If you forgot your your Windows account password, it got hacked or some virus changed it so you’re not able to access your computer any more, you can use the following tutorial to restore and reset the password. This method will also work for Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP and Windows Vista!
WARNING: Please do not use this method for illegal activity such as hacking passwords without the other user’s consent!
Your Windows passwords are stored in the Windows registry. In order to reset them, you need access to this registry without running Windows. Luckily, there is a tool called “Offline NT Password & Registry Editor” which contains a small Linux kernel and drivers for your hard drives. Download the tool from this server or the official website.
Extract the RAR archive. Now you need to create a bootable device in order to run the tool: Using a CD: Just burn the ISO file to any empty CD and proceed. Using a USB memory stick: Format the memory stick in FAT32 format (rightclick it and choose “Format”) and enable “Quick Format”. WARNING: When formatting, all data in the memory stick will be lost! Open the ISO file with WinRAR (or any similar program) and extract all files onto the memory stick. Start the console (Press WINDOWS + R and type cmd, press ENTER), enter the drive letter of your memory stick (e.g. L: ), then enter “SYSLINUX.EXE -ma L:” (replace L: with your drive letter). This will set the boot record for your memory stick, enabling your computer to use it as boot device.
Now plug in the USB memory stick or insert the CD into the drive of the password-locked computer and switch it on.
When the BIOS image is showing up, make sure you enter the “Boot Menu”, usually by pressing F12.
A window should pop up asking you to choose the device to boot from. Select CD or USB HDD.
After a few seconds, this screen will show up. Just press enter to boot normally.
Now a lot of text will appear on your screen while the system is loading drivers for your hardware. Just wait until it comes to a stop and waits for your input. Now the tool is asking on which partition your Windows registry files are located. Usually, this would be the first partition, but since there is a small (100MB) backup drive in Windows 7, you should take the next one, enter the number below and press enter.
Next, it asks for the path to your registry files on the drive. These are usually fine, just press enter to continue. When the files are located, you can choose what to do. Enter 1 and hit return for “Password reset”.
Then you have to select “Edit user data and passwords” by entering 1 again and pressing Enter
Enter your account name from the list and press Enter
On the next screen, enter 1 to “Clear (blank) user password”. You may also select 4 to “Unlock and enable user account” if you have entered the password too often and it is locked. If that’s all you wanted to do, enter ! and press return to quit.
Enter q again to leave the next menu and write the files by typing “y” in Step 4.
Now your password has been reset, just restart your computer normally and you should be able to log in to Windows again!
If your computer crashes or is somehow malfunctioning, a BIOS update may help. I tried to run Microsoft Virtual PC on my Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P mainboard with AMD Phenom II X4 955 processor, but it refused to start due to lack of Hardware Virtualization support although I enabled it in the BIOS setup. Updating my BIOS to the latest version with Q-Flash using an USB memory stick helped, so this tutorial will show you how to do it.
Extract the 7-zip archive to some folder, e.g. C:\bios_flash\
Plug in your USB memory stick and format it using the FAT32 file system (enable Quick Format).WARNING: When formatting, all data on the memory stick will be lost!
Go to the directory with the extracted BIOS update files and locate the actual BIOS data file, called something like M79XTUD4.F7, where the .F7 stands for version 7 and the stuff before for my mainboard model. Copy this file onto the freshly formatted memory stick
Restart your computer. When you see the BIOS image, press END to enter Q-Flash mode
A blue box will show up asking you what to do. First of all, backup your original BIOS to your USB thumbdrive. Select “Save BIOS to Drive”, then your USB memory stick and type in a name for your backup. Once you press enter, it will start backing up your data which may take up to 5 minues.
Once you are done backing up, return to the previous menu and select “Update BIOS from Drive” and locate the BIOS file you downloaded. Press enter to start flashing. WARNING: Do not switch off your computer while flashing your BIOS. This may permanently corrupt your mainboard!
When the flashing is finished, restart your computer, enter BIOS setup (press DEL when seeing the mainboard image) and “Load Optimized Defaults”.
After loading the default settings, “Save and Exit Setup”. Your computer should start normally with the latest BIOS version, hopefully solving the problems you encountered before!
If you did any adjustments to the BIOS before (enabling Virtualization, memory timings, CPU clock, etc.) you will have to set it again.
If you have problems following this guide, please comment! You can take good pictures of your computer screen using the Xshot! camera stabilizer!
When trying to play Medieval II: Total War multiplayer in LAN mode, you may encounter the problem that the players can’t see each other in the lobby and can’t find the hosted game despite of correct versions, network configuration and firewall settings.
There is a quite easy fix for this problem, just follow the steps below:
Browse to the directory containing Medieval II (e.g. C:\Program Files\Medieval II Total War)
Open medieval2.preference.cfg with notepad
Scroll down to the [network] section and edit the following line saying “use_ip = “. Put your LAN IP address after the equals sign and save the file
Restart the game, now everything should work nicely!
If there are any other issues, please comment and I will try to help!
The new version 4.0 of Google Chrome (currently Beta) enables the use of plugins and extensions in your browser. Extensions are a long requested feature for Chrome and one of the only reasons why many users still favored Firefox over Chrome.
In the Google Chrome Extension Directory you will find many interesting extension, but the one I waited for a long time is one that blocks annoying advertisements on websites. With AdThwart, there finally is such an extension and I will show how to use it. There was a trick to do block ads with earlier versions of Chrome, but using the official extensions is much more comfortable.
Make sure you have Chrome 4.0 or later. Click at the tool button (top right corner) and “About Google Chrome” to see your version. If it’s not 4.0 or later, download the Chrome Beta here.
Once installed, you will see the options page. By default, the filters EasyList and Extra filters are enabled. You may choose another filter for your country.
Now most ads on websites should be gone.
If there are still some remaining, you can use the Easy Filter function to block them as well. Click on the devil-button on the right side of your address bar and select “Easy create filter”. Then click on the element you want to block or hover over it and press CTRL + Shift + E. Return to the popup and confirm that you want to block that element.
If you for some reason don’t like AdThwart, there is another ad blocking extension called simply AdBlock. I didn’t try it, but looking at its rating of 4.5/5 stars, it seems to be quite good as well.
Currently, Google is testing a new search interface for their websearch somehow reminding of Bing. This new interface is supposed to make searching easier by putting all the useful filters and kinds of search in a bar on the left side while displaying the search results on the right side.
Although this interface hasn’t been released for the public yet, you can try it already by following these easy steps:
Open a new browser window or tab and go to this URL: http://www.google.com/ncr By using the “ncr” statement, you make sure that you’re not redirected to a local version of Google (e.g. .de, .cn, .co.uk, …)
Paste this script into the address bar replacing the URL: javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”); This will set a cookie telling the search to use the new interface
Go back to google.com and start searching!
There is also a nice comment on the bottom of each page with customized search telling you that you’re awesome!
If you have a Google account and use the Google search while logged in, the search engine will try to improve your results by relying on keywords you searched for before and on the websites you visited. In the official help file, they describe this personalized search as follows:
When you search using Google, you get more relevant, useful search results, recommendations, and other personalized features. By personalizing your results, we hope to deliver you the most useful, relevant information on the Internet.
If you use personalized search and have the new beta search interface enabled (enable the new Google Search Interface), Google will show this message on the bottom of each search results page:
Have you heard about Google’s upcoming operating system ChromeOS and are willing to test it on your computer? Then follow this guide to make it working! ChromeOS is intended to include only the Chrome browser and is only able to run web applications, thus targeting users who spend most of their time in the internet.
Test and use ChromeOS without installing it:
Download a compiled release of ChromeOS. This is the easiest way, you may of course compile it on your own, but that is not part of this tutorial. Use the torrent mirror for fastest downloads. Once it’s done, unpack the image file (ChromeOS-Cherry.img)
Connect a USB memory stick (at least 1GB) to your computer
Download and unpack Win32DiskImager and launch Win32DiskImager.exe. Click on the little folder symbol and select your image file unpacked in step 1. Select the proper drive letter of your USB memory stick in the Device section. Then click Write and confirm the window warning your about a potential physical corruption on your device.
Once it finished writing, unplug your USB device and plug it into the computer you want to test ChromeOS on. Make sure your computer is configured to boot from USB devices as first priority. If your computer is a netbook (e.g. Asus Eee PC), try the steps under Prepare the Asus Eee PC to boot from USB devices in my tutorial on Windows 7 on the Eee PC. Most other computers will have a similar BIOS configuration, though.
Boot from the USB device and wait a few seconds. ChromeOS shouldn’t take long to boot (around 5 seconds on my Eee PC 900).
Login using facepunch as both username and password.
There should be three symbols at the top right corner. The first is showing your battery status (in running ChromeOS on a laptop), the second your WiFi and Ethernet configuration and the third some menus. Click the second one and connect to your WiFi/Ethernet network. This is really necessary since all applications in ChromeOS are web-based!
Enjoy ChromeOS!
Troubleshooting:
I am connected via WiFi/Ethernet but can’t open websites. This may be due to a misconfiguration in your network settings. Sadly, ChromeOS currently has no GUI to configure it, but you can try to do it with the terminal. Press CTRL + ALT + T to open terminal, and go on using Linux commands (e.g. ip addr to see your network configuration, ping to ping other network devices, sudo bash for root user, …)
My screen resolution is not at its maximum. I had this problem a few times and there was no way of fixing it (xrandr in terminal didn’t work and told me that VGA1 was disconnected). Probably ChromeOS has some problems with the display drivers, but restarting the computer always helped.
Flash/YouTube videos are lagging. This happens probably also due to bad/missing video drivers. I don’t think there is a solution for it except finding and installing fitting display drivers for your device and Linux on your own. Hopefully Google will fix this in the final release.
Since Google keeps providing me with new invitations for Google Wave and all my friends have it already, I don’t know what to do with my invites. If you’re interested, just post a comment and I will send an invitation to the E-Mail address provided in the comment form.
If you don’t know what Google Wave actually is, check out my post about the Google Wave Preview!
On 26th November 2009, the ”World’s Largest Digital Festival” DreamHack Winter started in Jönköping in Sweden. I was lucky and won the journey to Sweden as well as the ticket, sponsored by Razer. Razer even chartered a bus and painted it with the Razer logo just for the DreamHack festival:
The official website describes DreamHack as “the word’s largest LAN-party and computer festival” with more than 12,000 participants. DreamHack is focused on everything one can do with computers: gaming, communication, programming, designing, music and so on. Moreover, there were many gaming tournaments with famous teams from all over the world in games such as Counter-Strike, Quake, Warcraft 3 and Street Fighter.
Participants had to bring their own computers and equipment, but got a quite nice Gigabit Ethernet and an extremely powerful internet infrastructure in return. Speed-Tests I did on DreamHack certified downstreams of almost 100MB/sec and upstreams of almost 50MB/sec. In actual downloads, I was able to reach 7.5MB/s downloading and 8.7MB/s uploading.
In addition to gaming events, there was also a Dream Expo of different hardware and software companies showing products and doing overclocking competitions or giving away products. Furthermore, live bands and singers, games and events on stage and movie screening during night added to the fun. There were also lots of really powerful computers (the best featuring Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition, 12GB DDR3 RAM, 4xGTX 295) with many games installed (Modern Warfare 2, Couter-Strike, Left 4 Dead 2) provided by different hardware and software vendors (Razer, Fujitsu, R.U.S.E). Thus even persons visiting DreamHack without a computer or any hardware had enough to see and enjoy.
Surprisingly, 10% of all participants were female and some were even competing in the tournaments. I will add some pictures and a video in hope of giving you an idea about DreamHack!
If you have used Google Translate earlier, you will have recognized that the translations were mostly awful and that bad that it was hard to understand them at all. This new version improves the quality of translations significantly; now you can actually use it to read websites or texts in foreign languages.
It also adds a dictionary function: Just type in the word you need and it will give you different meanings. Moreover, by clicking on “detailed dictionary”, you have the possibility to see examples of how to use this word in a phrase and listen to the translations.
The real-time translation is also a quite nice feature: You can just type in a sentence, and as you type, it will try to translate it. This reminds me of the live translation called Rosy used in a promotional video for Google Wave. Rosy currently isn’t available for Google Wave users, but the new Google Translate may actually be a testing ground.
multiplayer in LAN mode, you may encounter the problem that the players can’t see each other in the lobby and can’t find the hosted game despite of correct versions, network configuration and firewall settings.
