It also has action buttons that allow you to perform certain tasks quickly like switching to tablet mode, creating a note, connecting to a VPN, etc. In this article, I will talk about how you can customize the taskbar, notification area, and action center in Windows 10. If you’re only interested in one section, just skip down to the appropriate header.

Windows 10 Taskbar

Start Menu

So what’s new in the Windows 10 taskbar? Quite a few things actually. Firstly, we have a functioning Start button again with links to apps, settings, etc., which has made many people very happy.

The Start menu is a whole different beast, so I’ll be writing a separate post on how to customize it. Basically, it’s a combination of the Windows 7 start menu and the Windows 8 start screen. It’s actually fairly useful and I like it more than the standard start menu in Windows 7.

Cortana & Search

Right next to the start button is a new search box that also integrates Cortana, Microsoft’s virtual assistant software. You’ll see the I’m Cortana. Ask me anything. message if Cortana is enabled.

When you click in the search box, you’ll be asked if you are interested in enabling Cortana or not. If you click on Not interested, Cortana will be disabled, but you can still search the computer and web.

If you want use Cortana, click Next and follow the instructions. Note that you give up a lot of your privacy when you enable Cortana. Before you click the Use Cortana button, you’ll see a list of items that gets sent to Microsoft from your computer including location, searching history, calendar details, voice input, browsing history from Edge, and lots more. Many people have complained that way too much info gets sent to Microsoft and it’s probably true.

In order to use Cortana, you also need to sign in with a Microsoft account. If you want to change Cortana settings, just click on the gear icon at the left and you can turn it off or on, enable or disable Bing search, etc.

If you don’t like how much space the Cortana search box is using up, just right-click on the taskbar, go to Cortana and choose from Hidden or Show Cortana icon.

The first option will remove it entirely and the second one will simply use a search icon.

Task View

The next new item on the Windows 10 taskbar is the Task View button. It’s basically like Mission Control on OS X if you have ever used a Mac. If you click on it, it will show you all the open apps on the current desktop and it will also show you any other desktops.

In Windows 10, multiple desktops are finally an built-in feature. You can hide or show the Task View button by right-clicking on the taskbar and clicking on the Show Task View button option.

You can also get into task view by using the hotkey Windows Key + TAB. I’ve already written a detailed post on how you can switch between programs and desktops in Windows 10, so be sure to check that out. Overall, it’s an excellent feature and works very well.

Taskbar Properties

If you right-click on the taskbar and choose Properties, you can customize a few more settings related to the taskbar.

This screen is very similar to older versions of Windows: you can lock the taskbar, set it to auto-hide and use small taskbar icons. You can also adjust the location of the taskbar to the left, right or top. Lastly, you can choose how you want to combine icons in the taskbar. By default, multiple windows from the same app will be combined.

At the very bottom, you can also enable Peek to quickly preview the desktop when you move your mouse over the Show Desktop button. The Show Desktop button is still at the very far right of the taskbar and is now a tiny slice you can barely see.

Windows 10 Notification Area

Now let’s talk about the notification area in Windows 10. It’s pretty similar to the notification area in Windows 7, but it also has the Action Center icon, which is the icon at the farthest right that looks like a piece of paper with text on it.

To configure the notification area, you can either right-click on the taskbar, choose Properties, and click on the Customize button next to Notification area or you can click on Start, go to Settings, click on System and then click on Notifications & actions.

On this screen, you can actually customize both the notification area and the Action Center. First, let’s talk about the system tray and icons.

Click on Select which icons appear on the taskbar to choose all the different app icons you would like to have appear in the main area of the taskbar.

Note that if the value is set to Off, the icon will appear in the “extra icons” section that shows up when you click on the little up arrow. If you switch it to On, the icon will move from the extra icons section to the main taskbar.

It’s worth noting that you can also move icons yourself by just clicking and dragging an icon between the taskbar and the extra icons section. That’s actually easier than going through the settings.

If you click on Turn system icons on or off, you can choose which system icons will appear in the taskbar. You can pick from Clock, Volume, Network, Power, Input Indicator, Location, and Action Center.

So from here, you can even turn off the Action Center, if you don’t find it useful. If you go back to the main Notifications & actions page, you’ll see the Notifications section. This section controls which notifications you get, from which apps and where they appear.

If you disable the first two options (Show me tips about Windows and Show app notifications), you’ll pretty much stop getting any notifications from Windows other than system messages. App notifications are the most common notifications you’ll see in Windows.

You can also choose whether or not you want notifications on the lock screen. For privacy purposes, some users might want to disable notifications on the lock screen. Lastly, you can enable hiding of notifications while presenting.

Directly below this section is the individual notification settings for each app. If you get a lot of notifications from a particular app, you can turn just that one off and still get notifications from other apps.

Windows 10 Action Center

Lastly, we have the Action Center. If you click on that little icon in the taskbar, you’ll see a windows slide in from the right hand side of the screen.

Here you will see a scrolling list of all notifications from the system and from apps. At the bottom of the screen are the quick actions I was talking about earlier in this article. You can change which icons appear here by clicking on the icons at the top in Settings and picking a different icon.

On desktops, you’ll pretty much see all the possible actions listed, but on laptops, you may only see one row of four icons. Currently, you can pick from All Settings, Connect, Project, VPN, Note, Quiet hours, Location and Tablet mode. Some of these only really apply to laptops or tablets and won’t make much sense for a desktop.

So that’s basically all there is to customizing the taskbar, notification area and action center in Windows 10. It’s a big improvement over Windows 8 and has enough new features to make the switch from Windows 7 seem sensible. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Enjoy!

The post Customize Taskbar, Notification Area and Action Center in Windows 10 first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

You’re probably reading this because you’ve tried changing the power plan settings to Never for everything and your monitor still turns off! This can be very frustrating and usually occurs with new installs of Windows 7, though I’ve seen it happen on older installs too.

In this article, I’ll go through the different ways you can fix this problem. Note that if your computer is on, but the screen is showing No Signal or No Input, you should read my post on fixing blank or black screens. Now let’s go through the possible solutions.

Power Options – Control Panel

First, we need to make sure everything is set correctly in Power Options. Click on Start and type in power options or go to Control Panel (icon view) and then open Power Options from there.

Click on Start, then Control Panel and then Hardware and Sound, and then click on Power Options.

Click on the Change plan settings link that is next to the plan that is currently selected. In my case, the High Performance plan is selected, so I’ll click on the link next to it.

First, make sure that Put the computer to sleep is set to Never. Next, change the Turn off the display setting to whatever value you desire. You don’t have to set it to Never if you don’t want to. After this, click on the Change advanced power settings link.

Expand Hard disk and then expand Turn off hard disk after. Reduce the value till it gets to Never. Click OK and then click Save Changes on the Edit Plan Settings page.

Screen Saver – Control Panel

The second setting you want to check is the screen saver. Go to Control Panel, click on Personalization, and then click on Screen Saver at the bottom right.

Make sure the setting is set to None. Sometimes if the screen saver is set to Blank and the wait time is 15 minutes, it’ll look like your screen has turned off.

BIOS, Graphics Card, Monitor

The two methods above are the most common reason why your display will turn off after a set amount of time, however, there can be other possible causes.

BIOS – On some computers, the BIOS can have power saving settings that determine how the computer sleeps. These are called sleep modes (S1, S2, S3, S4, and S5). On some computers, you’ll see an option called Deep Sleep Control. You may need to disable this in order for the computer to wake up faster.

Graphics Card – If you have a high-end graphics card installed, make sure you have the latest driver and management software installed. If you go through the settings, you may find an option that puts your graphics card into lower power mode or something similar.

Monitor – Lastly, some monitors have power saving features themselves. Usually, the monitor is supposed to go into power saving mode if it doesn’t detect any input (HDMI, VGA, DVI, etc), but sometimes it happens unexpectedly.

You’ll have to press the buttons on the monitor to get access to the monitor settings. Those are about all the reasons I could think of for your display turning off when it shouldn’t. If you have any other questions or solutions, feel free to comment. Enjoy!

The post Does Your Windows Computer Display Turn Off Every 15 Minutes? first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

Unfortunately, most people never mess around with network settings because they don’t understand what everything means and are afraid to mess something up. However, once you understand the settings, you can fix problems on your own, increase your privacy, and quickly setup file and printer sharing between multiple computers.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the different aspects of the Network and Sharing Center and show you certain features you can use on a regular basis to make yourself more productive.

Opening Network & Sharing Center

The first step is to open the Network and Sharing Center. The quickest way to get to it is by clicking on Start and typing in network and. This will instantly bring up the app in the list.

In all versions of Windows, the app is located in the Control Panel. In Windows 7, just click on Start and the Control Panel is listed on the right side of the Start Menu. In Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, just right-click on the Start Menu and choose Control Panel from the list.

In the Control Panel, you can click on the Network and Internet category and then click on Network and Sharing Center. If you are in icon view, just click directly on Network and Sharing Center.

Private or Public Network

The first thing you’ll see when you open the Network and Sharing Center is your current connection to the network and to the Internet. Windows 7 has a little bit more information and also a couple of more options.

In Windows 8 and Windows 10, they cleaned up the interface by getting rid of a couple of items and combining other items.

At the top, you’ll see the active network or networks, the network type, the type of access, HomeGroup info and the connection info. The first thing to understand about this info is the network type, which is listed directly below the name of the network.

In the above examples, one has Home network listed and the other has Private network listed. This is very important because when you are connected to a private or home network, there are a lot of sharing settings that are set by default to be trusting. This means others can find your computer on the network, possibly access shared folders, stream media from your computer, etc.

Windows will normally try to figure this out for you automatically so that when you connect to a public WiFi network, it will use the Public profile and not the private one. Sometimes, Windows will ask you if you want to enable sharing or find devices once you connect to a network and if you say yes, it will make the network private. If you choose no, it will make the network public.

You can also manually change the network type to Public or Private depending on what kind of privacy you want. This can be useful, for example, if you are visiting someone and you want to make sure no one can access any data on your computer while you are connected to their network. Change the network type to Public and no one will be able to discover your computer on the network.

You can read my post on how to switch between public and private for the currently connected network. So what exactly does switching do? Well, you can see all of the different sharing settings when you click on the Change advanced sharing settings link, which I explain in detail in the next section below.

To the right of the network name and network type, you’ll see HomeGroup and Connections. Next to HomeGroup, you’ll see a link that says Available to join or Ready to create depending on whether a HomeGroup already exists on the network or not. A HomeGroup allows you to easily share files, printers and more between computers. I talk more about it in the Advanced Sharing Settings section below.

Next to Connections, you can click on the name of the WiFi or Ethernet network to bring up the status info dialog for the current connection. Here you can see how long you have been connected, the signal quality for WiFi networks, the network speed, etc. You can also disable the connection and diagnose the connection if there is a problem.

For WiFi networks, this screen is useful because you can click on Wireless Properties and then click on the Security tab and view the WiFi password. This is really useful if you have forgotten the WiFi password, but still have a computer that is connected to the network.

Lastly, if you click on Details, you can get more info about the current network like the Default Gateway (router IP address), MAC address, and computer IP address.

Advanced Sharing Settings

The advanced sharing settings dialog is main place for managing how your computer communicates with the rest of the network. In Windows 7, you have two profiles: Home or Work and Public. Only one profile can be active at a time. All the settings are the same and repeated under each profile.

In Windows 8 and 10, you have three profiles: Private, Guest or Public and All Networks. Basically, it’s the same settings as in Windows 7, but just split up more logically. Let’s go through the various settings:

Network Discovery – This setting is turned on for private networks by default and it means that your computer can be seen by other computers and vice versa. What this means in practice is that when you open Windows Explorer, you might see the name of another computer connected to your network under Network Locations.

File and Printer Sharing – This setting will allow others to access shared folders and printers on your computer. I always turn this to Off even on private networks unless I need to use it in a specific situation. There are so many times when guests come over to my house, connect to the network and then could possibly browse my system. Only shared folders can be viewed, but you’d be surprised how folders can become shared without your knowledge.

HomeGroup connections – If you really do need to share files and folders, you should just setup a HomeGroup, which is more secure and a lot easier to configure.

Now expand out All Networks if you are using Windows 8 or Windows 10. There are a couple of more settings here.

Public Folder Sharing – I recommend turning this off unless you specifically need to share data with another computer. The reason is that it’s very easy to accidentally save files into these publicly shared folders without realizing it, which will then be accessible by anyone on the network. A very useful feature when you need it, but a big privacy risk otherwise.

Media Streaming – This is another option you should keep disabled until you need to use it. This basically turns your computer into a DLNA server so that you can stream music, movies and pictures to other devices on the network like an Xbox One, etc. When enabled, it opens up quite a few ports in your firewall also.

File Sharing Connections – This should always be set to Use 128-bit encryption unless you need to share files with Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows 2000 computers.

Password Protected Sharing – I highly recommend turning on password protected sharing because it will force users to enter a username and password for an account on your computer in order to access any data.

Setup New Network & Troubleshoot Problems

The next part I want to talk about is the section under Change your networking settings. In Windows 10, you can either setup a new connection or troubleshoot problems.

For setting up a new connection, you only have four options in Windows 8/10: Connect to the Internet, Setup a new network, manually connect to a WiFi network or connection to a VPN. Note that creating an ad-hoc network is no longer possible in Windows 10.

If you click on Troubleshoot problems, you’ll get a list of troubleshooting links for the Internet, network adapter, HomeGroup, Shared Folder, Printers, etc.

These are not just troubleshooting guides, they are actual programs that run and fix issues with various networking related services. I have found the Internet Connections and Network Adapter troubleshooting fixes to be the most useful.

Change Adapter Settings

Lastly, let’s talk about the Change adapter settings link on the left-hand side. You probably won’t use this too often, but it does come in handy when troubleshooting network problems.

Here you will see a list of all the network adapters on your computer. If you have an Ethernet port and WiFi card, you’ll see both items listed. You might also see other network adapters, but they are usually always virtual, meaning they are created by a software application like a VPN client or virtual machine program.

If you’re having connection problems, you can simply right-click on the adapter and choose Diagnose. This will usually fix any problem with a misconfigured network adapter. If you right-click and choose Properties, you can configure your computer to use a static IP address rather than obtaining one from a DHCP server.

As mentioned, this is not something you’ll need to do often, but it’s good to know for troubleshooting purposes. For the technically savvy, there are a lot of other advanced settings you can modify here, but this guide is meant for newbies.

Hopefully, this article will help you navigate the Network & Sharing Center settings without feeling overwhelmed. It’s the easiest way to fix network problems and to make your computer more secure by disabling a lot of the automatic sharing enabled by default. If you have any questions, post a comment. Enjoy!

The post Guide to Network and Sharing Center in Windows 7, 8, 10 first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

This feature stuck around in Windows 7 also and it can be activated by using the Windows Key + TAB combo as opposed to the standard ALT + TAB combo. If you liked this feature a lot, it got removed in Windows 8 and Windows 10.

The key combo still works, but it does something different in Windows 8 and something else in Windows 10! Yes, thanks Microsoft for changing features in every version of Windows!

Anyway, in this article, I’ll explain to you how Aero Flip 3D worked in Windows 7 and how the Windows Key and ALT combos now work in Windows 8 and Windows 10.

Aero Flip 3D

In Windows 7, if you press the ALT + TAB key combo, you get the following display for your programs:

Basically, you get small little thumbnails for each program or window that is on the taskbar. If you use the Windows Key + TAB combo, you get the cool looking flip 3D stack look:

By the way, if your computer does not support hardware acceleration, then when you press ALT + TAB, you’ll see small icons instead of previews like shown below:

If Aero Flip 3D is not working in Windows 7, it could also be that you are not using an Aero theme. Right-click on the desktop and choose Personalize. Then select one of themes under Aero Themes.

Windows 8 Switching Between Apps

So what happened in Windows 8? Well, firstly, flip 3D was removed in favor of the new sliding bars that come out from all sides in Windows 8. You remember the Charms bar on the right hand side?

In Windows 8, if you press ALT + TAB, you get a similar thumbnail view of all open programs, which includes desktop apps and the new Windows Store apps that were introduced in Windows 8.

This is logical and makes sense, right? However, if you press the Windows Key + TAB, you end up getting this sliding bar from the left side of the screen:

Firstly, I don’t use that many Windows apps to justify this annoying sliding bar on the left side of the screen. I much preferred the 3D flip of Windows 7. On top of that, it doesn’t list out desktop apps, but instead has one tile called Desktop. This is one of the many reasons why people simply hate Windows 8.

Windows 10 Switching Between Apps

Thankfully, Windows 10 has fixed a few of those problems. You’re still not going to get any 3D flip action in Windows 10, but I don’t mind that as much anymore.

Firstly, when press ALT + TAB in Windows 10, you get the same thumbnail previews as older versions of Windows, but the thumbnails are huge compared to preview versions of Windows, so it looks really nice.

As with Windows 8, ALT + TAB will show you desktop apps and Windows Store apps. Thankfully, in Windows 10, Store apps are inside windows and can be used like desktop apps, rather than going to full screen and being really annoying.

So what does Window Key + TAB do in Windows 10? Well, now that Windows 10 supports multiple desktops, like OS X has for a while, this key combo will allow you to switch between desktops. What’s nice about this key combo is that you can also let go of all the keys and it doesn’t disappear.

Here is where things get a little interesting. When you are in this mode, pressing tab will not switch you between apps in a particular desktop. Instead, it will switch you from the bottom part of the screen, where it lists out all the desktops, and the top part of the screen, where it lists out all of the apps and programs on a particular desktop.

If you press the left or right arrow keys, it will let you switch between the different programs on that desktop like shown below.

You’ll see a little white box around the app that is currently selected. You can then press Enter to select that app. While in this mode, if you press TAB, then you will activate the lower section and now you can move through the desktops by pressing the left and right arrow keys. As you can see below, two desktops are showing brighter because one was active one when I pressed Windows Key + TAB and the other one I used the arrows key to highlight.

Now if you just press Enter when selecting a different desktop, then it will simply load that desktop and show you whatever the active window was previously for that desktop.

However, to show all the windows that are active for another desktop, you have to press the SPACEBAR key. Then you can press TAB again to get back to the top part of the screen and arrow around to which app you want to select. Then press Enter and you will load that app from that desktop.

Since I use multiple desktops quite a bit, these new key combos are pretty useful and everything makes much more sense. The SPACEBAR trick wasn’t intuitive, but once you learn it, it makes a world of difference navigating between desktops and apps. Hopefully, that gives you a bit of an idea on how these shortcuts have changed over time. If you have any questions, feel free to comment. Enjoy!

The post What Happened to Aero Flip 3D in Windows 8 & 10? first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

With the Math Input Panel, you can write well-formed mathematical expressions and then have those inserted into other programs that support MathML or Mathematical Markup Language.

A couple of programs that support MathML are OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Calligra Suite and Microsoft Office. The web browser with the best support for MathML is Firefox. All the others either require a plugin or don’t support it at all (Chrome). So don’t plan on trying to embed MathML code in your web pages!

The Math Input Panel supports lots of high-school and college-level math like functions, numbers, letters, arithmetic, algebra, sets, geometry, probability and statistics, etc.

The best way to use the Math Input Panel is to have some kind of writing tablet or pad connected to your computer. Trying to write an equation with your mouse is a pretty frustrating experience. The best writing pads I have used for Windows are from Wacom, which has been around for ages.

Using Math Input Panel

Now let’s take a quick look at how you can use the Math Input Panel. The easiest way to load it is by clicking on Start and typing in Math. The first result should be the Math Input Panel.

When you first open the program, you’ll just see a blank screen with a graph paper type background that says Write math here. If the window size seems too small, don’t worry because the screen automatically grows in height and width as you get close to any particular edge, which is pretty neat.

Secondly, when you start writing an equation, another small window pops up to the right of the main math input screen. These are some tools you can use to erase or correct your equations.

Now just start writing your equation and don’t worry if you see that the preview window is showing something different. For example, after I wrote x=, the preview window was showing something else. However, once I wrote the letter a, it figured out that it should be x = a.

Once you have finished writing your equation, there may be a few items that were not correctly recognized by the input panel. In these cases, we can use the correct tools at the right. The best one to start with is Select and Correct.

As you can see above, I wrote a horrible a, which the program recognized as an n. To correct it, I could erase and rewrite it, but the easier option is to click on Select and Correct, then click on the letter a so that it is highlighted in red and then choose the correct letter or symbol I want. The second choice in the list is what I want.

To erase something, just click the Erase button and then click and drag on the input panel to erase anything you like. Now that you have your equation completed in the input panel, it’s time to insert it somewhere useful.

You can do this by first opening the program you want to insert the equation into. In my example, I’m going to use Word, so I will open it and move my cursor to the point where I want to insert the equation.

Then click on the Insert button and your equation will be dropped into the document. Note that you can adjust the size of the font for the equation by simply selecting it and then increasing or decreasing the font size.

Again, you always want to write out the whole mathematical expression first before you start making corrections. The more of the expression you write, the more likely the program will be able to figure out what you are trying to do. If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment. Enjoy!

The post Geekiest Windows Accessory: the Math Input Panel first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

DVD Maker comes with over 20 different DVD styles that let you create a professional looking DVD that matches the theme of your home movie or photo slideshow.  You can also customize the DVD even more by adding a disc title, a notes page and editing the menu text.

Windows DVD Maker

In terms of creating slideshows, Windows DVD Maker doesn’t have very many options for effects or transitions, etc since it’s really only for burning previously created projects. I’ll first write how to use it to create a super simple photo slideshow that you can burn to DVD using Windows DVD Maker, but at the end I’ll also mention other programs you can use to first create nicer photo slideshows before burning them to DVD.

Using Windows DVD Maker, you can customize your DVD menu using their built-in and very professional looking styles. So if you have a bunch of photos and Windows Vista or 7, then let’s create some DVD slideshows that you can then share and watch on your TV.

First, go to Start, and then All Programs. Click on Windows DVD Maker or simply type it in the search box.

At the top left, you’ll see the Add items button, which will let you add pictures or videos to your DVD project.

Browse to the location of your picture folder, select all of the photos desired and press Add. You should see a slideshow folder in the list with the number of pictures. If you have more pictures from a different folder, you can add those too and they will be added to the slideshow folder. Here’s what it looks like with a couple of photos.

Go ahead and click Next and now you’ll be able to choose the style of your DVD menu. Here you can customize the Menu text, customize the menu itself, and preview the DVD menu.

Like I mentioned earlier, there are not very many options for configuring your slideshow, but you can do a few small things if you click on the Slide show button at the top (next to Customize menu).

Here you can add music to the slideshow, change the slide show length to match the music length, change the length of time each picture is displayed, change the transition type used for each picture and choose whether to pan and zoom the pictures. It’s basic, but it will get the job done for a lot of people.

Once you have finished customizing the settings, go ahead and click Burn! That’s really all there is to it! The DVD will be burned and you’ll now have your own slideshow on DVD.

Windows DVD Maker will encode the movie in the appropriate DVD format and then it will burn it. The encoding process takes much more time than the burning so you will have to wait a while depending on the speed of your computer.

So what if you’re running Windows 8/8.1 and don’t have access to Windows DVD Maker? Well, there are a couple of other options. One of my favorites is DVD Slideshow GUI, which is freeware.

DVD Slideshow GUI

DVD Slideshow GUI basically uses a bunch of free tools that are already available and packages them together into a nice GUI interface. Once you install it and run it, go ahead and click on Slideshow and then Add Pictures and Videos.

You should see a list of all the pictures added with some information like Duration (slide), Animation, Transition and Duration (transition). The durations are in frames and the transitions are randomly selected by default when you load the pictures.

You can change all of these settings, of course, by simply right-clicking on any picture. It will instantly bring up the slide settings dialog box.

Here you can change the transition and durations and also click on the little brush icon, which will ask you to choose your favorite photo editor. You can pick anything from Photoshop if you have that installed to Microsoft Paint. In this way, you can edit the photos beforehand or via the DVD Slideshow program if you like. The subtitle option will add whatever text you type onto the image and you can then change the position and style of that text using the style dropdown box.

You can also animate the images if you click by selecting one, click on Slideshow and then clicking on Animation. You can basically zoom, pan and rotate the images using this tool.

You can also preview the entire slideshow by just double-clicking on any photo in the slideshow. Once you have completed the slideshow, click on File and then Project Settings.

Here you can choose the resolution and format for the slideshow, aspect ratio, whether to include pre or post process effects, and adjust the quality of the animations. Finally, you can click File and then choose Burn to Disk to burn your slideshow to CD or DVD. The program also has the option to export it as a movie file or upload it to YouTube.

Microsoft Photo Story 3

Photo Story 3 is almost 10 years old now, but it’s still a nice piece of software that runs on everything from Windows XP up to Windows 8.1. Once you install it, choose to Begin a new story on the wizard.

On the next screen, click on Import Pictures and choose all the pictures you want in your slideshow. Once loaded, you’ll be able to click on a picture in the grid at the bottom and then click on the small buttons to correct color levels, remove red eye, rotate or edit.

When you click on Edit, you can rotate and crop the photo, auto fix it or add effects. You can also apply one effect to all the pictures if you like.

Next, you can add titles to each photo and adjust the justification and font using the buttons directly above the text box. You can also pick an effect for each picture from this screen too.

What’s cool about Photo Story is that you can also add narration to each of your photos by directly recording your voice in the program! It’s a pretty neat and unique feature and that is why I still recommend this program 10 years after it was released.

If you click on the Customize Motion button, you can add any zoom/pan and transition effects here. I also like having the ability to choose the exact parts of an image that I want to zoom in on rather the program randomly deciding.

Now you can add music to your slideshow by either selecting MP3 files or you even have the crazy option of creating your own music on the fly by combining various pre-set music tunes, changing the tempo, etc.

Lastly, you choose what you want to do with your photo story. You can either save it to your computer, which is the option to choose if you want to burn it to DVD later. It basically saves the file out as a WMV file, which you will then just add to Windows DVD Maker to burn to DVD.

You can also click on Settings to adjust the resolution and quality of the saved video. So those are three options you have for creating photos slideshows and burning them to DVDs, emailing them, uploading to YouTube or simply saving to your computer. Enjoy!

The post 3 Ways to Create Video Slideshows in Windows first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

Normally, I would have called the person lazy and told them to stop bothering me, but since this person was performing a repetitive task and needed to open the same applications every day, I thought I would come up with a solution.

I also found that I usually open a couple of programs every morning no matter what: Chrome for Internet browsing, Outlook for checking email, and Visual Foxpro for writing code (since I’m a programmer). So instead of clicking on three icons, I decided to create what is called a batch file to open all three applications at once!

You can create batch files in Windows very easily and all you need to create them is Notepad! Also, I cover how you can use Task Scheduler to run your batch file when your computer boots so that the programs start without even having to click once!

How to Create a Batch File in Windows

Step 1. First, open Notepad

Step 2. Copy and paste the line below as the first line in the file:

@echo off

Echo off basically tells Windows to not give you any messages or popup windows when running the commands in the batch file.

Step 3. Now we need to actually call the executable for each of the three programs that we want to open. So in our example, I want to open Firefox, Outlook, and Foxpro. The next three lines would look like this:

start “Chrome” “C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe”
start “Outlook” “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Outlook.exe”
start “Foxpro” “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9\vfp9.exe”

There are three parts to each command above, which I explain below:

start – That is the command used in batch files to open programs

“App Name” – The second parameter is the name of the application you are going to be opening. You can put any name you like here since it only uses this parameter for title purposes.

“App Path” – The last parameter is the actual path to the executable file for the program.

You can always find the path of a program by right clicking on the icon and going to Properties. For example, if I wanted to know the path to the executable file for Firefox, I would right-click and choose Properties.

Now all I need to do is look at the path in the Target box and simply copy and paste that into my batch file script.

Note that there are certain shortcuts where the Target box will be empty like shown below, mostly with Microsoft Office programs.

If this is the case, you have to manually go and look for the EXE file on the system. For Office, everything is located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Officexx if you installed the 64-bit version or C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Officexx if you installed the 32-bit version. The application files are usually just the name of the program like EXCEL, WORD or POWERPOINT.

After you have added all the entries to your file, the batch file should look something like this:

Now all you have to do is actually save it as a batch file, which is very easy. Go to File and click Save As. Give your file a name like “Test.bat“. Note that I added the .BAT to the file name manually. Lastly, change the Save As Type to All Files instead of Text Documents.

That’s it! You should now go ahead and test out your batch file and see if all of your programs load up. One thing I have found is that loading applications via a batch file is much faster for some reason. I’m not really sure why, but Chrome, Outlook and Firefox all loaded several seconds faster than when I normally click on them.

Schedule Batch File on PC Startup

Now let’s schedule our batch file to run when we first log into Windows. To do this, click on Start, type in task scheduler and click on the first link.

Don’t become overwhelmed looking at the interface because we only have to create a very simple task. On the right hand side, you should see a link to Create Basic Task. Go ahead and click on that.

Now give your basic task a name, which can be whatever you want. You can also give it a description if you like. Click Next when done.

The next step is to choose the trigger. In our case, we want the batch file to be run when we log onto the computer, so choose When I log on. That’s the only option that really makes sense anyway.

The next step is to choose an action. In our case, the action will be to run our batch script, so choose Start a program.

Finally, we have to actually choose the batch file we want to run when we log onto the computer. Go ahead and click on the Browse button and navigate to the location of your batch file.

Click Next and then click Finish. Now go ahead and restart your computer and the programs should open when you log into Windows! Pretty neat, huh? If you have any questions, post a comment. Enjoy!

The post How to Open Multiple Programs in Windows at Once first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

Today I’m going to talk about how you can share files on your Mac and access them on your PC. The process is fairly simple and should work as long as you are on the same network and don’t have any over zealous security settings configured on your Mac.

The first thing you’ll need to do is enable file sharing on your Mac. Here’s how to do it.

Enable File Sharing on Mac OS X

First go to the System Preferences menu option by clicking on the Apple icon at the top left and then clicking on System Preferences.

Now click on the Sharing icon, which is where we need to go to configure all the sharing options.

Before you get started, make sure to click on the little gold lock icon at the bottom left otherwise everything will be greyed out and you won’t be able to make any changes.

Now go ahead and check the File Sharing box under Service to enable file sharing. This one dialog pretty much contains all the settings and options for sharing. Starting at the top, you can change your computer name to something less complex so Windows users have an easier time connecting. If you don’t, OS X will give it a short name automatically so that Windows can recognize it. Click the Edit button to change the name.

You’ll also see the IP address for the computer listed by the Options button. Under Shared Folders, the Public folder is shared out by default. Click the little + (plus) button to share any folder on your hard drive. Under Users, you can see the standard permissions and edit them as you see fit.

The only other thing you have to do is click on the Options button and you’ll see a section at the bottom called Windows File Sharing. In order to connect from a Windows machine, you have to check the box next to the user name and enter your password. For whatever reason, OS X has to store your Mac user account password in a less secure way in order to connect from a Windows machine. If you don’t do this step, you’ll be asked to enter the username and password from your Windows machine, but it will just give you an error even if you type it in correctly.

That’s about it from the Mac side. Now it’s time to try connect from your Windows machine.

Connect to Mac from Windows

There are a couple of ways you can do this. One way is to simply open up Explorer and click on Network. You should see the Mac computer listed there.

If Windows asks you to enable Network Discovery, then go ahead and do that. Now when you double-click on the computer name, it should pop up a login dialog box. Enter the same username and password that you had entered in the Windows File sharing dialog on OS X earlier. If the user account on your Mac had spaces, don’t worry because Windows can handle it just fine.

If everything went well, you should see some shared folders now on your Windows computer!

Another way to connect is to use the Run command from the Start Menu. Click on Start, then Run and type in the IP address or computer name:

Now you’ll get the same dialog box where you have to enter the username and password for your Mac user account. You should now be able to copy files back and forth from Windows to Mac and vice versa.

The only setting that can cause issues is the firewall on OS X. Everything should work fine with the firewall enabled with default settings, but if you go to firewall and then Firewall Options, you can block all incoming connections. If this item is checked, then file sharing will no longer work.

Just uncheck that option under firewall options and you should be good to go. If you have any other trouble sharing your Mac files with your PC, post a comment and I’ll see if I can help. Enjoy!

The post How to Access Mac Files from a Windows PC first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

There are many other reasons why you may need to rename file extensions, so I’ll show you how you can change them one at a time if you have a small number of files or batch rename file extensions if you have lots of files.

If you have a file with no extension, Windows will probably assign a generic icon to it. When you try to open it, the Open With dialog will pop up where you’ll get a list of programs to choose from.

Obviously, since there is no file extension for the file, Windows is not able to determine which program should open it. If you want to change the file extension for the file, you first need to be able to see file extensions in Windows. You can do this by going to My Computer and then going to Tools and  Folder Options.

In Windows 7, click on the Organize button and then click Folder and search options.

In Windows 8, you just click on the View tab in Explorer and check the File name extensions box.

Go to the View tab and scroll down till you see the option “Hide extensions for known file types“. Go ahead and uncheck it.

If the file has no extension at all, this step may not be necessary, but I am including it because if you’re trying to CHANGE the file type from one type to another, then you need to do this. Now right-click on your file and choose Rename.

Move to the end of the name and type in .XXX or whatever the type is for the file you want it to be, i.e. .TXT for text files, .XLS for Excel files, etc. Obviously, the file has to have originally been from that program that you are changing the file extension too. In my case, the text file was from Excel, so I added that extension back.

How to Batch Rename File Extensions

So how do you rename multiple file extensions at once? If you have a directory full of files that need to be changed from .PNG to .JPG, it’s going to take forever to do this using the method above. Luckily, there are a couple of different ways we can change the file extension for multiple files at once.

Command Line

For those of you who are familiar with the command line, there is a very easy command you can use to perform very simple file renaming tasks. There are two commands that you can use at the command prompt: ren and rename. Both of them do the exact same thing, so it’s just a preference as to which one you use.

If you have a folder with a bunch of JPGs inside and you want to change the file extension to PNG, for example, you would type in the following command:

ren *.jpg *.png

As you can see above, the command changed all the files in that directory with a JPG file extension to ones with a PNG file extension. You can get more information on how to use the ren command from Microsoft’s website.

Bulk Rename Utility

If the command line sounds daunting, then there are a couple of useful file renaming utilities that will get the job done for you with only a few clicks. One of my favorites is the Bulk Rename Utility because it is the single most comprehensive file renaming utility out there.

Yes, the interface is absolutely jammed pack with options that make little to no sense unless you read all the document from the website. However, for our purpose, all we have to worry about is the box labeled Extension (11) down at the bottom right. Change it from Same to Fixed and then type in the new extension you want. You’ll see that the list box will show you the new name of the file instantly before you even commit the changes. Click the Rename button and that’s it.

I mentioned this tool even though it’s overkill for our purpose because it’s a really great utility and one that some might be interested in learning if they want to rename thousands of photos with names likes DSC00x, IMG00x, etc.

Advanced Renamer

Another good program that also requires a bit of reading to figure out is Advanced Renamer. Thankfully, both sites have user guides and tutorials. Also, I’ll explain the process for changing the file extension here. Once you install it, go ahead and click the Add button to add their files or to add a folder, which will add all the files in that folder to the list.

Now in order to perform any actions on that list, you have to add methods in the left hand pane. You can add multiple methods to perform complex renaming of files and folders. We want to click Add Method and then choose New Name.

Now go ahead and type in the new extension you would like into the box at the top and then change the Apply to box at the bottom to Extension instead of Name.

In the list of files, you should see the updated New Filename field updated with the changes to the file name or extension. When you have gotten it right the way you like, go ahead and click on the Start Batch button.

Again, I’m giving the simplest example with these programs, but you can create far more complex renaming schemes if you like. If you really don’t care about all the extra functionality, then check out the last program that does nothing but change the file extension.

Bulk Extension Changer

If you want simple, Bulk Extension Changer is the program for you. All you have to do is three things: first, pick the folder where the files are located, then set the current and replacement extension and then just press the Go button.

The only option is if you want to include sub-directories or not. In the 2nd step, you can add multiple replacement rules in case your folder has files of many different types and you want to check several at once.

Hopefully, those are enough options for any need you might have for renaming file extensions. If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment. Enjoy!

The post How to Batch Change File Extensions for Windows Files first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

If you have been meaning to learn how to use the command prompt in Windows, I’ll go through some of the basic commands that are performed most often. Just so everyone’s on the same page, you can get to the command prompt by going to Start and then click on Run and typing in CMD. In Windows 7, just click on Start and begin typing cmd. In Windows 8, you can just right-click on the Start button and choose Command Prompt.

You’ll now see a large black window with the cursor at the end of the path to your user profile in C:\Documents and Settings\Username or C:\Users\Username. So what to do now!? Well, since I can’t explain everything, you’ll probably want to end up using some of the help guides that are provided in MS DOS itself by typing in HELP and pressing Enter.

When you do that, you’ll get a list of all the commands you can use in MS DOS and a short description of what they do:

You can also find out more detailed information about the parameters and how to use each command by typing in the command name followed by a /?. For example, typing in CD /?, will present you with a quick tutorial on how to use the CD command:

As you can see from above, the MS DOS command CD displays the name of or changes the current directory. So if you wanted to change from the default user profile directory to the Windows System32 directory to delete a virus file, you would type in the following to navigate to that directory:

cd c:\window\system32 and press Enter

You current directory at the prompt will now change to:

Now that you are in that directory, you may want to view all of the files and directories first, so you can type in the command DIR and press Enter. You’ll now get a giant list of all of the files and folders in that directory. You can type in DIR /? and see what parameters you can pass to it.

As you can see, you could type in DIR /P to give the list in a paginated format that you can browse through slowly. Or you could type in DIR /W to get the list in a wide format rather than one single column. The cool thing about DOS is that you can include several parameters for each command, so you could type in DIR /P /W and get a page-by-page view along with wide format:

So now that we have a list of files and folders, let’s continue with our deleting a virus example. If you want to delete a file, you would use the DEL command. Again typing in DEL /? will give you some useful info on the command.

To delete a file, we can simply type in DEL filename and that will delete the file. When you use the command this way, it won’t prompt you to confirm before deleting the file, so make sure you have typed in the correct file name. Also, you have to enter the file name with the extension, so it would be DEL Test.txt to delete that file. Also, if you need to delete a file that has spaces in the name, you have to use quotes like DEL “This is a test.txt”.

If you need to create or delete folders, you would use the MKDIR and RMDIR commands. It’s worth noting that if you try to delete a non-empty directory, you will get an error message. However, if you are sure you want to delete the directory and everything inside, you can use the RMDIR /S foldername command.

There are lots of other commands that you can use to do all sorts of stuff like copy files, print text files, change file permissions, etc. So if you can do most of this stuff in Windows using the GUI interface, then why bother with DOS, right?

Firstly, you never know when something bad will happen to Windows and you’re stuck in the command prompt because nothing else will load. Also, any command you type in the command prompt, like we showed above, can be saved into a file with a .BAT extension and run anytime by just clicking on the file or can be scheduled to run using the Windows Scheduled Tasks Control Panel applet.

So if you want to be able to routinely perform some simple actions on your computer, like copying files from one folder to another, just type the commands into Notepad and save the file with a .BAT extension instead of as a text file. Basically, you have to choose All Files for the File Type option and then type in the name like “MyFile.bat” with the quotes included.

Let me mention a couple of other commands that prove to be very useful very often.

IPCONFIG

The IPCONFIG command gives you information about your network cards, IP addresses and also lets you renew your IP address. My favorite is ipconfig /all, which will give you detailed information about each network adapter on your computer. You can then use this info to figure out your router IP address (default gateway) and whether or not you’re getting an IP address from a DHCP server.

DISKPART

Again, when you end up with hard drive problems, this command can prove to be very useful. DISKPART lets you administer the hard disks installed on your computer. You can do things like set a partition to be the active partition, assign a drive letter to a partition, shrink a disk, take a disk offline or online, etc.

SFC

System File Checker is really useful because it scans all protected system files and replaces incorrect versions with correct file versions. There will be a lot of times when certain system files in Windows have become corrupt and system file checker will fix them for you easily. You just run sfc /scannow and it will perform a scan and fix any issues. It does take quite a bit of time, but worth it if you’re having any kind of corruption issues.

A couple of other very useful commands that you might have to end up using are listed below:

• chkdsk – Verifies a hard disk or a floppy disk for file system integrity.
• copy – Copies files from one location to another. The destination defaults to the current directory. If there are multiple source files, the destination must be a directory or else you will get an error.
• fc – Compares two files or sets of files and displays the differences between them
• fdisk – Manipulates hard disk partition tables. When run from the command line, it displays a menu of various partitioning operations.
• format – Delete all the files on the disk and reformat it for MS-DOS. Use mostly for formatting floppy disks or other removable disks.
• scandisk – Disk diagnostic utility that is a replacement for the CHKDSK utility.
• netstat – Shows you all the current connections from your local computer to anything external.

That should hopefully get you up and running on how to use and navigate in the MS DOS command prompt! You can also check out this site that has a list of all commands you can use at the command prompt. If you have a question, please post a comment! Enjoy!

The post Beginner’s Guide to the Windows Command Prompt first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

So if you come across a file with a strange extension you have never seen before, there are a couple of ways you can identify which program opens that file. I’m also going to go through some of most common file types that people need to open, but if it’s not in my list, check the online lookup sites that will let you search for file extensions.

Online File Extension Lookup

The easiest way to determine the program associated with a file type is to use an online database of file extensions. There are a couple of sites with thousands of entries, so unless someone made up their own file extension, you should be able to find it.

FileInfo

My favorite site for getting information on files is FileInfo because it has a huge database plus its got a very clean and well-organized site.  Just type your extension into file extension search box to get started. I searched for .NRG and got the following results:

At the top, you see it is a Nero CD/DVD Image file and you get a short description of exactly what the file might be. Also, this site gives you really useful info sometimes like in this case where it says you can convert NRG files to standard ISO files using a program called Nrg2Iso.

The best part, however, is the fact that it tells you which programs can open files with that extensions on Mac, Windows and Linux. This is mostly what people are looking to do when they are searching for a file extension, so FileInfo puts that info front and center.

FileExt

I’m not a huge fan of FileExt because it’s got a ton of ads blended into the content to try and confuse you so that you install software to speed up your pc or scan for registry errors. Just avoid all of those links. To search for a file extension, just use the Google Custom search box at the top of the site.

At the top you’ll see the file extension and also the file type. This is important because it’ll tell you what kind of file the extension is associated with. In the example above, .NRG is a CD-image file created by the Nero application. Skip the blue sections as those are ads and it’ll give you a short paragraph with more details on the program that is used to create those files.

FileExt doesn’t give much more info beyond that, so that’s why I listed it second. As shown above, several different programs can open the NRG file and FileExt doesn’t clue you into that fact.

How to Open Dat Files

DAT files are so common in emails that I wrote an entire post just about opening .DAT files. DAT files aren’t necessarily from one program and that’s why it’s a bit hard deciphering the best way to open them.

How to Open ODT File

I have gotten an ODT file several times while at the office because it’s a text document, created using one of those free open source word processors like StarOffice or OpenOffice. Thankfully, this is a really easy one because you can open it directly in Microsoft Word if you have that installed.

On a Mac, you can open it in TextEdit, which is included in OS X. If you don’t have Office installed on a PC, you can also use LibreOffice, Lotus Notes or WordPerfect to open the document.

How to Open a RAR file

I don’t know why people use RAR for compressing files, but they do, especially if you are trying to download anything off of torrent sites. Anyway, you don’t have to purchase any software like WinRAR or anything like that because there are free programs that can open RAR files just fine.

7-Zip is my favorite file archiver and will open and extract RAR files just fine. If you have a password protected RAR file, you can read my previous post on cracking password protected RAR files.

How to Open PRN file

A PRN file is what you end up getting when you check the “Print to file” option from Windows. It’s a special file that contains the print job in a format that can be understood by the printer, such as what to print, the tray to use, the paper size, etc. Normally, when you print this file is created transparently in the background before being sent to the printer.

Since the PRN file is actually the instruction set for the printer, it will contain lots of extra garbage data that you won’t understand. It’s almost impossible to open it in Word, Notepad, etc if you try. You can, however, use a PostScript viewer like GSView to view the file correctly. Normally, however, if someone was intending to send the file to your electronically, you would want them to print it out to a PDF writer, etc as the “Print to file” option is not meant for humans to read!

How to Open MPP file

An MPP file is the file extension for Microsoft Project files. Sometimes people unintentionally send this file thinking that everyone has Microsoft Project installed on their computers! Sadly we all do now work at places that can afford that type of luxury. Either way, there are a couple of free and commercial programs that you can use to open an MPP file.

Check out this list of free/paid apps for opening Microsoft Projects files.

How to Open PSF file

The PSF file extension can be one of several different types of files. If you have to open a PSF file, it is more likely than not a Photoshop Proof Setup file or a PhotoStudio Graphic. It can also be from Microsoft’s Picture It! software that creates slideshows of pictures.

The first way to try an open it would be to download the Picture It! viewer software or try to use Adobe Photoshop. If you don’t have Photoshop, you can try a free photo viewer like XnView.

If that doesn’t work, try to rename the file extension to .JPG instead of .PSF and then open it. Some people have said this method works for opening PSF files.

Also, it could be a PhotoStudio file from Arcsoft, which you can get here. That should hopefully get your file open! You will need to download the trial version since it’s not free.

How to Open MDI file

MDI stands for Microsoft Document Imaging and is usually created by the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer when you go to print files from Office. This is basically useful for printing documents in electronic format that you can then send to someone else for viewing.

Sometimes Windows will not open this file type even if you have Office installed on your computer, especially if it’s Office 2007 because Microsoft Office Document Imaging is not installed by default.

You can install it by following these steps:

1. Go to Control Panel and select Uninstall a program link under the Programs section.
2. Click on Microsoft Office 2007
3. Click on Change towards the top of the window
4. Select Add or Remove Features
5. Expand Office Tools
6. Click on the drop down list for Microsoft Office Document Imaging and select Run all from My Computer
7. Click Continue and then Close.

You should now be able to open MDI files with Office 2007 in Windows XP or Windows Vista.

How to Open VSD file

A file with a VSD file extension is a Microsoft Visio drawing. In order to view the drawing, you have to have Microsoft Visio installed on your computer. If you don’t, there are several free Visio viewers that are available for free.

Visio 2010 Viewer

Visio 2013 Viewer

Using the Visio 2010 viewer, you should be able to view Visio documents created in Visio 5, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2007, and 2010!

How to Open PUB file

A file with a .PUB extension is another proprietary Microsoft format, this time from Microsoft Publisher! Luckily, if you don’t have Publisher installed on your computer (obviously otherwise you would not be on this site), then you can try to convert the file into another format, such as PDF, etc.

Check out Zamzar.com, a cool and free website that converts several different file formats, including PUB into PDF format. Sadly, there are no viewers, plugins, or anything else for viewing Microsoft Publisher files, so you’ll have to convert it to PDF or tell the person to save it out as a different file type.

There are many other types of files that I have not mentioned here, so check the websites mentioned above for more info on those. If you have any questions, post a comment. Enjoy!

The post How to Open Files in Windows with Different File Extensions first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

However, if you’re looking to setup your own FTP server in Windows using IIS, you can do so, but it requires more technical knowledge. Of course, it also gives your more granular control over sharing and security, so it’s better for anyone who has a little computer know-how. Plus, IIS is all about running websites, so if you want to run a couple of websites along with an FTP server, then IIS is the best choice.

It’s also worth noting that different versions of IIS come with each flavor of Windows and they all have slightly different feature sets. IIS 5.0 came with Windows 2000 and 5.1 came with Windows XP Professional. IIS 6 was for Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Professional 64-bit. IIS 7 was a complete rewrite of IIS and was included with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista.

IIS 7.5 was released along with Windows 7, IIS 8 released with Windows 8 and IIS 8.5 released with Windows 8.1. It’s best to use IIS 7.5 or higher if possible as they support the most features and have better performance.

Setup and Configure an FTP Server in IIS

The first thing you’ll need to setup your own FTP server in Windows is to make sure you have Internet Information Services (IIS) installed. Remember, IIS only comes with Pro, Professional, Ultimate or Enterprise versions of Windows.

In Windows Vista and earlier, click on Start, Control Panel and go to Add/Remove Programs. Then click on Add/Remove Windows Components. For Windows 7 and higher, click on Programs and Features from Control Panel and then click on Turn Windows features on or off.

In the components wizard, scroll down until you see IIS in the list and check it off. Before you click Next though, make sure you click on Details and then check File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Service.

For Windows 7 and up, go ahead and click on the box next to Internet Information Services and FTP Server. You also need to make sure you check the Web Management Tools box otherwise you won’t be able to manage IIS from Administrative Tools later on. For FTP, you need to check the FTP Service box otherwise you won’t have the option to create an FTP server.

Click OK and then click Next. Windows will go ahead and install the necessary IIS files along with the FTP service. You may be asked to insert your Windows XP or Windows Vista disc at this point. You shouldn’t need a disc for Windows 7 or higher.

Setup and configure IIS for FTP

Once IIS has been installed, you may have to restart your computer. Now we want to go ahead and open the IIS configuration panel to set up the FTP server. So go to Start, then Control Panel and click on Administrative Tools. You should now see an icon for Internet Information Services.

When you open IIS in Vista or earlier for the first time, you’ll only see your computer name in the left hand menu. Go ahead and click the + symbol next to the computer name and you’ll see a couple of options like Web Sites, FTP Sites, etc. We’re interested in FTP Sites, so expand that out also. You should see Default FTP Site, click on it.

You’ll notice after you click on the default FTP site that there are a couple of buttons at the top that look like VCR buttons: Play, Stop, and Pause. If the Play button is greyed out, that means the FTP server is active. Your FTP server is now up and running! You can actually connect to it via your FTP client software. I use SmartFTP, but you can use whatever you like best.

For Windows 7 and higher, you’ll see a different look to IIS. Firstly, there is no play button or anything like that. Also, you’ll see a bunch of configuration options right on the home screen for authentication, SSL settings, directory browsing, etc.

To start the FTP server here, you have to right-click on Sites and then choose Add FTP Site.

This opens the FTP wizard where you start by giving your FTP site a name and choosing the physical location for the files.

Next, you have to configure the bindings and SSL. Bindings are basically what IP addresses you want the FTP site to use. You can leave it at All Unassigned if you don’t plan on running any other website. Keep the Start FTP site automatically box checked and choose No SSL unless you understand certificates.

Lastly, you have to setup authentication and authorization. You have to choose whether you want Anonymous or Basic authentication or both. For authorization, you choose from All Users, Anonymous users or specific users.

You can actually access the FTP server locally by opening Explorer and typing in ftp://localhost. If all worked well, you should see the folder load with no errors.

If you have an FTP program, you can do the same thing. Open the FTP client software and type in localhost as the host name and choose Anonymous for the login. Connect and you should now see the folder.

Ok, so now we got the site up and running! Now where do you drop the data you want to share? In IIS, the default FTP site is actually located in C:\Inetpub\ftproot. You can dump data in there, but what if you already have data located somewhere else and don’t want to move it to inetpub?

In Windows 7 and higher, you can pick any location you want via the wizard, but it’s still only one folder. If you want to add more folders to the FTP site, you have to add virtual directories. For now, just open the ftproot directory and dump some files into it.

Now refresh your FTP client and you should now see your files listed! So you now have an up and running FTP server on your local computer. So how would you connect from another computer on the local network?

In order to do this, you’ll have to open up the Windows Firewall to allow FTP connections to your computer; otherwise all external computers will be blocked. You can do this by going to Start, Control Panel, clicking on Windows Firewall and then clicking on the Advanced Tab.

Under the Network Connection Settings section, make sure all of the connections are checked in the left list and then click on the Settings button. You’ll now be able to open certain ports on your computer based on the service your computer is providing. Since we are hosting our own FTP server, we want to check off FTP Server.

A little popup window will appear with some settings that you can change, just leave it as it is and click OK. Click OK again at the main Windows Firewall window.

In Windows 7 and higher, the process is different for opening the firewall port. Open Windows Firewall from the Control Panel and then click on Advanced Settings on the left hand side. Then click on Inbound Rules and scroll down till you see FTP Server (FTP Traffic-In), right click on it and choose Enable Rule.

Then click on Outbound Rules and do the same thing for FTP Server (FTP Traffic-Out). You have now opened up the firewall for FTP connections. Now try to connect to your FTP site from a different computer on your network. You’ll need to get the IP address of the computer first before you can connect into it from a different computer.

Go to Start, click Run and type in CMD. Type IPCONFIG and jot down the number for IP Address:

In your FTP client on the other computer, type in the IP Address you just wrote down and connect anonymously. You should now be able to see all of your files just like you did on the FTP client that was on the local computer. Again, you can also go to Explorer and just type in FTP:\\ipaddress to connect.

Now that the FTP site is working, you can add as many folders as you like for FTP purposes. In this way, when a user connects, they specify a path that will connect to one specific folder.

Back in IIS, right click on Default FTP Site and choose New, and then Virtual Directory.

In Windows 7, you right-click on the site name and choose Add Virtual Directory.

When you create a virtual directory in IIS, you’re basically going to create an alias that points to a folder on the local hard drive. So in the wizard, the first thing you’ll be asked is for a alias name. Make is something simple and useful like “WordDocs” or “FreeMovies”, etc.

Click Next and now browse to the path where you want the alias to refer to. So if you have a bunch of movies you want to share, browse to that folder.

Click Next and choose whether you want it as Read access only or Read and Write access. If you simply want to share files, check Read. If you want people to be able to upload files to your computer, choose Read and Write.

Click Next and then click Finish! Now you’ll see your new virtual directory below the default FTP site. In Windows 7 and up, the process is reduced to one dialog shown below:

You can connect to you using your FTP client by putting in the Path field “/Test” or “/NameOfFolder”. In Explorer, you would just type in ftp://ipaddress/aliasname.

Now you’ll only see the files that are in the folder that we created the alias for.

That’s about it! You can create as many folders as you like! The only thing other thing that you would need to do is to give out your public IP address to anyone who is connecting from outside of your internal network. If you want users to connect from anywhere in the world, you’ll have to give them your public IP address, which you can find out by going to http://whatismyipaddress.com/.

Finally, you’ll need to forward the FTP port on your router to your local computer that is hosting the FTP server. Port Forward is a great site to show you how to forward ports on your router to computers on your home network. You should also read my other posts on port forwarding and dynamic DNS:

What is Port Forwarding?

Setup Dynamic DNS for Remote Access

This is definitely a lot of info with a bunch of steps; if you have any questions about all of this, post a comment! Enjoy!

The post How to Setup an FTP Server in Windows using IIS first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

If you want to disable recent documents and remove/clear your most recent documents, it’s actually a pretty simple process. The most recent list of documents was removed by default from the Start Menu starting in Windows 7, but it still exists in the jumplist.

Clear Recent Documents Windows 7 & 8

In Windows 7 and 8, you won’t see any list of recent documents by default in the Start Menu; however, it does still exist. If you right-click on the Start Menu, choose Properties, click on the Start Menu tab and then click on Customize, you’ll see a checkbox for Recent Items towards the bottom.

If that is checked, then you will see the recent documents in the Start Menu like shown below:

In addition to the Start menu, if Recent Items is enabled, you’ll also see the list of recent documents when you right-click on a program in the taskbar. This is called the jumplist and it basically includes a customized menu for each program.

Now there are two ways to get rid of items from a jumplist or from the list of recent documents in Windows 7 and higher: either clear the jumplist or prevent Windows from showing any recent documents at all.

I have already written a detailed post on how to clear jumplists in Windows 7, so read that first. However, that just temporarily clears the jumplist. Once you open more documents, the jumplist will again list out recent documents.

If you go back to the Customize dialog where you enabled Recent Documents, you’ll see two options at the bottom for Start Menu Size:

The item we are interested in is Number of recent items to display in Jump Lists. Go ahead and set that to and Windows will no longer show the list of recently opened documents. When you right-click on a program from your taskbar, the list will be gone.

However, this is a bit misleading in two ways. Firstly, when I went ahead and opened Word, all of my recent documents were listed there! So to truly remove the list of recent documents, you have to clear it from the application itself.

For Word, open the program, click on File and then Options. Click on Advanced in the left menu and scroll down till you see the Display section.

Here you will see the Show this number of Recent Documents option. Go ahead and change that value to 0. Now the list will be gone from Word itself.

Secondly, setting the number of recent items to display in jump lists to 0 is misleading because even though you may not see the list anymore when you right-click, Windows is still storing the history! For example, go ahead and change the value back from 0 to something else like 5. Now when you right-click on Word, for example, you’ll see the list is back!

To prevent Windows from storing the history altogether, you have to right-click on Start, go to Properties again and click on the Start Menu tab. This time don’t click on Customize!

You will see under the Privacy section a checkbox for Store and display recently opened items in the Start menu and the taskbar. Go ahead and uncheck that box and now Windows will no longer store the history of your recently opened documents for any program. As mentioned before, the individual program itself may store a list of recent documents, which has to be cleared manually.

Clear Recent Documents Windows XP & Vista

I’m going to explain the method for clearing the my recent documents list in Windows XP, but the same holds true for Windows Vista. So here’s a step by step guide to deleting your my recent documents list:

First, right-click on the Start Button and choose Properties:

You’ll now be in the Start Menu and Taskbar properties dialog box. You should already be on the Start Menu tab. Go ahead and click on the Customize button.

You should now be viewing the Customize Start Menu dialog box. Go ahead and click on the Advanced tab.

At the bottom, you’ll see a section called Recent Documents. Click Clear List to clear the most recent list of documents. If you do not want Windows to record your recent documents at all, uncheck the List my most recently opened documents box. That’s it!

Now the option on the Start Menu for most recent documents will be removed and nothing will be recorded! If you have any questions, post a comment! Enjoy!

The post How to Clear or Delete My Recent Documents in Windows first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

A good way to have both things taken care of at once is to create an image of your hard drive. By creating an image, your entire system state, including the OS and data files, is captured like a snapshot and can be reloaded at any time. It’s the best way to protect your data and is the fastest solution also. However, it’s not necessarily the easiest solution since most imaging programs require a bit of trial and error when performing a restore.

In this article, I’ll mention a couple of my favorite freeware programs for cloning a hard drive. You’ll find a lot of paid solutions also like Acronis, which make the process easier, but can cost a good chunk of change. If you hate computers and want the simplest process possible, then go for commercial software. Otherwise, read on for some great freeware apps for cloning your hard drive.

Paragon Backup & Recovery

Paragon Backup & Recovery is one of my favorite tools for backing up and restoring hard drives at home. It has a slew of features and is very reliable. It’s been around for a very long time and therefore the software is polished and works perfectly on all versions of Windows from Windows 2000 to Windows 8.1 32-bit or 64-bit. Here’s a list of features that make Paragon one of the best freeware utilities in this category.

– Complete disk backup including GPT disks

– Differential backups so that you can create one full image and then save space on future backups. I believe Paragon is the only freeware one I mention here that supports differential backups.

– Unique backup capsule feature that lets you store the backup on a local hard disk in a hidden partition for easy recovery if they active partition fails

– Linux and WinPE bootable recovery media options

– Restore an entire image or only certain files and folders from an image

The only annoying thing about the program is that it includes all the features from the commercial version too and when you try to use one of them, it will try to upsell you the paid version of the program. It’s not a major nuisance, but it’s slightly annoying. I would rather they just strip it down to the bare minimum and if I like the program, I might be interested in purchasing the more feature-full version.

The free version can still do a lot of other stuff too like create, delete, and formats partitions, hide/unhide partitions, and mark partitions as active.

DriveImage XML

DriveImage XML is a completely free data recovery program that you can use to create images and backups of logical drives and Windows partitions. Here are a couple of the major features of this program:

– Quickly backup logical drives and Windows partitions to image files without having to restart Windows (you can remain logged in)

– Easily browse, view or extract files from the images

– Restore the images to the same drive or to a different drive

– Copy data directly from drive to drive

– Schedule automatic backups and image creations with Task Scheduler

– Run the program from the Live CD or from the WinPE boot CD-ROM

The nice thing about DriveImage XML is that it uses Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Service (VSS), which means you can create hot images of hard drives that are in use. It supports Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

The one thing to remember though when restoring an image is that the partition you are restoring to needs to be of the same size or larger. You cannot restore to a smaller partition size than the original. Also, DriveImage XML does not perform incremental backups after the first backup image, so you’ll either have to have a lot of space or you will have to delete older backups.

Macrium Reflect Free

Macrium Reflect Free is another popular free utility for disk imaging or disk cloning. In terms of design, the GUI for Macrium is much better than Drive Image XML. It’s clean and looks more modern. The layout is also easier to navigate and understand.

You can clone a disk or image a disk. Cloning is better if you want to move everything on one disk to another hard disk, i.e. a larger disk. Imaging a disk can be scheduled whereas cloning has to be done manually. You can then restore the images to the same hard drive, a replacement hard drive or even to a new computer, though the last option will require a paid version of Macrium to restore to the new hardware.

Macrium also has a Linux rescue CD and Windows PE rescue CD that can be used to restore an image to a new hard drive. The restore process is fairly straightforward and if you get confused anywhere, they have tutorials for creating images, restoring images, troubleshooting problems, etc. in the knowledgebase. It’s a good program for a novice user.

EaseUS Todo Backup Free

EaseUS creates a lot of different products and one of the best is Todo Backup. Again, like Paragon, they want to upsell you to their paid versions, but the free version worked just fine for me when performing a backup and restore.

It’s got a simple clean interface and is a little better than Paragon when it comes to upselling. It just have a little bar at the bottom of the window that say “Upgrade Now to get a more powerful edition”.

Using the free version, you can only recover to the same disk or a new disk on the same machine. If you want to recover to new hardware, then you’ll have to purchase their paid software just like Paragon and Macrium do. Feature-wise, it’s closest to Paragon in terms of what it supports. You can restore using their WinPE bootable media and it works as expected.

I also found EaseUS Todo backup to be very easy to use, especially when following their online guides. Overall, it’s a great choice for a novice user.

CloneZilla

If you’re more of an advanced user, then CloneZilla may be the right choice for you. Clonezilla is basically a live CD that you boot from and then work with from there. Unlike other programs, it doesn’t have an executable file that you can run inside Windows. That right there will be reason enough for most people to choose something else.

However, if you’re familiar with the DOS environment and really want the most customization options for creating your backup or disk image, then CloneZilla has you covered. Here’s an abbreviated list of features:

– Supports a large range of file systems including ext2, ext3, ext4, xfs, jfs, FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, HFS+, UFS, VMFS3, VMFS5 and minix

– Both MBR and GPT formatted hard drives supported

– Image file can be stored locally or on an NFS server, Samba server, or SSH server.

Performing a clone and restore in CloneZilla was a bit more work than I had expected and it certainly had many pitfalls for novice users. Thankfully, they have some documentation with step by step instructions for performing common operations. Again, this is a great tool for advanced users only.

Those are my favorite 5 tools for cloning or imaging a disk in Windows. If you have another suggestion not mentioned here, feel free to post it in the comments. Enjoy!

The post 5 Free Disk Imaging/Cloning Utilities for Windows first appeared on Online Tech Tips.

But there’s yet ANOTHER way you can hide a files and folders, which is similar to the first post I mentioned above, but is a little bit more secure. It actually involves using the command prompt and a built-in Windows function to change certain attributes of a file or folder. Once the attributes have been changed, the files cannot be seen by the system.

The reason I like this method is because it does not involve any third-party software, which people may notice, and it’s not as simplistic as the first method I wrote about where you simply change the properties of the file or folder to hidden and anyone can easily un-hide the folder by configuring the Windows Explorer setting to “Show Hidden Files and Folders”.

Here’s how you can create a hidden folder in Windows for free that is fairly secure:

1. Go to Start, Run and then type in CMD to open the command prompt window

2. Now navigate to the parent folder of the folder you want to hide. If you want to hide a file, navigate to the folder where the file is located. For example, I want to hide a file in C:\Test, so I would type in the following:

CD C:\Test

3. Now type in the following command, replacing the word filename with the name of the file you want to hide.

attrib filename +s +h

And that’s it! Your file or folder is now completely hidden! It won’t show up in My Computer, it won’t show up if you browse via the command prompt and it won’t even show up if you select “Show all Hidden Files and Folders“.

If you want to un-hide the folder, you simply follow the same steps, expect now you’ll run this command:

attrib filename -s -h

You can use this command for both files and for folders. In our example, if I wanted to hide C:\Test, I would go one level above to C:\ and then type in:

attrib Test +s +h.

So you’ll notice that I had said this procedure is “fairly secure” above and the reason for that is you can still un-hide the hidden files or folders in a very simple way. When we change the attributes of the file/folder in the above method, we are actually just making it a hidden protected system file. In order to show protected system files, all you have to do is go to Folder Options, View tab and uncheck the Hide protected operating system files box.

Now if you were to browse into that directory with the hidden file or folder, you would see it listed there with a greyed out icon. As mentioned previously, all of these are very simplistic ways to hide data in Windows, but they can come in handy for short-term situations or for hiding content from kids, etc. It’s also rare for people to un-hide system protected files whereas a lot of people do enable the Show Hidden Files and Folders option in Windows.

So now you have four different ways to hide a file, folder or drive in Windows! If you have any questions, post a comment. Enjoy!

The post Alternative Method to Hide Files and Folders in Windows first appeared on Online Tech Tips.