Simple Informations

This is a small list of folders and files which were displayed by the method mentioned on the previous post in this series.
Recycler : Recycler is a twin of Recycle Bin. The Recycler folder contains a Recycle Bin for each user that logs on to the computer, sorted by their security identifier (SID).
System Volume Information : This contains the log files and backups of important System Files that are used for System Restore in Windows. (System Restore allows you to roll back all the settings and System Files to a previous time)
NTLDR : This is the Windows NT loader, boot loader. This is replaced by winload and Windows Boot Manager in Windows Vista
NTDETECT.COM : This file is used by Windows NT during startup to detect basic hardware. This is used for Systems having BIOS.
Autoexec.bat : is most often used to set environment variables such as keyboard, soundcard, printer, and temporary file locations. It is also used to initiate low level system utilities.
These are the main folders and files in XP.

On the last article we have discussed about seeing all the files that are part of Windows. Now lets see whether we can directly access these folders. As it turns out Windows by default will not grant you permission to the folder System Volume Information.

Thats because the folder contains important System Restore Point informations. So what do you do when you can’t touch your own property. well it is there that the Windows file sharing comes into play. It may sound a little weird at first but it is true. Lets see how.

Step 1 : Go to Tools>>Folder Options and select View tab.

Here scroll down to the bottom, you can see a check box named Use Simple File Sharing (Recommended), UNCHECK the box, click APPLY and OK. Now you are done with the settings part. So just take the Properties (ALT+ENTER) or RIGHT CLICK>>PROPERTIES) of System volume Information you can see a new tab named Security here. You can see that there will be a user named SYSTEM there and it has full permission (refer picture).

You need to add your User account as a user here and give full permission to your self in order to gain access. Click Add button and type in your user name and click Check Names your user name will be filled along with the computer name automatically.

Click OK. now just click on user name of yours and check Full control. Click Apply, OK and you are done.

You can get access to files that return an “Access Denied” error by using this method. are some Files and Folders which need some more work to open I’ll discuss it in next post. Till then try this and figure out what all were hidden from you.

This is the first among a series of posts on administering Windows . It starts with how to see the files and folders that were hidden by Windows for some reason. The series is actually inspired from the one done by Samanathon on Starting your Day with a fresh Computer. He did a good job and I am a regular visitor of Saman’s Blog.

A Super Hidden or a Protected Syetem File is a file that is normally not shown in the Windows Explorer even if you have enabled Show Hidden files (Tools>>Folder Options>>View>>Show Hidden Files and Folders) in Windows Explorer). This is because if some of these files are deleted or changed Windows may encounter a fatal error. Some of such folders are :

• C:\Windows\system32\dllcache
• System Volume Information - this is in all the drives
• Recycler - which is also in all the drives

So the first step involved is to make Windows show all the Super Hidden files. This can be done in two ways. One is directly through Windows Explorer Tools>>Folder Options and the other is through registry. So the former being easier and straight forward I’ll discuss it first.

1 . Through Windows Explorer

In Windows Explorer from Tools (Alt+T) menu take “View” tab in “Folder Options”.Make sure that you have selected Show Hidden Files and Folders and that you have unchecked Hide Protected operating system files options. Click Apply and then OK. This will enable you to see system files that had previously been hidden from your view.

2 . Through Registry Editing

This is a little more complex.(It is recommended that you read the following posts before you go into the registry. Try this if you know Registry editing. Make a backup of the registry before you proceed.( The Introduction to Windows Registry , Know how to backup your registry )

Follow these steps..

1 . Run ( WIN+R ) regedit and open registry editor.

Go to the Key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced.

2 . In there you will see a Registry DWORD named ShowSuperHidden Make the value 1 instead of 0.

3 . Now all you need to do is to restart Windows Explorer. to do so you can goto Start>>Shut Down and Click Cancel while holding down SHIFT+CTRL+ALT. Now press ALT+CTRL+DEL this will bring Task Manager. Take File>>New Task and type explorer and press Enter.

Now if you go to any drive you can see the previously Hidden files there. Note that you will still need to enable Show Hidden files option in Folder Option.

This is the screen shot of a Microsoft Office document with an image inserted into it. The top one is the original image. But Office kept on showing it with white portions as black. This is shown at the bottom of the Screen shot.

If you have met with a problem like the above one its just a minor bug in Microsoft Office that renders transparency in PNG (Portable Network Graphics) images. To put it lightly Office will not show PNG images with transparency. The problem could be solved with a workaround. Try saving the image as GIF with transparency or make the transparent pixels just white (remove transparency) and add the new image. It will be rendered correctly. No other image type seems to cause a problem.

This is the simplest and slowest tip which will actually improve the boot time only by a small amount.

1 . Take Microsoft “System Configuration Utility” by typing “msconfig” in the RUN (WIN+R - more Windows KeyBoard shortcuts) dialogs (Start»Run).

2. Select “BOOT.ini” tab from General,SYSTEM.INI,WIN.INI,Services and Startup tabs. There will be a check box NOGUIBOOT enable it.

This will disable the Windows Splash Screen (an animated loading indicator with the windows logo on black background that appears just before the welcome screen) that appears every time you boot. This will improve the boot up time a little bit.

2. Goto Start»All Programs»Startup and delete all the programs that you don’t want at start up. (A powerful function is provided by msconfig but I’ll deal with in detail later.)So try this out today itself and tell me if you have any suggestions or doubts…

Warning
Enabling NOGUIBOOT will make the boot-time messages not to be shown. This means if an ERROR checking has been scheduled you will not see the dialogs that says “An error check has been scheduled press any key to cancel it:” also if you use third party tools to format your hard drive during boot time there can be a problem.

Watching your blog pass all the validations like html, xhtml, css etc. is actually satisfying for everybody. W3Schools validator tool is the most popular one used for the purpose. Many Blogger users should have found that however hard they try there will still be errors if the strict check is enabled, Why?

1. For Blogspot : If you know your page well and look at the errors shown you will come to the sad conclusion that you will NEVER be able to make your page valid..It’s because even if write your posts and template in valid xhtml the Blogger parts - Navbar, iFrames and attributes used with them are not properly xhtml formatted. You can do nothing about them.

There are some common errors among these especially if you come from an HTML background. Many of the attributes used in HTML are invalid if we use xhtml strict mode.

2. For all : If you are a blogger or a web page developer there can be errors in your document. Of course if you are only starting you may not be able to resolve many of this. So following are the main errors and the suggestions to rectify them.

General

Always use small letter for all tags and attributes. ie use <img src=” ” alt=” ” /> instead of <IMG arc=” ” ALT=” ” />

<META>

Use small letters as well as close the tags your meta tags should read
<meta name=”name” content=”content” />

<a href=”"></a>

Always use title attribute for <a tag <a href=”http://sample.com” title=”my title”>Link Text</a>

<img>

Empty tags are not allowed in XHTML. so you need to use <br /> for <br>, <hr /> for <hr>, <img /> for <img>

width=..,height=..,

It is always better to use <style=”width:xx px; …”> The usage is as follows
<img src=”PATH” width=”xx” border=”mm”>>. for this try using <img src=”PATH” style=”border: toppx rightpx bottompx leftpx; margin: toppx rightpx bottompx leftpx; width:xxpx;” alt=”Alternate text” /> (you can use negetive numbers for margin border etc.. and also px can be changed to cm centimeter, in inch etc..)

alt=”TEXT”

Never forget to put alternate text, the text shown in image disabled browsers. (always use some text that best describes you image)

<sctipt language=”JavaScript”>

Use <script type=”text/javascript(VBscript)“>

<style>

be sure you use <style type=”text/css”>

<u>

This tag for underlining can’t be used (it works still) use <font style=”text-decoration:underline;”>

Most common errors - from W3Schools site

not using </li> or other closing tags, usage of empty tags like <br>, not using alt in images etc…

So check your web page for errors and go care fully through the result page so that next time you edit your page the error wont repeat.