4 Simple Steps to Change Your Computer Sounds

Tired of your standard Windows Startup and Shutdown tunes?

If you’re like me, you use your Windows-based computer almost every day.  The startup and shutdown sounds have just gotten a little boring to be honest.  Here are some simple steps to use your favorite voice, music excerpt, or sound for your computer’s start-up and shutdown sequence.  You’ll need two soundbites.

Step 1. Choose the soundbites: Choose the track which you want to play at start-up and shutdown jingles.  Key to note:

1. It must be in the .WAV format.
2. The soundbite shouldn’t be too long otherwise you could be waiting for the bite to end before you begin computing.

Your preferred file is likely an mp3, but regardless, if its not in .WAV format, you can easily convert it using  any converter.  My preference is audacity, which is an open source music editor <– it allows you to actually select a “soundbite” from any song.

Step 2.   Rename the new files. Rename these files as “Windows XP Startup.WAV” and “Windows XP Shutdown.WAV” respectively.

Step 3. Rename the old files.

1. Goto “C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA”
2. Find the files “Windows XP Startup.WAV” and “Windows XP Shutdown.WAV”, and rename them to Windows XP Startup_old.WAV and  Windows XP Shutdown_old.WAV respectively. This step is required for the case if you need to revert back to these sounds, otherwise you can ignore this step and just delete them (not recommended).

Step 4. Save your new files. Just copy your files from step 2 into the directory “C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA”

You now have new startup and shutdown tunes.

Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics.  Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website.  You can also read her blog which discusses phone number privacy issues.

Group Policy: Desktop Lockdown Part 1

I get a lot of questions about how to “lock down” workstations.

So, in the next series of tips, I’m going to give you some little strategic “base hits” for doing that.

Indeed, there’s s not a “magic bullet” toward true desktop lockdown. And, well, I also know SOME people tend to go “overboard” once they start tasting the sweet, sweet taste of “users not bothering them anymore.”

But, let’s (collectively) try not to go bananas as we implement some of these strategies. (What? People dealing with ‘Policy Control’ can sometimes go bananas once they start locking things down? Never!)

The Tip: Replacing your shell

So, in this first tip, I want to share a neat secret. Did you know you can “replace the shell” ? It’s true. You don’t NEED to use Explorer as your shell. How about “Calc” ? Yep.. Login, and… Calc. Or Solitaire. Or, DogFoodMaker. That’s it. The only app running. Nothing else.

It’s possible.

Step 1: Choosing your shell

The policy is found under:

User | Policies | Administrative Templates | System | Custom User Interface

Enter in “c:\windows\system32\calc.exe” to try.

(I’m using hard coded paths, but you might want to use variables.)

Step 1A: A more useful shell

A more useful thing to do would be Internet Explorer, say, for cafeteria, library machines, and others.

Try entering in this (using quotes)
“C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe”

Step 2: Locking down your desktop a little bit

We want to make it so users cannot use task manager, or lock out the machine. Thankfully those options are located under:

User | Policies | Administrative Templates | System | CTL+ALT+DEL Options

You might also want to Turn off Windows hotkeys:

User | Administrative Templates | Windows Comp | Windows Explorer | ?Turn off Windows+X hotkeys?

Step 3: Lock down IE to your liking

There are a zillion options here. But some of my top favorites are

User | Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Internet Exp. | Browser Menus |

“File Menu: Disable open menu option”

and

“File menu: Disable closing the browser and Explorer windows”

Other areas to explore and control are the: Toolbars and Internet Control Panel sections.

Now, you’ve quickly taken a machine, and made it “IE only” and “pretty well locked down.”

It’s not perfect. Users could still get to, say, the command prompt by typing in
“c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe” into the browser window.

But you’re almost home now, and that’s a pretty good start. Do you have group policy tips, tricks and how to’s to share? Well then hit up the comments and make yourself heard!

Written by Jeremy Moskowitz of GPanswers.com

Frustrated With Firefox Failing To Properly Render Web Pages?

The Firefox add on IE Tab solves this problem, though with a continued frustration. With IE Tab you can embed IE in tabs and see web sites as they should be seen. Just click on the IE Tab icon, and the rendering engine switches to IE, while you remain in Firefox. For sites regularly visited, their URL’s can be added to the

IE Tab Site Filter. Neat, but I found myself frustrated with having to frequently add URL’s to the filter. (Go to the IE Tab options, check the enable box under Site Filters, then add URL’s as necessary.) After adding a URL to the site filter, each time you visit that site Firefox and IE Tab will automatically display that site, and all of

its pages, as if in IE Explorer. But you will actually still be in Firefox with all of its benefits.

Frequently adding sites to the site filter is a time consuming step I wanted to eliminate. Then, one recent morning, it struck me how simple this was going to be. I went to the site filter, deleted all those URL’s and added *.* as the only filter. Voila! The best of Firefox and IE together in one place. Now all the foxes are happy. And, by the way, if this slows my computer it isn’t enough for me to notice it. Pages still appear more or less “instantaneously” on my DSL connection.

Admin’s Arsenal: BareGrep

Ok, here is the situation: you’ve got 1200 script files in a particular directory on your XP workstation, and you need to find any script that references “\\atl01\share” (queue Dennis Hopper voice), what do you do?!

Traditional convention is that you spend several hours opening each file in notepad and doing a “find”, or you might be able to cut it down to an hour or so if you opened several dozen of the files at a time in Notepad++ and did “find in all files”, or you could take about a half an hour and move the files over to a *NIX machine and use grep. I’ve got a better answer: BareGrep.exe from our friends at Bare metal Software. BareGrep is basically a GUI version of the *NIX grep command for Windows machines, and it works wonderfully.Much like BareTail (which I reviewed here), BareGrep is fully portable, meaning you can run it from a USB drive!

Here is a short list of some of the features in BareGrep:

• Regular expression text search (that’s inside the files)
• Wildcard and regular expression file search
• Files to find or search can be specified with a regular expression
• Multiple files can also be specified with the mouse
• Recursive directory search
• Frequently used text search patterns may be saved, named and edited
• Searching while you type, to find results quicker
• Capturing groups (using bracket characters ‘(’ and ‘)’ in a regex) extract strings from files
• Tabular presentation of search results
• Export/copy of search results in many formats
• Search files of any size (> 2GB)

Not only will this utility do all that, but it is usable from the commandline as well! What more could you want? Wait, what? You want… more features? Well you’re in luck, as BareGrep comes in two forms, the Free version (what we’ve covered so far), and the Registered version ($25 at the time of this review), which offers all of the features of the free version, as well as:

• Selecting a search result line shows that line in context in the file
• Tabs display files recently viewed
• Tabs may be positioned on any side of the window and oriented horizontally or vertically
• Lines containing particular strings can be highlighted to help you notice important text
• Highlight colors are fully customizable

Now I can’t even begin to cover the colossal amount of time that this utility has saved me, but I can tell you that it is well worth the price of admission. BareGrep can be downloaded here.

How Group Policy is Like Pumkin Chuckin’…

Written by Jeremy Moskowitz of GPanswers.com

Sunday, I went and saw the most amazing thing ever. Since I used to live in Delaware, and now live in Philadelphia, I finally decided to go out and see it for myself.

That’s right: the world championships of Punkin’ Chunkin.

For the uninitiated, Punkin’ Chunkin is a competition to see who can launch a pumpkin the farthest. The basic categories are: Centrifugal, Air Cannon, Catapult and Trebuchet. 72 machines in all in this year’s competition. Yowsa !

I took some pictures, and got one amazing video of (what I think was) the most interesting device there. You can check out my pictures and the one video here:

https://moskowitzinc.infusionsoft.com/link/94db4cc00/249f00

You can see the official website here, including rules and other videos. Or get

“Flying Pumpkins — the Movie!”

http://www.punkinchunkin.com/main.htm

The winning shot this year went more than 3,000+ feet — into the wind!

If you can’t have a good time at Pumpkin’ Chunkin — you can’t have a good time anywhere. You should go. It’s weird. It’s fun. It’s hurling pumpkins using machines. It’s like Mythbusters Live — with real people and real pumpkins!

C’mon !!

And, as usual, while I’m not thinking about work, I end up thinking about work.

The history of this thing is neat: it started out innocently enough. A couple of farmers in a field and a little bragging rights as “payment.” In other words, they started small.

And so can you. I know lots of people who are basically afraid of GPOs. And for good reason. They can be dangerous if not used properly. Kind of like hurling 12 pound pumpkins from a trebuchet or an air cannon. Used well, they’re both lots of fun!

So, here’s some advice if you’re just getting started with Group Policy (so you don’t blow your network apart like a blown-up pumpkin):

(1) Use an offline test network: Don’t think that the Group Policy Object action you WANT to have happen is always GOING to happen. Make sure it works FIRST in a test lab before bringing that GPO over into production.

(2) Read the Explain text: The policy settings’ explain text is your best friend. In recent years, it’s become more and more accurate. So, read first, test second.

(3) Have others validate your work: Just because it “looks right to you” doesn’t mean the “goal” has been attained. Have others double-check your work to make sure what you’re doing is accurate.

(4) Start small; don’t go overboard: This is the biggie. When people catch “GPO fever” it’s common for people to “go a little crazy” and go a little overboard.

PS: If you blow up your pumpkin as it comes out of your machine, they call it “Making Pie.” Don’t be the guy (or gal) who makes pie out of your network.

Written by Jeremy Moskowitz of GPanswers.com