Raymond.CC Blog

Category: Computer

Block Windows Shutdown, Restart or Logoff When Disc or USB Drive is Attached

I find it very annoying when I totally forgotten that my USB flash drive is attached to the USB port located at the back of the desktop and only realizing it when I get home, or when I borrowed a software installation disc from my company and forgot to return it back. Using the “forgot” excuse in a working environment can be quite embarrassing and shows how inefficient you are. One solution to prevent that from happening again is to use a software called Free USB Guard that will block the Windows from being shut down which will indirectly inform me that a CD or USB flash drive is still attached to the computer. This method offers me a last chance to remove the disc or USB flash drive from the computer if I needed to.

Free USB Guard is a free and portable tool that is capable of blocking Windows shutdown, logoff and restart process when it detects a flash drive (or another external drive) is attached or a disc is present in the dvd reader. The only user interface that you will see is when it blocks the shutdown process telling you if there is a disc left in the dvd reader or there are still some USB drives connected. If you still want to shut down the computer without removing the USB drive or disc, then you can click on the Shutdown button at the Free USB Guard warning window. There is also a Standby, Hibernate and Restart option but unfortunate there is no logoff button.

By default the Free USB Guard only monitor the presence of USB flash drives but not the CD/DVD disc left in reader or burner. Monitoring of disc can be easily enabled by right clicking on the Free USB Guard icon located at the notification area, go to Monitor the presence of these drives and click on the CD/DVD disc left in reader/burner option. You may also want to set the Free USB Guard to autostart with Windows because it needs to be running in order to block Windows from shutting down when there are disc or USB drive connected to the computer.

Free USB Guard is a donationware, meaning that it is free to use without any limitations but any amount of donation to support the program is much appreciated. It is compatible with Windows XP / Vista / 7 on both 32 & 64 bit and requires .NET Framework 2.0 to run.

Download Free USB Guard

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March 30, 2012

Monitor File Operations with Windows Explorer Tracker

When you use Windows, performing file operations become second nature. Copy or delete a file and thinking nothing of it, carry on with your tasks. The problem arises when the file or folder you might be looking for isn’t where you thought it was. Perhaps you renamed it, moved it or accidentally deleted it. Maybe another person who also uses your computer like a relative has unwittingly done something with it.

A useful little utility to have around is Windows Explorer Tracker. What it does as the name suggests, is monitor a number of file operations in Windows Explorer, displays them in its window and records them in a log file. Things like deleting, renaming and creating files and folders is actively watched so you can go back and see what actions have been taking place.

Other useful features are the program will record when drives and storage media like USB sticks are inserted or removed, and you can also record file operations on a remote host by using the option to Map a network drive.

The program is pretty easy to set up and use, just download and install it. You will initially be greeted with a blank lower window until file operations in Explorer start to happen.

When the main window starts to collect data, it will give information such as;
Date and time of action
The action performed (delete, create, add, remove etc)
The object type being logged (file, folder, driver)
The path of the action
The original / new file name to log renaming

A quick tip: To get the file extension to display in the name columns such as .zip .exe, you need to have ‘Hide extensions for known file types’ unticked in the Explorer folder options. Open an Explorer window >> click on the ‘Organize’ menu >> click on ‘Folder and search options’ >> goto the ‘View’ tab >> untick ‘Hide extensions for known file types’.

To view any logs, click on ‘Manage log files’ and a window will open with folders split into year / month. Inside those folders, will be numbered log files corresponding to the day of the month so you can search through the log history for an exact day.

If you wish to view any previous history log in the program, simply click on ‘History’ and select the date range from the dropdown calendars.

Double clicking on a line or clicking ‘Detail View’ will bring up the selected file operation in an easier to read window. The arrows cycle through the current log line by line (<>) or go to the top / bottom of the displayed log (|<>|).

The ‘Options’ window is pretty light on content, only allowing for altering of the format for which to display the date and time in the log.

Overall, Windows Explorer Tracker is a very useful utility for keeping an eye on who, or what has been has been performing file operations on your own, or a networked system. It may not be as comprehensive as something like Sysinternals Process Monitor, but is good at what it does.

Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7 or higher, 32 and 64-bit.

Website

Download Windows Explorer Tracker

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March 30, 2012

Get Windows 7 Repairs done Easily with 7 Quick Fix 2

Unfortunately, as is the way these days, having a nice trouble free Windows install doesn’t seem to last very long from the time you start using it. As soon as you begin putting hardware drivers or new software on it, the potential for minor or even major issues to appear, increases. Quite often, some bits of software don’t remove themselves very cleanly from the system and other times, one program might not play very nicely with another. Add into the mix fake antivirus programs and other malicious software changing system settings to stop you doing even simple tasks, and you can see yourself needing something to fix the problem rather quickly.

Have a good look around, and it will not take too long to come across a utility that will ‘fix’ your Windows issues with the click of a button. In fact there are so many, it may take more time to pick the right program to fix your issues than it could do to sort it out yourself. Sometimes, it’s just nice to have a utility that is simple to use and doesn’t give you a million options, but can get a number of tasks done with the minimum of fuss.

A little utility called 7 Quick Fix 2.0 is just such a program. There are a total of 108 options available for fixing common Windows 7 errors and problems as well as a few tweaks thrown in for good measure. As the name implies, this is more of a quick and easy one-click-fix type of utility as opposed a more comprehensive, in depth and deep down repairer like Tweaking.com’s Windows Repair (All In One) tool.

To start with, the program IS portable but it’s a bit of an odd situation because you need to install it first and then copy the standalone 1.1 MB QF.exe from the ‘C:\Program files\7 Quick Fix’ folder, then uninstall again. Be careful to disable the toolbar / facebook smiley option during install.

As you can see, the main window is pretty clean with six different categories represented by the icons in the middle. They are; ‘Enable / Disable’ (default screen), ‘Restore Missing Stuff’, ‘Performance’, ‘Errors and Crashes’, ‘Tweaks’ and finally ‘Associations’.

The top part of the Window shows each fix or tweak in each category and by hovering over each button, you will get a description of what the tweak actually does and any instructions like needing a reboot.

The default window is ‘Enable / Disable’ and contains some useful options like enabling the Task Manager or Control Panel again after a malware attack.

The second window is for ‘Restore Missing Stuff’ and is useful if you have such problems as no access to optical drives or Windows Aero has somehow been disabled.

‘Performance’ is mainly for altering certain delay times for various things like start menu delay and Taskbar Thumbnail display.

‘Errors and crashes’ has a few fixes for various issues like errors when launching Internet Explorer or Computer Management.

The ‘Tweaks’ window is mainly for adding things like ‘Copy to’, ‘Command Prompt Here’ and ‘Take Ownership’ to the context menu as well as some options for the ‘Send To’ menu.

The last windows is for ‘Associations’ and could prove useful if opening a certain type of file has odd results like opening the wrong associated program.

7 Quick Fix 2 uses a combination of registry modifications, ini file modifications, re-registering system components, stopping and starting services or removing files to perform the fixes and tweaks. When any button is clicked there will be an undo folder named after the fix in a folder called ‘Backup’ where the QF.exe is located. Depending on the fixes applied, there will be a mixture of batch, registry and ini files along with a readme on how to reverse the procedure should you need to.

Overall, the program is easy to use and does a good job of allowing you to find and apply several fixes with the minimum of fuss. I have used it several times for various things and it works well, definitely one for the USB toolkit.

7 Quick Fix 2 is compatible with Windows 7 only (32 & 64 bit)

Website

Download 7 Quick Fix 2 (Mirror)

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March 29, 2012

Get Rid of Unwanted Toolbars in Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer with Toolbar Cleaner

I personally don’t think that all toolbars are bad or can be classified as adware. Google Toolbar used to be one of the must have toolbar on my Firefox web browser but I’ve stopped using it since it only supports Internet Explorer now. However, most third party toolbars embedded into software installers are generally unwanted because they are enabled by default during the software installation and clicking the Next or Finish button blindly will silently install the toolbar. In my opinion, only if the toolbar cannot be fully uninstalled from the Programs and Features in Windows operating system should be considered as a rogueware. One example is the Babylon Toolbar where after uninstalling it will still leave some traces on your web browser and you have to manually access the browser’s settings to change the default home page and search engine. If there are some toolbars installed on your web browser and it doesn’t come with an uninstaller, you can use Toolbar Cleaner to forcefully remove them.

Toolbar Cleaner is a free software that is able to detect toolbars and BHOs (Browser Helper Object) installed on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and allows you to remove them with a single click. Make sure that the web browser is closed and not running before you start to remove the toolbars with this software. Other than that, it also comes with a basic startup item remover at the Windows Startup tab.

Toolbar Cleaner

Toolbar Cleaner was last updated about 7 months ago and I get to know this by referring to the Last-Modified value in HTTP response header of the download link. Go to web-sniffer.net, enter the download link into HTTP(S)-URL box and click the Submit button.

Toolbar Cleaner Last Modified

Although Toolbar Cleaner doesn’t seemed to be in active development, but it managed to detect SweetPacks, SweetIM and Babylon Toolbar together with a couple of BHOs such as Complitly and SweetPacks during testing. Checking all of them and clicking the Remove Selected Toolbar(s)/BHO(s) is able to successfully remove the toolbar but it doesn’t restore the default homepage and search engines that was modified by the toolbar installer.

The irony of Toolbar Cleaner is the setup installer comes with default options to install Anti-phishing Domain Advisor and setting MyStart as homepage in Internet Explorer. It is kind of weird that it helps to remove unwanted Toolbars and on the other hand it installs third party unwanted software. Toolbar Cleaner is actually portable and there is a trick to get the program without installing it. Simply use 7-Zip to extract the toolbarcleaner_setup.exe file and you can get the main program file ToolbarCleaner.exe at \$SHELL[17]\Toolbar Cleaner\ folder.

Toolbar Cleaner

If you wonder why Toolbar Cleaner doesn’t support Safari and Opera, that is because these two web browsers are not vulnerable to automated installation of toolbars, plugins and BHOs.

Download Toolbar Cleaner

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March 29, 2012

Useful Environment Variables in Windows 7

Windows comes with a few environment variables by default to assist batch files or programs in accessing the important location on the hard drive because not all Windows are installed in C drive, probably the temporary folder is set to a different location and etc. A variable is surrounded by percent sign % on both sides and one example is %WinDir% which will output the directory where Windows is installed on the hard drive. You can type the variable at the address bar in Windows Explorer, in the Run box or at the Search programs and files bar in the Start menu and hitting the Enter key will directly open the location in Explorer. The environment variables are not fixed as you can use the SET command to create, modify or delete the variables.

You can find out all the environment variables in your Windows by launching the command prompt (Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt), type set and followed by hitting the Enter key.

SET display variables

The most common environment variables that I use very often are %LOCALAPPDATA% and %APPDATA% because nowadays a lot of data are stored in that location by third party software such as the Firefox profile, Chrome, Opera, uTorrent and etc. Basically both of the variables points to the current user’s application data folder except one is LOCAL and the other is ROAMING. By typing the variable in the run box, it instantly brings me to that location instead of double clicking through a few folders to get the Application Data folder.

Other than that, AppData folder is a hidden folder and using environment variables allows me to directly open the hidden folder without going through the hassle of enabling show hidden files, folders and drives in Folder Options and then disabling it back when I am done with the troubleshooting.

March 29, 2012

Reset Windows security settings with a security restore utility

More often than not, when your machine is on the receiving end of a virus or malware infection, one of the things that gets attacked is the computers security settings while the little nasty is trying to hide itself and cause havoc. Even if your antivirus or security package might have been able to clean the infection, there still could be a number of security settings which were changed, remaining that way, which has the potential to further cause trouble.

A great source of frustration is when you might get messages telling you that you don’t have permission to install or upgrade a piece of software or use Windows Update. Common pieces of software to get this sort of error are antivirus and firewalls.

There is a small portable utility called Rizone Security Restore that will attempt to sort out these permission errors by restoring Windows to its default security settings and give you back control.

Along with the permissions fixes, the security restore utility may be able to help when the error is a simple ‘Installation Failed’ error, and is also quiet adept at curing the dreaded 0×80070005 ‘Access Denied’ error which is again connected to system permissions and can affect system components like system restore.

As the program is portable, simply download and extract it, then run the SecRes.exe.

Running it couldn’t be easier to use, as you can see. Press the ‘Go!’ button and wait. The process could take 10 minutes or more so be patient.

This is a very focused tool and I would not recommended you use it unless you are specifically having one of the problems previously outlined; permission errors, ‘Installation Failed’ errors or the 0×80070005 ‘Access Denied’ error. Any security settings you may have set up yourself will also be reset.

Rizone Security Restore is compatible with XP, Vista, 7 and Server 2008 / 2003

Website

Download Rizone Security Restore

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March 28, 2012

Use Google Docs to Monitor Your Website Uptime and Downtime

So far Pingdom is the only uptime checker that I use because the free account comes with a lot of features except with the limitation of only checking one website. I don’t have a problem with that since I only have one website to monitor. The feature which I think is most important in an uptime checking service is the 1 minute interval check because if Pingdom fails to connect to my website for 5 times consecutively, that means the website is probably totally inaccessible and I should definitely check on the problem as soon as possible.

Recently I read from Labnol.org that Amit has developed a very useful script that is able to check a website to see if it is up or down. The script runs on Google Docs which means anyone with a Google account is able to use it. The best part is it can even be configured to check on the website every minute and notifies you immediately via email if the script detected that your website is down and then notifies you when the website is back up again.

The setting up process is fairly easy and anyone should be able to do it without problems. Just login to your Google account, make a copy of the Google Docs sheet, enter website to check and email to receive notification and setup a time-driven trigger. See the detailed steps here. Basically the script checks for HTTP OK Response Code Header which is 200 when accessing the website. To test if the script works or not, try entering a non existent URL such as http://www.labnol.org/testtest and you should receive an email notification and also see that the downtime details being logged in the Google Docs sheet itself.

Is My Website Down?

The Is My Website Down script by Amit is very creative but Pingdom still takes the lead because their robots can crawl the webpage to check for certain keywords on the monitored webpage, alerting when down for X times in a row (to reduce false positives), and sending notifications to multiple contacts via email, sms, twitter, iphone and android. Moreover the free Pingdom account comes with 20 SMS alerts without charges.

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March 28, 2012

Windows Service Monitor

The status of Windows Services are very important to keep the computer running in stable condition. Any important services that are disabled or even deleted can cause a lot of problems such as broken Windows Update, Firewall, Windows Defender, unable to Print and many more. For experienced Windows users, they may instantly suspect that the problem is caused by a service being stopped and they can either manually restart that particular service or use a third party tool such as Windows Repair to restore all services status back to default. A better way is to monitor the Windows services so you will immediately know if a service that is supposed to be started, suddenly stopped running. There are a few third party tool that can monitor Windows services but we will be taking a look at Windows Service Monitor today.

Windows Service Monitor is a free tool that is used to monitor the status of services that the user select in Windows and alerts you via icon color changes at notification area. Unfortunately the icon color changes is the only notification option in Windows Service Monitor software and there is no email, popup, sound alert or auto restarting of the service or computer when the service fails. Running Windows Service Monitor will allow you to select the services that you would like to monitor. Simply select the service from the list and click the arrow pointing to the right to monitor.

Windows Service Monitor Configuration

When all monitored services are started, it will show the green icon. Yellow icon means some monitored services are stopped while a gray icon means that ALL monitored services are stopped. So if you see a yellow or gray icon, you should right click on the Windows Service Monitor icon at the notification area to check which service is not running and clicking on the service from the context menu will attempt to restart the service.

Restart failed services

There is a bug in Windows Service Monitor whereby when a monitored service is deleted, the program will crash. The only way to get Windows Service Monitor working again is to manually edit the user.config file from C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Viktar_Karpach\ and delete the invalid String. Until Viktar Karpach decides to update the program to support detection of deleted services, we will just have to keep in mind that one of the reason for Windows Service Monitor program crashing is a services being removed.

Download Windows Service Monitor

March 28, 2012

Snap2HTML Creates Fancy Directory Listings in HTML Format

A Windows computer contains a lot of files and asking a computer illiterate to locate for some files on their computer can be a daunting task. I once even asked a computer technician to search for a file on a Windows computer which I am very sure its there but he kept on saying that the file couldn’t be found. I gave up and asked him to run a program to generate a file which lists all the folders and files on the computer and send it to me. After checking the listings, the file is located deep inside the hard drive and the technician finally managed to locate it after me letting him know the exact location of the file. Today I would like to introduce a software called Snap2HTML which takes a snapshot of folder structures on your harddrive and saves it as HTML files.

Snap2HTML is a free and portable tool that is able to generate a single HTML file listing all folders and files that you set it to crawl. All you need to do is run the Snap2HTML.exe file, select the folder that you would like it to crawl, and click the Create Folder Snapshot button. Finally select the location where you want to save the HTML report file. You can also include hidden and system files by checking the two checkboxes on the program.

Snap2HTML

Although there are many other similar tool that does the same thing, but what I personally like about the result file created by Snap2HTML is it gives you a “real” application feel which is similar to Windows Explorer, displaying a treeview with folders that you can click to view the files contained within. There is also a very useful built in file search in the HTML report file.

Sample report of the snapshot created by Snap2HTML. Click on the image to test it.

I would advice you to avoid creating a snapshot of the whole hard drive because you may end up with a relatively large HTML file that may cause the web browser to hang if you open it. Select only the necessary folder that you want to generate the listing. If you know HTML coding, you can actually edit the template.html file which is the base for the output, and you can modify it with your own enhancements. Snap2HTML runs on all versions of Windows and requires at least .NET Framework 2.0 installed.

Website

Download Snap2HTML

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March 27, 2012

Wifis.org Offers Free Contact Form for Your Wi-Fi Network

Most if not all modern laptops or tablets comes with a wireless adapter and that allows you to conveniently connect to the Internet without cables. The wireless network that appears in your list means that the wireless router is near you and you can only connect to it if you know the wireless password as most of the wireless networks are password protected. You won’t be able to pin point the exact location of the wireless router but can only guess when you see the signal gets stronger as you move around. Obviously there is no way you can contact the owner of the wireless network as it does not reveal any information other than the SSID. However Wifis.org has made it possible for people nearby to contact the owner of the Wi-Fi network by a few simple steps.

Basically you need to create an account in Wifis.org either by logging in to your Google or Facebook account and then register a unique URL such as http://wifis.org/raymond.cc. Once the URL is created, opening the link in a web browser will present a contact form for the visitor to send a message to the owner’s email. Up till now, there seems to be nothing special about it other than a contact form. In order for people to know the contact form URL, the trick is to change the name (SSID) of your Wi-Fi network so that people within the Wi-Fi range has the opportunity to contact you without them knowing who you are and where you live.

Wifis.org SSID
SSID shows Wifis.org URL

Wifis Contact Form
Anyone in your Wi-Fi range can send an email to you via Wifis.org contact form

This idea seems to be unique but has some drawbacks. First of all your neighbor that wants to contact you must have their own Internet connection or else they won’t be able to open the contact form at wifis.org. Secondly, the email doesn’t contain the IP address of the sender in the email body and headers. Thirdly, not everyone will automatically know that the URL in SSID can be used to contact the owner unless they are curious and decided to visit the link. Nevertheless, Wifis.org service is free and you can still use it as a contact form for your website.

Visit Wifis.org

March 27, 2012

Updated SpeedyFox 2.0 Optimizes Skype, Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird Database

There are many methods to optimize and speed up Firefox and one of them is by optimizing the SQLite databases used by Firefox. Firefox stores a lot of information in SQLite databases and overtime Firefox will slow down if the database gets too large. The problem with SQLite databases is when a data is deleted from the database, it is not really removed from the database file but instead it is marked as free for future use. The good thing about this is the database file will not increase when a new data can be saved into the “free” space. However it also poses a problem where the database gets fragmented and eventually slowing down the application when the database file size gets too large.

To think about it, this is actually quite similar to how our hard drive works. In Windows operating system, defragging the hard drive solves this problem but for SQLite database, you will need to use the SQLite VACUUM command. Fortunately compacting the SQLite database can be easily done using SpeedyFox which I have review 3 years ago when it was still in version 1. Today SpeedyFox has been updated to version 2.0 and it also supports optimizing Skype, Chrome, Thunderbird and Firefox.

Upon running, SpeedyFox 2.0 automatically detects and loads the default profile on the program. Click the optimize button and SpeedyFox will start to compact the SQLite databases. The progress window shows what databases are optimized and also how much space is saved. It is also possible to load custom profiles such as Firefox portable by clicking the SpeedyFox menubar and select “Add custom profile” or drag the profile folder and drop it to SpeedyFox.

SpeedyFox 2.0

If you use Firefox, Skype, Chrome or Thunderbird very often, you may need to frequently compact the databases. One easy way to do it is via command line which is supported in SpeedyFox 2.0. Click on the Command line button in SpeedyFox and click the Copy button to copy the parameter to clipboard. Finally, right click on Desktop or at any other location, select New > Shortcut, paste the SpeedyFox command line parameter to the box by pressing CTRL+V or right click > Paste, click Next and Finish button. Now whenever you run the shortcut which you’ve created, SpeedyFox will automatically optimizes the databases in background. However make sure that the application that you want to optimize is terminated first or else it will not work.

If you have SSD hard drive, you don’t need SpeedyFox 2.0 because it is fast enough to load and process large SQLite databases without any noticeable slow downs.

Download SpeedyFox 2.0

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March 26, 2012

A useful small information tool called Kiwi System Info

If you want to get some information about what’s going on inside your PC, there are a lot of tools available to do it for you. Anything from monitoring your temperatures to checking which version of a particular piece of software of driver you have installed, there’s an information tool around to do it. Some of the more popular tools around you will probably know of, such as Speccy from the makers of CCleaner, PCWizard from the people that bring you CPU-Z and others like HWInfo32. One of the most well known is Aida64 (formally Everest) but that obviously isn’t free.

Kiwi System Info is another system information tool, but this one is pretty new and has not been around for many weeks. It’s is a little bit different in it’s approach though, as it doesn’t concentrate on things like temperatures, fan speeds and your hardware information all nicely laid out in an easy to read format. Kiwi pulls information directly from the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) component found inside Windows that can grab data from just about any part of your system.

There is a downside to this though, and that is the sheer amount of information given out can be quite overwhelming and a lot of the data is just numbers, so a bit of an experienced eye is required to interpret what you see.

Kiwi System Info is a very small download (170KB) and because it’s portable, the zip unpacks to only 360KB.

The interface is pretty simple and easy to use with the information split into icons:

Hardware Info: For just about every piece of hardware in your PC.
Data Storage: Information about hard drives , ROM drives and partitions.
Memory: Detailed analysis of memory components.
System Info: Info about drivers, services etc.
Network: Info about network adapters and network data.
User & Security: Info about accounts and logs.
Developer: Detailed info about performance counters / COM objects etc.

Using the software is pretty simple; select an icon across the top for the area to get the information from, and then select the individual category from the drop down to study the components values:

The main Window will give you the information gathered from the WMI. You might get the odd blank window or error; this just means Kiwi can’t read the WMI information usually because there might be nothing to read from the relevant values.

Kiwi System Info might not be to everyone’s taste because the data is not that easy to interpret in places, and there’s a lot of it, but if you want more numbers than the average system information tool might be able to give you, this is useful to have around.

Kiwi System Info is compatible with XP, Vista and Win 7 32 and 64 bit.

Website

Download Kiwi System Info

March 25, 2012

Hotmail Finally Adds Forgotten Attachment Reminders

If you work in an environment that requires you to send a lot of emails everyday, someday you may just forget to attach a file that you’re supposed to attach to the email. That is just normal because most people just continue typing and only add the attachment at the end before sending out the email. If you immediately realized it, you can just resend another email with the attachment but if it was your last email before you leave your work desk, then the recipient will have just have to notify you that the attachment is missing and wait for you to send another email with the attachment. It can be a waste of time and sometimes embarrassing as it shows how careless or forgetful you are.

Gmail has an automated detection of certain keywords in the email body and alerts you if you’ve forgotten to attach files when the email doesn’t have an attachment. In fact Gmail had this feature for nearly 5 years already and today I’ve just found out that this feature is implemented in Hotmail as well.

Here are some keywords that I found to be in the list of keywords, there may be more so feel free to share in the comment area. You can try it yourself by composing a new email with any of the keywords below in the email body and send.

Hotmail:

see attached

see attachment

in attachment

in attached

Gmail:

see attached

see attachment

For Hotmail, you will get a popup saying “Send without attachments? Just checking. It looks like you mentioned attachments but didn’t add any“. There is a checkbox to disable this option but you can toggle it by going to Options and click on Sent message confirmations under Writing email. You will see an option for forgotten attachment reminders where you can select to check messages for forgotten attachments before sending or send mail without checking for forgotten attachments.

Hotmail send without attachments

For Gmail, the popup message says “Did you mean to attach files? You wrote “see attached” in your message, but there are no files attached. Send anyway?“. I couldn’t seem to find an option to disable the forgotten attachment detector feature in Gmail.

gmail did you mean to attach files

The forgotten attachment reminder in Gmail and Hotmail is smart enough to only detect the keywords on the latest email conversation and ignores the previous conversation. Definitely a great feature!

March 25, 2012

UAC Pass Automatically Creates UAC Free Shortcut

Whether you like the UAC feature in Windows Vista/7 or not, normal computer users should always have it enabled because it is indeed capable of blocking some actions by the malware such as adding itself to global startup, dropping or modifying files located in Windows and etc. Although there are ways to bypass the UAC restrictions but not all malware is capable of doing that. If you use CCleaner everyday to clean up the junk on your computer, you may find it annoying because it prompts for elevation whenever you run it. I have previously shared with you a workaround to bypass UAC prompt using the Windows Task Scheduler but if you find it hard to get it right, then you can use a tool called UAC Pass that automatically creates a UAC promptless shortcut on your desktop with drag and drop.

Basically UAC Pass does the same thing as the Task Scheduler trick except it is fully automated. UAC Pass is a single small executable and portable file that requires UAC elevation itself. Let us take CCleaner as a test. If you try dragging the CCleaner shortcut to UAC Pass, by default it will create another CCleaner shortcut at desktop. Now if you run the newly created CCleaner shortcut created by UAC Pass, you will notice that CCleaner runs immediately without the UAC prompt. This is made possible by adding CCleaner to Windows Task Scheduler and then the shortcut simply starts the task.

UAC Pass

There are other options in UAC Pass that allows you to create the shortcut that pins to Start Menu and Taskbar, creates a scheduled tasks that is started with Windows, allowing multiple instances, create a batch file, force language and relative paths. For most situation the default preset should work just fine.

To delete the UAC promptless shortcut, you can either drag the shortcut and drop it to UAC Pass to remove the program from Windows Task Scheduler and then only manually deleting the shortcut or alternatively you can also just delete the shortcut and then go to Windows Task Scheduler to delete the task.

UAC Pass works Windows Vista & Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit. The program comes with English and French language which can be switched by clicking on the flags at the top right.

Download UAC Pass

March 25, 2012

A Power Efficiency Report for your Windows 7 laptop

Laptops and netbooks are great devices but like everything else that is portable, the battery never lasts as long as you would like it to. Even worse is the prospect of the machine hibernating or shutting down just when you really need it. Of course, Windows 7 has the charging and time left icon, but it doesn’t give you much more information than that.

There are times when it might seem the battery isn’t lasting as long as perhaps it should, and that obviously means less time disconnected from the power supply. Windows 7 has many features to try and reduce power consumption like; powering down the hard drive, dimming or turning off the display, turning off unused devices and several more. But what if the power saving options are not working properly or something else is using your battery when it shouldn’t be? How would you know?

There is a built in utility in Windows 7 which can scan your system and give you a report on any potential problems with your laptops power consumption. It can also sometimes recommend what action can be taken to fix the issues, and what other options could be tweaked to help improve the battery life.

The feature is called the ‘Power Efficiency Diagnostic Report’ and can be accessed from the command prompt. It will monitor your system for around 60 seconds and give you the report in the form of an html file. For the best results, run this report when your computer is idle and there are no open documents or programs running.

Click on the Start Orb and type ‘cmd’ into the search box but don’t press Enter yet.
Right click on the cmd icon and select ‘Run as administrator’.
Now type ‘powercfg –energy’ into the command prompt and press Enter.

As mentioned earlier, the process will analyse the system for any possible power efficiency issues and takes about a minute to complete. Afterwards you will be given an idea of whether there are any areas of concern. Errors or warnings should be looked at in further detail by reading the report. If you have no errors then there are probably no major efficiency savings to be gained although there may still be a few minor tips to look at if you get a few warnings.

Now type ‘energy-report.html’ and press Enter. This will open the report in your browser to have a look at.

The report will show exactly what is causing problems with the power consumption of your laptop / netbook, and if possible will offer a solution or a tip on how the issue could be improved. As you can see, the report will not mean an awful lot to complete novices, but if you want to find out a lot more about what the results mean and to go into more depth about all aspects of the Power Efficiency Report, a .docx Word document from Microsoft may make an interesting read.

Download the Microsoft System Energy Efficiency document

March 24, 2012