With Xbox 360 game consoles now found in tens of millions of homes worldwide, Microsoft has found a perfect way to share PC-based music libraries with a device that is probably connected to the best TV display and stereo system in the home. Thankfully, the process is simple:

1. After you’ve confi gured Windows Media Player 11 to share its media library, ensure that your Xbox 360 is connected to the home network, and then turn it on. You will see a Found Windows Media Center Extender balloon window, but you can ignore this for now (unless you’re using your Windows Vista–based machine as a Media Center PC).

2. You will also see a balloon window appear for sharing with the Xbox 360. Doubleclick this icon and click Allow in the resulting dialog box. Alternatively, access the Media Sharing dialog box described earlier and make sure the Xbox 360 is configured to allow sharing.

3. Access your Xbox 360 and navigate to the Media blade. This part of the Xbox 360 user interface enables you to interact with PC-based digital media, connected portable devices (e.g., iPods and other MP3 players), and even external hard drives with stored digital media files. Right now, of course, you are just concerned with sharing media content from a Windows Vista–based PC.

4. To play shared music, select the Music option to display the Music page. Then select the name of your Vista-based computer from the source list on the left. (You’ll also see options such as Console, Current Disk, and Portable Device.) If this is the fi rst time you’ve done this, Xbox 360 will need to download Windows Media Connect, which is the same software many devices use to stream media from Windows Vista–based PCs. After this download is completed, Xbox 360 will automatically connect to PCs that are sharing media libraries. Just select the correct PC from the list to continue. Now you can access your PC’s media library using a simple menu that consists of albums, artists, saved playlists, songs, and genres (see Figure 11-43). Xbox 360 also includes a decent media player for playing back this content.

As you might expect, photos and videos are accessed in a similar manner.

If you attempt to access photos or videos from an Xbox 360 or other Windows Media Connect device and receive a “No photos found,” “No videos found,” or similar message, then you’re not sharing any content of this type. To add photo or video content to Windows Media Player, you can either add it via Windows Photo Gallery or use the Find Media steps to manually search folders that include photo and video content.

The Xbox 360 isn’t the only electronics device that can access digital media content on your Vista-based PC over the home network. A variety of hardware makers, such as D-Link, Linksys, and others, sell so-called digital media receivers, which are simple set-top boxes that bridge the gap between your home stereo and TV and your PC. Sony’s PlayStation 3 (PS3) also offers Xbox 360–like media connectivity functionality, also using Microsoft Windows Media Connect technology. Increasingly, it’s getting easier and easier to access your content regardless of where you are.

Source of Information : Wiley Windows Vista Secrets SP1 Edition

Microsoft introduced Windows 7 Version in reaction to statements made by the European government with respect to Internet Explorer. The EU introduced antitrust case against Microsoft to the group of IE with Windows and therefore the exploitation of dominant market position. The government claimed that "the linking of Microsoft Internet Explorer for the Windows operating system harms competition among web browsers, undermines the product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice."

Windows 7 version E is a response to this that shows that Microsoft must comply with the law. The E version is without any type of browser and therefore welcomes the European markets with Windows without any type of Internet browser now so they can use any browser of your choice. However, the question remains: HOW? If no browser at all how is it possible to download any web browser?

Microsoft has provided detailed information about installing Windows 7 E on its website. However, the instruction also includes an extra step for customers in Europe with regard to keeping the browser of choice in some external hard drive. Therefore, European customers that Windows 7 will save the web browser on a CD, DVD or USB or other storage media and install the browser once the Windows 7 has been completely installed.

This is a genius step taken by Microsoft, as they show they are following the laws, and to be able to get more revenue by providing additional CD web browser with the operating system.

John James is a professional writer with extensive work experience in the development of web services industry. The author has written several useful and informative articles on various topics related to IT and computer Tech Support.

Press Ctrl-Shift-Esc. A window opens and presents you with six tabs. As most Windows administrators already know, you’ve just opened the Windows Task Manager, which presents a graphical display of open programs, processes, and services that are currently running on your computer. It’s been available for many years on various Windows operating systems, and has now been updated with a few new features for the release of Vista.



The Applications tab
The Applications tab is one of the simpler tabs visually; it displays a list of any open applications in alphabetical order, and it includes a Status column to indicate whether the application is running or, worse, not responding.

The following three buttons appear at the bottom of the Applications tab:

End Task. This is the most commonly used command on the Applications tab, and it’s used for just what the button name suggests.

Switch To. This button can act as the equivalent of Windows Flip or Windows Flip 3D.
Simply select the application in the program list and click the Switch To button.
The selected app becomes active.

New Task. This lets you launch a new application using a dialog box called, appropriately, Create New Task, which looks and behaves exactly like the Run dialog box.

Recovering a frozen application. One of the main reasons you’d visit the Applications tab during the course of troubleshooting is to close an application that has stopped responding. The click-steps are minimal, and they have not really changed in this iteration of the Task Manager.

Here’s what to do:

1. Open the Task Manager. Either use the keyboard shortcut introduced previously
(Ctrl-Shift-Esc), or right-click the taskbar and choose Task Manager from the context menu.

2. Choose the Applications tab. The Applications tab is the default, but note that the Task Manager always opens with the previously selected tab.

3. Select the program with a Status of Not Responding, and then click the End Task button.

Note that you usually will not get any kind of confirmation before the application closes when you’re using this technique. Also, it’s usually a good idea to give the frozen application a minute or two to try to resolve the issue on its own, because closing a program in this way will cause any unsaved changes to be lost.

Troubleshooting a frozen application. OK, you know how to close an application that’s frozen, but wouldn’t it be even better if the Task Manager could help you figure out why the application froze in the first place?

Guess what: it’s time to point out one of the new features of Vista’s Task Manager.
You now have the ability to create a dump file for a specific application that’s frozen. You can then use this dump information in a debugging application to determine the root cause of the problem. To create a dump file for a frozen app, just right-click it from the Applications tab and select Create Dump File from the context menu. When the procedure completes.

This will help you retrieve the dump file for later parsing in the debugging app of your choosing. Naturally, interpreting debugging files is something of an art unto itself, and it requires a good understanding of the various operating system mechanisms that govern how data is used and executed. You can find more information on how to use Windows debugging tools at: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/debugstart.mspx



The Processes tab
One of the improvements on the Processes tab is the ability to access the properties of a particular process. To do so, just right-click the process and choose Properties from the context menu. The nice thing about accessing properties for a process is that you can set specific compatibility options for an application’s process. Try this if you can’t get a program to run as well as you’d like.

Setting processor affinity. Another helpful task that you can perform from the Processes tab is setting processor affinity for a particular process. Setting processor affinity should not be a task you perform regularly, but it can be especially helpful in optimizing performance in Vista systems that are running either two processors or single processors with a dual core (Intel’s Core 2 Duo, for instance).

To set processor affinity, right-click the process on the Processes tab and choose Set Processor Affinity from the context menu.

Troubleshooting excessive CPU usage. One of the biggest benefits of the Processes tab is the ability to see how much processing horsepower a particular process is using. Obviously, a process that is taking between 50 and 100 percent of the processing cycles is most likely going to cause problems for anything else running on the system.

Vista tries its best to manage processing time so that all apps and background processes get their instructions processed, but often you’ll notice an app hogging more than its share.

Sometimes it’s easy to tell where the problem lies—the application’s process is taking up a lot of time; killing the process fixes the problem. But at other times, the problem is with related processes such as svchost.exe. Services such as these can sometimes be responsible for hosting multiple child processes, and killing the svchost.exe process can cause a lot of cascading problems.

In this case, two different tools can help. One, of course, is the Task Manager. The other is the Tasklist command, which you can run from the Command Prompt. With these two tools in hand, Vista administrators can quickly pinpoint the problem and correct it.



The Services tab
Similar to the Processes tab, the Services tab lists all services currently running on the computer and lets you sort them according to column headings. You can use the Status column to quickly locate a service that is not running. The Services button on the bottom launches the Services MMC console, which is the same as launching services.msc from the Start menu.



The Performance tab
The Performance tab provides a quick peek into Vista system performance, listing several critical performance parameters and a graph of CPU and processor usage. As Here are a few things to look for:

A flat memory graph. A flat Physical Memory Usage History graph means that open applications aren’t continuously asking for more system memory, also known as a memory leak. A graph that looks like a ramp will lead to poor performance as other applications fight for remaining memory.

The amount of free physical memory As the value approaches zero, memory is running low. You might want to close an application or two, especially one that’s using large amounts of memory.

The physical memory cached. If the value is less than half of the total available memory, Vista is having trouble storing recently used information in memory. Again, the solution here is to close applications you aren’t actively using. Vista gives up some of the system cache when it needs RAM, so closing the programs should alleviate this problem by reducing the demand for RAM.



The Networking tab
The Networking tab provides another graphical representation of performance, this time on the network adapters on your system. On a desktop computer, you might see only one adapter. On a laptop, three (or more) network connections may be displayed: a local area connection, a wireless network connection, and a Bluetooth network connection. The information here will help administrators determine whether a networking connection is being stressed. Such a circumstance would be very rare, and you could address it by disabling the network connection before determining the root cause (i.e., what’s sending all that traffic).



The Users tab
The Users tab is not new to Windows Vista, and it’s used for the same purposes as it was in Windows XP. With the Users tab, administrators can see who is currently logged on or otherwise connected to the Vista machine, and can force such users to either disconnect or log off. You can also send messages to the other users displayed on this tab. It’s often a good idea to send a message to a user before forcibly disconnecting him. This allows the user to close any open work in an orderly fashion rather than risk losing data when the connection is abruptly terminated.

Source of Information : OReilly Windows Vista Administration The Definitive Guide

Hidden in the bowels of Windows is a super-secret Administrator account. Here’s how to unlock it, in case you ever need to use it.

Deep inside Windows, there’s a secret Administrator account, and it’s different from the normal administrator account you most likely have set up on your PC. Oddly enough, this Administrator account is not part of the Administrator group. (Note the differentiation between the secret Administrator account, and the administrator account you’ve set up. In describing this hack, we’ll always use the capital “A” for the secret account, and a lowercase “a” for an administrator account you’ve set up.)

What’s the difference between the secret Administrator account and a normal administrator account? On Vista, the difference is more than the name: the Administrator account is not subject to User Account Control. So the Administrator can make any changes to the system and will see no UAC prompts.

For this reason, you may want to unlock the Administrator account, and use it only for those times when you want to make a series of system changes and don’t want to be bothered by UAC. True, you could instead simply disable UAC on your system, but it’s a pain to do this, and you may forget to turn it back on.

Turning on the Administrator account is pretty straightforward. On Vista, open an elevated command prompt by typing cmd.exe into the Search box on the Start menu and pressing Ctrl-Shift-Enter. Next, enter this command:

Net user administrator /active:yes

On XP Professional, fire up TweakUI, go to the Logon section, and choose “Show Administrator on Welcome Screen”.

On Windows XP Home, the Administrator account is only available when you boot into safe mode.

From now on, the Administrator account will appear on the Welcome screen. Use it like any other account. Be aware that it won’t have a password, so it’s a good idea to set a password for it by going to Control Panel -> User Accounts and Family Safety (Vista) or Control Panel -> User Accounts (XP). If you want to disable the account and hide it, enter this command at an elevated command prompt:

Net user administrator /active:no


Use WHOAMI To See Account Information - Windows Vista has a cool new command line tool called Whoami that shows plenty of information about the currently logged on user, including the account name, a list of group memberships, and much more as well. At any command line, type whoami, and you’ll be shown the name of the loggedon user. Type whoami /all to see a wide variety of information, including a list of groups to which the account is a member, user privileges, and much more. For a list of all parameters, type whoami /?.

Vista’s User Account Control is one of Vista’s new security tools—and is without a doubt, Vista’s most annoying feature as well. Here’s how to bend it to your will.

Quick, answer this: What’s the most maddening feature of Windows Vista? If you’re like 99% of the world, you’ll probably answer User Account Control (UAC). When you try to make any one of a variety of changes to Windows Vista, a UAC prompt appears, and you have to click the Continue button or enter a password before you proceed.

There’s some method to this madness. UAC is designed to stop your system and its files from being tampered with. If malware gets loose on your PC, the thinking goes, UAC will help stop it from doing damage because the malware won’t be able to click a Continue button or type in a password. You’ll get some warning before you try to make a change that will launch a UAC prompt.

The kind of UAC prompt that appears—either one that asks you to continue or one that asks you to type in your password—depends on whether you’re logged in as a standard user or an administrator. If you’re logged in as an administrator, you’ll only have to click Continue. If you’re logged in as a standard user, you’ll have to type in an administrator’s password. If there are multiple administrators set up on the computer, the prompt will include a list of all the administrators. You’ll have to type the password underneath the right administrator account.

UAC and Elevating Privileges
Before you hack UAC, you need to understand its guiding principle—that of the least-privileged user. Under it, an account is set up that has only the minimum amount of privileges needed in order to run the computer for most tasks. A standard user, in Windows Vista, is this least-privileged user.

But when a change needs to be made that can affect the overall operation or security of the operating system, the user’s privilege needs to be elevated. In other words, someone with greater privileges than the least-privileged user must make the change. That’s why a standard user will need to type in an administrator password to make a change, and why an administrator will have to confirm when wants to make a change.

Hacking UAC
You’re not stuck with Windows Vista’s default behavior when it comes to UAC; you can change how UAC works on your PC. To do it, run Local Security Policy by typing secpol.msc in the Search box or command prompt and then typing Enter. Now go to Security Settings/Local Policies/Security Options. This lets you edit various security policies on your PC, including those related to UAC. To edit a policy, double-click it, and fill in a dialog box—for example, choosing Enable or Disable.

secpol.msc is not available in the home editions of Windows Vista. However, you can use the Registry to make changes to UAC’s behavior. Launch the Registry Editor by typing regedit at the Start Search box or a command prompt. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies System\EnableLUA, and give it a value of 0 to turn off UAC. You may need to reboot in order for the change to take effect. The rest of this hack includes registry keys for many of the settings you can change in UAC.

You’ll need to edit these policies to hack UAC:
User Account Control: Admin Approval Mode for the Built-In Administrator Account
Registry key: FilterAdministratorToken. This determines whether the main Administrator account is subject to UAC. Enabling it means that the account will be treated by UAC like any other administrator; the prompt will appear as normal. If it is not enabled, no prompt will appear for the Administrator account but will appear for standard user accounts.

User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode.
Registry key: ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin. This determines what prompt appears for
administrators (members of the Administrators Group, not the built-in Administrator account). The default is Prompt for Consent, which means that a UAC prompt will appear, and the administrator needs to click Continue or Cancel. You can also choose Prompt for Credentials, in which case the administrator password will have to be typed in. If you choose No Prompt, a UAC prompt won’t appear, and you can make the change.

User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for standard users
Registry key: ConsentPromptBehaviorUser. This determines what prompt appears for standard users. The choices are Prompt for Consent, Prompt for Credentials, or No Prompt. The default is Prompt for Credentials.

User Account Control: Detect application installations and prompt for elevation
Registry key: EnableInstallerDetection. By default, this is enabled, and so before software can be installed, UAC will ask for a prompt or a password. Disabling it allows software to be installed without the prompt.

User Account Control: Elevate only executables that are signed and validated
Registry key: ValidateAdminCodeSignatures. When enabled, UAC allows programs to be installed without a prompt if those programs have been properly signed and validated by their creators. By default it is disabled, and all programs, whether signed and validated or not, require the prompt.

User Account Control: Run all administrators in Admin Approval Mode
Registry key: EnableLUA. This setting requires all administrators (except for the built-in Administrator account) to give consent or supply credentials (depending on the setting of ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin). By default, it is enabled.

User Account Control: Switch to the secure desktop when prompting for elevation
Registry key: PromptOnSecureDesktop. This determines whether Windows Vista will switch to the secure desktop when the prompt appears. You’ll notice that when the UAC prompt appears, the screen first goes black, and that when the prompt appears, the rest of the screen is dark. That’s the secure desktop. By default, the secure desktop is enabled.

User Account Control: Virtualize fi le and Registry write failures to per-user locations
Registry key: EnableVirtualization. This controls whether changes to the Registry made by standard users should be written to a special, virtual area, rather than directly to the Registry. This protects the Registry. By default, it is enabled.

There is a great deal of confusion about administrator accounts in Windows Vista. There are in fact two different types of administrator accounts—the single, all-powerful, built-in Administrator account, and accounts that are part of the Administrators group. The Administrator account can do anything on the computer, while members of the Administrators group run much as standard users, except they can elevate their privileges by clicking a Continue button in a dialog box when prompted.

Turn Off UAC
If UAC prompts drive you around the bend, you can turn them off. Choose Control Panel -> User Accounts and Family Safety -> User Accounts, and click Turn User Account Control on or off.

Alternately, you can run the MSCONFIG tool by typing MSCONFIG at the command line or search box. When the tool runs, click the Tools tab, and scroll down until you see Disable UAC. Highlight it, and click the Launch button, then reboot. To turn it back on again, follow the same steps, except choose Enable UAC instead.

Hack the Elevated Command Prompt
When you try to run certain commands from the command prompt, you’re told that you don’t have administrative rights to run them, even if you’re currently logged in as an administrator.

The problem is that these commands are protected by UAC. So if you want to run them, you’ll have to run the command prompt itself as an administrator; what’s called running an elevated command prompt.

One way to run an elevated command prompt is to type cmd into the Search box on the Start menu, right-click the command prompt icon that appears at the top of the Start menu, then select “Run as administrator.” You can also type cmd.exe into the search box, and press Ctrl-Shift-Enter to launch it as an administrator.

Do you really want to have to do that every time you want to run an elevated command prompt? Most likely not. Instead, create a Desktop shortcut for an elevated prompt, or pin an elevated prompt to the Start menu.

To create a shortcut to an elevated prompt on the Desktop:
1. Right-click the Desktop, and select New -> Shortcut.

2. In the text box of the Create Shortcut dialog box that appears, type CMD, and then click Next.

3. On the next screen, type a name for the shortcut, for example, Elevated Command Prompt. Then click Finish.

4. Right-click on the shortcut you just created, and select Properties.

5. Click the Shortcut tab, and click Advanced.

6. Check the box entitled “Run as administrator”, and click OK, and then OK again.

If you’d like the elevated command prompt to appear on the Start menu, drag it from the Desktop to the Start button, and place it where you would like it to be.

When a user is asked to type in an administrator password, it’s called credential prompting; when an administrator is asked to permit an operation, it’s called consent prompting.

Just like Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer keeps track of the applications that you run and files that you open. It does this so that it can tailor your computer to your personal use with features such as the frequently run programs list on the Start panel. Features like this are designed to speed up the use of your computer. However, the side effect of the convenience is a loss of privacy.


Clearing Frequently Run Programs and the Open files list
One of the great new features of Windows Vista can also be a pain when you are concerned about your privacy. The capability to select the programs that you use frequently directly from the Start panel instead of having to navigate through the entire Start menu can save you some time. However, over time, this list can become cluttered with programs that you do not want to be there. Additionally, anyone who uses your computer can easily see what programs you use.

Windows Vista also does something similar with the files that you open. Every time that you open a Word document, a digital image, or any other file, an entry is created in the Recent files list. Although this feature exists, I never find myself using it and it just seems to add another privacy concern.

In Windows Vista, it is very easy to clear and/or disable these features. Just follow these steps:
1. Right-click the Start button and select Properties.

2. Clear the two check boxes under the Privacy section on the Start Menu tab.

3. Click OK to save and activate your changes.

Depending on what check boxes you chose to clear, you may have to go back in and check them again if you would like to use the frequently run feature again.


Removing temporary files from your hard drive
Over time, your hard drive can become cluttered with temporary files left behind from applications and the operating system. These files not only take up space, but they can be tracks of activity on your computer. Removing the temporary files is a great way to clean up any garbage information that is left behind, increase your privacy, and free up some disk space.

Windows has advanced greatly over the course of it existence. In the early versions of Windows, there was just one temp folder that all temp files were located in. With Windows Vista, temp folders are all over the place. To remove the files, you could go to all the different folders and manually erase the files, but there is a better way.

To clear my temporary files from my hard drive, I like to use Disk Cleanup. Disk Cleanup is a utility that comes with Windows Vista that makes it easy to remove your temporary files. It works by automatically checking the known temporary file locations for you and removing the files. With Disk Cleanup, you do not have to worry about where to navigate on your hard drive to delete the files. Instead, just execute the program.

To get started using Disk Cleanup, follow these steps:
1. Click the Start button, type Disk Cleanup in the Search box, and then press Enter.

2. You will be prompted to choose which files you want to clean-"My files only" or "Files from all users on this computer." I recommend selecting Files from all users on this computer.

3. If your computer has multiple hard drives, you will be prompted to select which drive you want to clean. Select the drive you want to clean and press OK.

4. After the utility has analyzed your computer, it gives you a report of various types of files that it can clean. Scroll through the list and make sure that only Temporary Internet Files and Temporary files are checked.

5. Click OK to run the cleanup.

6. Click Delete Files on the confirmation screen. The utility will now run and exit automatically when it is finished cleaning your hard drive.

Disk Cleanup is the perfect way to easily clean up your temporary files. Now that you know how to use it, I recommend that you run it at least once a month to keep your temporary files under control.


Removing saved passwords
When you visit a Web site that requires authentication or attempt to connect to remote computers, you are given the option to save your password so that the next time that you visit the page or attempt to access a remote resource you do not have to reenter your password. This feature can be a huge convenience, especially if you access a particular Web site or resource frequently. The downside to this convenience is the potential for horrible security and privacy problems that it creates. Essentially, you are taking the password off all the sites and resources for which you saved a password. Anyone who has physical access to your computer can get in using your username and password, even if they do not know your password.

Removing your saved passwords from your computer is a very good idea because doing so will protect your accounts. Removing the password is a little tricky in Window Vista because there is not an easy way to access a list of all the accounts that have passwords stored for them within Control Panel or any other user interface element. Fortunately, there is a great hack that will do just that.

Hidden away in the keymgr.dll system file is an interface for viewing stored usernames and passwords. To use this cool interface, follow these steps:
1. Click the Start button, type rundll32.exe keymgr.dll, KRShowKeyMgr in the Search box, and then press Enter.

2. The Stored User Names and Passwords window will load, showing you a list of all the accounts that are saved on your computer. To remove a saved password, select the account on the list and click the Remove button.

3. Click OK on the Confirm screen and the account is removed from the list, erasing your stored password.

4. Repeat the previous steps for any other accounts that you want to remove.

5. When you are finished, just click Close.

You can also use the Stored User Names and Passwords window to add more usernames and passwords to your computer. If you have a Web site or resource for which privacy isn't a concern, such as some news Web site, just click the Add button when the Stored User Names and Passwords window is loaded.


Setting file and folder permissions
Windows Vista runs on the NTFS file system, which allows users to set file and folder permissions. These permission settings enable you to specify the users that can view a particular file or a whole folder on your computer. In fact, file permissions in Windows Vista are so detailed that you can even specify if a person has the ability only to read your files while preventing them from saving any changes. For the sake of privacy, file permissions are very helpful because they allow you to prevent other users from even being able to gain access to your private folders.

Setting the permissions on files and folders is easy to do. Just follow these steps:
1. Right-click any file or folder for which you want to modify permissions and select Properties.

2. Click the Security tab and press the Edit button.

3. Make sure that your username is added to the list and that you give yourself Full Control. You can do this with the Add button.

4. Remove all users from the group or username list that you do not want having access to this file. It is a good idea to remove the Everyone group because this does include everyone that can access your computer, including guests. Make sure that you do not accidentally remove your username from the list. Also watch out for the SYSTEM account. This is one account that the operating system uses to access files but can be safely removed unless you experience any problems with its removal.

5. Now that you have the list of users and groups taken care of, set the specific permissions that the user has on the file or folder. Select the name of the user that you want to modify, and then check the corresponding boxes in the Permissions for list for the activities that you want them to be able to do.

6. When you have finished setting the permissions for all the users, click OK to exit the permissions screen.

When you have set the permissions for all sensitive directories, you will have greatly increased your security and privacy. Also keep in mind that file permissions are inherited. Every folder within a folder inherits the permissions of the parent folder unless they are specifically removed. Therefore, if you set the file permissions for a folder, all the subfolders and files will be automatically set with the same permissions. File and folder permissions can be very useful. If you have a program on your computer that you do not want anyone else running, simply set the permissions on that folder so that only you can read and execute it.

Source of Information : Hacking Windows Vista ExtremeTech 2007