Posts Tagged ‘windows’
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 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.
Windows Vista temporary user profile
Sometimes when a user logs into their vista machine they are greeted with a temporary user profile. This is caused from a few different things but the main causes are
1. The computer cannot authenticate the user on the domain (usually because it did not get a respond from the domain controller). Or the computer is no longer a part of the domain.
2. The user is part of the Guest user group.
3. The user profile folder/user name was not available or the user already existed in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
4. The login service failed to start on the machine prior to logging into the machine.
The main indication that the user is using a temporary user profile is all of their documents appear to be missing (desktop, documents, favorites, etc.). Any settings the user may have are also set to default (default background, screen saver), and the user will have this popup in the lower right hand corner.
The popup warns the user saying “User profile was not loaded correctly. You have been logged on with a temporary profile. Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off. Please see the event log for details or contact your administrator”
If this problem happens for a user the first thing that will probably fix the problem is restarting the computer (so the computer can connect to the domain controller). If that does not fix the problem please put in a work order so we can look at the problem and narrow down why this is happening.
One important thing to note when the user is logged into a temporary user is that their documents in their profile are not lost. Nothing has been erased they are just logged in as a different user. It is also important that the user does not save anything to the temporary profile. If they need to save a document they should email it to themselves using apumail.apu.edu, save the document to one of their network drives, or save files to a usb drive. If anything is saved to the desktop, documents, or favorites of the temporary profile it will be lost once the user is logged off.
Please see these links for more information.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940453
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947242/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257580/en-us
How to apply custom themes to Vista
So after a bit of searching around I was able to use custom themes for Windows Vista. Here is what you need to do it yourself. There is a awesome tutorial on how to do everything manually over at the GuiMods forum, but who wants to do all that. All you got to do is download VistaGlazz and click the first icon to patch your dll files.
Once the patch is done you will need to restart (to reload the files into aero).
After the restart clear some space on your hard drive to download some visual styles. You are going to be looking for .msstyles files. Once you download the file you will want to copy them over to your \Windows\Resources\Themes folder and double click on them. Your “Appearance Settings” window will open and you can apply the newly installed theme and you are done. Give a few a try to find the one you like best.
Here are a couple of links to find some new themes:
Gui Modes Vista Visual Styles
DiviantART Vista Styles
AeroXperience
Neowin Forums
joejoe.org
Oh, and lets not forget about your vista sidebar. How-to Geek found some great software to apply custom themes to that too. Download the Windows Sidebar Styler and install it. I would tell you how to use the program but you can just head over to the How-to Geek for that.
BTW I am currently using Curved Sidebar and Ezlo Thin Style.
*EDIT* Just to let everyone know. It appears that with Vista SP1 RC1 build 6001 this doesn’t work anymore. The SP1 installer replaces the hacked dll’s and Vista Glazz shows that the dll’s are corrupt now. It may work if I hack them again but I need to test SP1 a bit more before I do that. I will keep this post updated with what I find.
*EDIT* I want to keep this up to date. If you have Vista SP1 you will need to download the new UxTheme patches that Vista SP1 requires. I uploaded the 32 bit version here. If you need x64 or Windows server patches you can head over to where I got them. You can also patch the files the easy way with Vista Visual Master from vista123. Vista Visual Master lets you do a whole lot more than just patch your UxTheme files but you can read about all that over at their site.
*EDIT* I heard that the guy that actually made Vista Glazz worked with someone to make a new/easier tool for custom themes. I think it works with Windows Vista and Windows 7 but I haven’t tried it myself. I just wanted to keep everyone updated on what I found. The new site is called UxStyle. Let me know if you try it and find it useful.