These extensions at the end of a file name refer to the type of file it is. This information is used by your operating system to launch an appropriate program when you click on the file name. Example: file.txt is a text file and can be opened by a text editor program. Read More…

Full article here

What is this about?

To keep the introduction short, Microsoft denies that booting Windows off a USB drive works.

See this page for example. It says:

Q: Can a USB storage device be the primary (and only) means of storage?
No. USB-based mass storage devices cannot be the primary hard disk storage solution on a regular system …

Or this one from the microsoft newsgroups:

Windows cannot boot from an USB drive. If your computer supports
booting from such device, you can load a boot loader to the USB device
which starts Windows XP from the HDD.

Anyway, the web is full of those. I was wondering about the same thing, as i did not want to put a Windows partition on my Linux.based work laptop, and thought it was a good idea to run Windows XP off a USB Hard drive that i just plug in when i need it, and boot from it. To put a long story short, this is exactly what i do now, thanks to the fantastic research of the people credited below. However, it took me significant time to figure out all the painful little problems, and i was not fully happy with the current official guide by Dietmar (no pun, he was the first to make ANYthing public). I wanted an easy guide that allows creating a modified version of the Windows XP CD, for painless and transparent installation to as many systems as you want. Read More…

Introduction

Millions of wireless access points are spread across the US and the world. About 70% percent of these access points are unprotected—wide open to access by anyone who happens to drive by. The other 30% are protected by WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and a small handful are protected by the new WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) standard.

At a recent ISSA (Information Systems Security Association) meeting in Los Angeles, a team of FBI agents demonstrated current WEP-cracking techniques and broke a 128 bit WEP key in about three minutes. Special Agent Geoff Bickers ran the Powerpoint presentation and explained the attack, while the other agents (who did not want to be named or photographed) did the dirty work of sniffing wireless traffic and breaking the WEP keys.

This article will be a general overview of the procedures used by the FBI team. A future article will give step-by-step instructions on how to replicate the attack. Read More…

After careful research done in the Windows XP online community, I’ve decided these command-line shortcuts are best for beginners:

To get more information about any command, type command name /?. Then press Enter.

Shut Down the System

Although shutting down the computer from the Start menu is faster and easier, the shutdown command can also be issued at a command prompt to shut down the computer. The shutdown command also offers parameters to log off a user, restart the computer, and abort a system shutdown. If you ever have to boot to the command-line to troubleshoot a problem, you’ll want to know how this command works. To shut down the computer and experiment with other options:

Other options include -r to restart the system, -m \\computername to shut down a remote computer, and -l to log off of the computer. To see all the options, type shutdown /? at the command prompt.

Convert a FAT File System to NTFS

If your file system is configured as FAT instead of NTFS, you’re missing out on quite a few extra perks. Using NTFS, you get increased security, file compression, disk quotas, and encryption—features you don’t get with FAT. For the pros and cons of both file systems, read Charlie Russel’s article, NTFS vs. FAT: Which is Right for You? If you do decide to convert, it’s quite simple: Read More…

We tend to think of Windows as a mousing environment, but it’s often easier to get from place to place, file to file, or app to app using keystroke combinations. Below you will find some useful keyboard shortcuts.

First, some quick definitions of two keys found on Windows keyboards: The Windows key is the one with the Windows logo. The Application key is the one with the illustration of a mouse pointer selecting from a menu. Note that many keyboards have two Alt keys and two Ctrl keys, and some key combinations work with one but not with the other.

Start faster: Instead of clicking the Start button, press either Ctrl-Esc or Windows to open the Start menu. To select an item from the menu, hit the underlined letter in the menu option’s name (or the first letter if none is underlined). For example, to get to the Run box in a jiff, type Windows-R. You can also navigate the menus via cursor keys (Home, Page Down, the arrow keys, and so on). Bonus tip: Hold down Windows while you repeatedly press Tab to cycle through the buttons on your taskbar. Read More…

1.    A quick way to jump into PowerPoint’s Master views (97/98/2000)

If you want to change to one of the Master views without using the menu options, there’s a simple way to do it. Simply hold down the [Shift] key and click one of the slide view buttons in the lower-left portion of your screen. Depending on which button you click, PowerPoint switches to that Master view. For example, if you hold down the [Shift] key and click the Slide View button, PowerPoint switches to Slide Master view.

2.  Applying the same animation effects in PowerPoint (97/98/2000)

If you want to apply the same animation effect to several different objects, you don’t need to select each object and change the effect individually. Instead, you can select all the objects at once and apply the same effect to all of them. To do this, first open an existing presentation with several unanimated objects on one of the slides. Next, choose Slide Show | Custom Animation to open the Custom Animation dialog box. Click on the Order & Timing tab and select the check box next to each object you want to animate. Read More…