Reader questions answered

Today I will answer some questions posted by readers (that you may find useful, too) in the “Q’s and there A’s” format.

Q: taskbar has been disabled by the administrator what to do ?
A: (I have to assume here that we’re talking about the adjustable options found in Taskbar’s Properties.) All modern operating systems allow for multiple users, and the assignment of privilege levels to each user. It is quite often a good idea to restrict what users can do do on a machine, such as guests and the machine is a kiosk.
In corporate environments, schools, and libraries (where multiple machines are in use), it is typical for a single machine “image” to be used, and for all the “adjustable” (think “personalize”) options to be disabled by the Administrator. While this makes for boring uniformity, it greatly reduces the time and cost of maintaining those machines, and restoring them after a serious crash.. they just remount the “image”.
I suppose you could ask the IT department for temporary permission and make your “tweak”, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope for approval.
It may help to keep in mind that it’s their machine, and there are very good reasons for them to “lock it down”.

(I have written an article on creating limited [privilege] User Accounts for your children to use. This may be something you’d like to explore; if so, click here.)

Q: I have too many things running on my taskbar – Vinyl Deck, Spybot, Micro Innovations Internet Access Keyboard, Mouse, launch Keyboard properties, and Quicktime. How do it get these off? I believe they are slowing down my computer.
A: Sounds like you may want to manage which programs launch at startup (boot), and stop the unnecessary (non-essential) ones from loading. My advice for doing that is here: https://techpaul.wordpress.com/2008/01/11/manage-startup-programs-in-vista/ (It contains links to How To’s for older versions of Windows as well.)
But, I must also add that, if those mentioned are the sum total of your “too many” list, I doubt they’d noticibly slow down your machine, and I’d look for other causes as well… such as spyware.

Today’s free link: A great CD/DVD/Blu-ray authoring tool, Ashampoo Burning Studio 6 Free, allows you to create easily installable backup archives (across multiple disks), handles most music formats, copies DVDs, and works with .iso files. Possibly the best free alternative to Nero.

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved.

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Strong passwords, hidden Admin

Some basic security pointers–#1 was one of my first articles and it appeared 6/9/07– 

Is your computer a zombie? You can never be too secure, and neither can your PC. These few steps will go a long way in keeping your private information away from prying eyes, and prevent your machine from being used as a “zombie” by tech-savvy evil doers. (Most owners of zombie PCs are totally unaware that their computers are being used in this way.)

Tip of the day: The two basic steps I will discuss today– password protecting your User Accounts (and requiring logging in), and renaming your Administrator Account– should be prefaced with a quick description of what is, exactly, a strong password.

Strong passwords should be “complex”. That means that they should contain both upper and lower-case letters, special characters (!@#$%^&*(){}[]) and numbers, and be at least eight characters long, and–most definitely–not be a word found in the dictionary (or a name). Your passwords (notice the plural. It is not wise to use the same password for everything.) will be easier to remember if you make them into a ‘passphrase’. An equestrian might use a passphrase of 1Lu^h0rsez, for example.

Now that you have a good password, it’s time to require authentication to use your machine. Start by clicking on Start>Control Panel>User Accounts (or Start>Settings>Control Panel>User Accounts. Depending on your version and preference setting). Then click on “Change an account,” and then click on “Create a password for your account.” Enter your password, twice, and if you’ld like, a password “hint” that will remind you (but not clue in the whole world) of your new password. Click “Create password.”

Now, since knowing your User name is half the battle, click on “Change the way users log on or off.” Deselect (by unchecking the check in the checkbox) “Use the Welcome screen.”

Unbeknown to most folks, Windows has a hidden Administrator account (this becomes vitally important when troubleshooting failing systems, or when User accounts get “locked out”) named “Administrator”. Hackers are well aware of this, and it is their favorite method of gaining access (and control over) your machine; since they know the User name (Administrator), all they have to do is guess the password–which by default, and unless you set one, there isn’t one!
Remedy this in XP Professional by going to Control Panel>Administrative Tools (you must use Classic View) and clicking on Local Security Policy. Then in the left column click on the plus sign next to Local Policies, and then click the Security Options folder (If you receive a warning about Group Policy, just ignore it) and a series of policies will appear in the right pane. The 4th or 5th one from the top should be “Accounts: Rename administrator account”. Double click on it and a dialogue box will open. Enter a new name, and click Apply, and OK.

In XP Home, the method is to click Start>Run. In the Run dialogue type in “Control userpasswords2” [no quotes] and click OK. From the User Accounts dialogue box, select the Administrator Account and click Properties. Enter the new name in the User Name text box, and click OK.

(For other versions of Windows the methodology is similar, but I recommend Searching Microsoft’s website for the specific steps.)

The last step is to congratulate yourself, because you have just made your computer much, much harder for a determined cracker to penetrate, and practically eliminated access to the casual browser.

Today’s free link: Steve Gibson’s ShieldsUp! This free scan, offered by a true giant in the computer field, analyzes your computer for vulnerabilities coming from the Internet, and tells you how your private data may be visible to outsiders. This link will appeal to the more tech-savvy, and be an eye-opening experience for those of you who have not learned about firewalls yet.

Copyright © 2007-8 Tech Paul. All rights reserved.

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Tell Vista you ARE an Administrator (repost)

This article — originally posted 9/14/07 — tells you how to overcome Vista “run permission denied” frustrations by elevating your user privellege. It is important to note that this can be done to every “executable” (program/application). I am reprinting it, with a different title, because of a high number of reader questions. Have a great weekend.

The Vista security feature that’s most effective — and the most annoying — will sometimes prevent the Run and command line tools from doing what you tell them to do. This is (usually) due to the fact that you haven’t told it you’re an Administrator. Note: this technique can be applied to other programs as well.

I overcome this annoyance by creating a desktop shortcut and setting its Properties to “Run as an Administrator”.
Go to Start >Programs and open the Accessories folder. Right-click on, and holding down the right-click, use the cursor to drag the black Command Prompt icon to a vacant area on your descktop. Let go and select (click) “Create shortcut here” from the list of choices.

Now you will have a new, black Command Prompt icon. Right-click on your new icon, and select Properties and click on the Shortcut tab. Now click on the “Advanced” button toward the bottom

Place a check in the “Run as Administrator” checkbox, and click the “OK” button twice. That’s it!

Now you will be able to use your programs, and accomplish the advanced commands as you expect you should.

Copyright 2007 © Tech Paul, All Rights Reserved.

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Changes+kids and the Internet+User Accounts

Loyal Readers,
Tomorrow, very bright and early, I will be doing something I really don’t like to do (and I mean really)– I will board a plane and fly clear across the nation. I am blessed with the opportunity to visit with my niece and nephew, and so I shall just overcome my fear of flying.
Upon arrival there, I will continue to write, six days a week, articles and provide the daily free download links as usual, but the timings of postings may be different and most likely nothing will appear tomorrow. There is much preparation to accomplish today, and so today I must repost a previously article: Part 1 of a series I wrote on keeping your children safe on the Internet– which appeared July 27th.

When considering how I wanted to approach this important topic, I started to feel a bit overwhelmed. I began to think that the best policy was to put up an Internet Age Limit — no one under 18 allowed. For all that’s marvelous about the Web, there’s also creeps and pedophiles lurking. There’s hardcore pornography. There’s build-your-own-bomb how-to’s. There’s poisoned sites ready to turn your machine into a spambot zombie that rely on naive clicking (“Download this cool Transformers screensaver..!”). There’s depictions of violence and crude language …
Yes. I think that’s the answer. No surfing until you’re 18.

Tip(s) of the day: Take these steps to reduce the risks of the Internet. I am going to offer you some guidelines and practical advice, and since this is such a complex and important topic, I’m going to stretch it over a series of posts. I hope that you will take (and apply) what you can use, and maybe pass this information along to your friends who have kids. And please notice that I used the word “reduce”; I cannot tell you a 100% iron-clad, never-fails method for stopping all the bad possibilities of life. I wish I could.

Step 1: Give your child their own User-level user account and crank up all the security settings. While this may seem counterintuitive, I assure you that you will have full access to their account from your own, administrator-level account. (I discussed User Accounts in a previous article, click here to view.) By having your child run as a User, they will not have the administrative privileges required to undo some of the restrictions you’re going to put into place. A side benefit is any malware that tries to install itself onto your machine will not have the authority to run, and thus it’s foiled (Curses! Foiled again!). Let’s face the facts: kids are more computer savvy than we are, so we need to reduce their ability to tweak and change the machine’s settings.

To create a new account for your kids, click Start >Control Panel >User Accounts.

Click on “Create an account”, and give your new account a user name. For purposes of illustration, I’m pretending that I have a Tech Paul Jr. and his name is “Charlie” (I’m also pretending he’s a handsome little devil, and smart as a whip).

Now click next and accept the defaults. We’re going to use administrator privileges to install our security precautions, and when we’re finished we’ll come back and change it to user-level. Click “Create account”.
This will create an Administrator account named Charlie and return us to the User Account welcome page. Minimize this window, and log off your current account and onto your child’s new user account by clicking Start >Log Off, and either typing (Charlie, in my example) into the account box or clicking on their icon. There is no password yet. We’re now ready for the next step.

Step 2: Locking down IE. Now that we’re in “Charlie’s” account, launch IE. When it opens, click on the down-arrow of the Tools menu and select “Internet Options” and then click on the Security tab. Click on the Internet zone’s globe icon and click on the “Custom level” button.

By default the over-all security setting for this zone is “Medium-high”. Use the down-arrow to set it to “High” as shown above, and hit the “Reset…” button. Should this prove too restrictive, you can come back and reset it to “Medium-high” at a later date.

Now click on the Privacy tab and make sure the slider is set to High and that the pop-up blocker is checked, as shown below, and click Apply (if necessary).

We’re just about through, but the next action is to click on the Content tab. Enable the Content Advisor by clicking the “Enable” button. A window will open that will show a list of the types of content you can limit. Your choice for each category — using the slider — is None, Limited, and Allow. Go through the list (click on each item in the list) and set it to your desired restrictions … they don’t have to all be the same. The age of your child may influence your decision as to which “level” you want to permit. In the example below, I am completely restricting (a “None” level) sexual material. Click “Apply” when you’ve made your changes.

If you want, you can return to the Security tab and add specific sites — My Space, for instance — to the Restricted Sites zone. This will prevent those sites, period, regardless of their content or rating.
Now we need to log off “Charlie’s” account and back onto our own (steps described above), and maximize the User Accounts welcome window again (or Start >Control Panel >User Accounts) and this time we select “Change an account”.

We want to change several things — we want to create a password, and change the account type from Administrator to Limited. Click on the Limited radio button and click the Change account type button.

I know we covered a lot of ground today, but I feel much better knowing Charlie’s web surfing has the proper boundaries in place … and that he cannot go in and undo all my hard work. There’s more we can do, which I will cover as this series continues. I am too worn out to post a free link today.

If you found this tutorial informative and useful, please, tell your friends. Comments are always welcome.

Click here to view Part 2.
Click here to view Part 3.
And here to view Part 4.

Copyright © 2007 Tech Paul. All rights reserved.

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Quick Tip: overcome “access denied” in Vista’s Command Prompt

The Vista security feature that’s most effective — and the most annoying — will sometimes prevent the Run and command line tools from doing what you tell them to do. This is (usually) due to the fact that you haven’t told it you’re an Administrator. Note: this technique can be applied to other programs as well.

I overcome this annoyance by creating a desktop shortcut and setting its Properties to “Run as an Administrator”.
Go to Start >Programs and open the Accessories folder. Right-click on, and holding down the right-click, use the cursor to drag the black Command Prompt icon to a vacant area on your descktop. Let go and select (click) “Create shortcut here” from the list of choices.

Now you will have a new, black Command Prompt icon. Right-click on your new icon, and select Properties and click on the Shortcut tab. Now click on the “Advanced” button toward the bottom

Place a check in the “Run as Administrator” checkbox, and click the “OK” button twice. That’s it!

Now you will be able to accomplish the advanced commands as you expect you should.

Copyright 2007 © Tech Paul, All Rights Reserved.

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Create a hidden folder for your private stuff

Sometimes a little privacy is nice. Today I’m going to show you how to hide a folder so that other people who use your machine won’t be able to see it, or its contents.
I hope all of you had a pleasant and enjoyable holiday weekend.

Tip of the day: Create a hidden folder for your private files. The first thing to consider is where to place the folder. You want it to be someplace you’ll remember easily, and someplace sort of out of the way. Some folks will put it right on their desktop, and there is a certain elegance to the “hide in plain sight” approach, but I’m going to bury it a little… inside my My Video folder (inside My Documents).

Navigate to the My Video folder (My Documents >My Video) and open it. If you have not loaded any video onto your PC, this window will be blank (empty). Now create a new folder. Right-click on any part of the blank area and select “New” from the list of choices, and a new list of choices appear — select “folder”.

Now you will see a folder ready for a new name. I chose to name mine “stuff”, as it is fairly uninteresting and innocuous. If you want to make sure nobody is tempted to look in there, you could name it “efficiency reports 2005”, but you want to avoid an intriguing name, like “private”, “confidential”, “good stuff”, or “collection”.

Now we’re going to make the folder hidden: right-click on your new folder (“stuff” in my example) and select “Properties”. Down towards the bottom is a checkbox labeled “Hidden”. Check it, and click on the “Apply” button.

Now when you navigate back to the My Video folder you will not see your folder. If you do, it should be faded, or “dim”. This means you have your Folder Options set to “show hidden files and folders”. This is normally off, by default; but to undo this setting, look (up) to the Tools menu and click it, and select “Folder Options” (the bottom choice) and then the View tab.

Make sure the radio button “Do not show hidden files and folders” is selected, and then click on the “Apply to All Folders” button, or the “Apply” button if you only want to affect the My Video folder. Now the folder is invisible. To make it visible again, for when you want to use it, reverse the steps above to “Show hidden…”

Let us say you want to put a password “lock” on the folder to make it even more difficult for other users to look inside (should they locate it somehow). Right-click on the folder and select “Properties” again and click on the Sharing tab.

Place a check in the “Make this folder private” checkbox and click “Apply”. Now the folder is protected with your User Account’s logon password. If you have not implemented a User Account password, you missed my very second Tech–for Everyone article; to see it, click here, you will now be warned that there’s no User Account password.

answer “Yes”, and you’ll be taken to the User Accounts control panel.

Since you will have to enter this each time you log onto the PC, I suggest you follow the rules of a strong password (complex), as discussed in the article above (the link) and write it down someplace as well.

Now you have a secure — and private — place to keep your personal files. But wait, there’s more!

Today’s free link: Because of the fact that hidden files and folders can be found by someone with a little savvy (like you, now that you know the “Show hidden files” command) and the password protection will only apply to network shares and when the other user have their own User Accounts… if you are sharing your UA (User Account), you need a 3rd-party tool to hide and encrypt the folder(s) you want to keep private. True Crypt is the free solution I recommend.

Copyright 2007 © Tech Paul, All Rights Reserved.

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Steps you can take to protect your kids on the Web, pt.2

The Web can be a dangerous place. It is unlikely that you haven’t heard of kids (and spouses) running away to go meet with a stranger they met in a chatroom. It is common knowledge that child predators use the Web’s anonimity and strike up conversations with our kids (N.C. found 26,000 on My Space). I want to remind you that the most effective tool you have is talking frankly with your children. But since this is a tech how-to site, I’m going to help arm you with some other tools to bolster your defenses.
Since I’m going to have to reference the steps I suggested yesterday, please read it before continuing (if you haven’t already) by clicking here. 

Tip(s) of the day: Spy on your kids. Let me rephrase that — monitor your child’s online activities. Yesterday I suggested giving your child their own user account (Limited) and password protecting it. If your child goes in and changes their password to try and prevent your snooping, don’t worry, as an administrator you can still access  their account. But to make things easier, let’s make a change so that they cannot change their password. Right-click on My Computer and select Manage, and then click on Users and Groups. Click on the Users folder.

Now double-click on your child’s account (my pretend kid-genius, “Charlie” in this example). Simply place a check in the “Password never expires” and “User cannot change password” checkboxes and then click on the Apply button. Now “Charlie” is stuck using the account password I gave him, and we can close out of these windows.

 Now let’s get down to the fun part — spying (Ahem. I meant ‘monitoring’. Pardon.). Use IE’s History feature to view your child’s activities. To start, log onto your child’s user account and launch IE (all browsers work similarly). Open Internet Options from the Tools menu. In the “Browsing History” area, click on the Settings button. Now change  the number of days IE will log to a decently high number. In the illustration below I am setting “Charlie’s” history recorder to one month. (I suggest it wise that you take a peek at your child’s viewing patterns a little more often than that…)

I can now click on the gold star “Favorites” icon and click on History. I can view what websites “Charlie” has visited, and by sorting by “frequency”, I can see where he’s spending the most time. I cannot see what he does there, or what he types while he’s in a ‘chat’ … for that I need a special, freely available, program or two (I will return to this later in the series). By taking a look at the websites “Charlie” visits — and determining if it was a ‘one-time thing’ or a daily habit — I can gage if he’s into risky behavior or not without actually “reading his diary”.

Today’s free link: If you have done these steps, yesterday’s and today’s, and done a little experimenting, you now know that “Charlie” can undo some of the security changes we made to IE, and that when we enable content filtering it affects our browsing as well; so we are sort of forced to disable it to do our (adult) stuff and then we have to remember to enable it again when it’s our child’s turn to use the computer. You will also likely discover that IE’s content filtering (None, Partial, Allow) is fairly clumsy and unless you spend a lot of time ‘fine-tuning’ it, it will block even such innocuous sites as Google and MSN. (But making the settings adjustments isn’t hard to do.)

The solution, like so many others, is found in 3rd-party software. You can find a large assortment of types under the categories of “Parental Control” and “content filtering”. The “best” are for sale, and if spending a few dollars is not out of the question for you, my personal reco is NetNanny. These tools usually come with a pre-built list of “naughty” sites and “bad” words to block and some are capable of analyzing images for too much skin (or bodies too close together…I’m not sure how they do it exactly). They can let you set times for your child’s Internet usage, so he or she can’t get up in the middle of the night to do their shenanigans. Some record the contents of chats. And most offer other ways to restrict your child’s online activities while still allowing them to do their homework, etc.

Update 8/30– I can no longer recommend the free program I had listed here. It did what it said, but was impossible to remove.
Click here to read part 3.
And here to read part 4.

Copyright © 2007 Tech Paul. All rights reserved.

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