If you are unfamiliar with the Sysinternals Process Explorer utility, you should really check it out… it gives you so much more information than the default task manager, including a tree view of all the processes so you can see which processes launched other processes. You can look at pretty much every piece of data concerning a process, including associated registry key handles, open files, dlls. There’s even a search function.
I have just started to play around with Access 2007 and so far my thoughts are indifferent. I am not sure how well the “Ribbon” is going to play out. I work in Access Databases a lot with my job and I am pretty comfortable with the way things have been. I have gotten used to the Ribbon in Word, Excel, and Outlook. In fact it seems to make those tasks more fun. I have been really holding off on Access though.
If you allow Firefox to store your passwords you might be worried about the recent security holes found in the password manager. The solution to these problems is to use the Secure Login extension to prevent Firefox from automatically filling in password fields, but at the same time giving you the automation that saves you time. In fact, using the hotkey means that this method is probably even quicker.
Update: The Bounty Program has a new home page.
Today a reader had a very good question about lsass.exe is the Microsoft security management process for domain access and local security policies. Simply put it manages who logs on to your PC and/or Server. There are a few viruses that mimic this process. The Sasser virus was one of the more popular attacks a few years ago. The Sasser worm would exploit lsass.exe so that XP would start a countdown of 60 seconds advising you to save your work. Every time you rebooted your machine this would keep happening. This process is located in C:WindowsSystem32 in either a PC or Server. If you were to find it in any other location in your system … it is a virus.
In the next logical extension of this site, I’ve added a forum so that the readers can interact with each other. The geeks behind How-To Geek will be answering any questions that you might ask, and hopefully other readers will participate in answering questions as well.
Let’s face it – the Windows Vista shutdown dialog is one of the worst pieces of UI nonsense ever. Just look at it… what were they thinking with that popup dialog?
If you are doing a lot of testing of different builds, there’s nothing more annoying than rebooting and then having the system boot into the wrong choice on the grub menu before you have a chance to pick the one you want. Reader Victor wrote in with this tip: You can just comment out the timeout line entirely to stop grub from picking anything, giving you time to get your morning coffee.
I have been a fan of yousendit.com for a few years now. This is a decent and reliable service to email large files to others. The maximum size is 100 MB for the free version. You can send larger files for a fee. The way the service works is you upload your file to their server which sends an email to the recipient including a hyperlink directly to the file for them to download. The cool part is that your recipient does not need to be a member or sign up for anything. If the recipient wants to send files they will have to create an account though.
Those who are familiar with resizing picture attachments in Outlook 2003 might wonder where on earth they hid this feature in Outlook 2007 - at first glance, it seems like they removed it completely, when in reality they buried it in the Ribbon.
Every time you delete a file, Windows asks you “Are you sure you want to move this file to the Recycle Bin?” This is typically a good thing, to prevent you from deleting files by accident, but if you are trying to do some cleanup and need to delete a lot of files, you might not want to be prompted every single time.
In a previous post I mentioned that I am ready for a new audio player application. This all came to fruition because Apple pissed me off with their last iTunes update. It includes unnecessary software for the iPhone. Sure I could choose not to update … but that’s counter productive. Software updates should enhance the end user experience, not degrade it.
I realize this is probably only relevant to about 3 of the readers, but I’m posting this so I don’t forget how to do it myself! In my efforts to ban the completely insecure FTP protocol from my life entirely, I’ve decided to disable the FTP service running on the How-To Geek server, which is running the CentOS operating system.
Here at geek central, we’re in the business of making things as easy as possible. There’s a registry hack for Windows that will let you add a Copy To Folder or Move To Folder to the right-click menu, which can be very useful when you want to move a file but don’t have the other folder open already.
We’ve come a long way in our coverage of Windows Vista, and it’s time to put together a roundup of all the articles that tweak the appearance of Windows Vista. If you’d like to suggest something that we left out, leave a comment with the details of what you’d like us to feature next.
I would argue Foxit Reader 2.0 is the best alternative to Adobe Reader for Windows. Unlike the bloated Adobe product; Foxit Reader 2.0 is light on system resources and opens PDF docs extremely faster than adobe. Foxit Reader 2.0 also includes free add-ons, no lengthy splash screens, has an intuitive streamline interface, and is under 2MB download size.
I recently came across an article on Cnet questioning the advantage of using the anti-spyware freeware Spybot Search and Destroy. I definitely have to take exception to her position. This is my opinion on this great software.
My favorite web browser is Firefox and when I try a new extension or “Add-ons” that sticks I feel the need to tell everyone about it. In a previous post I wrote about my favorite Add-ons so far. Today I am adding Colorful Tabs to the list. This is a fun way to keep track of your multiple tabs while browsing the net with FireFox.
I tend to leave a lot of comments on various blogs that I read throughout my day, and typing in the same name, email and site URL takes quite a bit of time if you don’t automate it somehow.
Up until now, there’s been no way to show the Alexa rankings directly in Firefox… if you wanted to see them you had to either use the really great About This Site extension, or use the toolbar for Internet Explorer.
The market seems to be full of OS X Expose clones, but this is the first one that I’ve found that not only works really well, but has a ton of customization options. It’s called Switcher, and you might already be familiar since it’s been out for a while.
Outlook 2007 and earlier versions display the Outlook Today page when you first start up, but for most people it’s a fairly useless page since you just want to get to your email anyway.
From the unsure why you’d want to do this department comes this tip on how to completely disable tabbed browsing in Firefox. I’ve gotten quite a number of requests for this over the last few months, so I’m finally breaking down and writing an article about it.
Let’s say you have a directory with hundreds of files with the wrong file names, and you’d like to replace every filename containing test with prod. (this is a contrived example). We can easily do this with the “for” command in bash, combined with a little bit of bash goodness. Today we’ll learn how to replace text in a variable in a for loop.
