Tommy Nation

When you have more than one computer in your local network, you may want to be able to access all your files on all your machines, whichever one you’re sitting at. Here’s how you can accomplish that in Windows:

To be able to access all files you will be using something called Administrative Shares. These are hidden shares of your local hard disks and optical drives. These shares are not like normal shared folders, in that they require administrative access to open.

An administrative share always has a dollar ($) sign directly behind it, and do not show up by default when you access a computer through Windows Explorer. To access the C:\ drive for instance, you would type this in the address bar of Windows Explorer: \\Computername\c$

This alone is not enough however, as you still need the administrative access rights. To get this, all you have to do is to create an account on each computer that has administrative rights, and the same username and password. To do this, open Control Panel and go to User Accounts and make the necessary account and/or password changes there.

Now, whenever you want access to your files on your other machines, just open Windows Explorer and type in \\Computername\c$ in the address bar - replacing the letter c with the drive letter of the hard disk you want to access.

There’s an additional administrative share that’s standard on all Windows computers, and this is the Windows folder. To access this share, type \\Computername\admin$. If Windows was installed on a different drive than the C:\ drive, it doesn’t matter when you use this share. Pretty useful when you want to view Windows log files on remote machines.

Windows Vista troubleshooting:
In Windows Vista you will get prompted to enter a username and password. Enter the username and password, and tick the box to remember the password if you don’t want to be bothered again. You may get problems here, being denied access even if you entered the correct username and password. Should this be the case, you should read my previous article on enabling admin shares in Vista.

The first Beta version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 has just been released publically.

Improvements include default mode interpreting web pages much more correctly according to W3C standards. A button to “Display as IE7″ is available for debugging.

The big news that MS is touting is something they call Webslices. Essentially Webslices are like RSS feeds - small subscription services, except they can go both ways - output and input. An example of output would be a weather service, while input could be a task manager.

A crash recovery feature is also in place, to recover crashed sessions.

Oh, and it passes the Acid 2 test with flying colors. The Acid 3 test however…

Click here to download the Internet Explorer 8 beta client
(only works on XP SP2, Vista and Server 2003).

PS! I don’t recommend you install this on your main system, as it is beta software and could be unstable.

NVIDIAs new Crysis-optimized beta drivers 169.01 and 169.04 were picked apart over at Elite Bastards, who could reveal shocking results. Apparently these drivers force removal of certain water/shadow effects, increasing performance at the expense of visual quality.

One can easily deduct that NVIDIA has made this move in order to better benchmarking results for their 8xxx line of graphics cards, trying to make them stand out more vs their AMD/ATI opponents. Elite Bastards conclude that this is not an issue in the official 163.69 drivers, and adds that the difference in performance between the old and new drivers is 7 %.

Users of the new drivers who prefer not to rollback can easily circumvent this game-specific “optimization” by renaming the “crysis.exe” file to “nvidiacheats.exe”.

The Mozilla team has released Firefox version 2.0.0.9. This update fixes a serious Java issue on Windows Vista where Java applets don’t work like they should after Firefox crashes. Four other bugs that were preventing add-ons from working after a successful upgrade of Firefox have also been squashed.

The official release notes for Firefox 2.0.0.9 (external link).

Download Firefox 2.0.0.9 from Firefox.com.

If you already have Firefox installed, click on ”Help” and “Check for Updates…” to upgrade immediately.

You just formatted your Dell laptop and popped in that nice little Recovery CD, only to find your computer full of all kinds of crap you never asked for?

Maybe you will like PC Decrapifier - a handy little app that picks up the trash and takes it out for you too.

PC Decrapifier scans your computer and presents you with a list of highly lightly candidates for removal. You select what you want to remove and what you want to keep, and just like that - the crap is gone!

Click here to download PC Decrapifier (external link).

Right click on the shortcut for Windows Media Player 11 and click on ’Properties’. In the ‘Target’ field, after the ” ends, type ‘/Task NowPlaying’ (without the single quotes).

Example: If the shortcut looks like ["C:Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" /Prefetch:1] change it to ["C:Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" /Task NowPlaying].

How to mark a partition as active using the Windows interface:

1. Open Computer Management (Local)

2. In the console tree, click Disk Management.

Where?
Computer Management (Local) > Storage > Disk Management

3. Right-click the primary partition you want to mark as active, and then click Mark Partition as Active.

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If you managed to go into Disk Management in Windows XP and somehow click “Mark Partition as Active” accidentally, this could render your computer unbootable. If you are so lucky that you haven’t rebooted yet, here is one possible solution to the problem: mark the partition as inactive using the DISKPART tool:

1.  Open up a command prompt and type DISKPART.
2. Type LIST DISK
3. Type SELECT DISK n (where n is the number of the old Win98 drive)
4. Type LIST PARTITION
5. Type SELECT PARTITION n (where n is the number of the active partition you wish to make inactive)
6. Type INACTIVE
7. Type EXIT to exit DISKPART
8. Type EXIT again to exit the command prompt
9. Reboot

If you have problems booting your computer or the above approach didn’t work for you, you could also try what Microsoft suggests on their help page entitled The computer does not start after you change the active partition by using the Disk Management tool - external link, opens in new window. For your convenience, the content of that page is reproduced below:

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