Posts Tagged ‘How-to’
Biometric Devices Missing from Windows 7 Control Panel
AuthenTec, a company that makes fingerprint scanning devices, worked closely with Microsoft to enable fingerprint authentication without third-party software for Windows 7. Unfortunately, the settings to set up the fingerprint scanner do not always show up in the Windows 7 control panel. To set up the fingerprint scanner you usually can navigate to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Biometric Devices. From there you can enter your password and register your fingerprints. What if biometric devices is missing from control panel?
To get the biometric devices to show up in Windows 7 control panel download the drivers from AuthenTec’s website (mirror here). I am not sure if this next step is necessary, but the directions I found said to extract the driver with uniextractor. I have extracted the driver for you and zipped it up here (x32, x64) so you don’t have to. Open the zip file and extract the files somewhere and run setup.exe. This installer will create a folder under C:\Program Files\ called WIN7TS and will install the drivers for your finger print scanner. It will also load the necessary components so you can use the fingerprint scanner from the control panel. Once the biometric devices option shows up you can set up everything from the control panel.
If you are getting the ‘Set-up Failure’ error, then try running C:\Program Files\WIN7TS\TrueSuiteApplication.exe directly. It is the same program that runs from the control panel but sometimes has less errors on setup.
Let me know in the comments if you have any problems or questions.
How-to Modify the Default User Settings in Linux
Just like my other two posts here is how you can modify your default user settings in Linux. This is similar to OSX but instead of “/System/Library/User\ Templates/English.lproj” being our template directory. It is “/etc/skel”.
The skel directory stands for skeleton and it is where the default files and settings come from when you create a new user in Linux. The skel directory is a lot more basic than Windows or OSX mainly because A) not much is needed to create a Linux profile and B) all of the configuration files are stored in plan text and not some fancy .plist or .dat file.
Typically, most distros will only include three files in their “/etc/skel” directory. Those files are “.bash_logout”, “.bash_profile”, and “.bashrc”. If you want to include any more files/settings you can simply edit the configuration in your profile (or a temporary user), copy the setting files to the “/etc/skel” directory, and chown the files with root:root.
What if you don’t want to overwrite the files that came with your distro but you still want to make a skeleton directory? Simple, edit the “/etc/adduser.conf” file and set the SKEL value to whatever you want. Just make sure that the folder is available to root when you are trying to create the new user. In other words, don’t put the folder on a removable drive.
If you are using the GUI to create the new user the files and settings will be copied automatically and if you are using the adduser command just make sure you use the -m flag.
That is really all there is too it. Let me know if you have more tips for creating a user profile or if this helped you out in the comments.
How-to Modify the Default User Settings in OSX
After my post on modifying default user settings in Vista I thought I should follow up with how to accomplish a similar thing in OSX. For OSX there is only one way to accomplish this, and that way is the manual way.
Just like with the manual way in Vista set up two user accounts, your local admin and a template user. Change all the settings you want for the template user and then restart and log in as admin. To copy the files to the default user you will need to open the terminal and follow the commands below.
Local admin isn’t enough, you will need to actually be using the terminal as the root user. If you don’t have root enabled you can find out how to enable it here.
sudo su
The English.lproj is the default user directory for any user that uses the English language. All we are doing here is copying the English.lproj folder and its contents to English.lproj.bak. For these important files ditto is better than cp because ditto will preserve the “resource fork” using the –rsrc option. It is also a good idea to keep a copy of this default user somewhere else besides just this computer in case something happens. I would recommend zipping up the English.lproj folder and storing it on a backup drive somewhere.
cd /System/Library/User\ Template/
ditto –rsrc English.lproj/* English.lproj.bak
Now that we copied a backup we can remove all the files/settings in the old English.lporj directory. If you accidentally delete the English.lproj folder (instead of just its contents) you can create it again with mkdir.
rm -rf English.lproj/*
Here we are just copying everything from our user we set up to the user template folder. Replace “rothgar” in the below command with the username you gave your template user.
cp -R /Users/rothgar/* English.lproj/
This final step will change the owner and group of the files and folders inside the user template to what they should be. All of the default user files should be owned by root and the group wheel.
chown -Rv root:wheel English.lproj
Those are all the steps needed to modify the default user. It would also be a good idea to reboot the computer, log in as admin, and check/repair disk permissions on the drive just to make sure everything is correct before you take an image of the computer. If everything is correct you can test out your settings with a new user and if everything checks out delete your template user.
Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or problems with the process in the comments.
How-to Create a default user in Windows Vista/7
In Windows Vista and Windows 7 there are two ways you can create a modified default user profile. One is automatic and the other is manual. The automatic way is the recommended way according to Microsoft. However, you may run into some problems using this way so I will explain it the manual way too.
First up is the automatic way. For the automatic way you have to use the system preparation (sysprep) tool that Microsoft provides built into Windows Vista and 7. This tool is used for a variety of things but is mainly used for when you need to create a single computer image to put onto multiple machines. To see all the crazy things sysprep can do read the technical documentation on creating an unattend.xml file for sysprep to change everything from your sidebar widgets to your computer name.
Once you have your unattend.xml file created you just need to make sure you have the CopyProfile option turned on in the “specialize” pass and you should be all set.
<CopyProfile>True</CopyProfile>
A few things to note if you are going to do it this way.
1. The account you run the sysprep command from is going to be the account that is copied to the Default profile. So make sure the account you are running sysprep from has admin rights and is set up exactly as you want it.
2. The administrator account is removed during sysprep. Even if you have everything set up the way you want it to be admin will get the same settings as Default user unless you do some fancy scripting.
You can do some more reading on using this method with the following KB article.
Now for the manual method. This method is good if you don’t want to sysprep the computer because all you want to do is change some items for all the users that are going to be logging into a computer. I got all this information from this technet thread but I have used this mothod pretty extensively.
First thing you have to do is to create the profile just as you want it (same as the automatic steps). In this situation though you need to create a second user account because you are going to use the local administrator account to copy all of the settings from the second account to the default profile.
Once everything is set up just the way you want it, restart the computer and log into the local administrator.
After you log in follow the steps below.
1. Right click Computer and select Properties
2. Select Advanced System Properties (elevating as required)
3. In the system properties dialog click the Settings button under User Profiles
4. Select the account you want to use as a template
5. Click Copy To
6. Change the “permitted to use” option to “Everyone”
7. Use the Browse button to select the location of the default profile (C:\Users\Default) You will need hidden files shown to see this.
8. Click OK
9. Click Yes to overwrite the existing default profile
The steps above copy all the files and settings to the profile but there are still things in there that probably reference your old account you had created. To get rid of all those references to the other account you will need to edit the registry hive of the Default user. Follow the steps below to remove all traces of your template account from the default user.
1. Enable “Show hidden files and folders” in Folder Options
2. Disable “Hide Protected Operating System files” in Folder Options
3. Launch Regedit
4. Select HKEY_USERS and go to File -> load hive
5. Navigate to the profile directly of the user you want to load (e.g. C:\users\default for the default user)
6. Open the ntuser.dat file
7. Provide a name for the hive, this will be used as the root key name for that hive under HKU
8. Search the hive for any reference to your old user account.
9. When you find any keys that reference your old user account you can delete the keys (they will be re-created when someone new logs in).
10. Unload the hive before attempting to log in as the user
After you have finished you can log in with a new user to test that all the correct settings transferred to the default profile. If you are satisfied with everything go ahead and go back to System Properties -> Advanced System Properties -> User Profiles and delete the account you set up for the Default User template.
If you have any questions, comments, or problems feel free to leave a comment. I hope this helps.
How-to Fix a Video Card in the Oven
I recently happen to come across a video card that had problems with 3D rendering. I usually would just throw out the video card and get a new one, but when the video card is a Nvidia 8800 GTX I just couldn’t throw away the card no matter how bad it was broken. Luckily shortly after I got the card in it’s broken state I found this article over at Engadget about someone who was able to fix their Nvidia video card by baking it in the oven. Now of course I thought they were crazy but figured “it’s not like it can break my video card any more”. So I gave it a shot.
I was completely surprised that not only did it do no visible harm to the video card. When I plugged it in my test machine it worked flawlessly. I wasn’t able to test extensively because I don’t have a dedicated desktop that can handle any games that would really test this card. So instead I ran a 3D benchmark tool before and after I cooked the video card. Lets just say that before I cooked it the benchmark tool wouldn’t even start, and after it worked flawlessly.
I am not saying this is a fix for everything you might have wrong with your computer but you may want to give it a try if you have a video card on the fritz. The reasoning I read in the forums that this works, who knows if it is actually true, is that some cards will get micro cracks in their solder joints that cause bad connections between components. Solder melts at 365 degrees Fahrenheit so when you stick the video card in the over you are really just softening and filling in those micro cracks. I have some pictures of the card before and after (there wasn’t much difference) so you can see exactly how I set the card in the oven.
I cooked my card at ~385 for 8 1/2 minutes. We will see how long this card lasts.
In the forums there are probably 2-3 dozen reports of this working on other video cards. I have see 2 unsuccessful attempts out of all the reports I read, and I even saw one person unsuccessfully cook their motherboard to see if it would fix their problems. Let me know if you give it a try in the comments.
How-to enable blank passwords in Windows
If you set up a user account in Windows and you want to allow the user account to have a blank password you may find it a little difficult. In order to accomplish this you probably need to change a couple settings in Windows.
The error message you probably got is:
The password does not meet the password policy requirements. Check the minimum password length, password complexity and password history requirements.
To allow a blank password go to Start -> Run and type in gpedit.msc then hit enter.
You should get a window that pops up and has a whole bunch of settings you may have never seen before. On the left side expand Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Account Policies and then click on Password Policy. On the right side you will need to change a few of the settings.
The three settings you will need to change are Maximum password age, Minimum password length, and Password must meet complexity requirements. Change maximum age and maximum length both to zero and disable the complexity requirements. Once you have these three settings changed you can just close out the window and now you should be able to set a blank password for your user account.
If you cannot change these settings you may be joined to a domain which has these settings locked down. I can’t help you there, but this should help in most other cases.
Let me know if this helps, or doesn’t help, in the comments.
How-to format a disk to FAT32
When backing up my PS3 for repair I needed to plug in a external hard drive to back up the system. My PS3 is only 40 GB but even that is larger than any USB flash drive I have so I needed to pull out one of my USB hard drives for the backup. I started the the backup process and when it asked for a hard drive I plugged in my terabyte external hard drive but nothing happened. I soon found out that the PS3 will only read FAT32 formatted hard drives. I did not think this would be as much of a problem as it was.
First I tried the format tool built into Windows but I found out that Microsoft decided not to let any drive larger than 32 GB be formatted in FAT32 because…well because they suck and wanted everyone to move to NTFS. So I tried formatting from a command line with: format d: /fs:fat32But I got an error saying the drive is too large for FAT32. I know that isn’t true because FAT32 is technically able to format drives up to 2 terabytes. So I decided to try gparted in Linux. Of course gparted wouldn’t have any problems right? Well in gparted I only had the options for ext2, ext3, reiserfs, and unformatted. That’s a bummer. So how about from the terminal? I tried variations of mkfs and mkfs.vfat but I know there was something I was doing wrong because each time it would just give me a error.
Finally I found a way to do it! There is a program called Fat 32 Formatter. This is a command line program that works in Windows XP/2000/Vista and all you need to do is open a commend prompt and type in:fat32format.exe d: You need to replace d: with whatever your drive is currently mounted as. Once the process completes you have a fully formatted FAT32 drive for your PS3 backup needs. There is a mirror of the fat32format tool here just in case it is removed from online.
And yes this was far more complicated than it needed to be. If you have the commands for completing this task in OSX or Linux please leave them in the comments.
How-to map network drives based on network location
This has been driving me crazy and I cannot figure out how to do it. Here is my problem:
I have a work laptop that I obviously use at work as well as at home. At work I have 6 network drives that are mapped automatically if I log into my computer while at work. At home I have a Windows Home Server with 5 shares that I wrote a batch script to connect to them when I get home. The WHS Connector also adds a shortcut to the shares on my desktop but I want the shares mapped so I can use them as local drives in programs. I also had to write 3 more scripts (1 to disconnect my work drives, 1 to connect my work drives, and 1 to disconnect my home drives) in case I go between work and home without fully turning off my computer and instead just putting it to sleep. I am fairly certain this problem can be fixed with AutoIT or some other tool but I am just surprised this sort of functionality isn’t built into ANY operating system. My laptop has Vista and Linux Mint on it but I know this functionality isn’t in OSX either.
Is there anyone out there that can can suggest something to accomplish this? All I want is something that monitors what network I am connected to, and if that network happens to be home or work, map the appropriate drives. I am going to work on this in AutoIT but I am open to suggestions if you have any.
As soon as I find more information or someone points me to a solution I will update this post with how it works.
Leave your idea’s in the comments.
How-To Create a UBUD
I just made that up. UBCD is a great tool for tracking down hardware and software problems with non-Apple computers. To be honest I am not sure if it works on Apple computers but I assume most of the tools would not work even if it boots on the hardware. UBUD is my abbreviation for UBCD on a USB Disk (a.k.a. thumb/pen/flash drive).
I ran into a problem on my last road trip fixing someones computer and I was without any CD’s to burn UBCD to. So I ran across these instructions at pendrivelinux.com and they worked perfectly for turning my USB drive into a bootable UBUD.
USB Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) prerequisites:
* ubcdfix2 (does the USB conversion) <--I found that this file doesn't download so you can get it from the link above
* UBCD ISO
* USB flash drive (fat32 formatted) Sorry there is no download link for this.
* A windows host PC to perform the buildUBUD How-To:
1. Download and launch UBCDfix2.exe, a UBCD folder is created
2. Download the UBCD ISO and move to your UBCD folder
3. From the UBCD folder, click fixubcd2.bat and follow the onscreen instructions. I ran into one problem where it said I needed to run the program again because I was using Vista but really I didn’t have to. So if it gives an error in Vista go ahead and try rebooting anyway.
4. Reboot and set your computer to Boot from the USB device
I hope this helps with any problems you may run into when you find yourself without a blank CD.
Let me know in the comments if there are any other tools that you always keep with you on the road for fixing those random computer problems.
Also, has anyone tried UBCD4Win? It seems like it could be interesting for Windows specific (a.k.a. virus/spyware) problems.
Setting up RSS feeds with Google Reader
This how-to is actually my original intent with the post I just had, but I got carried away explaining what RSS feeds do instead. So here is how you can use Google Reader for your news butler.
First here is what you need:
A Google account. I know you were probably expecting more but that is it. If you are reading this site you already have a computer with a web browser so you are all set to go.
Let’s head over to Google Reader’s website to log in. Look familiar? It should because it is the same login that you use for your Gmail account. Once you are logged in you should see this sidebar. 
This side bar lets you view all your unread news articles or you can also share items with friends (requires a Gmail account) or put notes on things. Lets not forget this is Google so it tracks what you do. If you click on Trends you can see how many articles you have read, what categories you usually read, and how many items you have shared and starred. To be honest I don’t do much starring because I find it like a inferior bookmarking method and if I find something I like (and want to keep for later) I bookmark it with delicious and move on. You can also browse for stuff to find articles you probably will like and subscribe to them right there. If you want to share articles with fellow Google reader’s you can click the start sharing button and get right to it. Below that is where all your subscriptions show up. You can sort them into relevant folders and go through the articles you want to read in a jiffy.
Here is how mine looks.
As you can see on the left I have everything collapsed so that I can just browse all my news by either clicking All items at the top or by each folder. On the right I also turned on collapsed view so that I can read more articles without having to scroll as far. If I find something I like I just click on the headline and the article expands. If I want to read it further or see it at the original site you can just click on the headline in blue. Once I am done with a folder I just click the “Mark all as read” button at the top and that whole folder gets marked and I move on to the next folder.
If you want to share an article you can either click on the share button, share with note, or if you want to share it with someone who doesn’t use Google Reader you can just email it to them right there. It drops a little spot down to write the email and send it all without leaving the reader. Pretty fancy if you ask me.
Last thing you will probably want to know is how to add sites when you are not at Google Reader. 
All you need to do is look for the RSS link. Usually it will have this icon. All you have to do is click on the logo and any modern browser will ask you what you want to do with the feed. You can simply say “add to Google Reader” and it will take you there with the feed already populated with the latest 10 items. Couldn’t be more simple. Give it a try and subscribe to my blog by clicking the RSS button at the top or click here.
Hope to see you sharing articles in Google Reader.