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Thursday, September 18, 2008
How to Block Incoming Attacks Without A Firewall
Limit your exposure to attacks from the cyber world by blocking incoming connections. Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Network Connections. Right click on ‘Local Area Network’ and go to ‘Properties’.
In the scroll box, click on ‘Internet Protocol (IP/TCP)’ and then click ‘Properties’; in the new window, click ‘Advanced’.
Then in the other new window go to the ‘Options’ tab, click on ‘TCP/IP Filtering’ and hit ‘Properties’. Uncheck ‘Enable TCP/IP filtering (all adapters)’.
Next, in the above ‘TCP Ports’, check the radio button that reads ‘Permit Only’, and then add in the ports you want people to be able to access.
This way, you close the ports you don’t need. An alternative to this tweak could be running a firewall or enabling Windows’ inbuilt firewall.
A point to note is that in order for other computers to connect to you, like using Windows Messenger to send a file, you’ll have to make sure the required port is not blocked on your system.
But hey guys, Commodo firewall is free and is very best. Use it to avoid all worries.
How to Add Items To ‘Send To’
First enable the viewing of hidden files and folders. XP, like previous versions of Windows, has a handy ‘Send to’ option in the menu that appears when you right-click an icon in Windows Explorer.
By default, this contains only a few options, none of which are particularly useful except for creating shortcuts.
However, you can easily add your own destinations to the ‘Send to’ menu. Very useful if you have a folder you use for backing up files, for example, and you want to periodically move different files or folders to a location.
To add items to the ‘Send to’ command, navigate to ‘C:Documents and SettingsUsernameSend to’.
Any shortcuts to folders or applications placed in this folder will appear in the ‘Send to’ option when you right-click an icon.
(thanks to digit for this tip)
How to do ‘No To All’ When Copying Files
Have you noticed that XP gives you the ‘Yes to all’ option in its file copy dialog box, which is useful if you would like to overwrite files in a directory with newer files of the same name from another location, but fails to offer a ‘No to all’ option for doing the opposite? Annoying, if you think about it.
What if you have a lengthy file copy operation partially finished, and wish to restart it? If you use the default options, you essentially have to recopy every file, since saying ‘No’ to every duplicate file will take just as long.
Fortunately, there’s a way to tell XP not to copy all duplicated files, with a single command.
To do this, when the file copy dialog box appears asking you whether you wish to overwrite the first file, hold down [Shift] and click ‘No’. This will automatically answer ‘No’ for all the files that follow!
Note, however, that XP will ask you again for the first new folder it encounters. Follow the same procedure to answer ‘No’ automatically for all the folders.
(thanks to digit for this tip)
How to Run Older Software On XP
If you have a program that simply refuses to work on XP, then do the following
After installing the application, right-click on the exe file or on the shortcut to it, and select ‘Properties.’ Choose the ‘Compatibility’ tab. The first section in this window, ‘Compatibility mode’, covers mimicking various OS environments to try and make your application more comfortable.
You can also set the program to run in 256 colours and/or 640 x 480 resolution, which many older software titles require.
How to Mount A Hard Disk As A Folder In The C: Drive
This tip works for any partition of any NTFS formatted drive except the partition with the Windows system files on it.
Windows XP, like Windows 2000 before it, allows you to ‘mount’ drives as folders in a pre-existing logical drive. So if your computer has a 20 GB disk formatted as a single partition and volume (drive C:), you could purchase a second drive, partition and format it through the Disk Manager, and then instead of giving it its own drive letter, add it to your C: drive as a directory.
Any files added to that directory would, of course, be stored on the new disk.
This can come in handy—certain applications such as databases are extremely large, but may not support storing data on a logically separate drive.
As far as Windows is concerned, a drive mounted as a directory is just a directory. This can also cut down on storage confusion and it’s easy to do, though it can only be done with NTFS-formatted partitions.
Also, obviously, the boot partition cannot be used this way, although other partitions can be added to the boot partition.
If you have installed software on a partition you plan to mount as a directory, it is best to uninstall and reinstall it, since the move may stop the software from working correctly. Windows will warn you about this.
To mount a partition as a directory, go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management> Storage >Disk Management. Then right-click on the partition you wish to mount as a directory in the lower pane of the graphical partition window.
Select ‘Change drive letter and paths…’ Remove the current option (if any), then click ‘Add’. Choose ‘Mount in the following empty NTFS folder’, browse to the desired volume, and add a directory for your drive. Click ‘OK’.
If you wish to return things to the way they were, simply repeat the procedure, removing the directory location and choosing a drive letter instead. The data on the drive will be unharmed.
(thanks to Digit for this tip)
How to Check And Set DMA Mode
XP occasionally sets IDE hard drives and CD drives to the PIO transfer mode by default, which is slower than the standard DMA (Direct Memory Access) mode used by modern drives. To make sure your machine has not been slowed down, it makes sense to check your drive settings.
To check your drives, right-click ‘My Computer’ and select ‘Properties’, then ‘Hardware’ and then
‘Device Manager’. Expand ‘IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers’. Highlight ‘Primary IDE channel’ and click
‘Properties’.
Go to the ‘Advanced Settings’ tab, and ensure the transfer mode is set to ‘DMA if available’. Repeat these steps for the secondary IDE channel.
(thanks to Digit magazine for this tip)
How to Disable The Disk Performance Counter
XP contains an inbuilt performance monitor that examines various areas of your system. This information can be called up using the performance monitor application, found in Control Panel > Administrative Tools. Most of us have little interest in this sort of performance statistics monitoring, that being more the territory of system administrators
XP, however, is still monitoring away, and some of its observation tools use a considerable amount of resources. Disk monitoring is an example of this, and it’s a good idea to turn the disk monitors off if you are not planning on using the performance monitor app.
To disable the performance counter, go to Start > Run, type in “cmd”, and type in “diskperf -N”. This does away with the unnecessary monitoring that eats up valuable resources. To turn it back on, all you need to do is go back to the command prompt and type in “diskperf -Y”.
How to Clean Up Unwanted Startup Programs
Several programs run automatically when you turn on your system, and the number of such programs grows as you keep using your computer.
This leads to a gradual reduction in startup speed. Also, having programs that you only use selectively—or not at all—load automatically is a waste of resources.
To top it all, spyware, viruses and Trojans install themselves into the automatic start locations to ensure they run at startup.
To prevent the slowing down of your machine, you must take a look at the software that loads every time you start your PC, and disable what you don’t need or can’t identify.
The process is simple. Go to Start Menu > Programs > Startup. This is the directory XP uses to launch application shortcuts on bootup. If you remove the shortcuts from this directory, the apps will not load on startup.
This directory can also be a repository for spyware and viruses, so if there are files here that are not shortcuts and you don’t recognise them, you should consider removing them, as Windows will not place critical files in this directory.
The other way to remove unnecessary startup files is via the handy ‘msconfig’ utility. To use it, go to Start > Run and type in “msconfig”. The ‘Startup’ tab in msconfig provides access to several other applications that start up at bootup and run in the background. By examining their filenames and directories, you should be able to get a feel of what is necessary and what is not.
Another method for removing programs from startup is through the programs themselves; many applications, such as MSN Messenger, offer the option of not starting at bootup.
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