FREE COMPUTER COURSES: December 1, 2009

December 1, 2009

How to open UIF file

Have you recently downloaded a UIF file and now want to mount it so that you can view the contents? A UIF file is actually a MagicISO CD/DVD image file. In order to view the contents, you have to first mount the UIF image file.

There are many formats for creating images files of CD/DVDs, but UIF is used because it provides better encryption and also has better compression. The most common format is ISO. Unfortunately, MagicISO is not free, but you can still use the trial edition to decompress UIF files. First download the software and then start it up. Then click on Tools and Decompress UIF Image.

Choose the source file and the destination location for the ISO file. The nice thing is that MagicISO will convert the UIF file to ISO format, so you can then mount it using any virtual disk manager software.

Now download MagicDisc, which is a free program, and install it. This program supports a large range of virtual disc formats including BIN, CIF, NRG, IMG, VCD, C2D, PDI, and lots more. It’s a great tool for managing virtual CD/DVD drives. Now right-click on the MagicDisc icon on your desktop and expand Virtual CD/DVD-ROM, choose X: No Media and then choose Mount.

Find the decompressed ISO file on your computer and click Open! You should now be able to go to My Computer and browse the CD like a normal Windows drive. Enjoy!

Download Magic Disk

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How to Mount a Virtual Hard Disk in Windows 7

With Windows 7, you now have some cool options for backing up and restoring your computer. I’ve previously written about backing up your computer using the built-in backup tool in Windows XP, but the new version is way better.

In Windows 7, when you perform a backup of your computer, the backup software will create a virtual hard disk file (VHD). If you have used Virtual PC 2007 before, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

You can also read my previous post on how to convert your PC into a virtual machine easily. Once you have a VHD file of your PC, you can load it up in Windows 7 and access the data just as if it was another drive on your computer.

Note that you can also use that VHD file to restore your entire computer to a previous state, but what if you just need some files or folders from a backup? Mounting a VHD backup in Windows 7 makes it really easy to copy data back and forth from the virtual machine.

To mount a VHD in Windows 7, you have to open Computer Management by clicking on Start and typing in compmgmt.msc in the search box. You can also go to Control Panel, then System and Security, then click on Administrative Tools and then click on Computer Management.

Now click on Disk Management on the left hand menu and wait for the list of drives and partitions to show up. Next, right-click on Disk Management and choose Attach VHD.

In the dialog box, go ahead and click Browse and navigate to the location of the VHD file that you want to mount. Then click OK.

Once it has finished mounting, you will see it display as another Basic disk that is colored a light blue. At anytime, you can right-click on that disk and choose Detach VHD to un-mount the machine.

That’s pretty much it! It’s really easy and works very well in Windows 7! If you created a virtual machine (VHD) file from another program like Virtual PC or something else, it will mount in Windows 7. Enjoy!

How to Create a Network Map in Windows 7

cool new feature of Windows 7 is dynamic networking mapping.

Basically, instead of buying or downloading a network mapping software tool, you can do it from within Windows 7 itself.
You can quickly create a network map that includes all computers and devices connected to the same network.
To create your own network map, click on Start, then Control Panel , then Network and Internet, and finally Network and Sharing Center.

Now you’ll see some basic information about your current network connection, such as the wireless network you’re connected to, etc.

Now click on the See full map link at the top right. Wait a few second while the network map is being dynamically generated.

Pretty neat right! As you can see, I have two PC’s connected to my wireless network, which is called Aseem Home. In reality, the wireless router is called Linksys WRT310N and it’s also connected to a switch, which connects to the Internet.

Other devices like my wireless printer and Xbox 360 show up, but are not added to the map. You can click on “Click here to see all other devices” to get a break-down of everything else on the network.

At the top, you can also choose which connection you want to create the network map for in case you have multiple network adapters on your computer. It’s not as fancy looking as a professional software app, but it’s free and works fairly well! Enjoy!

How to Remove Device Generic volume cannot be stopped right now error

When you try to remove a USB pen-drive by using “Safely Remove Hardware > Safely remove USB Mass Storage device” option, windows should stop all the read-write operations on the drive so that the drive can be removed.
But sometimes when you try to eject the USB device by using “Safely remove USB Mass Storage device” option, it shows a message box which says:

“The Device Generic volume cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device later”
In such case its not safe to remove the pen drive as it can get corrupt or get damaged. Many of us face such problem in removing pen-drive. In this post we will see how to fix such issue.

First Let’s see why it happens and the fix

This error comes when you have an application which is running from your pen drive or may be some file or document opened from your pen-drive when you are removing your drive.

In short, some file on your pen drive is in use by some other program on that computer. So close all such files or applications and try removing the drive.
It happens sometimes that you have no application running from your pen drive or any file opened in your knowledge but still when you try to remove the pen-drive it shows this error message shown above. In that case you can use a free application called Unlocker which will help you to remove your pen drive from your windows.

What is Unlocker?

Unlocker is an explorer extension that allows you with a simple right-click of the mouse on a file, folder or pen drive to get rid of error message like the one mentioned above.

Download

How To Remove USB Pen Drive with Unlocker?

1. Download Unlocker from here and install it on your computer.
2. Right click on your USB pen drive in my computer and select Unlocker.

How to send exe and other files through Email-Fix

There are occasions when we wish to send to our friend some cool software or any application via email but the email scanners don’t allow us to do that.

This is right on one part to disallow anyone to send virus which are exe files through email but it is of no use to people who have no intention of sending the viruses through the mail.

So here are the steps if you wish to send the executable files through the email like Gmail.

Steps:

1. The best way to do that use online file storage like Rapidshare or MegaUpload and send the link to the friend.

2. Or you can try just renaming the file extension from exe to some other like jpg, doc or txt and ask your friend on other side to rename it back to the exe. This will fool the email scanner and the file can be sent.

To rename just go to the folder options -> view tab -> uncheck the option of Hide extensions, this will display the file extensions so that you can easily rename the files.

3. You can also compress the exe files into a zip or rar archive and rename the archive from zip or rar to some other (Note: Gmail scanner can scan the zip archive as well, so renaming zip to other extension is necessary).

P.S.: sending exe files even while renaming violates the mail policies.

How to Save Windows Update for Future Use-AutoPatcher

Saving the windows update files on a disk will help you install these files on a fresh installation of windows or to install these updates on a computer which is not directly connected to Internet. For this there are two Tools. Lets see the details of what these tools do and how they work.
The Tools are :

1. AutoPatcher
2. WUtool By MajorGeeks AutoPatcher
AutoPatcher is a tool that will check what all updates you need and will download them for you. It will install the updated and will save them on disk for re-use if needed. To know more about this tool, see this page.
http://www.autopatcher.com/downloads/

WUtool By MajorGeeks WUtool is again a windows update tool developed by MajorGeeks. This tool will control the download and installation of windows update files and save Windows Updates files in a special folder. This is a lightweight tool which is very useful.

http://majorgeeks.com/WUtooL_d4332.html

How Protect your Windows Computer from Conficker Worm

Many of you must have come across this new worm/virus named Conficker as of now. Those who have not come across Conficker so far, here are the details.

Security researchers have determined that the virus is expected to go “live” on April 1st, 2009, causing your computer to do bad things—but since the worm uses a P2P protocol it’s nearly impossible to identify the source.

What is Conficker worm?

The Conficker worm is a computer worm that can infect your computer and spread itself to other computers across a network automatically, without human interaction.

Conficker is also known across the globe as Kido or Downadup and also has been reported as Win32/Conficker.A, Win32/Conficker.B, Win32/Conficker.C and Win32/Conficker.D so far.

Conficker cropped up in November and exploits vulnerability in Windows that Microsoft patched in October. Conficker.B, detected in February, added the ability to spread through network shares and via removable storage devices, like USB drives, through the AutoRun function in Windows. Conficker.C, shuts down security services, blocks computers from connecting to security Web sites, and downloads a Trojan.

How Does Conficker Spread?

Conficker might spread through file sharing and via removable drives, such as USB drives (also known as thumb drives). Whenever the pen drive is attached to the computer, the AutoPlay dialog box will show one additional option (as shown below).

The option Open folder to view files — Publisher not specified was added by the worm.

What Happenned on April 1, 2009?

Systems infected with the latest version of Conficker will begin to use a new algorithm to determine what domains to contact. It is possible that systems with the latest version of Conficker may be updated with a newer version of Conficker on April 1 by contacting domains on the new domain list.

Protecting PCs from Conficker

1. Apply the security update associated with MS08-067.

2. Make sure that your computer is running an updated and good Anti Virus.

3. Make sure you are using strong passwords (combination of alphabets, numerics and symbols).

How to Unblock Gmail And Gtalk in office and School

The other day I was talking to a friend who recently joined a large investment bank in India and he shared that a lot of websites and IM clients are banned inside his Office under the pretext of “security”.

While he is not a regular on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace or Orkut, what makes him unhappy about the new workplace is the fact that he cannot check Gmail in Office or connect with other friends over Google Talk – they are all blocked by the corporate firewall.

If you are in a similar situation, worry no more as here are some simple workarounds to bypass the filters (but use them at your own risk).

Google Talk (GTalk) – If you are not allowed to install the GTalk IM client on your computer, there’s a better web based version of Google Talk available at talkgadget.google.com – open this page in your web browser, sign-in with your Gmail user/password and start chatting with friends who are online. You can even group chat with multiple contacts, a feature that’s missing in the desktop version of Google Talk.

Gmail (Google Email) – There are multiple ways to check your Gmail email in the office. The first option is to create a Gmail filter, an option that’s available right near the search box in Gmail. Type your email address in the To: box and then select “Forward all incoming email”. You can select any other email service that’s accessible from office and Gmail will auto-forward all incoming email to this address.

The other option is to use Gmail RSS Feeds. You can use Google Reader, Newsgator, Bloglines or any other newreader and add a new feed with the URL https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom – then submit your Gmail address and password. All new messages can now be read inside your RSS reader.

Google Web Search – If Google.com web search itself is blocked in your office, you can try other alternatives like www.jux2.com or www.aftervote.com which offer search results from Google. Another option is to use googlesyndicatedsearch.com which is the same as google.com but on a different server that’s probably safe from your corporate firewall.

How to Unblock All Restricted Websites With Opera Simulator

Internet filters are active everywhere - Flickr is banned in Iran & UAE, BBC & Wikipedia are blocked in China, Blogspot blogs are banned in Pakistan, YouTube & Photobucket are prohibited for US army overseas while social sites like Bebo, MySpace or Facebook may be banned in your office.

Some companies even block access to mail websites like Yahoo or GMail under the pretext of security.

Click To Play

In the past, we have discussed atleast a dozen methods to help you access blocked websites that are banned in your office, school or by the government of your country. Here's a new method for unblocking websites - you'll probably enjoy it more than the previous hacks because it takes the geekiness out of the whole process and make it extremely easy to access blocked URLs.

Opera provides a free online tool called Opera Mini Simulator that emulates the Opera mobile phone browser on your desktop computer. The tool is done in java and is quite popular among web designers for testing website layouts on mobile phone devices without actually using a mobile phone.

As you probably guessed it by now, this Opera Browser Simulator can also be used for accessing web pages that may be blocked on your computer. Since the requests are made via the Opera.com website, they would easily bypass the local filtering.

To open any site in Opera, just append that site address to the following URL and start browsing.

http://www.operamini.com/demo/?url=[URL] - example

The Opera Simulator can even be used for secure sites that require cookies - for instance, you can check your Hotmail emails via Opera. Though you are restricted to the tiny 200x200 screen of Opera simulator, it's still a very handy tool.

How to Use Mobile proxy in PC Web Browsers

Services like Phonifer, Google Mobile and Mowser help you browse web content (meant for the desktops) on the small screens of a mobile phone or a PDA device.

They optimize the webpages for mobile phones by stripping them of all unnecessary HTML tags, embeds and formatting styles.

The next question - do you need to know about these services if you access the web only from a desktop computer ? Well, the answer is yes and here are some reasons:

For users on a slow internet connection (like a dial-up)

Phonifier and Mowser will help improve your internet browsing experience since they load webpages with just the text and images (optional). Other elements like Flash animations, CSS, Java applets, Javascripts are removed automatically..

Dial-up users will probably feel more productive when they browse the web via these services as the page loads will happen much faster.

While Google Mobile and Mowser will divide a webpage over several pages, Phonify will present everything on one page so it's more suitable for browsing on desktop computers.

How Search Engines see my site ?

Though Google Cache is a good tool to understand how web crawlers look at your site, Phonifier is another great option since it generates a very clean view of your webpage as it appears to the search engine bots. [

Create a Mobile version of your Blog

Don't have the time to create a mobile friendly version of your website. No problem - ask the mobile phone and PDA users to browse your site via Phonify or Mowser.

They'll love the experience. See real examples on Mowser, Google Mobile and Phonifer.com. You can toggle the display of images in Mowser and Phonify.

As a proxy to open restricted websites

You may access blocked websites in your school or work by using Google Mobile or any of the other two services as a proxy.

Since the browser request is sent via Google.com, the internet filters will normally not block the page.

www.google.com/gwt/n?u=URL_HERE

For example, to access the Myspace profile of Madonna, type the following address in your web browser and the page is very likely to open on your school computer without problems:

www.google.com/gwt/n?u=myspace.com/madonna

More: PHONifier is an open source project that anyone can download free of charge. You could install the PHONifier script on your server to have it automatically update your webpages when a mobile device tries to access them.

Related Readings

How to Unblock Gmail And Gtalk in office and School

How to Unblock All Restricted Websites With Opera Simulator

How to Access Blocked Websites, Unblock Restricted Sites

How to Access Blocked Websites, Unblock Restricted Sites

How to access blocked websites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo at school or office?

This article suggests workarounds to help you unblock access to restricted websites at universities, school and offices.

Background: Blocking access to undesirable Web sites has been a common government tactic but China, Iran, Saudi Arabia are believed to extend greater censorship over the net than any other country in the world.

Most of the blocked or blacklisted sites in Saudi Arabia are about sex, religion, women, health, politics and pop culture. They even block access to websites that sell swimming or bathing suits. In China, websites that talk about sex, Tibet or Democracy are blocked.

Social sites that are often blocked include Google News, Typepad, ebay, Blogger blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, Orkut, MySpace, Pandora, Bebo, Photobucket, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL AIM, Flickr, last.fm, etc.

There are always legitimate reasons to bypass the internet filters and unblock websites. The following tricks will show how to access all websites at school, college, offices or at home.

1: To access blocked website, type the IP number instead of the URL in the browser address bar. However, if your blocking software maps the IP address to the web server (reverse DNS lookup), the website will still remain blocked.

2: Use a URL redirection service like tinyurl.com or snipurl.com. These domain forwarding services sometimes work as the address in the the url box remain the redirect url and do not change to the banned site.

How to Unblock Gmail And Gtalk in office and School -Related Readings

3: Use Google Mobile Search - Google display the normal HTML pages as if you are viewing them on a mobile phone. During the translation, Google removes the javascript content and CSS scripts and breaks a longer page into several smaller pages. Google Mobile

How to Use Mobile proxy in PC Web Browsers-Related Readings

4: Enter the URL in Google or Yahoo search and then visit the cached copy of the page. To retrieve the page more quickly from Google's cache, click "Cached Text Only" while the browser is loading the page from cache.

5: There are anonymizer websites who will fetch the blocked web page from their servers and display them to you. As far as the service provider is concerned, you are viewing the page on the Anonymizer website and not the blocked site.

6: You can access blocked or restricted websites by using Yahoo Babelfish or Google Translate language tools as a proxy server.

You just have to invoke the Google translate service with the same language pair like English to English. Assuming that Google is accessible in your school, you should be able to access any website with this method - Babelfish Proxy Sever

How to Unblock All Restricted Websites With Opera Simulator-Related Readings

7: Anonymous Surfing - Browse the internet via free proxy server. A proxy server (or proxies) is a normal computer that hides the identity of computers on its network from the Internet.

Which means that only the address of the proxy server is visible to the world and not of those computers that are using it to browse the Internet. Just visit any proxy server with your Web browser and enter a URL or the address of the blocked website.

How to generate your own error Message

Generate your own Error Message Dialog Box

Ever thought of making your own warning message or an error dialog box? Well if this is something that interests you then here is something for you.

Whether you want to fool your friend or just need to make your own error dialog, this tool is for you. The tool is called EasyError and can create any of the following in seconds

• Information Dialog Box

• Question box

• Error Box

• Warning Message box

• System Shutdown Box

Just download the tool, run the exe file and type in the message that you want to display and click the generate button, that is it.

The dialog box will be generated and will look exactly similar to the system dialog boxes.

Download EasyError

How to disable File, Folder and Text from Copy and Cut

Windows allows anyone to copy or cut any file or folder easily without any restriction. This is a problem if you have some secret files or folders that you want to keep with yourselves.

This was not possible for a long time but here is a tool that can do exactly that. Moreover the software is free and easy to use.

M File Anti-copy is great software that can lock and disable copy and move feature in Windows. The program requires a password to be used.

What you all need to do is just install this software and enter a password. You will see a home screen of the software from which you can activate the “Disable Copy” feature. After this the paste option in the right click context menu will get disabled.

However if you need to copy or cut the file then you can use the built in File Copier.

Advantages:

• Free tool.

• Disables file copy and cut in Windows.

• Password protected.

• Disables Task Manager and Registry Editor, so that some user can not end the process.

The only disadvantage I found was that you can however upload the file over internet. What you think?

Download M File Anti-copy

How to Disable Error Reporting in Windows XP

Does Word keep crashing your computer
every other day and then have the nerve to ask you to send an error report to microsoft every single time, which doesn’t seem to help with your problem!? I personally find the Error Report dialog to be a pain and therefore have disabled it. Half the time, it’s not even a Microsoft product that is crashing, so what is microsoft going to be about it? It’s either poorly written software or some other issue like a messed up registry, etc.

Here’s how to turn off the error reporting popup box when a program crashes:

1. Right click on My Computer and go to Properties.

2. Next, on the System Properties dialog, click on the Advanced tab.

3. Click on the Error Reporting button at the bottom right. Choose the Disable error reporting option and make sure “But notify me when critical errors occur“.

This ensures that you’ll be notified if something serious happens, but otherwise the daily crash of IE or Word or whatever app is not going to be bothering you with a useless Send to Microsoft popup!

OEM Editor For Windows Vista And XP

Let's do some fun stuff today....See I have done it in my Computer...

TRICK 1

open notepad dump the following lines into it and save it with the name OEMINFO.INI in the c:\windows\system32 directory:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[General]

Manufacturer=Your Name Here

Model=Your Model Here

[Support Information]

Line1=Your Name Here

Line2=Your Address Here

Line3=Your Email Address Here

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Save the file.

2. Then make a right click on my computer select properties, in the general tab a button will be highlighted (support information) make a click on it, you will be able to see the changes.

3. Now if you want to display some more information then simply increase the line in the file.

Ex: Line4=Your Working Hours Here