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Showing posts from January, 2012

Make pen drives perform faster and better

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At times, copying files to and from our USB pen drives takes too much time and we wish we could just lift them and place on the other drive.  There are ways to increase the speed of a USB pen drive.  Below are a couple of them:  The OS comes with drivers for pen drives. for increased performance, the drivers made by the pen drive manufacturers should be installed. the manufacturer's website should have the drivers for download.  Also, you can optimize a pen drive for performance instead of for quick removal. To do this,  1. Open my computer (windows key + e)  2. Right click on the pen drive and click properties  3. Go to the hardware tab and double click your pen drive name  4. Click policies  5. Select optimize for performance.    6. Apply the changes and you are done. another way is to use a USB2.0 port. (change the USB port in which the drive is if you don't know if it is USB2.0.  you can also check your media for errors, correct them and De-fragment it

Get any windows xp password

It depends on when your windows OS password was setup during or after windows setup. if it was after, follow the following steps:  1. Start your computer in safe mode  2. If you are not logged in automatically and still asked for a password, type ADMINISTRATOR in the username field and leave the password field empty.  3. Press enter (or click OK - that's obvious) and you are in.  ( See my post of starting your PC in safe mode for help here ) If your password was setup during installation, or the above method does not work, follow these:  1. Download any password recovery software. a Google search will lead you, but i recommend ophcrack.  2. If the system is on the desktop, install the app and crack the password (read the apps documentation)  3.If not, you can use a live CD or USB to run the program. ophcrack provides one.  I f none of these work, get a bucket of water and drop the PC into it. hahahaha, just kidding, but you can try it (@ your own risk.)

Set a screen saver in windows xp

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To set a screen saver in windows XP, follow the following steps:  1. Right click on the desktop and click on properties in the popup menu  2.Click on the screen saver tab in the resultant window.  3. Choose from the list, the most suitable to you.  4.You can change the time it appears when the PC is idle below the list.  5. Other settings can be set (like speed, etc) by clicking the settings tab.  6. Apply the settings and click on OK.  Apart from the default windows screen savers, others exist like the wits and wisdom screen saver. a Google search will lead you to more.  PS: be careful with screen savers as some may be malware.

Create a new partition on a hard disk drive

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One may want to create partitions on a hard drive for different reasons including ability to install multiple operating systems, separate personal files from operating system files, and to hide a particular partition from access.  To do this, follow the steps below:  1. Open control panel (start, control panel)  2. Double click administrative tools 3. Open computer management  4. Click on disk management on the left portion of the window that appears  5. Right click on the unallocated space and click on create partition.  6. Select the size of the partition  7. Format the partition by right clicking on it and clicking format  8. Restart your PC  PS: this method works for disk space that are already unallocated.  If there is already data on the disk, third party software can be used. a Google search will lead you to one.  I recommend the use of easeus partition manager (because i have used it before and it worked really well).  Nice tweaking