Tuesday, October 22, 2013

How to make Bootable Pendrive?

Steps for creating Bootable Pendrive. 

1. Insert your USB (4GB+ preferable) stick to the system and backup all the data from the USB as we are going to format the USB to make it bootable.

2. Open elevated Command Prompt.
To do this, type in CMD in Start menu search field and hit Ctrl + Shift + Enter. Alternatively, navigate to Start > All programs >Accessories > right click on Command Prompt and select run as administrator.

3. When the Command Prompt opens, enter the following commands:

DISKPART and hit enter.

LIST DISK and hit enter.

Once you enter the LIST DISK command, it will show the disk number of your USB drive. In the below image my USB drive disk no is Disk 1.

4. In this step you need to enter all the below commands one by one and hit enter. As these commands are self explanatory, you can easily guess what these commands do.

SELECT DISK 1 (Replace DISK 1 with your disk number)

CLEAN

CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY

SELECT PARTITION 1

ACTIVE

FORMAT FS=NTFS

(Format process may take few seconds)

ASSIGN

EXIT


Once it is done, copy the windows DVD contents to the pendrive.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Windows 8 hacks

Hack #1. Disable Windows 8’s Lock Screen

Tired of being forced to click through Windows 8’s lock screen before you get to the Start screen? Here’s how to bypass it.
Boot your PC or wake it from sleep, and you go straight to Windows 8’s lock screen, which looks more like the screen you’d expect to see on your smartphone than on a PC. It tells you the time and date, and a variety of timely information—meetings taken from your calendar, updates from social networking sites, an indication of your power level, email notifications, and other similar information.
That’s all very nice, but if you’re on a PC, you probably want to get straight to work. And that means getting to the Start screen faster. If you like, you can bypass the Lock Screen.
NOTE
Note: If you’re using a Windows 8 tablet, you may find the Lock screen more useful, since you may want to glance at your calendar or social networking sites while you’re on the go.
To do it, you use the Local Policy Editor. Launch it by pressing Windows key+R to open the Run bar, type gpedit.msc, and press Enter or click OK. The Local Policy Editor launches


Go to Computer Configuration→Administrative Templates→Control Panel→Personalization. Double-click the “Do not display the lock screen” entry, select Enabled, then press Enter or click OK (Figure 1-2). Exit the Local Policy Editor, then reboot.


Figure 1-2. Turning off the Lock screen
The new setting should take effect immediately. The next turn you reboot or wake your PC, you won’t see the Lock screen. Instead, you’ll go straight into logging into Windows 8.

Hack #2. Hack Your Way Through the Lock Screen

Want to bend the Lock screen to your will? Here’s how to do it.
There’s a lot more to the Start screen than meets the eye. It’s more than just a passing-through location, because the screen can also keep you updated with information grabbed from the Internet. In this hack, you’ll learn about plenty of ways to customize it.

Note: In corporate environments, an IT department may have locked down some of these options. In this case, you’ll be notified with the message, “Some settings on this page have been disabled by group policy.”

Change the Lock Screen Image

The Lock screen is mostly controlled via a single settings screen. To get there, press Windows key+C to display the Charms bar, and select Settings→Change PC Settings→Personalize→Lock Screen.

A screen appears, shown in Figure 1-3, that displays your Lock screen image at the top. Just beneath it are other Lock screen images you can use. Click any one of them to make it the new Lock screen image. To find other images you can use for the Lock screen, click the Browse button and browse through your pictures. Select the one you want to use, click Choose Picture, and you’ll make it your new Lock screen image.

Lock Down the Lock Screen Image

If you share your PC with someone, they have the same access to fiddling with it that you do. If you don’t want anyone changing your Lock screen image, you can tell Windows 8 not to let it be changed.
Launch the Local Policy Editor by pressing Windows key+R to open the Run bar, type gpedit.msc, and press Enter or click OK. The Local Policy Editor launches.
Go to Computer Configuration→Administrative Templates→Control Panel→Personalization. Double-click the “Prevent changing lock screen image” entry, select Enabled, then press Enter or click OK. Exit the Local Policy Editor.

If you decide you want to change the Lock screen, repeat these steps, except select Disabled, press Enter or click OK, then exit the Local Policy Editor. The setting takes effect the next time you reboot.

Customize Which Apps Show their Notifications on the Lock Screen

One of Windows 8’s niftier features is that it displays notifications on the Lock screen from certain apps—email, social networking, calendar, and more. That way, if you want a quick rundown of what you need to know, it’s right there for you. You don’t even have to log into Windows 8; just check out the Lock screen.
Maybe you don’t want to see updates from your social networking sites, but do want to see the current weather, or information from another app. Customizing exactly what shows up on your Start screen is a breeze.

Press Windows key+I, and then select Change PC Settings at the bottom of the Settings pane. From the right side of the screen that appears (Figure 1-4), select Lock Screen.



Down at the bottom-right of the screen, you’ll see icons of the apps that automatically display notifications, with some plus signs to the right (Figure 1-5). Click a plus sign to reveal a list of apps that can display notifications. Simply pick one and it will display alerts and other information on the Start screen.




Hack #3. Speed Up Boot Time

Shorten the time it takes for your desktop to appear when you turn on your PC.
No matter how fast your PC boots, it’s not fast enough. Here are several hacks to get you right to your desktop as quickly as possible after startup.

Hack Your BIOS for Faster Startups

When you turn on your PC, it goes through a set of startup procedures in its BIOS before it gets around to starting Windows. So, if you speed up those initial startup procedures, you’ll make your system start faster.
You can speed up your startup procedures by changing the BIOS with the built-in setup utility. How you run this utility varies from PC to PC, but you typically get to it by pressing either the Delete, F1, F2, or F10 key during startup. You’ll come to a menu with a variety of choices. Here are the choices to make for faster system startups:
Quick Power On Self Test (POST)
When you choose this option, your system runs an abbreviated POST rather than the normal, lengthy one.
Change Your Boot Order
If you change the boot order so that your BIOS checks the hard disk first for booting, it won’t check any other devices, and will speed up your startup time.
Boot Up Floppy Seek
Disable this option. When it’s enabled, your system spends a few extra seconds looking for your floppy drive—a relatively pointless procedure, especially considering how infrequently you use your floppy drive.
Boot Delay
Some systems let you delay booting after you turn on your PC so that your hard drive gets a chance to start spinning before bootup. Most likely, you don’t need to have this boot delay, so turn it off. If you run into problems, however, you can turn it back on.

Hack #4. Speed Up Startup by Halting Startup Programs and Services

Increase your PC’s performance and speed up startup times by shutting off applications and services that you don’t need.
One of the best ways to speed up your PC without having to spend money on extra RAM is to stop unnecessary programs and services from running whenever you start your PC. When too many programs and services run automatically every time you start up your system, startup itself takes a long time—and too many programs and services running simultaneously can bog down your CPU and hog your memory.
Some programs, such as anti-malware software, should run automatically at startup and always run on your computer. But many other programs, such as instant messenger software, serve no purpose by being run at startup. And while you need a variety of background services running on your PC for Windows to function, many services that run on startup are unnecessary

Eliminating Programs that Run at Startup

The task of stopping programs from running at startup is particularly daunting because there’s no single place you can go to stop them all. Some run because they live in the Startup folder, others because they’re part of logon scripts, still others because of Registry settings, and so on. But with a little bit of perseverance, you should be able to stop them from running.

Cleaning Out the Startup Folder

Start by cleaning out your Startup folder. It’s in C:\Users\<User Name>\\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup, where <User Name> is your Windows logon name. Delete the shortcuts of any programs you don’t want to run on startup. As with any shortcuts, when you delete them, you’re deleting only the shortcut, not the program itself.

Using the Task Manager

Taking the previous steps will stop the obvious programs from running at startup, but it won’t kill them all. The best tool for disabling hidden programs that run on startup is the Task Manager’s Startup tab, shown in shown in Figure 1-6. To run it, press Ctrl+Alt+Del and select Task Manager, then click the Startup tab. You can also run Task Manager by typing Task Manager on the Start screen and clicking the Task Manager icon that appears, or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Esc.



You’ll find the Startup tab exceptionally useful for deciding which programs and services should run at startup, and which can be safely disabled. Over on the right side, you’ll see a “Startup impact” column. For each service and app listed, the column tells you whether the impact on startup is Low, Medium, or High. That lets you concentrate on disabling the Low impact items.
To stop an app from running at startup, right-click it and select Disable. This prevents it from running, although the app will still be on your hard disk.
When you stop programs from running at startup, it’s best to stop them one at a time rather than in groups. That way, you can make sure that you’re not causing any system problems. So, stop one and restart your PC. If it runs fine, stop another and restart. Continue doing this until you’ve cleared all the programs you don’t want to run automatically.
After you’ve used the Task Manager to identify programs that run upon startup, you may want to try disabling them from within the programs themselves. Run each program that starts automatically, and see if you can find a setting that allows you to prevent it from running on startup.

Using the Registry to Halt Programs Running on Startup

Even the Task Manager won’t necessarily let you identify and turn off all programs that run on startup. You might also need to hack the Registry to disable them. To do so, launch the Registry Editor by pressing Windows key+R, typing regedit in the box that appears or at a command prompt (see Chapter 11 for details) and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. In the right pane, you will see a list of some of the programs that run automatically at startup. The Data field tells you the path and name of the executable so that you can determine what each program is. Right-click any program you don’t want to run, and choose Delete. That will kill any programs that run and are specific to your account. To turn off programs that run for every user of the system, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and follow the same instructions for deleting other programs that you don’t want to run at startup.