COMPUTER TROUBLESHOOTING 23

SELF EXCUTIVE FLIE
If you are confused that which windows you are using. I'll tell you the procedure.
Click on "Start Menu"
Click on "Run Command"
Type "winver" (without quotes) and press Enter

You can see Windows Full Name covered with red oval.
Windows XP Professional Edition provides more functionality over network while Windows XP Home Edition is designed only for home users who are not using networking.
Making Self Extractable Compressed File
Microsoft Windows XP has built-in utility to make self extractable compressed file. Its name is "IExpress". This utility is a useful utility for transfer multiple files from one computer to another computer. Advantage is that destination computer doesn't need any software for un-compression. This utility creates self extractable ".exe" file

COMPUTER TROUBLESHOOTING 22

SPECIAL FOLDERS
If you are logged in Windows XP then your login has some special folders according to logged-in user like every logged-in user has own settings in a special folder. Every logged-in user has own desktop folder. Every logged-in user has own "My document" folder.



I am going to explain method to get those special folders. Type the following commands in "Run command".

Get home drive of Windows type the following command in "Run command"
%HOMEDRIVE%

Open Windows folder. It will open folder where Windows is installed.
%WinDir%

Get and open Common Program Files folder.
%CommonProgramFiles%

Get and open Application data folder of current user.
%AppData%

Get and open folder which has all user profiles.
%ALLUSERSPROFILE%

Get and open home path of logged-in user.
%HomePath%

Get and open Program Files folders (Program Files folder has all installed program of Windows).
%ProgramFiles%

Open System drive. Normally it is C: but it can be different in some circumstances.
%SystemDrive%

Open System root folder.
%SystemRoot%

Open temporary files folder.
%Temp%
or
%Tmp%

Open current user's profile folder.
%UserProfile%

Open Desktop folder.
%UserProfile%Desktop

Note: These commands are not case sensitive. You can use these commands in any case like you can use %SystemRoot% or %SYSTEMROOT% or %SyStEmRoOt%. Every case will work on Windows.

COMPUTER TROUBLESHOOTING 21

7 EASY STEPS TO SPEED UP SLOW PC
When your computer was new it ran smoothly at top speed. The actual speed of course depends on the speed of your computer chip,amount of memory and various other things which relate directly to the components of your machine. A computer with a Celeron chip or equivalent will run slower than one with the latest dual core processor. If you want a really fast computer you will have to spend a bit more money for the right components.

This being said there are many other factors which influence the speed at which your computer surfs and runs programs.

(1.) If your computer boots slowly it is likely due to a large number of programs in your start menu. You should take a look at what is in there and remove programs which you do not often use at startup. You don’t have to delete them from the computer. Just take them out of the start menu and you can easily access them when you need them.

(2.) If you have seldom or never used programs on your hard drive get rid of them. Uninstall them completely,don’t just delete them. This can free up quite a bit of hard drive space which will help the computer to run faster.

(3.) If you have not defragmented you hard drive for some time do it now. This alone often results in noticeably better performance.

(4.) Remove temporary files and cookies. These items will greatly slow down your machine. Do this regularly and you will see a difference in performance of your computer.

(5.) Permanently delete all deleted emails and older sent and received emails you do not need. If you have not done this in a long time it will surprise you how much disk space you can free up.

(6.) If you have insufficient memory in your machine you should upgrade by adding some more. A minimum of 1 gigabyte of ram is needed to handle a lot of programs.

(7.) If your registry is overloaded this is the most likely cause of slow running and freezing. Your computer registry is a database used by all windows operated computers to run the computer and programs. Over time it becomes choked with many fragments of programs and other data. The operating system must find it’s way through all this unwanted registry material to locate the data it uses to run the machine. This causes slow running,freezing and even crashing. All windows operated computers suffer from this problem. Only one thing can be done to correct it and that is to clean the registry of all the useless entries.

If you have sufficient computer knowledge you may be able to clean the registry manually yourself. However make one error and you may disable the computer by removing an essential entry. You may then have to reinstall the operating system. This obviously is to be avoided as you will lose all the material you have in the computer.

There is a much safer and better way to clean the registry and that is to use a registry cleaner application. Several companies offer these registry repair utilities for download on the internet. Most of them will offer you a free scan of your registry to first of all find out if you do in fact have a registry problem. You can study the report you are provided with and decide what you want to do. You can choose to remove the unwanted material from the registry yourself or pay the very reasonable fee to have it done quickly and safely for you.

We would definitely recommend using the registry cleaner application to do the work safely and properly. Once you download the program it remains on your hard drive and you can use it regularly to clean and keep your registry in top shape. If you choose to do nothing your registry will become more bloated as time goes by and the computer will become ever slower and more balky.

We purchased and tested several of the popular registry cleaner programs available on the internet. In order to make the test meaningful we ran each program on the same computer to see how they performed in locating errors. We did not run the repair untill all the utilities had been tested. We found a good,better and best amongst these programs and found that one of them was clealy superior to the others.


Would you like to know which registry cleaner we found to do the best job? Would you like to know a lot more about how to speed up a slow computer? Just check out our website. You will be offered a free scan to fix registry problems: REGISTRY REPAIR

COMPUTER TROUBLESHOOTING 20

System Password Protection
You should always lock your computer when you leave it. A password will protect your computer from others. There are three or four methods to lock your computer manually, but you can lock your computer automatically using screen saver option. You can turn on automatically lock dialog box after specified time.
Follow the giving steps to set screen saver to lock computer automatically:
First right click on your computer desktop then select the properties option.
In the Display Properties click on Screen saver tab.
Now select any screen saver file then in Wait field set any suitable time to turn on screen saver.
At the end check the Password Protected option and press OK. Now after specified time, when your screen saver will turn on, your computer will be automatically locked.

COMPUTER TROUBLESHOOTING 19

Hidden User Account
For my next trick I will make a user account disappear, yet remain a full functioning account. Today's Security Tip is another way to lock down your system, and it does this by hiding specified user accounts. This feature is only available in XP and 2000, so unfortunately the rest of you are out of luck. This process does involve an easy registry edit, but if you're uncomfortable with that you might want to think twice about attempting this.
Normally when you log into XP, you see the startup screen where you see all the icons for the users who can access. What this tip does is allow you to hide a desired account from this screen. If you want to log on as this user you have to press Cntrl+Alt+Del twice at the Welcome screen to make a Windows Security dialog box appear. Here you can type in the user name and password of the hidden account and log in. Limited Users shouldn't be able to see any sign of you except for the listing in the Documents and Settings folder. Other administrative users will be able to see your hidden account in Control Panel/User Accounts, so keep this in mind when you're planning this out.
All right, now down to the good stuff. If having a hidden account sounds like your cup of tea, and you have no problem with small Registry augmentation, then let's go:
First we need to open up the Registry Editor. Go to Start/Run and type "regedit" and click OK
You should be looking at the Registry editor, and what we need to do now is navigate to H-KEY\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\Userlist . You will not see this folder if you do not have "show hidden system files" turned on.
Once here we need to create another DWORD value. This is easier than it sounds, right click on the User list label file on the left side of the screen and select New>DWORD . You'll see the new entry in the right pane of the window, rename this value the name of the user account you want hidden (exactly how it is listed in the Startup screen, case sensitive) and leave the value at 0.
Close your Registry Editor and restart the PC. When the Welcome screen comes up you'll notice that there's no icon for the user you just concealed. So how do you log in? This is where you press Cntrl+Alt+Del 2x's and the Windows Security Dialog box will come asking you to authenticate (name/password) after this the system should log you in.
Here's one more thing you might want to keep in mind, Windows logon screen. This is the screen where you see the available users you can choose to log in as. You can turn this option on/off in the User Accounts ( Start/Control Panel/User Accounts then "Change the way Users log in or off" and "Use Windows Welcome Screen" and you need to turn it off if you plan on using a hidden account and there are no other accounts on the system. The reason why is that the Windows doesn't have any user accounts to display in the Welcome screen, so it will continuously reboot. Now if you do run into this or any problems simply enter Safe mode at the next boot, this will allow you to go to the User Accounts Window and fix any problems. If you find that you can't log in at all with your hidden account go back and look at the registry value you created. Make sure you're spelling the user name is correct and that it's in the right location in the registry.

COMPUTER TROUBLESHOOTING 18

Download the youtube videos on hard disk

Using this tip, you can easily download the youtube.com movies and save on your computer hard disk. Actually all videos are saved on youtube in flash video format, so you can simply play these videos on the website and can't save directly to your computer. But there are many tools are available in the market to download these videos on the hard disk, but here you can do this using a website. You can convert also the downloaded videos from youtube into any common video format, for example, windows media video file (wmv), windows video file (avi) and movie file (mpeg).
Follow the given steps to download videos from youtube on your computer:
First open www.youtube.com then plays any your favorite video.

For example, you search a video and the URL of that youtube video is

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVkUG6XLItc

The ID if this search is pVkUG6XLItc after equal sign.

Now open a website http://youtube.navi-gate.org, now copy and paste above video ID in the search box, and press button ID search.
The result may be displayed in any different language, but don't worry, just click on download button and save this video on your computer hard disk. Now use any video converter to convert it in any other common format.