October 15, 2009 - 3:59 am
Tags: How To, Tips, windows
Posted in Questions | 7 comments
Please follow this email chain between myself and our friend Karl AKA ATA.
—————————————
ME
Here’s the scenario….
Backed up info off old laptop to external HD.
During XP install I saw two identical drives…nuked the first partition and tried to install. XP said no. Nuked the 2nd one…XP allowed the install. JOY!!!
You know where this is going don’t you…..
Anywho…it [...]
August 4, 2009 - 12:00 am
Tags: Free, How To, review, Tips, windows
Posted in How To, Reviews | 7 comments
So you don’t want to dole out the big bucks for some fancy smancy cd/dvd authoring suite just to burn cd’s and disk images? Or how about you don’t want the bloat from said suite?
No it’s probably that you are just like me and a big cheapskate when it comes to buying software!
Either which [...]
June 24, 2009 - 12:00 am
Tags: How To, Tips, windows
Posted in Admin's Arsenal, How To | 2 comments
Yes, we know you have taken a million digital photos over the last year, on your fancy shmancy new camera. And we also know the holiday season is almost upon us. Being the geek that you are, you could not just leave your pictures named digital_image_13456.jpg for your slide shows…
We just couldn’t have that now, [...]
April 13, 2009 - 1:31 am
Tags: Tips, windows
Posted in How To | 2 comments
James from Virginia wanted to know if it was safe to delete these Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files from his network. Check out our answer and step by step removal tips.
Running in a mixed Windows/Mac environment I find it annoying to deal with all the little artifacts the great OS’s leave behind. All of our mixed [...]
April 5, 2009 - 12:00 am
Tags: How To, Tips, windows shortcuts
Posted in How To | 4 comments
It’s very annoying and counter productive for your hands to leave the keyboard as you use your mouse to click, click, clickity click click away at something.
Join the ranks of power users to add keyboard shortcuts for every computer task you do. Yup Any Task!
Built into Windows is the ability to let you assign a [...]
MJ writes to us that her machine runs updates around lunch time and she keeps getting the prompt do you want to restart now?
Not only is it annoying – sometimes she clicks yes by accident and her whole world comes crashing down. (See the fix for this at the bottom of the post – not [...]
Hey Kiddies,
Commodore 64 here with a quick how-to for Photoshop. Have you ever downloaded an image you’d like to use on your website but it was sandwiched on top of some ghastly color which totally doesn’t fit with your “flow”? Well here is a quick, no-frills, way to a transparent image that you can set [...]
January 22, 2009 - 12:01 am
Tags: Tips, windows
Posted in How To, Questions, Security | 2 comments
I get asked all the time how the hell do I bring up the security box (control + alt + delete) in a remote desktop session and here is the answer:
To use Control + Alt + Delete in a Remote Desktop Connection terminal, use Ctrl + Alt + End instead.
I tested it and it [...]
January 22, 2009 - 12:00 am
Tags: Tips, windows
Posted in How To, Questions | 6 comments
Brought Back Up Top By Popular Demand…
Have you ever wanted to copy the path of a file located deep in your hard drive’s under belly (that you call a hard drive structure)? We are pretty sure you have one time or another, seeming that you are here at AskTheAdmin.com reading this article…
We previously covered how [...]
January 20, 2009 - 12:00 am
Tags: networking, Question
Posted in How To, Questions | No comments
Almost 3 weeks in to the New Year and the Admin needs some rest – maybe a day off?
Yeah right we have even more emails today and I am studying for my 2008 Microsoft Certs! This has been a big year for the AtA gang – stay tuned for more of our geeky flavored content [...]
June 25, 2007 - 1:05 pm
My daughter was 3 when she started using my PC.
What I did was I set up icons for her to go direct to Noggin.com, PBSKids.com, NickJr, and Playhouse Disney.
Then I got her, her own PC(a dinosaur from work). I gave her the icons and showed her which ones go where. She is totally independent on the PC. I showed her how to turn it on and off, login and how to get into what she needs.
Granted she is only 4 so she wont surf around to places she doesn’t know, and she can’t really spell/read yet so that helps matters with her going to sites that I don’t want her going to.
Also, to protect the home network, she is using an old Windows 2000 PC patched to the gills, with AVG running and her web browser is Firefox. So nothing executes on the PC unless I tell it to.
We regulate her time on it to a few hours a week at best. She’s a great kid so she doesn’t abuse it.
It is a matter of to each there own. I have read some studies on parallels of how much time a kid spends in front of the TV and on the computer as to how it correlates to IQ and performance in school. Less = more. Free, creative play time is much more important, but it helps if they have a familiarity with the PC because their lives will be spent using them in school and in industry/business when they get older.
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June 25, 2007 - 2:35 pm
Speaking of kids, there is a great Ubuntu distro for kids called Edubuntu.
Now, one of the first things I would do would be NOT add them as power or administrative users. Also, on most home routers, you can setup content filtering and restrict sites like MySpace, Porn sites what have you.
There is also software out there like Netnanny, that is good for monitoring your kids. Of course no software can replace your job as a parent to keep your kids safe. Never let your kids have their own PC in their room. Be nosey, see what they are doing online. So what if they get mad at you, they will get over it.
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June 25, 2007 - 2:51 pm
has anyone used that distro of ubuntu that was mentioned above?
what is restricted? how is it achieved?
we have had a lot of responses to this one via email this morning. i will compile everything and add it to the post when im in front of a pc again.
theAdmin via mobile
how about a quick explanation of what ubuntu is and how easy it is to run on a computer you already have an operating system on?
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June 25, 2007 - 3:01 pm
in case anyone was wondering the previous comment was front yours truly snitches…
glitches in the mobile to blogger setup but it loks like the cookies are working now.
one.
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June 25, 2007 - 3:30 pm
great information you guys rock.
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June 25, 2007 - 4:44 pm
I installed edubuntu once on a VM machine. i didn’t spend a lot of time playing with it though so i couldn’t tell you about any restrictions. I think for that distro you would have to lock it down like any other Linux distro.
It is very kid friendly though with a cute little GUI that they would like. It is pre-configured with math and learning games for them. I hear a lot of schools around the world are installing it.
Maybe mentioning it was slightly off topic…
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June 25, 2007 - 11:07 pm
most def. not off topic el di pablo. Its a great OS for kiddies and I am looking into it more in depth now.
Thanks!
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October 6, 2007 - 9:59 am
If you are using Windows, create a new limited account for the kids.
If you are using Google then go to the search page, click ‘preferences’ and enable safe search filtering. The anti-malware program called ‘Spybot – Search and destroy’ has a large blacklist which works for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera . After updating click on the shield labelled ‘immunize’. Then click on the green cross. There are a lot of horrors out there and even a typing error can land you in them. I wish I knew more.
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January 13, 2008 - 8:01 pm
Pretty good protection from porn sites, and it’s totally a free service: http://www.openDNS.org
How it works: you use them as your domain name server (DNS) instead of your ISP, and then you can set your account to block porn/other objectionable sites. Totally configurable and for FREE. The only way around it is if your kid goes to some host lookup site and gets the IP manually, they can enter that into the browser and access the site. Most kids won’t know how to do this tho.
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