE you check the box Create System Restore Point. The transformation pack will change a lot of system files and settings and although you should be able to uninstall easily later, you might find yourself in a mess if something goes wrong. This way you can always do a System Restore. Check any other options you want and you’re ready!How to make your XP look like Mac OSX - xptricks.net
Step 3: Enjoy!

After the restart, you should be able to convince all, but the most die-hard Mac lovers that you have an OSX. This is what your desktop should look like now: How to make your XP look like Mac OSX - xptricks.net Like other good transformation packs, this also leaves you a nice Mac OSX shutdown screen: How to make your XP look like Mac OSX - xptricks.net …And a Mac OSX logon screen: How to make your XP look like Mac OSX - xptricks.net


I’ll give FlyakiteOSX an excellent 5 stars. Note: The transformation pack might trigger your anti-virus protection as it changes some system files, but this is probably a false positive. Be careful though, and remember to back up!

If you have a slow wireless internet connection that often crashes, then there’s probably something wrong with it. (Duh!) Here are some tips and tricks to fix some of the most common wireless problems on Windows XP. Before you start “fixing” anything, make sure your wireless connection isn’t already at it’s best.
1. Move the wireless router to a better location

The first thing you want to do is to make sure your wireless router is in the best location possible. If you have a laptop that you move around all the time or if you have several computers, the router should be in the centre of your home and office. Don’t hide it into cupboards, or under chairs and tables.

But if you only have one stationary computer, use a cable connection to the router or move the router as close to the computer as possible.

You can check the signal strength from the Wireless connection menu, accessible from Start -> Connect To -> Wireless Connection. You can also access it by clicking the wireless icon at the bottom right corner of the screen if you are connected.
2. Upgrade the wireless router firmware

Sometimes the problem is with the router firmware. Make sure you update your router firmware as often as possible to avoid incompatibility with newer systems. You can update your router firmware from the wireless router control panel. Type your router’s IP address into the browser to access the CP.

The default IP of routers is normally 192.168.1.1 for Linksys, 192.168.0.1 for D-Link and Netgear, some US Robotics routers use 192.168.123.254 and some SMC routers have 192.168.2.1. The router’s default IP address is always in the documentation of the router.
3. Change the wireless broadcast channel

If there are several wireless networks in your area, they can begin to distract each other. Most routers use the wireless channel 6 by default and the channel can slow down if full of signals coming from many routers. You can change the wireless channel from the Wireless Control Panel.

If changing the channel didn’t speed up your wireless connection, change it back to 6. It’s better not to play with them too much because this can distract your firewall.
4. Update your computer’s wireless network drivers

You can search for driver updates from the Windows Update site or your manufacturers website.

If none of the above tips helped, contact your wireless router manufacturer or just go back to a wired internet connection.

Windows XP’s built in Windows Messenger can be quite a nuiscance for those 99% of us that use Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger) or any other instant messaging program instead of it.

To be honest, I don’t even really know why it even exists. Why does Microsoft need two free messenger programs, one much better than the other?

Anyway, here is how to remove Windows Messenger from your XP and save some valuable disk space.

Step 1: Navigate to C:\WINDOWS\inf and look for the file named sysoc.inf (NOT sysoc.PNF !), Copy it to a secure location on the hard drive to back it up. Remember to always back up befor making any tweaks or mofifications to Windows.

Step 2: Now we get to the diry work. Open sysoc.inf an look for the following line in the [Components] section:

msmsgs=msgrocm.dll,OcEntry,msmsgs.inf,hide,7

Remove “hide” so that the commas sit next to one another. This is what it should look like now:

msmsgs=msgrocm.dll,OcEntry,msmsgs.inf,,7

And you’re done editing! Save the file and quit.

Step 3: Go to Start -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> Add / Remove Windows Components and you should see “Windows Messenger” on the list. Check the box next to it to remove it.

Note: you can remove other Windows programs the same way, but as always, only at your own risk.

Any ordinary USB memory device can do a lot more than you probably thought it could. It can carry programs, encryption and even a full installation of Windows XP! Here is our tenlist for the coolest things you can do with a USB thumb drive:

Take your programs with you

We all know how frustrating it is when we take your files to another computer just to discover that the software required to read the files is not installed.

Here’s the simplest solution – take your programs with you – on your USB thumb drive. Here’s how to do it with Portable Apps:


1. Go to the Portable Apps website and download the installer, choosing the software you want to carry along.

2. Run the installer and install the software to the root of your USB thumb drive.

And you’re done! As soon as you connect your thumb drive into a computer, Portable Apps will open up automatically.

Surf anonymously

With Portable Apps and Firefox, you can surf the web without leaving any trace on the computer you are using. If you want extra security, install a Firefox security plugin such as FoxyProxy. To iput Firefox onto the drive, just copy-paste the Firefox folder from you computer, or install Firefox onto the thumb drive.

Set a program to run automatically (autorun)

Using autorun, you can set a program to start up automatically when you connect the drive to a computer. You can also use the same script for a data CD-ROM. Note that some computers have autorun disabled for security purposes. [Here's how to disable autorun.]

Open up notepad and paste the following script:

[autorun]

ShellExecute=filename

Label=description

UseAutoPlay=1

Make sure you replace filename with the full path to the file. For example, a file called program.exe in a folder called “programs” on the thumb drive would be /programs/program.exe

Replace description with a short description of the program, for example, My Jukebox or Mozilla Firefox.

Save the file as autorun.inf, making sure you select “All Programs” from the save menu, not “Text document”!

Help! I’m lost!

Ever lost a USB drive? Even if you haven’t, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll lose a few during your life. And with all the important information on it, it could be a disaster to have it fall into someone’s hands.

A good idea is to encrypt all the information on the drive, but you would still want it back, wouldn’t you? Luckily, the folks at the Daily Cup Of Tech have come up with a solution.

Save a program called “Help! I’m Lost!” on the drive, that a finder just can’t get around opening. The program opens a message box with your personal “I’m lost” message. It’s a good idea to offer the finder a bigger reward than the drive itself, so that they’ll be interested in contacting you.

Hide the drive inside something

Why not surprise your friends and co-workers by sticking something that looks like a broken USB cable into the computer’s USB drive?

You’ll be sure to get a few shocked faces when you start to play a movie from it.

The guys from Technobuzz.net show us how to do it. (You are gonna need an unbelievably small thumb drive for this…)

Secure your PC

Just like with an RFID badge, you can use a USB drive to lock and unlock a PC. Insert it to begin working and pull it out when you’ve finished, locking the computer. There are several programs for this . Rohos, a commercial program and WiKID, a semi-open source one.

If you really need to secure your computer with a USB drive, I suggest you give Rohos a try, as WiKID is rather complicated.

Portable jukebox

Don’t just carry the music with you, also carry the player! You can install audio programs such as WinAmp and CoolPlayer+ on your thumb drive. Just unextract the ZIP folders to the USB drive.

If you want the jukebox to start up automatically when you connect the memory stick to the computer, use the autorun feature shown tip 3 and point it to the exe of your audio player.

Encrypt your data

If you carry any sensitive indormation on your USB memory stick, a good idea is to encrypt it. Hardware-level encryption will help, but it will cost extra. You can get a free program to encrypt your data just as securely. For this I recommend TrueCrypt, but most others will also do.

You will need admin access on the computer you want to use your encrypted thumb drive on, so this it’s usability a little.

Run a standalone OS for dedicated tasks

The easiest OS to boot from a USB drive is probably Linux. There are many small capacity Linux versions out there that will fit on your drive. The best 3 are Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux and Webconverger.

Make sure you select a version that needs less space than your USB drive’s maximum, so you have room for files and software.

And this leads us nicely to the final tip…

Run Windows itself from a USB thumb drive
Modifying Windows to work on a USB drive is quite difficult, but luckily there are some tools that will do it for us. Note that you will need a separate Windows license for this, as Microsoft only lets you use one for each single computer, and a USB drive is treated by them like a computer…

What you’ll need:

1. A licensed copy of Windows
2. A USB device, min. 1GB (We recommend a USB hard disk, as a flash memory stick will become unusable after 100000 writing processes. Assuming that only 2 processes are used per second, the drive will last only 60 days with 8 hours of work each day… A hard disk doesn’t have this problem.)

Here is the link to the full tutorial, translated from German.

XP Performance Tweaks
Introduction

Do you want to make the very best use of your computer's RAM? There are thousands of websites offering performance tweaks and you could spend the next week or more researching the ones you might like to perform, or you can save yourself a lot of bother and read this article. There are hundreds of XP tweaks, but you only need the handful listed here to obtain a significant performance boost. The rest of the tweaks you might find will only give you minor and often indiscernible performance benefits.

Some of the tweaks listed here require that you to edit your registry. kadaitcha.cx accepts no responsibility or liability for your choice to make changes to your registry, or for any other changes you make. There may be serious consequences from making changes and the responsibility for that is entirely your own. In short, you should not perform any registry edits or any other changes to your system unless you know what you are doing.

To start RegEdit, Click Start, type RegEdit in the Run box, and then click OK.

WARNING
There are a number of websites offering alleged performance tweaks that include advice to empty the XP prefetch folder. If you follow this ridiculous advice, your system performance will decrease. Windows XP automatically manages the prefetch folder and there is no need to delete anything from it.

Additionally, the same websites offer a tip to add ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 to the SYSTEM.INI [386enh] section in order to force the OS to be a bit more aggressive about not going to the pagefile. This is complete rubbish. In Windows XP, SYSTEM.INI is used only by 16-bit applications, and it is included in XP only for backward compatibility, which means the alleged tweak does nothing at all for XP.

Also see Tweak #10 for more information on alleged performance tweaks being peddled by various XP "technical" websites.


Tweak #1: Enable ClearType
Performance isn't just about the speed of your system, it includes being able to clearly see the text on your screen. ClearType provides support for vastly improved font display on colour LCD monitors, high-quality TFT and standard CRT screens, and whilst ClearType is enabled by default in Internet Explorer 7, it isn't enabled in XP. Compare the difference:



To enable ClearType and make any adjustments to suit your eyes, go to the Microsoft Typography pages and follow the simple instructions. You can adjust ClearType in the Control Panel after installing the software at the link.

Tweak #2: Disable Last Access Timestamp
Whenever XP reads a file, it stamps the file with the date and time that you accessed it. This feature has its place but is not required for normal use unless you rely on the date of last access for backup purposes, which is a rare requirement for most backups. Putting a timestamp on a file that has just been read means that a write access has to be made to disk, so every time a read is executed, a corresponding write is also executed.

To disable the last access timestamp behaviour, start a command prompt, enter the following command then reboot;

FSUTIL behavior set disablelastaccess 1

Those of us who read and write Her Majesty's English need to take note of the American spelling of the BEHAVIOR parameter. To turn timestamps back on, repeat the command but replace 1 with 0;

FSUTIL behavior set disablelastaccess 0

I found an article on the web the other day about automatically defragmenting drives and thought that I might just as well post a tutorial about it here. Basically, this allows you to defrag any drive by right-clicking on it and choosing “defrag.”

To enable this, open notepad and paste the following code:

; context_defrag.INF

; Adds Defrag to the right click context menu in Windows XP

[version]
signature=”$CHICAGO$”

[DefaultInstall]
AddReg=AddMe

[AddMe]

HKCR,”Drive\Shell\Defrag\command”,,,”DEFRAG.EXE %1″

Next save it as context_defrag.inf onto your desktop or basically anywhere… (Note: be sure to save it as All Files and not Text Documents!)

Right-click on it, choose Install and you’re ready to start defragmenting!

I believe the original article by Paul Thurrott is here.