pArAs's Blog

The Registry Hacks

Paras — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 06:07:00 GMT

In my previous blog, I have stated the basic understanding of the Registry Editor. Now it’s time to edit the Registry practically.

Here are some of the useful hacks in order to understand the power of registry editing

Automatically Close Programs at Shutdown

To have Windows automatically close programs at shutdown, run the Registry Editor, and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop. Edit the AutoEndTasks key so that is has a value of 1. If the key doesn’t exist, create it as a DWORD value and give it the value of 1. To disable it, either delete
the key, or set the value to 0.

Disable Shutdown

Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. (In Win7, you may need to create the Explorer key.) Create a new DWORD value named NoClose with a data value of 1. Exit the Registry, and reboot for the change to take effect. You won’t be able to shut down Windows in the normal manner from now on; you’ll have to do using the Task Manager’s Shut
Down menu to close Windows. If this doesn’t work, delete the NoClose value and re enable normal shutdowns. In my practice I didn’t had to restart my computer to activate and I had to delete the key to deactivate this feature.

Change the Names of the Registered User and Company

Run the Registry Editor, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion, and look for the values RegisteredOwner and RegisteredOrganization. Edit their value data to whatever username and company name you want. This is normally available in those PCs which are loaded with the OS (like Windows 7 Home Premium) by the company itself.

Change the Amount of Time Before Programs Time Out

When an application hangs and might not respond for long as it might be doing heavy calculations in the background and won’t respond until the calculation is done. We can do registry hack to increase of decrease the amount of time it takes before Windows reports that the program has hung.

Run the Registry Editor, and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop. Select the HungAppTimeout entry, and put in a new value (in milliseconds) If the entry does not exist, create it as a DWORD value. The default is 5000. Exit the Registry. You might need to reboot for the new setting to take effect. Try increasing the number in increments of 1,000 until you find a number that works.

Disable the Disk Cleanup Warning

If your hard disk has what Windows decides is too little space left on it, the operating system will pop up a warning and recommend that you run Disk Cleanup. But you might be like me and not want a virtual nanny nagging you to clean up your mess. You can turn off the warning with a Registry hack. Run the Registry Editor, and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. (In Win7, you may need to create the Explorer key.) Create a DWORD value called NoLowDiskSpaceChecks and give it a value of 1. Exit the Registry, and reboot. Case solved.

**Avert disaster by backing up the Registry so that you’ll
always be able to revert to a clean copy.

Technorati Tags: registry editor,registry hacks,windows 7 hacks

Understanding The Registry Editor

Paras — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 06:13:06 GMT

When it comes to hacking Windows, we need to know how to use the Registry which contains the underlying organization of the entire OS. The Registry is the single best tool available for hacking in windows, so we shouldn’t fear the Registry. The Registry is a hierarchical database of information that defines exactly how your system works, including virtually every part of Windows and its applications. Windows contains so many different settings and customizations that it simply wasn’t possible for Microsoft to build a graphical interface for every conceivable option. And many times it’s easier, and you get more options when you edit the Registry instead of using the graphical Windows interface. You can use Windows without ever editing the Registry—many users do—but advanced users understand its power tool status.

The Five Logical Registry Hives:

The Registry has thousands of settings. In fact, it often has tens of thousands of them. They are organized into five main Registry sections, called Registry hives. Think of each have as a root directory. Each hive has a different purpose but the settings in different hives may be exactly same.

1. HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
This hive contains information about file types, filename extensions, and similar information and how to handle them.

2. HKEY_CURRENT_USER

This hive contains configuration information about the system setup of the user that is currently logged in to Windows which manages user’s rights & network connection.

3.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
This hive contains information about the computer itself, as well as the operating system including the entire hardware setup and the installed software.

4. HKEY_USERS
This hive contains information about every user profile on the system.

5. HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG
This hive contains information about the current hardware configuration of the system

Using Keys and Values
Each hive is at the top of the hierarchy, and underneath each hive are keys, which can in turn contain subkeys, and those subkeys can contain subkeys, and so on, organized in folder like fashion, much like a hard drive.

A key can contain one or more values. Here are the six primary datatypes of values in the Registry:

REG_SZ (string value)
This datatype is easy to understand and edit because it is made up of plain text and numbers. It is one of the most common datatypes in the Registry.

REG_MULTI_SZ (string array value)
This datatype contains several strings of plain text and numbers. The Registry Editor will let you edit these values, but it won’t let you create them.

REG_EXPAND_SZ (expanded string value)
This datatype contains variables that Windows uses to point to the location of files. For example, to point to the location of the nature theme file, the expanded string value in the Registry is %SystemRoot%\resources\Themes\nature.theme.

REG_BINARY (binary value)
This datatype is made up of binary data: 0s and 1s. As a general rule, you won’t edit binary values; instead you’ll edit string values because they’re made up of text and numbers.

REG_DWORD (DWORD values)
This datatype is represented as a number. Sometimes a 0 turns on the key or a 1 turns off the key, though it can use other numbers as well. While you see and edit the value as a number, such as 456, the Registry itself views the number as a hexadecimal number, 1C8.

REG_QWORD (QWORD values)
This is like REG_DWORD, except that it can hold larger values. A DWORD holds 32 bits (D stands for double, and Q stands for quad), and a QWORD holds 64 bits.

This is the basic things we need to understand about the Registry Editor in order to use it and handle it properly. In the next blog, I will put some examples so that every one can understand the power of registry editor.

Technorati Tags: registry editor,windows 7 hacks,registry

**Avert disaster by backing up the Registry so that you’ll
always be able to revert to a clean copy.

WIN7 hack: Speed Up Boot and Shutdown Times

Paras — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 12:12:47 GMT

No matter how fast our PC boots, it’s not fast enough. Lets shorten the time it takes for our desktop to appear when
we turn on our PC and make Windows shut down faster with following few hacks which are described below:

Confirm That Boot Defragmentation Is Enabled:

There’s a simple way to speed up Windows startup: make our system do a boot defragment, which
puts all the boot files next to one another on our hard disk. When boot files are in close proximity to one another, our system will start faster.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction

After running regedit on run command window, edit the Enable string value to Y if it is not already set to Y. Exit the Registry and reboot. The next
time we reboot, our computer will perform a boot defragment.

**Many web sites are found to suggest a way of speeding up boot times for Windows XP that might in fact slow down the amount of time it takes to boot up and probably slow down launching applications as well. The tip recommends going to C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch directory and emptying it every week. Windows uses this directory to speed up launching applications. It analyzes the files we use during startup and the applications we launch, and it creates an index to where those files and applications are located on our hard disk. By using this index, Windows can launch files and applications faster. So, by emptying the directory, we are most likely slowing down launching applications.

Fine-Tune Registry for Faster Startups:

Over time, our Registry can become bloated with unused entries, slowing down our system
startup because our system loads them every time we start up our PC. Get a Registry cleanup
tool to delete unneeded Registry entries and speed up startup times. Using Free Registry Cleaner
(www.eusing.com/free_registry_cleaner/registry_cleaner.htm), shown in Figure, is an excellent
Registry cleanup tool. It combs our Registry for outdated and useless entries and then lets us
choose which entries to delete and which to keep. It also lets we restore our Registry if we run
into a problem.

Registry cleanup tool combs our Registry for outdated and useless entries and then lets us
choose which entries to delete and which to keep. It also lets us restore our Registry if we run
into a problem.

Don’t have Windows clear our paging file at shutdown:

For security reasons, we can have Windows clear our paging file (pagefile.sys) contents
whenever we shut down. However, clearing the paging file can slow shutdown times significantly, so if extreme
security isn’t a high priority, we might not want to clear it.
To shut down Windows without clearing our paging file, run the Registry Editor and go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
Change the value of ClearPageFileAtShutdown to 0. (It may already be set to this). Close the Registry and restart computer. Whenever we turn off Windows from now on, the paging file won’t be cleared, and we should be able to shut down more quickly.
**One simple way to speed up shutdown (and startup) times is to not ever actually shut down our PC. Instead,
use sleep or hibernate modes. They use very little power, and shut down and start up our PC far more quickly
than when we shut off the power completely.

Changing the waiting time during shutdown:

Sometimes it takes Windows a long time to shut down because it’s waiting to see whether a service will stop on its own before prompting we to manually shut it down. Windows, by default, waits 15 seconds before prompting us, which can sometimes seem interminable. We can hack the Registry to have Windows ask we sooner than 15 seconds. Run the Registry Editor and go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
Look for the WaitToKillServiceTimeout value. By default, it’s set to 15000 (15,000 milliseconds).
Change it to another number, in milliseconds—such as 10000, which would have Windows wait 10seconds instead of 15 before prompting we. It’s a good idea to start off lowering the number in
increments of not more than five seconds, to see how our computer responds. And don’t set it to
lower than 5000, or we might lose data or our PC might not shut down properly.

Shutting off applications and services that we don’t need at startup:

One of the best ways to speed up our PC without having to spend money on extra RAM is to stop
unnecessary programs and services from running whenever we start our PC. When too many
programs and services run automatically every time we start up our system, startup itself takes a
long time—and too many programs and services running simultaneously can bog down our CPU
and hog our memory.

To do this, go to command window, run msconfig and then go to startup tab. Now uncheck the programs that we don’t need to be started up automatically.

Startup Weekend

Paras — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 03:15:47 GMT

This is a place to build own community or own companies.

Less talk, All action.

This is about 54 hour event going to be organized on April 15-17(Date may vary later) at Banepa Training Center with full residential arrangements on a nominal fee of registration. The event has targeted 75 participants along with 50-50 percentage of technical and non-technical participants.

What do we get on Startup Weekend:

· Experimental education

· Co-founder dating

· Build our network

· Learn new skills

· Learn how to launch a business (& actually do it)

· Mentorship

· Get access to valuable startup resources

This Startup Weekend event has targeted to promote IT entrepreneurship by respecting local ideas and building local capacities in Nepal. This is the correct platform for sustainable entrepreneurship, which is most necessary in the context of Nepal. Besides these we can have collaboration with various entrepreneurs and will be able to link with global communities. This event will definitely help us with networking at local and international level.

For more information http://nepal.startupweekend.org/

A Road to Imagine Cup 2011, USA

Paras — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:47:00 GMT

The Imagine Cup is all about solving the toughest problems, like hunger, poverty,health,education,etc. in the world with the help of technology. It has been started since 2003 with only 1000 competitors and this year this is going to be organized at USA. This time 3,75,000 competitors are taking part and more than 3,00,000 have already registered. This competition deals around with the social cause around the world that needs to be solved as soon as possible.

The main reasons for participation are like:

· Learn new skills

· Make new friends of international level

· Last but not the least, to change the world

The imagine cup has 5 competitions in the subjects like:

· Software Design

· Embedded Design

· Game Design

· Digital media

· Windows phone 7

· IT challenge

· Orchard challenge

· Windows 7

In order to get participated, all we have to get a project with a world changing concept and a team of 5 members(4 students and 1 faculty).

Dual Boot for

Paras — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 04:11:00 GMT

Windows Server 2008

Windows Server 2008, built with web and virtualization technologies, is the most robust, secure, and reliable foundation on which to develop, deliver, and manage rich user experiences and applications.

To be a MTA on “fundamentals on Windows Server 2008”, a test comprising the 14 modules should be passed successfully. The 14 modules involved are:

Network Infrastructure
TCP/IP
Installing and Configuring Windows Server
Windows Server Roles
Implementing Active Directory Domain Service
Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
Active Directory Rights Management Services
Active Directory Federation Services
Implementing Windows Server Security
Implementing network software
Implementing Security software
Monitoring Server performance
Maintaining Windows Server
Network load balancing fundamentals

If you are planning to learn about Windows Server 2008 and want to install it (usually for academic purposes) on your PC without hampering the existing OS, then dual-boot facility is available. This allows you

to use either OS. Windows Server 2008 would be in its own partition even for even 10GB available space at your hard disk. You can dual-boot Windows Server 2008 with Windows 2000 and later Windows OSs, both client and server. In all cases, you must have installed the other OS before installing Windows Server 2008. If you are installing Windows Server 2008 on a computer that already has a dual-boot environment, Windows Server 2008 Setup will create a third boot environment in which you can boot all three OSs. If you dual-boot, you need to use at least two different partitions to keep the two OSs separate so that the Windows Server 2008 installation does not replace any of the original OS’s files.. To dual-boot, you must partition a drive to divide it between the OSs. Windows Server 2008 installation does not replace any of the original OS’s files.

Dual-booting also has significant drawbacks:

You must install Windows Server 2008 in a separate partition so that it doesn’t overwrite any of the files belonging to the original OS. This means that you must reinstall all the applications you want to run under Windows Server 2008and you must reestablish all your settings, as you do in a clean install.
You may have to handle some complex file-system compatibility issues. See the discussion following this list of bulleted items.
In a dual-booting situation, the Plug and Play features of prior OSs and Windows Server 2008 could cause a device not to work properly in one OS because the other OS reconfigured it.
Dual-booting takes up additional disk space with two complete OSs.
Dual-booting makes the operating environment more complex than it would be otherwise.