Monday, December 24, 2012

How to safeguard your Microsoft product activation

I keep meeting my friends who have lost their windows activation one way or other. Now first of all let us look, how you can lose your activation.

1. File corruption : By far the biggest culprit. System files get corrupted due to virus or hard disk failure or by some shit software you downloaded from torrent sites. The windows gets corrupt and you have to reformat and re install.

2. Virus Attack : Hackers are out there to harass you. They may not get any valuable from you but anyway they get the kick out of troubling a large number of people.

3. You are trying something geeky: Lets say you are installing Fedora in dual boot with windows. If you are not careful, fedora will wipe out the windows boot files.

4. You system is slow and someone tells you that re installing the windows will make it faster.

5. Un installation of some software made it unstable. The antivirus software are notorious when you uninstall them. They don't like goodbyes.

So now what to do. Simply reinstall the Windows from your CD/DVD and go online. On most of the cases your windows will be activated immediately. On some other cases you might have to call their customer care and one machine or a person will talk to you and give you some numbers which you have to feed. That will activate your windows.

But some people are really shy. they dont want to talk to a machine or person to activate their windows. They think that after paying money to MS the OS is their property and they should be able to do whatever they want with that. True sir, But MS doesn't sell the exclusive rights to us. They only licence it for use on one computer. Otherwise an OS built by thousand of Software Engineers can't be yours for $200. Thats their viewpoint not mine. I am fully with you.

But the consumer cannot do much in this regard. Sure you can drop Windows and go mac way or linux way. But if you want to eat your cake and have it too then there are software to help you. I personaly have used many of them and found most of them very good. the best one is

ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE ; It never failed me.

NORTON GHOST; 90% time it served me good.

PARAGON BACK UP : 100 % good.

There are others but then their success rate is less than desirable. Mind it, its my personal experience. But I tell you, if you go with Acronis, you will never regret your decision. The best part is the older versions of Acronis like vs 8 or 10 are available free on many forums. They are as good as the latest system and as reliable.

You dont have to reinstall your system ever again. You whole C drive will be backed up by Acronis including all the softwares and updates and whatever you have on that drive. If anything goes wrong with your system then simply restore the image made by acronis. It will take 10 min for a 40 GB partiton. And you are as good as new.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista


Windows doesn’t have a default setting to allow for disabling the key, so what we have to do is re-map the key to something non-existent so as to completely disable it.
ChangeCapsToControl.reg
Changes Caps Lock to be a Control key
ChangeCapsToShift.reg
Changes Caps Lock to be a Shift key
SwitchCapsToScrollLock.reg
Disables Caps Lock and swaps Scroll lock to be Caps Lock
KillCapsLock.reg
Disables Caps Lock
DisableKeyboardRemap
Uninstalls the preference by deleting the key
Once you’ve applied one of these registry files, you’ll have to reboot your computer for it to work. To uninstall, you can use the uninstall registry tweak, or you can simply delete the Scancode Map key entirely.


How to Disable All Notification Balloons in Windows 7 or Vista

If you find the popup notification balloons in the Windows system tray to be too annoying, you might be interested to know that you can completely disable them.
 I have not tried it on Windows 8 yet but I am sure it should work on any version of Windows.


Manual Registry Hack
Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced 

Right-click on the right-hand pane, and create a new 32-bit DWORD with the following values:
  • Name: EnableBalloonTips
  • Value: 0
You’ll have to logoff and back on in order to see the change… or to be more correct, you won’t see any popup balloons anymore.

Windows Explorer's shortcuts in Windows 8


Here’s the complete list of keyboard shortcuts for the built-in Windows 8 File Explorer:
  • Alt + D – Select the address bar
  • Ctrl + E – Select the search tab
  • Ctrl + F – Select the search box
  • Ctrl + N - Open a new window
  • Ctrl + W - Close the current window
  • Ctrl + mouse scroll wheel – Change the size and appearance of file and folder icons
  • Ctrl + Shift + E - Display all folders above the selected folder
  • Ctrl + Shift + N – Create a new folder
  • Num Lock + asterisk (*) – Display all subfolders under the selected folder
  • Num Lock + plus (+) – Display the contents of the selected folder
  • Num Lock + minus (-) – Collapse the selected folder
  • Alt + P – Display the preview pane
  • Alt + Enter - Open the Properties dialog box for the selected item
  • Alt + Right arrow – View the next folder
  • Alt + Up arrow – View the folder that the folder was in
  • Alt + Left arrow – View the previous folder
  • Backspace - View the previous folder
  • Right arrow – Display the current selection (if it’s collapsed), or select the first subfolder
  • Left arrow – Collapse the current selection (if it’s expanded), or select the folder that the folder was in
  • End - Display the bottom of the active window
  • Home - Display the top of the active window
  • F11 - Maximize or minimize the active window

Thursday, December 6, 2012

How to Write in Hindi

If you want to type online then you can go to this page

http://www.google.com/transliterate/

This same page also gives you an option to download

Download Google Transliteration IME

It will install on any version of Windows from XP to Windows 8. You will have a language bar in your system tray and from there you can select either Hindi or English. Now you can write in MS Office, Wordpad, and in any browser of your choice.

How to Translate any text

First of all there is always Google translator service.

http://translate.google.co.in/?hl=en&tab=wT

But there is another convenient way to do it. There is a small software called Q translate.

QTranslate is a free translator for Windows (Windows 8/7/Vista/XP/2008 Server/2003 Server). With this small utility, you simply select the text you want to translate and then press hot key (Ctrl+Q to show translation in the popup window or Double Ctrl click to show the translation in the main window). The program also has the ability to speak text (Ctrl+E) and perform a dictionary search (Ctrl+Alt+Q). Also, you can open the main window and type text manually.

Note! The program translates a text by using online translation services, so you need an Internet connection.

The current version supports the following translation services: The program has two modes of translation by mouse selection (click on the program icon in the system tray to turn this mode on):
  • Show icon (Select text in any program, the program icon will appear near the cursor. Click on the icon, the popup window with the translation of the selected text will appear);
  • Show translation (Select text in any program and the popup window with the translation of the selected text will appear immediately).
The main features:
  • Translate text in any application that supports text selection (Google Chrome, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, Acrobat Reader, Skype, IE and etc.);
  • Search in online dictionaries;
  • Back translation;
  • Replace the selected text with its translation;
  • Instant translation;
  • Spell checking;
  • Text to speech synthesis;
  • Word suggestion/autocomplete;
  • History of translations;
  • Virtual keyboard;
  • Portable version.
 Download the latest version of QTranslate (4.1.0)