NOTE: People are also reporting that this works in 32-bit Vista, but NOT 64-bit Vista.
1. Open Windows Explorer and create a new folder
Create the folder anywhere. For ease of use, I created mine in the Root directory/folder.

NOTE: Creating the folder on the Desktop might or might not work. The feedback seems to vary, so you’ll just have to experiment with it.

2. Rename the folder by pasting the name below exactly as it appears:
GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

NOTE: You can name it whatever you want (within reason), I just use “GodMode” in this example.

3. Enjoy!
Start enjoy your all-in-one folder to control virtually every aspect of Windows 7. I’m still having fun going through and seeing all the stuff I didn’t know was in Windows 7!

Security, while definitely a GOOD thing, leads to people who would much rather focus on their work having to think outside of their normal comfort level and juggle around a lot of passwords and rigamarole that inevitably leads to their coming to me and saying things like “Trent, I FORGOT MY PASSWORD AGAIN. Can you help me?”.

Hopefully I can. Here are a few points of discussion that might aid you in your painful quest for a password you can remember that is (most importantly) still secure, and why it’s important.

Why do we have to do this?

Why? Why indeed! As I have become fond of saying, and as a popular technology columnist coined over the summer, “security is a process… it isn’t a product”.

Just because you have every Windows patch, security update, and service pack installed doesn’t mean that you’re safe. If you are using a weak password, or one that’s been shared with others, or — worse yet — one that hasn’t been changed in YEARS — none of that hard work keeping things patched and up to date matters one bit.

If that’s the case, you’re the big, gaping hole in that ongoing security process, because your private data (in the case of your home computer) and your company data (in the case of your work computer) is only one weak password guess away from a very bad hacking incident if someone malicious were so inclined.

Companies are held responsible for the data that gets stolen… and the more sensitive that data is, the worse things can be for them if there’s a security breach. And, to bring things a little closer to home, consider what you do on your personal computers. Identity theft is growing like a plague, getting worse every day, and one of the ways that happens is weak passwords and weak security processes, particularly among home users.

Think it’ll never happen to you? 9.9 million people just like you became victims of identity theft in 2008 alone.

Ever tried to fix something that got screwed up on a credit card or a bank account? Imagine having to do that with ALL of your accounts and credit cards, all at the same time, and then having to deal with the scars that leaves on your credit rating for YEARS to come. It happens all the time.

Okay, I get it, security’s important. Now what?

If everything’s patched, plugged, service packed and otherwise locked up tight, the easiest point of entry into any system is a weak password. You’d be amazed at how many times I’ve encountered users who use things like “password” or “test”, or even their user names as their passwords. Yes, really.

I can tell you, while it may be easy for you to remember how to get in that way, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

Reasonably secure passwords should include at least one or two numbers, one or two upper case letters, and a few lower case letters, shouldn’t consist of anything that is part of your name or user name, are at least 6 or 8 characters long, and (ideally) don’t make any kind of words.

I know, I know… that means they’re hard to remember, right?

They don’t have to be.

Here’s a method that I’ve advised regular users to use for years, and with great success.

Step 1: Make up a phrase that you won’t forget

A friend of mine who shall remain nameless once used to categorize certain types of humor as “Stupid Bobby Turner Jokes” if they made a person groan. It was sort of an inside joke reference, because she had worked with someone for years named Bobby Turner that told awful, groan-inducing jokes every morning when he came into work.

Utilizing that phrase as a starting point — something that person could easily remember — is where we begin. But it’s not long enough. Let’s add a couple of words to it:

Stupid Bobby Turner jokes make me groan

Step 2: Add some things to it to make it secure

Remember though, a good password will have at least a number or two in them. So let’s add to this phrase again:

Stupid Bobby Turner jokes make me groan 25 times a day

That’s pretty good, but it needs some emphasis. Let’s make that a little more exclamatory:

Stupid Bobby Turner jokes make me groan 25 times a day!

Step 3: Abbreviate!

How on earth does this make a secure password? By taking the first letter of each word and stringing them together, along with the number and the exclamation point, like this:

STBTjmmg25tad!

Voila! Right there is a secure password! It meets the requirements: it’s longer than 6-8 characters, there are upper case letters, lower case letters, a couple of numbers, it doesn’t make any words, and there’s a special character in there to boot!

And as long as you use a phrase as a starting point that’s meaningful to you in some way, it’s not hard to remember. Give it a try!

Conclusion

I talked a bit preachy above about security processes being of dire importance, particularly when it comes to user passwords. However, as I had mentioned, that doesn’t mean it has to be hard or impossible for you to figure out a password scheme that works for you.

Using this simple method for devising a password makes it easy for you to come up with things, easy to remember them, and most of all, lets you get on with your work, play, or whatever else for which you’re using technology.

So the next time your system administrator makes you reset your password, rather than throw up your hands and say “I can’t do this!”, add a couple of numbers to that phrase… “I can’t DO this 10 more times!” then becomes your new password!

IcDt10mt!

See how easy it is?

Stay secure out there!

– Trent

A lot of these things are actually helpful to the uninitiated user, someone who is totally new to desktop computing in general, but nothing irritates more advanced users like Windows constantly reminding them of things they already know with little balloons that pop up and interrupt their normal workflow.

Well, the good news is, most of that stuff can be disabled in a few easy steps, and I thought I’d share a couple of those items with you today.

New programs installed

It’s a little thing, but any time you install a new application on Windows XP, by default a little balloon will appear afterward telling you that you just did so.

This drives me nuts… I know that a new program has been installed. I’m the one who installed it! I’ve never understood the point of this, and I’ve had users ask me many times how to make Windows stop telling them that. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to accomplish this.

The first thing you need to do is right-click on the Start button and select “Properties”. this will bring up a window that looks like this:

Click on the “Customize” button and then on the “Advanced” tab. Don’t worry, you won’t break anything by going in here; these are simply options for what’s on the start menu, and how it behaves, that’s all.

You’ll notice on this screen there’s the option you’re looking for, second down from the top: “Highlight newly installed programs”!

Uncheck that option, click OK, and then click OK again on the other window that’s still open and voila! No more “New programs installed” notification any time you add something to your computer.

Some naysayers out there might tell you “well, this could be useful information if some application installs itself without asking you first”, which in theory is true.

HOWEVER… in my experience, most programs that will do that will also suppress that notification, so that argument is moot in my book. I say if it bugs you, disable it! It’s not going to tell you anything you don’t already know!

There are unused icons on my desktop? But I AM using them!

Every so often, Windows XP will inexplicably notify you that you have icons on your desktop that you don’t use enough to justify leaving them there, apparently.

I’ve never understood this behavior either. The way I see it, I put those icons there so that I can get to certain things quickly and efficiently. Regardless of how long it’s been since I’ve utilized them, I still need them there… I certainly can’t have Windows deciding for me which ones to delete if they’re not clicked on every single day.

Since this is yet-another-nag-that-serves-no-real-purpose — but can lead to real problems if you let the “desktop cleanup wizard” actually do its thing (“Hey… where’d my shortcut to the biannual statistics spreadsheet go? I NEED THAT NOW!”), we can pretty safely disable that as well, in only a few easy steps.

This was one of those annoyances that took me a while to figure out how to disable, and to be honest, if I haven’t had to do it in a while, I tend to forget where I need to go the next time I have to do it on someone’s computer. So this might serve as a useful procedure for myself as well, so don’t feel bad if you don’t know where it is!

Right-click anywhere on the desktop (making sure you’re not right-clicking on any icons or shortcuts or anything) and select “Properties”, which will bring up the normal Display Properties window. There, you’ll want to click on the “Desktop” tab, which will bring you to a screen that looks similar to this:

In the lower left-hand corner of this window is the Customize Desktop button. Press that and you’ll come to the screen you need. This one:

Simply uncheck the “Run Desktop Cleanup Wizard every 60 days” option, click OK, and OK again, and that message will never nag you again!

Conclusion

A lot of people ask me “how did you figure that out?” when it comes to things like this, and the answer is actually pretty simple. I dig. You won’t hurt anything by looking around in properties windows and settings screens and options dialogues, particularly if you don’t apply anything. I have found that it’s often worthwhile to play around with things like this.

What’s that, you’re not the tinkering type?

That’s okay. That’s why I write things like this.

– Trent

For some time I’ve been dabbling with pc based home media. When I started, I had a pretty good library of mp3 files collected over the years, mostly pre-Napster days – downloaded file by file at 56K when ‘time’ was cheap. I also have a few racks of DVD’s, and a CD collection from high school that was once my pride and joy. Now thick with dust, cases broken, disks mostly missing. I also play guitar in a contemporary Christian band and learn most songs by listening to it over and over, picking up the basic structure and working out the details. Fundamentally, my media needs include music for enjoyment, music for entertainment, learning music, access to a library of digital photos, and watching movies.

My entry point was a couple years ago when I purchased an HP Entertainment Center. Basically a PC in a chassis that looks like an audio component so it could go in your rack, and has all the peripherals you need to get you rolling from the start. HDMI & DVI video, Dual TV tuners, Optical Audio, and a Remote control are the fundamentals. It has and internal 300gb drive, and a secondary 300 gb drive that inserts into the chassis, but can be removed and connected via USB to another PC. To get the ball rolling, I set up in my living room with a 20″ flatscreen setup by my couch. I connected the LCD on my wall as a secondary monitor. Now I could work on the PC, browse the internet as if it were a workstation, and throw slideshows, movies, etc. up on the wall for everyone to see. Cool! I then started moving media onto the 600 gb I had access to. The audio library went first, then, 15 years worth of digital family pictures. Pretty straight forward and smooth.

Next, I went after TV. I have satellite service from Dish Network, digital DVR with all the goodies. The only advantage to running through the media center was to centralize everything, and not have to switch video inputs on the TV. After fighting with the inputs, guide, etc for a few days, I did finally get it to work. The obstacle being that I could only render the native signal. That meant that a TV show that was not formatted widescreen could not be ‘stretched’ as my satellite receiver did so nicely. Instead of Black Bars on the top/bottom like most people complain to me about, I had black bars on the sides. Now it was my turn to complain! I decided that, for the time being, we were going back to the Dish equipment (oh yeah, I never got the guide figured out either).

In the meantime, I had played a couple DVD movies through the tray and thought that it would be really cool to dial-up a movie on the system, like I could with music. I started copying (ripping) DVD’s onto the system. This was an investment of about 60 minutes and 4-5gb per movie. After a few weeks, I had about 70 movies in the library and was starting to realize that 600gb may not be the infinite storage area I thought it was!

Base Camp 1 – Climbing the mountain of integrated home media, we have packed our gear and started up; the weather is good, but the peak is nowhere in site. At this point, I could sit in my living room and watch a movie, listen to music, put on slideshows of old pics, and even throw some ‘mood’ music behind it. I thought I was pretty awesome and proved it by putting on vacation recap of a trip to Lake Mead and to Jamaica for friends and family!

About this time, my wife and kids started wanting to use the system, and my design limitations started showing. Working in IT, I would never let a 15 year old on a system with Admin access. I started creating user accounts and my first flaw came to light. All my data was stored in My Music, My Video, and My Pictures. I had no access to the files from the new profiles. I discovered that the media center had predefined shares for Shared Music, etc. I moved all the data to these locations, and was able to access the data from any account I created. Simple, except now I have teenagers and a computer illiterate wife playing with my new toy – (oh yeah, that was the whole idea!) In summary, at this point I had invested $800 for a refurbished HP Entertainment Center from Amazon, a 20″ flatscreen for $120, and a 32″ flatscreen for $800. Getting setup and building the core data library took 4-6 weeks of my spare time. My data was a blend of legitimately purchased DVD’s and CD’s, Digital Photo’s, and mp3′s of questionable origin. I also pay monthly for TV and Internet service.

Our mission to offer a complete, competent IT solution has been a huge undertaking, and there are many aspects to be considered. A key component was to establish a fully managed suite of IT products and services, including a combination of proprietary, branded, and resold technologies. Kaltec works with their customers to build a custom tailored IT package, which is delivered for a predictable monthly fee. This fixed fee concept includes customer support, monitoring, security and patch management. It also has solutions for hardware, procurement, and licensing.

I am often asked, is Managed Services just another word for Outsourcing? After the technology bust, and all the hype surrounding the dangers of outsourcing, naturally the industry had to come up with another term to put everyone at ease. However the key to managed services really lies in the approach. As a general statement, experience, standards, and proactive monitoring are key to delivering a higher level service than businesses can obtain internally.

IT has long been a significant cost to businesses of all sizes. More and more, companies are realizing that; while necessary, IT really plays no role in how profitable your company is. While once a differentiating factor, today the benefits of automation are largely assumed as day to day necessity. To make matters worse, skilled IT employees are notoriously difficult to qualify, train, and retain. (Not to mention expensive!) Compounding this, the intellectual knowledge that IT staff obtains is invaluable – especially when supporting legacy systems is simply a fact-of-life for most businesses. Turning these issues over to a reputable service provider makes a lot of sense when looking at the problem from the top.

One of the most challenging aspects of the Managed IT approach is to avoid commoditizing the service as a whole. To brown-box the service too much means wrapping unique customers into a 1 size fits all container – ignoring the flexibility that is built into today’s systems. I firmly believe that one of the most intriguing aspects of IT is the ability to use common toolkits (known as software) to build custom solutions that make our everyday work experience more productive. Customers love the idea of a fixed fee approach (duh), but we work with them to create a plan that still accommodates enough flexibility to allow us to really improve their IT environment when we see the opportunity. With commodity comes predictability and stability, but the benefits – as well as the value – are typically reduced equally. Walking the line between commodity and cutting-edge is an important aspect, and should not be overlooked whatever role you play in the IT. arena.

Is IT outsourcing via managed services for everyone? The question a business owner needs to ask themselves is “Am I an IT company?” If the answer is no, the money that is spent staffing and supporting your IT department is not an asset. Even if your IT staff is putting in 60 hrs/wk supporting (i.e. breaking and then fixing) your network, they will never become as skilled as someone who is exposed to hundreds of networks in as many industries. In my experience; documentation, procedure, security and data protection derived from tested standards of practice – rather than the latest newbies “great idea” – provide the greatest longevity in a business environment. We are in the state of a paradigm shift on technology, and the days of the IT cowboy are numbered. Looking forward, as industry moves on creating a whole new level of expectations in the technology industry, we as IT providers need to reassess our methods and lead the charge.

Jason Kallevig
Kaltec of Minnesota, Inc.
www.kaltecdatasys.com

I’m always a little surprised to find users unaware of these little things, so I thought it would be a good idea to start things off with a quick two-tip writeup on how to do just that.

So, if you’re a Windows XP user (and if you’re reading this, you most likely are), and if you’re running on hardware more than a year or two old (again, this is most likely the case), you can benefit from following along.

It’s easy, I promise!

The first thing: Turn off the default Windows XP theme

Windows XP always starts users out with a fresh profile when they log on for the first time, and most users don’t bother changing anything around from that.

If you’re one of those people (face it, you’re probably too busy to waste time tinkering around with Windows, right?), your desktop probably looks something like this:

Some people love this, some people can’t stand it, but in reality, most people don’t really care one way or the other. Aesthetics aside, this theme is a bit of a resource hog, and if you don’t care about how Windows looks, you can tone things down pretty quickly and make your computer a heck of a lot more responsive in the process.

So the first thing you’ll want to do to do this is right-click anywhere on your desktop and select “Properties” from the menu that comes up.

In the “Display Properties” window, make sure you’re on the “Themes” tab (you should be, by default), and in the “Theme” dropdown menu, simply select “Windows Classic” and then click “OK”.

There will often be a few seconds while Windows switches themes, during which you won’t be able to do anything but watch. Don’t worry, this is normal. Once it’s done, you’ll be looking at the “Classic” grey instead of the blue, red and green XP default, but you’ll notice right away that things will seem faster, and that’s the point, right?

The second thing: Watch your Startup items

Once you have the “Windows Classic” theme in place, the next place you should look for an easy speed-up is your Windows Startup menu.

This is pretty easily accessible by simply clicking on the Start menu and from there going to All Programs, and finally Startup, like below:

Now, you can see from my screenshot that my Test User’s Startup menu is empty, but that’s because a lot of times it already is. If yours is, mission accomplished!

If not, you’ll want to take a look at what’s there and remove anything you know for a fact you don’t need.

Common things you’ll find there that are safe to delete are the “Adobe Reader” speed launch (which simply loads Adobe Reader into memory ALL THE TIME, whether you’re looking at a PDF or not), and some older versions of Microsoft Office will put their own speed launch in the Startup menu that effectively does the same thing.

These two things don’t really accomplish much; by pre-loading both of those memory-heavy applications in background they make the startup of those particular apps faster, but only at the expense of slowing everything else down. Trust me, you don’t need that, especially if you’re limping along with a slower machine to begin with.

So, my advice to you? When it comes to the Startup menu, if you know you don’t need it, don’t be afraid to delete something out of there. The vast majority of the time, if something’s in there, it got put there without your knowledge or consent, and it’ll only slow things down in day-to-day operation.

Windows optimization

Now, I know there are more technical users out there that know plenty of other tricks for speeding things up in Windows XP. At some point, I’ll likely delve into some of the other ones (without getting too far into the guts of things to confuse people, I promise), but for now, the two items I highlighted here are by far the simplest ways to squeeze the most noticable performance boost out of an aging XP box, and both are methods that the average user can definitely handle.

– Trent

Here we plan to post regular content that’s relevant to our clients and end users, mostly things that can make their lives easier when it comes to their day-to-day technology needs.

However, these tips and tricks, howtos and pointers, can apply to anyone who utilizes a computer. So stick around, participate in the discussion, and keep watching this space for more to come!