RahulPatel–twikies…

January 7, 2010

Windows 7’s “God-Mode” Hack

Filed under: Tips n Tricks, Windows 7 — Rahul Patel @ 3:15 pm

One irritation with Windows – even the well-designed Windows 7 – is that various control panels (Autoplay, Action Center, Administrative Tools, etc.), tend to be spread around the OS in multiple locations, making management more time consuming.

Some may have known this already, but a new tweak is just now gaining public attention, which allows all of these control panels to be congregated in a single folder. To get access to this “God-Mode” super folder, all you have to do is create a new folder named:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Once you’ve completed the (re)name the folder’s icon will switch to a control panel. You’ll then be free to start performing all the administration tasks you’ve been putting off.

December 5, 2009

Introduction to Google Public DNS

Filed under: My Knowledge — Rahul Patel @ 11:42 am

As web pages become more complex and include more resources from multiple origin domains, clients need to perform multiple DNS lookups to render a single page. The average Internet user performs hundreds of DNS lookups each day, slowing down his or her browsing experience. As the web continues to grow, greater load is placed on existing DNS infrastructure.

Since Google’s search engine already crawls the web on a daily basis and in the process resolves and caches DNS information, we wanted to leverage our technology to experiment with new ways of addressing some of the existing DNS challenges around performance and security. We are offering the service to the public in the hope of achieving the following aims:

* Provide end users with an alternative to their current DNS service. Google Public DNS takes some new approaches that we believe offer more valid results, increased security, and, in most cases, better performance.
* Help reduce the load on ISPs’ DNS servers. By taking advantage of our global data-center and caching infrastructure, we can directly serve large numbers of user requests without having to query other DNS resolvers.
* Help make the web faster and more secure. We are launching this experimental service to test some new ways to approach DNS-related challenges. We hope to share what we learn with developers of DNS resolvers and the broader web community and get their feedback.

As web pages become more complex and include more resources from multiple origin domains, clients need to perform multiple DNS lookups to render a single page. The average Internet user performs hundreds of DNS lookups each day, slowing down his or her browsing experience. As the web continues to grow, greater load is placed on existing DNS infrastructure.

Since Google’s search engine already crawls the web on a daily basis and in the process resolves and caches DNS information, we wanted to leverage our technology to experiment with new ways of addressing some of the existing DNS challenges around performance and security. We are offering the service to the public in the hope of achieving the following aims:

* Provide end users with an alternative to their current DNS service. Google Public DNS takes some new approaches that we believe offer more valid results, increased security, and, in most cases, better performance.
* Help reduce the load on ISPs’ DNS servers. By taking advantage of our global data-center and caching infrastructure, we can directly serve large numbers of user requests without having to query other DNS resolvers.
* Help make the web faster and more secure. We are launching this experimental service to test some new ways to approach DNS-related challenges. We hope to share what we learn with developers of DNS resolvers and the broader web community and get their feedback.

Google Public DNS is a recursive DNS resolver, similar to other publicly available services. We think it provides many benefits, including improved security, fast performance, and more valid results. See below for an overview of the technical enhancements we’ve implemented.

Google Public DNS is not, however, any of the following:

* A top-level domain (TLD) name service. Google is not an operator of top-level domain servers (generic or country-code), such as Verisign.
* A DNS hosting or failover service. Google Public DNS is not a third-party DNS application service provider, such as DynDNS, that hosts authoritative records for other domains.
* An authoritative name service. Google Public DNS servers are not authoritative for any domain. Google maintains a set of other nameservers that are authoritative for domains it has registered, hosted at ns[1-4].google.com.
* A malware-blocking service. Google Public DNS does not perform blocking or filtering of any kind.

To try it out:

* Configure your network settings to use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers or
read this :http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html

November 21, 2009

Virtual Router Wifi Hotspot for Windows 7

Filed under: Windows 7 — Rahul Patel @ 9:58 am

Microsoft’s CodePlex has released Virtual Router that turns a Windows 7 Computer into a Wifi Hotspot using Windows 7’s Wireless Hosted Network (Virtual Wifi) technology.

Virtuual Router turns any Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 Computer into a Wifi Hot Spot using Windows 7’s Wireless Hosted Network (Virtual Wifi) technology.

VirtualRouter_09_Screenshot001.png

The Wireless Network create/shared with Virtual Router uses WPA2 Encryption, and there is not way to turn off that encryption. This is actually a feature of the Wireless Hosted Network API’s built into Windows 7 and 2008 R2 to ensure the best security possible.

You can give your “virtual” wireless network any name you want, and also set the password to anything. Just make sure the password is at least 8 characters.

Download : Virtual Router

November 20, 2009

Create bootable USB drive for Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

Filed under: Hyper-V, Server 2008 — Rahul Patel @ 9:59 am

BootFromUSB is a simple application to automate the manual preparation process for booting Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 off of USB drives.

Description
A simple application to automate the preparation process for booting Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 off of USB drives.

The application automates the manual USB creation process detailed on the Microsoft website.

Requirements

* Copy the EXE locally
* You have the Windows AIK or Windows OPK installed.
* You are running as a local admin
* You have the INSTALL.WIM file for Hyper-v Server 2008 R2 available.
* You have .NET 3.5 or later installed.
BootFromUSB-screenshot.PNG

Directly using a prepped Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 VHD file (instead of from a WIM):

One additional feature of BootFromUSB is you can leave the WIM field (step3) blank and
select a “Blank” VHD that is actually a pre-configured sysprepped VHD and it will directly
copy the VHD to the USB drive.

This is a quick way to prep USB drives since it skips the long VHD creation and WIM
extraction processes.

NOTE: The operating system will display a “Format disk?” dialog box a number of times while preparing the USB drive. You should ignore and just close those dialogs.

Download : http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/BootHVSR2FromUSB/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=3549

November 4, 2009

RDP 7 for Windows XP and Windows Vista

Filed under: Windows Vista, Windows XP — Rahul Patel @ 3:28 pm

October 26, 2009

Windows 7 Compatibility Center

Filed under: Windows 7 — Rahul Patel @ 9:10 am

Do you own a old hardware (for example printer, scanner, or any other device) or software and want to check its compatibility with Windows 7? Apart from using the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor, there is an excellent online resource which tells you whether a software or hardware is compatible with Windows 7 or not.It’s the Windows 7 Compatibility Center which list thousands of products and clearly label their compatibility status for Windows 7.

Click here : Windows 7 Compatibility Center

October 24, 2009

Microsoft Releases “Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool” for Installing Windows 7 from USB

Filed under: Windows 7 — Rahul Patel @ 11:55 am

Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool allows you to create a copy of your Windows 7 ISO file to USB flash drive or DVD. To create a bootable USB flash drive or DVD, download the ISO file and then run the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool. Once this is done, you can install Windows 7 directly from the USB flash drive or DVD.

Download: Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool or My Shared  Box

UPDATE 11/21:

Microsoft has confirmed their Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool does contains GPLv2 code (although they say it was not intentional). Microsoft will make the source code as well as binaries for this tool available next week under the terms of the General Public License v2.

October 21, 2009

Applications That Are Known to Work with RODCs

Filed under: Server 2008, Server Core — Rahul Patel @ 10:30 am

Overview of what applications are supported to run with a Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC) implementation.

1.Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) server
2.Microsoft Office Live Communications Server
3.Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS)
4.Microsoft Office Outlook
5.Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM)
6.Windows SharePoint Services
7.Microsoft SQL Server 2005
8.Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS)
9.Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS)
10.Credential Roaming
11.Distributed File System (DFS)
12.Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) and File Replication Service (FRS)
13.Domain Name System (DNS)
14.Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
15.Group Policy
16.Internet Authentication Service
17.Internet Information Services (IIS)
18.Network Access Protection (NAP)
19.Terminal Services (Users and Computers snap-in)
20.Terminal Services Licensing server

Note:Exchange isn’t on the list. In fact, you can’t run Exchange (2000, 2003, 2007) if there’s only a RODC it can connect to. Exchange needs a full-DC around to function correctly.
Reference:http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732790(WS.10).aspx

October 20, 2009

Disk2vhd v1.0

Filed under: Hyper-V, Server 2008 — Rahul Patel @ 10:28 am

Sysinternals  offers a free P2V tool Called Disk2VHD that creates VHDs (Virtual Hard Disks) of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC and/or Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs).  You can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online, since it uses Windows Volume Snapshot (VSS) capability, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include.

To use VHDs produced by Disk2vhd, create a VM with the desired characteristics and add the VHDs to the VM configuration as IDE disk(s).
On first boot, a VM booting a captured copy of Windows will detect the VM’s hardware and automatically install drivers, if present in the image. If the required drivers are not present, install them via the Virtual PC or Hyper-V integration components.

You can also attach to VHDs using the Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Disk Management or Diskpart utilities.

Download here

For more information: Sysinternals website

October 3, 2009

Microsoft Security Essentials Released

Filed under: Micorosoft Windows, My Knowledge — Rahul Patel @ 5:56 pm

Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. Microsoft Security Essentials is a free download from Microsoft that is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date so you can be assured your PC is protected by the latest technology. It’s easy to tell if your PC is secure — when you’re green, you’re good. It’s that simple.

Microsoft Security Essentials runs quietly and efficiently in the background so that you are free to use your Windows-based PC the way you want—without interruptions or long computer wait times.

Download: Microsoft Security Essentials

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