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.

Can I disable the RESTART option after completing windows update? Is there any way to cancel a Reboot?

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 for the faint of heart or slow typers!!!)

Not only will we show you how to disable the automatic restart option after updates via Group Policy we will show you how to quickly cancel a reboot.

1. Go to Start –> Run, type “gpedit.msc”.
2. Go to Computer Configuration –> Administrative Templates –> Windows Components –> Windows Update.
3. Look for option “No Auto Restart For Scheduled Automatic Update installation” and Enable that option.



4. This will make sure that your computer is not rebooted automatically, instead it will just notify you for a reboot. It will be users choice as to when to reboot your computer
5. If in case you want it to notify you again and again, after a specific interval of time, then look for option “Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations”. Enable that option and specify the time.

Everything above is all easy, its just editing some policies which you can perform easily. [TechiesDen]

Now to cancel a reboot:

1. Start
2. Run
3. Type Shutdown -a and hit enter

Thats it, that will cancel your impending doom if you hit it fast enough!

_TheStopRestartingMyComputerAdmiN_

Mount Your Mac on Your PC Using Target Disk Mode.

You read that right homeboy.

Now that I have jumped deep into the pool that is Apple I have discovered some tricks that those fan boys don’t want you to know.

I am going to combine two of them into one tip for you out there in AtA land.

The two tricks are - reading ANY MAC disk on your PC or from within BootCamp. And the other is to use Mac’s fancy smancy ultra insecure target disk mode to turn a MAC of your choosing into nothing more than a glorified firewire drive sans security!

Using Virtual Server 2005 to run a virtual machine on Windows Home Server

As you might have read on AtA, Windows Home Server (WHS) is Awesome.

WHS backs up all the machines on my network for me, gives me a central location to store all my files (MP3’s, Photo’s, etc) with redundancy in case a drive fails, gives me remote access to my files, and is able to do so much more…

But it can’t do everything. The OS partition for WHS is small and to get your application to start after WHS boots you need to either log on to the server and start it or get it to run as a service. Neither of which is a perfect solution if you want to do something automatically.

For example, I wanted to download podcasts to my podcast folder on my WHS. I could have just installed HappyFish, my current rss aggregator, to the WHS and let it do the work but if the server rebooted I wouldn’t always know I needed to remote in to the WHS and re-launch HappyFish, and I had other programs I wanted to run as well. What to do?

As it turns out WHS is based on the Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 supports Virtual Server 2005, therefore Windows Virtual Server 2005 will run on Windows Home Server. Whew, type ‘Windows’ much…

Using Windows Virtual PC on a local machine, I created a virtual Windows XP Machine and did all the current Windows Updates and installed HappyFish. Doing this locally was easier for me since I installed the OS using my local DVD drive and my local machine has a faster processor than my WHS but you can potentially install from within VS2005.

Next you will need to:

• Install VS2005 on your Windows Home Server. I kept the suggested port of 1024
• Create share for virtual machines on your Windows Home Server ( ex. \\whs\virtualMachines ) and copy the virtual image files to a folder there.
• Launch your browser (Only IE supports running the virutal images from the browser) and head over to the Virtual Server web interface. http://whs:1024 for me.
• Next add your new virtual machine under Virtual Machines by clicking Add and supply the path to your share with the virtual machine image you created. \\whs\VirtualMachineImages\WindowsXPPro\WinXP.vmc for me.
• Now you can configure the virtual machine by choosing Configure under Virtual Machines and selecting the virtual machine. Since the server will need to be restarted occasionally I decided to have the virtual machine always automatically start when the server starts and save state and keep undo disks on shut down. These settings are under ‘General Properties’. To automatically start the virtual machine you need to supply user credentials for an account on the WHS that will have access to the virtual machine files. I chose to use the administrator account.
• Next you need to add a network. Under ‘Network Adapters’ choose the External Network with the name of the adapter in the Windows Home Server. This will give your virtual machine a virtual network adapter and connect it to your LAN through the physical adapter in the WHS.
• I Setup my virtual machine to set it’s own IP Statically. Depending on your LAN setup and how you hand out IP’s you may need to make some changes to get your new virtual machine an IP.

You will see that VS2005 warns that SSL security is not enabled. As long as you are not opening up your VS2005 ports to the outside you can ignore this warning as the only unencrypted data is staying within your LAN.

Depending on how you plan to manage your virtual machines you may not need to open up these ports. Since my image is an XP Pro image I turned on Remote Access and I can use Remote Desktop Connection to gain access to the virtual machine. I also installed the connector software ( but turned off backups  ) and can use the WHS login page to remote to this machine from anywhere just like any other machine on my LAN via the WHS web front end.

If I need to access the VS2005 page from the outside I can Remote to any machine and use a browser from that machine.

After this little bit of work you now have a machine on your LAN with access to your WHS shares that is on all the time. It’s even green since you are utilizing a machine that is on all the time already without having to to add another machine with a power supply .

HP has sent us a sneak peak as to what is coming up for next year. Stay tuned for the exciting details over the next few weeks. And if you have any WHS work-a-rounds or hacks… WE WANT TO KNOW! That is what the comments are for.

How to Rip DVDs with ImgBurn.

A previous article explains how to use the awesome VLC player to rip a DVD to an MPEG-1 file. Technically, it gets the job done, but there are other options. Storage is dirt cheap so why not retain the full image quality and size as well as all the menus, languages, subtitles and bonus material from the original DVD. Using ImgBurn you can rip the entire disc to an ISO file and then use the VLC player to watch the DVD just like you had the physical disc in your drive.

After downloading and installing ImgBurn, a wizard will offer a few choices.

The one you want to choose is Create image file from disc.

Before we start ripping, we need to prevent ImgBurn from splitting the file into multiple parts since we want to end up with a single ISO file of the entire disc. Go to Tools > Settings and click on the Read tab. Under options, change the value of File Splitting from Auto to None. Click OK to go back to the main screen.

The main screen shows everything you would want to know about this disc. Under Destination, click the folder and navigate to a location where you want to store the image file. Be sure you have enough space. Look in the window on the right, the value for Size is how many bytes the disc contains (this disc is 4.6 Gigs).

When you are ready, click the button at the bottom with the green arrow. The ripping process will begin and the screen will give you a progress indicator including the estimated time remaining.

Go do something else while this runs, it’s going to take a while. A dual layer disc can hold more than 8 Gigs and you should rip at the lowest speed you can bear for best results.

When it’s done you will have a file called ‘Name of the disc’ .ISO.

Now, start VLC player and select Open > File. Navigate to the ISO file and select it. VLC player will start playing the file and the result will appear just like you were playing the physical disc.

Now you can enjoy the full quality and functionality of the DVD without having to lug around all those discs.

ImgBurn is a very powerful piece of software that does a lot of other things, including burning image files to disc, and it is completely FREE (I know the Admin loves free). It runs on all versions of Windows, including Vista and all 64-bit versions of Windows.

One thing ImgBurn will NOT do is rip encrypted discs (discs with CSS and/or Macrovision). For that task you need a tool called DVD Decrypter. The developer of DVD Decrypter is no longer working on the software due to issues with the Macrovision corporation and the obvious DMCA violations the product allows. It wouldn’t be proper to advise you on how to rip protected material or commit DMCA violations, but if you do happen to obtain a copy of DVD Decrypter, you will see that its interface and operation is very similar to that of ImgBurn.

See what’s going on when you are away from your pc using a simple search.

When the cat’s away the mice will play!

Ever get the feeling someone has been messing with your machine while you were away?

Your trusted Anti-virus isn’t telling you there is something wrong but you know deep down in your gut something is off- and chances are it is! After all an unprotected windows machine can be infected on the Internet in under 10 seconds now-a-days so if you are missing some patches or have an easy password… Whoa Boy!

This is what The Admin does when he gets that not so secure feeling aka the “I think I have been hacked” panic.

So now you have that not so secure feeling? You can follow these easy steps with no software other than windows search needed.

1. I open task manager with Control Shift Escape and sort my processes by CPU usage from high to low - I kill what i don’t know ( I do know a lot of process names and such but even I don’t know every process in the world - if you are unsure Google it! - FYI - Windows will not let you kill system processes.)
2. Next I open a search box and look for modified files within the last 24 HRS (or however long you were away for!)
3. Now you have a perimeter to cordon off - your crime scene so to speak. Scrutinize these files as your jump off point.
4. Open Log files, examine exe files, read text files to make sure they don’t contain your personal info in them, new user profiles and directories, funny file or directory names. Hackers like to use names you would think are system processes like winservice.exe or MScontrol.com.

All from a simple search… The power of simplicity. If you need assistance send us screenshots or the file name in question and The Admin will get right back to you!

All of this is CSI like evidence to help you piece together what is going on. If you find files or directories you cant access, large amounts of space are missing from your machine and still don’t come across anything using this method re-install your anti-virus software and run a full scan. Still turning up nothing and still paranoid? Install a different antiviral package like Kaspirsky and scan scan scan.

If you still turn up nada chances are you are clean!

_TheWhoDidWhatAdmiN_