Can’t login to XP? Forgot Admin Password? Reset Password in XP!

The Question:

“I forgot my user password (with administrator access rights). I tried booting into safe mode, hoping that it would login me in as the ‘Admin’ user, but I forgot the admin user password, too! How can I get past this? ”

The response:

I have a 100% sure fire way to get into any Windows PC discussed further down — but let’s try the most obvious things, first.

Login with Admin Access via Safe Mode

1. Go to Safe Mode and try the Admin user account (again). How to boot into Safe Mode:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315222

2. At the login prompt of Safe Mode:

If asked for user login, Enter (or click) “administrator” as user (no quotes), and leave password blank; click login button. If that doesn’t get you in, try “admin” or “owner” with no password. Note: you can also click the “?” button to see your password hint at login. If that doesn’t work, try clicking Cancel to get in. If that doesn’t work, try a network PC login (noted further down in #4).

Reset Password (Admin or Other)

Assuming you’ve logged in to Safe Mode, you should (hopefully) now have administrative access rights, allowing you to edit / change / reset any user passwords attached to that PC.

3. Go to Control Panel -> Users -> click the user you want to edit, and change the password. Click Start -> Shutdown and reboot the computer to login.

Reset Password via Network

4. If you still can’t get into Windows at this point: you can try to create a password reset disk with another computer that belongs to the same workgroup as your computer.

Typically the default workgroup name is “workgroup” for all Windows PCs that belong to a network (example: if you share Internet access with multiple PCs in the same house using a router).

To make password reset disk, follow these steps:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305478

100% Sure Fire Way to Get Into Any PC: Easy, Non-Techie

If you’re not a techie and all of this seems daunting — or if you just want to “fix it in a jiffy” without having to think, SpotMau Power Suite is what you need.

This all-in-one suite offers you a complete solution to solve many common computer problems, including a Startup CD that can Reset Windows Admin/User password — with no fuss, no muss and it comes highly recommended! And heck, it’s reasonably cheap at $34.95.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Windows Live: Is it Worth It?

Because I previously wrote about the Windows Live trend of software as services, Dennis asked me to answer the following question submitted by “Jeanie”:

” Can you tell me any thing about this ‘Windows Live One Care’? I downloaded it to try it. Of course, it had disable my antivirus completely. Can you tell me, does Windows Live work and is it any good? “

When I replied, “Jeanie, this is probably not meant for you,” watching Dennis’ double-take via email made my day. I’m known to defend most things Microsoft and generally I’m pretty enthusiastic over their innovations.

Let me explain.

First: What is Windows® Live™ OneCare™ beta?

Running as a service in the background, Windows Live provides virus protection, does PC tune ups and enables backup (to an external hard drive) automatically and simply. The interface is so much like the Security Center in the XP Control Panel, it is easy to forget that you are actually online. The tune-up is little more than setting Disk Cleanup and Defrag on a scheduled basis and forcing some System Restore points. As you noted, you trading the free AVG for a paid Microsoft brand anti-virus, which has no track record but in all likelihood will be a fine product.

Even in the beta that I tried several months back, Windows Live ran fairly well. The Forum, Blog and Support were top of the line. OneCare Live works and pretty well, even in the present beta form. It is being offered at an introductory price of $19.95/year to beta testers till April 30. 2006 and will be sold at $49.95/year (covering up to 3 computers) when it goes to market. (Source: live.com)

So why isn’t this meant for Jeanie?

If you’re reading Infopackets, you aren’t a careless user. You’re concerned about your computer and willing to take steps to insure it runs well. You want to learn and you take responsibility for your machine.

However, the target market Microsoft is aiming for is small businesses (primarily), and the totally careless user. And I sincerely hope OneCare reaches them all because in doing so, our lives would a whole lot better. With less vulnerable computers on the Internet, that translates to less unwanted SPAM, and fewer denial of service attacks against places I want to surf. In short: the Information Superhighway will be a nicer place to surf!

Managing the PC without Windows Live

As I write, my Task Manager is set to launch a cleaning routine (thanks to Fred Langa for the tip).

Ashampoo’s Magic Defrag, an Infopackets suggestion, is keeping my multiple partitions and drives well ordered and tightly arranged. Windows Defender (the beta is still not playing nice with Update, but it is improving) is monitoring spyware and Spybot ran this morning and will again tonight and AdAware chimes in once a week to triple check for nasties. AVG updated at 6:00 AM and will scan tonight at 9:00 PM. Around 4:00 PM Acronis True Image, another gem Dennis suggested to me, will backup the partitions, I’ve specified to their external drive.

My system purrs!

As you can see, with a little care and some initial planning and prep work, all the features offered by OneCare can be done and totally free. Infopackets readers know or can learn how by reading our articles and asking for our help.

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Google Earth: Can it Find You?

Could Google Earth’s privacy-invading tendencies save your life? Maybe one day, but right now the Internet search leader is on the lookout for missing people. Renowned aviator Steve Fossett is currently on the search list.

The pilot disappeared over the Nevada desert after taking off in a small plane early last week. Two days later Google became involved in the case when his friend, British billionaire Richard Branson, proposed that Fossett be located through the company’s satellite mapping service. Branson said “I’m talking with friends at Google about seeing whether we can look at satellite images over the last four days to see whether they can see which direction he might have been flying and whether they can see any disturbances anywhere that they can pin from space.” (Source: news.com.com)

But, why Google?

Unlike any other search engine, Google has connections to the many contractors that provide satellite imagery for the Google Earth software. Therefore, its abundance of resources has made Google an important ally for search-and-rescue teams. As well, the company can call in favours in life-threatening situations. For example, most of the images that the average web surfer sees on Google Earth are about six months to three years old. However, when images need to be obtained rapidly, the company can request more recent photographs that have been taken from space.

While this may sound like the answer to many cases of missing people, know that satellite searches are not always successful. When acclaimed computer scientist, Jim Gray, disappeared while sailing on a yacht from San Fransisco, Google helped a rescue team obtain necessary satellite pictures. Unfortunately, despite the information that Google was able to supply, Gray was not found. (Source: ap.google.com)

Another problem: not everyone can easily contact the Google company and convince them to help find a lost friend or family member. The Fossett search is an exception and the company refuses to discuss its reasons for getting involved.

Although Google Earth may not find every missing person on its search list, its efforts will greatly increase the chances of a recovery.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Google Closes Acquisition of DoubleClick

Google recently announced that it has completed negotiations before European anti-trust commissioners, and is finally able to close its $3.1 billion deal to acquire DoubleClick.

The new addition to the Google brand will bring a greater concentration of advertising power within one corporation. However, anti-trust hearings in the US and Europe felt that the companies could merge because they occupied different parts of the advertising search market (Google is the dominant online supplier of text-relevant ads, while DoubleClick is a large advertiser for banner ads). (Source: nytimes.com)

Commissioners in Europe also pointed out that customers have a wide variety of choice for search companies, such as Ask.com, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo. The biggest concern for many critics is the unprecedented access to information that Google now has.

Part of Google’s plan is to combine the search data that it maintains with DoubleClick’s viewership tracking ability. This may result in a further refined advertising delivery service for individual users, but it also means that those same users will be under greater scrutiny by marketers.

The deal opens the door for Microsoft to acquire rival Yahoo. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey Lindsay, an investment analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. said, “the strategy poses a significant threat to Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., which have distinguished themselves by providing display and search advertising services. As a result, Microsoft’s push to buy Yahoo takes on greater urgency with Google’s DoubleClick purchase.” (Source: irishdev.com)

Google publicly denounced Microsoft’s attempts to acquire Yahoo as a threat to the openness on the Internet. Sounds like the pot’s calling the kettle black.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Google Enters the World of Television

Google is taking advertising to new levels by partnering up with popular television icons and inventors.

Soon Google’s AdSense network will feature online videos from Seth MacFarlane, the creator of the animated TV show “Family Guy,” as well as Raven Symone, who stars in the show “That’s So Raven.” The company supporting the projects, Media Rights Capital, financed last year’s Brad Pitt flick, “Babel.”

It sounds entertaining, but if you fear change then these ads might not impress you. What’s more, if you were hoping to spend time on Google with the Griffins, think again. MacFarlane will feature new characters in his short videos. And, don’t get too excited for Raven’s crazy antics. Instead of complicating the lives of the characters around her, Raven will guide viewers in how-to shows.

Google plans to bundle the programs with banner ads and in-stream video advertising. This way, users will have to click in order to view the content. The philosophy behind this setup: advertisements will invite potential customers, rather than intrude upon them. If users can control how much advertising they are exposed to, marketers will become more familiar with ads that do and do not work. Kim Malone, a Google executive says, “This combination allows for the creation of original content that was historically too expensive to produce for Internet distribution and connects advertisers with high-quality content.” (Source: Internetnews.com)

This new idea is Google’s attempt to try to reach everyone. For this reason, AdSense is the chosen distributor because it will allow the videos to reach a broader audience. Also, Google’s trust in AdSense may be due to its credentials. AdSense already has experience with this form of distribution since it signed a similar distribution deal last year with Viacom’s MTV Networks.

In the words of a Media Rights Capital co-chief executive, “We feel this partnership answers the question of how best to reach viewers online, because the Web is fragmented into millions and millions of viewing destinations.” (Source: forbes.com)

Popularity: 5% [?]

Flickr, Getty Images Offer Payday to Amateur Photographers

Yahoo is partnering with Getty Images to turn the Flickr online photo community into a treasure trove of resources. Getty has announced it will be offering select Flickr members the chance to license their work for publication in media outlets all over the world. With clients in 100 countries, Getty is the largest distributor and provider of photographic images for media outlets in the world.

Reports suggest Getty is willing to pay up to $240 for the photographs it uses. Over the next few months, the image provider will be checking out available photos on Flickr, and when they find something they like, Getty will invite the image owner to participate in the pilot program. (Source: shareholder.com)

“We are excited and proud to be partnering with Flickr to offer our customers even more choice for their projects,” Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images said in a statement. Mr. Klein said that Flickr is the ideal partner for Getty and that its library of images will enable his company to offer a much wider range and richer amount of content to Getty customers. Flickr is one of the largest online photo sharing sites on the web with over 2 billion images and 27 million users to date. (Source: nytimes.com)

While this news may have some Flickr users excited over the prospect of turning their hobby into a side business, this has to have regular photographers concerned. The maximum $240 that Getty is offering is the standard rate it pays for professional photographs, but it is possible that Getty may end up offering much less, turning Flickr into a fire sale for images. (Source: pcworld.com)

Photographic journalism it seems is just the next profession under threat in a troubled industry. Newspapers, especially those owned by Sam Zell’s Tribune Co., have been firing staff all over the U.S.; some fret over the fact that ‘citizen journalist’ Mayhill Fowler broke two of the largest stories during the Democratic presidential race through fairly devious means, and newspapers around the world are outsourcing their writing, layout design and editing to a small company in India.

Maybe Andrew Keen is right: the Internet really is killing our culture — or at least my job, anyway.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Intel to purchase Wind River for $884 million

Intel continues to expand beyond its traditional PC stamping ground after announcing it will acquire Wind River Systems, as part of a move to bolster its offerings in the market for processors for embedded systems and mobile devices.

“This acquisition will bring us complementary, market-leading software assets and an incredibly talented group of people to help us continue to grow our embedded systems and mobile device capabilities,” said Renee James, Intel vice president and general manager of the company’s Software and Services Group, in a statement.

The board of directors of Wind River has approved the deal, which the companies expect to close by the end of the third quarter of this year, subject to regulatory approvals and other conditions to which the companies have agreed.

After the deal, Wind River will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel and continue with its current business model, Intel said.

Wind River, based in Alameda, California, was founded in 1981 and has more than 1,600 employees. The company reported revenue of $359.7 million in his fiscal year that ended 31 January.

Wind River develops operating systems, middleware and software design tools for embedded computing systems. VxWorks, an embedded operating system, and Wind River Linux are among its main products.

In February, Wind River announced plans to acquire Tilcon Software, a Canadian developer of graphical user interfaces for embedded devices, for $3.5 million.

In January, Wind River announced that it had developed software code that will help enable support for open source Android mobile software running on larger screen-sized mobile computing devices using Snapdragon chipsets from Qualcomm.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Meru launches new type of WLAN management

Meru Networks has released a new wireless LAN management application that for the first time runs on a dedicated appliance to collect only periodic summaries of access point statistics and look for problems.

Version 2.0 of E(z)RF Network Management digs up the equivalent of log information – packet-level data that shows the interactions “events”) of the Wi-Fi client with access points and back-end servers. A Meru-built inference engine correlates the events, searching for patterns that show immediate or developing problems.

Company executives say the application can pinpoint specific problems quickly, and identify the root causes precisely. That in turn saves IT troubleshooting time, and minimizes or prevents users being offline and unproductive.

Problems, trends, WLAN states can be displayed in a package of customisable graphical dashboards that give network managers a quick visual summary of what’s going on (an optional software module creates a visual representation by mapping this data to a floor plan showing WLAN access points and clients). With a few clicks, customers can dig down into details and histories of a given client or access point. Because this event data is stored in a PostgreSQL RDBMS on the appliance, managers can replay events to watch what happens when a laptop, for example, repeatedly requests an IP address.

The previous version of E(z)RF software, like most other WLAN management packages, periodically polled access points, requesting summaries of statistical data on throughput, signal strength and the like. Many enterprise sites have relied on a companion tool, a wireless sniffer that captures packet level data.  But it’s been difficult to bring together and correlate the information from the statistical tools and the sniffers, said Kamal Anand, senior vice president of marketing for Meru.

“There’s been no concept of a history of [WLAN] events to see what was happening in the network at various time,” he says.

Wireless events are a series of back and forth interactions that reveal how and why some feature or characteristic of a Wi-Fi client or access points changes. “You want to capture the meaningful bits of information, for example, those that cause a client’s IP address to change,” said Joe Epstein, Meru’s senior director of technology. “We can capture these and see the actual error codes.” It’s this subset of data that the new E(z)RF version captures and uploads to the appliance-based inference engine for processing, analysis and correlation.

The result is a kind of automatic self-questioning management application that once it comes to a conclusion alerts the administrators about potential problems and their likely cause. In the past, a user’s complaint of WLAN disconnects could require a largely manual, time-consuming process of eliminating possible causes, possibly even sending someone to check the access point. “With 2.0, if I see a client trying to associate [with an access point] many time, but they’re not getting an IP address, the software triggers an alarm to check the DHCP server,” Epstein said.

Meru has created a browser-based client for the 2.0 release, for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch, dubbed E(z)RF OnTheGo. Users can connect wirelessly to the Meru management appliance over 3G or Wi-Fi links and use the mobile Safari Web browser to see the same set of dashboard displays as they would from a desktop or laptop PC. E(z)RF in turn can send alerts to the mobile user about high-priority events.

The E(z)RF Network Management rack-mounted appliance is $6,995. There are two software packages with pricing based on the number of access points. The base application, at $4,995 for 50 access points, provides all the core functionality – collecting, storing, correlating and reporting on WLAN event data. A second software module, also $4,995 for 50 access points, will map all this data to floor plans showing the locations of all Wi-Fi clients and access points.

Popularity: 6% [?]

What Does The Soccer Ball Pattern Mean On A Soccer Ball?

Thank you for read this article, what follows is the result of great research put into excellent writing.

Most teams have a soccer ball pattern that any real fan will spot within a glimpse of an eye. However, it is difficult for an unexperienced watcher to identify similarities in game actions and the way the players move, pass the balls, dribble and try to score. According to experts the soccer ball pattern results from very good analytical thinking and quality training. When a player masters the technique and uses personal experience or knowledge on the field, the entire team benefits from his/her skill. Moreover, the soccer ball pattern is not something performed individually, since it involves lots of ability and unity in the soccer formation.

The cooperation between the team members is developed during trainings, and the coach has the great responsibility of making trainees learn the soccer ball pattern and respond to it properly according to the individual position assignment. The full mastery of the soccer ball pattern comes in time and involves a constant evolution. Thus, competing teams often study the opponents’ strategies to understand where the strength or the weakness comes from, where the attack is at its highest or where it lacks in intensity. The entire team contributes to the creation of the soccer ball pattern as it is not the merit of one individual alone.

Amateurish players don’t know how to develop a real soccer ball pattern, but for hobby playing it is not even important to have great skills. Most of the time players have a constant movement or action on the field and do little in the direction of changing something in their play. This can sometimes be a problem for the success on the field, but since we are not talking about professional achievements, things should remain relaxed. Therefore, the soccer ball pattern is not an objective in itself when playing for sheer personal pleasure.

All in all, the soccer ball pattern remains a major attribute of team playing particularly in professional leagues and championships. Although not easy to identify and characterize by an untrained eye, it is an inherent part of the training standards specific to every team. Any coach will do his/her best to make all the players contribute to the creation of a good soccer ball pattern that can win goals or points and bring the success of the team. Yet, sometimes, changes in the soccer ball pattern are necessary particularly when the results are not the expected ones.

Feel free to continue to browse around my website to find further article of interest.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Obtaining Free Gifts And Gadgets Over The Internet

The marketplace we know as the Internet has made many things possible. One such thing that seems almost unreal is the fact that there are websites giving away gadgets and gifts for free- without hidden catches or scams attached. In this way, obtaining a Nintendo Wii is entirely possible with the right effort.

You can get rewards in the form of gadgets and technology products by filling out simple offers- such as signing up for a credit card or applying for a magazine subscription. Websites that offer these rewards will either give you a ticket into a drawing or allow you to save up points you have earned to redeem them for a gadget or two in a virtual store. It’s entirely possible to get a new-age gaming console system without even having to pay for it!

Filling out a survey is another method of getting free gadgets, although odds are you will be doing this a longer time than you would if you had opted for completing offers. Surveys are still a good option to investigate, as you are also helping out business organizations around the world with the answers you submit. Surveys vary in subject, making them fun to take.

Then of course, there are websites that feature drawings. Drawings give you poor odds in winning anything, but they are often free and only require you to take the time to fill out a bit of information. Some websites add to the difficulty by forcing you to obtain “tickets” by doing other tasks, such as playing games, contributing to a community, or otherwise invest your time into a resource.

Not all drawings and sweepstakes are found online- you can still find plenty of them through local businesses you frequent. Malls are commonly stocked with vehicle drawings, in which you put your name and information into a drawing box and hope you get the vehicle being showcased. In this method, you are likely allowing the entity supplying the drawing permission to contact you with advertisements.

Don’t put all of your trust in a single resource. Some businesses function to get information, then shut down and not pay out based on its promises. You can avoid this unfortunate scenario simply by only siding with websites that are established, have had positive reviews in the communities you browse, and have been in business long enough to count out the possibility of scams. That way you won’t waste your time.

Final Thoughts

Getting free products or services online is easier than what you would think! To get started, conduct a few searches on your own part, and then research each website you find as a result.

Popularity: 4% [?]