Removing All Icons from the Desktop in Windows 7

No matter how hard I try, I always end up with a lot of junk on my desktop. There is never an end to the war I fight with my desktop to keep it clutter-free � this is evident from the programs I download, documents that I am too lazy to save elsewhere, and new program links that seem to pop up from nowhere. I like to see my desktop wallpaper and not have my view of the wallpaper blocked by useless icons. One cool way to win the never-ending desktop war is to disable the desktop�s ability to show the icons and instead pin the most common desktop icons � such as the Recycle Bin and other shortcuts � to the taskbar. Disabling the icons on the desktop is actually a very simple task. Most people never know about this feature because it was placed where you would never expect it in previous versions of Windows. In Windows 7, just right-click your desktop, expand View, and then select Show Desktop Icons. Almost instantly, the icons disappear. Don�t worry because the icons and folders on your desktop were not deleted. If you ever want to turn the icons back on, just repeat the preceding steps again. This is a very simple way to clean up the desktop quickly. It�s sort of like sweeping dirt under a rug. The desktop clutter is still there, but you can�t see it.

Source of Information : Windows 7 Tweaks 2010

Enabling Windows 7 Num Lock by Default

If you have a password that has both numbers and letters and you frequently use the number pad to enter part of your password, this hack is for you. I cannot count the number of times that I started to type my password and was then presented with a logon error telling me that my password was incorrect. I would sit there staring at the screen for a second before I realized that Num Lock on my keyboard was not on.

This is a great hack for every desktop computer with a full-size keyboard and a separate number pad. Turning on Num Lock by default on a laptop is not a good idea because most laptops do not usually have a separate number pad. Enabling this feature on a laptop will result in almost half your keyboard functioning as the number pad, and you would be much better off using the numbers instead of the letters. To get started, follow these steps:

1. Click the Start menu, type regedit, and press Enter.

2. When the Registry Editor loads, navigate through HKEY_USERS, .DEFAULT, Control Panel, and Keyboard.

3. Locate the InitialKeyboardIndicators entry, right-click it, and select Modify. To enable Num Lock, enter 2 into the box. If you want to disable it, enter 80000000 into the box with the Base set to Hexadecimal (80000000 is the hexadecimal equivalent of 2147483648 which is the system default value).

4. Then click OK to save the changes. That�s it!

If you are on a laptop and you attempted to enable Num Lock � even though I told you not to � and need to fix your system, repeat the preceding directions but replace the value of InitialKeyboardIndicators with 80000000 to disable the feature.

Source of Information : Windows 7 Tweaks 2010

Changing the Windows 7 Logon Screen Screensaver

If you turn on your computer and let it sit at the logon screen long enough, eventually the screensaver will appear. This setting can be tweaked so that the screensaver that you want to see instead is set and not the boring Windows default. Unlike changing your screensaver for your account when you are logged on, it is possible to change the logon screen screensaver setting only by using the registry. With the help of a few quick registry hacks, you can fine-tune the screensaver that is displayed and other settings, such as the screensaver Timeout value that determines how long before the screensaver is activated.

Follow these simple steps to customize your logon screensaver:

1. Start the Registry Editor. Click the Start button, type regedit in the box, and press Enter.

2. When the Registry Editor starts up, navigate through HKEY_USERS, .DEFAULT, Control Panel, and Desktop.

3. First, you need to tell Windows the logon screensaver is active. Right-click the Desktop key and select New and then String Value. Name the value ScreenSaveActive. Next, set the value to 1 by right-clicking it and selecting Modify. Enter 1 and click OK.

4. Set the amount of time the system waits after the last activity was detected before starting the screensaver. To do this, right-click the Desktop key and select New and then String Value. Name the new entry ScreenSaveTimeOut. Then, set the value to the number of seconds you want to wait before the screensaver starts by right-clicking the new value and selecting Modify. I like to set mine to 300 seconds for 5 minutes.

5. Now you need to set the screensaver you want to display. To do this, rightclick the Desktop key again and select New and then String Value. Name this value SCRNSAVE.EXE and set its value to the full path to the .scr file. For example, I use C:\windows\system32\Mystify.scr for the Mystify screensaver. Refer to below for a list of Windows screensavers and the paths you can use.

6. Close Registry Editor. You are now finished. After a reboot, you will see your new screensaver.

Windows 7 Screensavers
Screensaver Name Full Path
Bubbles C:\Windows\System32\Bubbles.scr
Mystify C:\Windows\System32\Mystify.scr
Photos C:\Windows\System32\PhotoScreensaver.scr
Ribbons C:\Windows\System32\Ribbons.scr
Blank Screen C:\Windows\System32\scrnsave.scr
3D Text C:\Windows\System32\ssText3d.scr

Source of Information : Windows 7 Tweaks 2010

Clearing Windows 7 the Last User Logon

Every time you boot up your PC, all computer accounts and users who have logged on to it display on the logon screen. This can be a big security risk because it shows the usernames of all accounts that someone can try to use to break into the computer. In addition, the logon screen can become cluttered with many user accounts. Therefore, it might be a good idea to enable the Do not display last user name policy. In previous versions of Windows that used the classic logon screen, this policy would just clear the User name text box so that an attacker would have no clue about the last account used to log on. With the removal of the classic logon screen in 7, this policy behaves slightly differently by removing the Account list on the logon screen and turning on basic User name and Password boxes.

Using the policy is easy, if you choose to enable it. If so, just follow these steps:

1. Click the Start button, type secpol.msc, and press Enter.

2. When the Local Security Policy editor loads, navigate through Local Policies and then Security Options.

3. Locate the Interactive logon: Do not display last user name policy. Rightclick it and select Properties.

4. On the Local Security Settings tab, select Enable, and then click OK.

5. Close the Local Security Policy editor and you are finished.

For those of you that don't have SecPol.msc in your version of Windows (only Professional version and higher) you will have to set the registry key manually:

1. Click the Start button, type in Regedit, and hit Enter.

2. Navigate through HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE, Microsoft, Windows, CurrentVersion, Policies, then System.

3. Right-click dontdisplaylastusername and select Modify.

4. Set the value to 1 and click OK.

As soon as you log off or reboot, the new logon screen settings will be present.

Source of Information : Windows 7 Tweaks 2010

resolve the frequent troubles of LCD monitor Ourselves

TFT LCD monitors are rapidly becoming shipped with new computers by default. On this page I explain you the frequent trouble of TFT monitor and how to resolve them. 

No display or white screen:
If this is a new install make sure the refresh rate is not set too high. If you installed a new video card in your system make sure the refresh rate is not set too high. Under Windows, reboot the system and go into “Safe Mode” (Use F8 key on boot up) select safe mode and change the refresh rate under display properties to either 60Hz or Default. Then reboot the system and the screen will turn on. Maximum mode on 15″ TFT screens is 1024×768 and maximum mode on 17″ and 19″ TFT is 1280×1024. Check to see if the green light is on with the external power adapter. Make sure all plugs are secure and the video cable is properly attached to the computer.

Dark screen in games:
TFT Liquid Crystal Display monitors are a unique devices that are manufactured to meet excellent picture clarity and reproduction in a native mode. Outside a native mode graphics will be darker, fine lines and text will be thicker. Native mode for 15″ TFT panels is 1024×768, 17″ and 19″ TFT panels are 1280×1024. Most games can be configured to run at 1024×768 which should produce clean graphics.

Thick text:
As described above, TFT LCD monitors perform best in their native modes. Other modes can be used however the reproduction of text will vary in thickness depending on the mode the monitor is running in. Best text reproduction is view in the monitors native mode.

Faint or unseen text:
TFT monitors are Bright! So bright that sometimes text in a DOS program may be very faint or not seen. In order to see this text, you can reduce the contrast level down until the text is visible. TFT LCD monitors were manufactured to perform in a GUI environment such as Windows, Linux (X) and Macintosh. Older designed programs may have upgrades to enhance this effect to make the text legible.

Wavy lines on the screen:
In some instances you may encounter wavy lines on the screen. These are usually 1/4″ thick and move in a vertical motion. This is caused by a noisy electrical feed from a wall outlet. If you change your vertical refresh rate under display properties to 75Hz this effect should disappear.

Small dot on screen:
TFT panels by their very nature are difficult to manufacture. KDS uses displays from various suppliers including; Samsung, Hyundai and Acer, who all guarantee the display to be 99.99% free from pixel defect. What that means is a 15″ LCD display can have up to about 6-10 broken pixels and still be considered “acceptable”. Broken pixels are individual pixels, which are stuck on, off, or as one particular color. Depending on their location and intensity, they can be next to invisible or obvious. This is common to ALL TFT screens and is not considered a defect by the screen manufacturer.

Dark areas:
Retail TFT LCD monitor products employ the use of a single TFT backlight. This backlight is responsible to deliver full edge to edge brightness across the screen. On some models the screen may not be as bright in the center or the edges as other areas. This is due to the design the actual panel manufacture took to keep costs down so that the TFT panel is affordable for the retail environment. Prices of TFT panels vary according to added features (TV tuner, SVIDEO etc.). They also vary according to the number of backlights that are in the panel. High-bright monitors with multiple backlights can cost upwards of $2,500.00 for a 15″ panel.

Hiding Users on the Logon Screen in Windows 7

One of the features of the new logon screen is the list of all the user accounts on the computer. What if you created an account for running services? You do not want other users of your computer to have the option to log on to that account, because you designated it only to be used by applications running as a service. Maybe you have a secret user account that you don�t want anyone to see. With the help of a simple registry tweak, it is possible to hide any account on the logon screen so no one will know it exists.

Hidden away in the registry is the feature that Microsoft used in the past to hide system accounts from the logon screen. In the next few steps, I show you how to re-create the missing registry code so that you can use this feature again to hide your accounts:

1. Click the Start button, type regedit in the Search box, and then press Enter.

2. When Registry Editor loads, navigate through HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE, Microsoft, Windows NT, CurrentVersion, and Winlogon.

3. You must now create a new key. Right-click the Winlogon folder, select New, and then select Key. Name this new key SpecialAccounts.

4. Right-click the new SpecialAccounts key, select New, and then select Key. Call this new key UserList.

5. Now you are ready to add the name of the account that you want to hide. To add a name, right-click and select a new DWORD (32-bit) value.

6. When the new DWORD is created, enter the name of the user�s account as the name of the DWORD. After you have done this, you can close the Registry Editor.

After you log off and back on or reboot, the user will not be displayed on the logon screen. If you want to hide all accounts and just have a User name and Password box, the next section is for you. If you opt for that method, you can hide all accounts and still log on to them. You just need to remember the username and the password because no accounts will be listed anymore.

If you ever change your mind and want the account to display on the logon screen again, just delete the DWORD that you made in the system registry, and everything will be back to the way it once was.

Source of Information : Windows 7 Tweaks 2010

What Is Sharding?

Sharding is the method MongoDB uses to split a large collection across several servers (called a cluster). While sharding has roots in relational database partitioning, it is (like most aspects of MongoDB) very different.

The biggest difference between any partitioning schemes you've probably used and MongoDB is that MongoDB does almost everything automatically. Once you tell MongoDB to distribute data, it will take care of keeping your data balanced between servers. You have to tell MongoDB to add new servers to the cluster, but once you do, MongoDB takes care of making sure that they get an even amount of the data, too.

Sharding is designed to fulfill three simple goals:


Make the cluster ?invisible.?
We want an application to have no idea that what it's talking to is anything other than a single, vanilla mongod. To accomplish this, MongoDB comes with a special routing process called mongos. mongos sits in front of your cluster and looks like an ordinary mongod server to anything that connects to it. It forwards requests to the correct server or servers in the cluster, then assembles their responses and sends them back to the client. This makes it so that, in general, a client does not need to know that they're talking to a cluster rather than a single server. There are a couple of exceptions to this abstraction when the nature of a cluster forces it.


Make the cluster always available for reads and writes.
A cluster can't guarantee it'll always be available (what if the power goes out everywhere?), but within reasonable parameters, there should never be a time when users can't read or write data. The cluster should allow as many nodes as possible to fail before its functionality noticeably degrades. MongoDB ensures maximum uptime in a couple different ways. Every part of a cluster can and should have at least some redundant processes running on other machines (optimally in other data centers) so that if one process/machine/data center goes down, the other ones can immediately (and automatically) pick up the slack and keep going. There is also the question of what to do when data is being migrated from one machine to another, which is actually a very interesting and difficult problem: how do you provide continuous and consistent access to data while it's in transit?


Let the cluster grow easily
As your system needs more space or resources, you should be able to add them. MongoDB allows you to add as much capacity as you need as you need it.

These goals have some consequences: a cluster should be easy to use (as easy to use as a single node) and easy to administrate (otherwise adding a new shard would not be easy). MongoDB lets your application grow�easily, robustly, and naturally�as far as it needs to.

Source of Information : OReilly Scaling MongoDB 2011

Preventing Vendor Lock-In as You Migrate to the Cloud

�Insanity is when you keep doing the same things expecting different results,� wrote Rita Mae Brown. In a similar vein, in The Life of Reason, George Santanyana (1863�1952) famously wrote, �Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.� While IT has been battling lock-in since the earliest days of computing, not too much attention has been paid to this problem as IT rushes to madly to embrace the cloud.

To prevent being locked in to a single vendor, you need to ensure that the architecture you have selected can run on multiple clouds, and that the data can be easily migrated from Cloud A to Cloud B. While that sounds trite and simple, it�s still true. And in theory, it�s not hard. But as usual, God (or the Devil; take your pick) is in the details. Totally new development without any use of legacy code is the easy case, but it is not so common; we all carry around the accumulated baggage of the past. However, should you be fortunate enough to have this luxury, I would suggest developing on Eucalyptus or OpenStack, a new open source effort led by Rackspace and NASA, and using one or more of the most favored languages for cloud development, namely C++, Java, or Python, or PHP for less-demanding applications. This approach gives you the greatest choice of providers. Eucalyptus runs under VMware, is compatible with AWS, supports Windows Virtual Machines (in Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition 2.0), and is supported by many, if not most, of the cloud service vendors. In addition to Linux images, Eucalyptus EE 2.0 customers can now deploy images running on Windows Server 2003 and 2008 and Windows 7, along with an installed application stack in a Eucalyptus private cloud environment.

OpenStack, currently built with the Ubuntu Linux distribution and using the KVM virtualization hypervisor, is compatible with Amazon�s AWS and is expected to run directly on Linux as well as be compatible with VMware, Xen or Hyper-V. However, if, like most enterprises, you need to deal with an accumulation of legacy applications, then it is obviously important to understand what the accumulated inventory of platforms and languages consists of, and to determine whether source code is available or has been partially or totally lost (this happens much more than one might imagine).

Next, you need to determine whether to use this as the opportunity to recode or to just make the existing applications work in cloud. If you are recoding, then the previous advice holds. If not, vendor choices for migrating applications to the cloud will be dictated (and limited) by several constraints:

� Does the vendor support the operating system(s) and programming languages that you require?

� Which database management systems are required? Is there a vendor-maintained �image� that supports your DBMS?

� How much memory and processing power is required? Does the vendor provide sufficiently powerful machines, and is there room to grow?

� Do you choose a private, public, or hybrid cloud? What impels your decision?

� Do the management tools you have in place support management in the cloud? Are there upgrades available?

� How rapidly do your needs change, and can your vendor provision and deprovision fast enough?

� Does the vendor�s service level agreement (SLA) meet your needs?

� Is your auditor satisfied with the vendor�s documentation of its compliance with SAS 70 and ISO 27001? Is SysTrust certification available?

Source of Information : Implementing and Developing Cloud Computing Applications 2011