How to get your computer online using your iPhone and 3g magic.

This information comes to us via Jewdass's comments from LifeHacker. He offered up a step by step guide to getting the most out of your 3G iPhone by teaching us how to tether.

1. Jailbreak your iPhone 3G (or first gen iPhone running the 2.0 software). Install OpenSSH via Cydia.

2. Create an ad-hoc network on your computer. On Macs, just click on the Wi-Fi icon in the menubar and select "Create Network." On Windows, set up internet connection sharing.

3. Join the iPhone to this network via Wi-Fi as usual.

4. On the iPhone, under Settings->Wi-Fi, select the network you have joined to view connection details. Write down its IP address.

5. From the Mac's Terminal, run the following command:

ssh -ND 9999 root@IPHONE_IPADDR

but replace IPHONE_IPADDR with the IP you wrote down in step 4. Login. The default root password is alpine; you should really login normally over SSH and change this.

Windows users: the free SSH client Putty will allow you to accomplish this same step. Don't install Cygwin+OpenSSH as some suggest, that's massive overkill.

6. Configure your browser to use a SOCKS5 proxy server at localhost:9999. Here's more on setting up a SOCKS proxy in Firefox; Adam did it on his Mac in Safari.

7. Surf. I've successfully done web browsing and IRC, anything that supports SOCKS4/5 should work. Haven't yet had success with my Citrix client :(

For the curious: The iPhone is joining your Wi-Fi network, but with no internet access on this network it falls back to using 3G for outgoing packets. ssh -ND creates a local proxy server that relays packets from the loopback address on your pc to the iPhone, which dutifully proxies them out the cellular connection.

Browsing is surprisingly fast, 3G really shows its potential here. It's zippier than doing it directly on the iphone, which I put down to rendering delay.

A more ideal solution of course would be to get the iPhone showing up as a regular access point. I see no reason why this wouldn't be possible, and will be doing some research myself, mostly observing what Unix processes handle this on desktop OS X, and see if they can be compiled from source for the iPhone. In the meantime, the steps to accomplish this are not bad and will definitely serve in a pinch.

Thanks Jewdass and Lifehacker for this one! You made some Fan Boys very happy today!

_TheJailBrokenAdmiN_

Unlimited free tech support for installing Vista SP1!

Did you have problems installing Vista SP1? Were you able to finally overcome your issues and get it working?

The boys in Redmond are offering up free Phone, Email and live chat support for Vista SP1.

So if you were having issues with getting this SP to install now is your chance to get some help right from the donkeys mouth...

You might even be able to swing a few other questions at the tech before he offers to transfer you to paid support.

All you need is your Product ID number. Just right click on My Computer-> Properties to find it.

Let us know how it goes for ya if you use it. Or maybe you should be submitting those issues to ATA!

Vista SP 1 Free Support Link

_TheMicrosoftIsGivingSomethingAwayAdmiN_

FREE Full Hard Drive Encryption

So there you are at Starbucks sipping on your latte, and surfing on their incredibly high priced wi-fi with your brand new Alienware laptop thinking to yourself, "Self! This is a mighty good latte!".

A few minutes later, you slip into a latte induced coma (Work with me here.)

After about an hour or two you wake up with foam and cinnamon all over your face, and a splitting headache, but that isn't the trouble. The trouble is that someone snatched your new Alienware laptop with all of your sensitive personal information (edit: a 24esque - mission impossible attempt in your stories to friends and family. We know how it goes. Que up the theme music).

Stuff like bank information, passwords, etc! No biggie right? I mean you have a pretty good password.

Seriously, who is going to guess banana12 right?

WRONG!

With FREE software available on the internet, you can boot up to a CD and browse files, or even change the administrators password on your laptop. Then all of your sensitive information becomes their sensitive information which they will use to take you for everything you are worth (It's called Identity Theft, look into it).

Well, the bad guys can't get to your information if you take stronger precautions to secure your data. One of the best ways you can do that is with full hard drive encryption. And lucky for you, I have tested a FREE software that can do it.

CompuSec is a free security suite that among many other things, encrypts your hard drive (including the operating system) using a fast 256bit AES encryption. When the bad guys try to look at your files, all they see is a blank hard drive.


So lets go back to our scenario then, the bad guy got your laptop, but you encrypted it using CompuSec... The joke is on him! Actually, that isn't true, he now has your $4000 Alienware laptop, but at least he doesn't have your personal information and you won't end up on Dateline's "To Catch an ID Thief."

Posted By El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power

How can I backup the information I cant see before formatting A Windows Box?

Every time a machine gets put in front of me that needs to be formatted I first have to backup all the user's personal data. I can't see their passwords for their IM or Email accounts - So how can I retrieve it? We have covered programs that reveal the password behind the Asterisks before but this goes much further. Check out what we can backup with this method:

• Documents/Pictures/Music Collections
  
• Mail Settings (Accounts, Passwords, Address Book etc.
  
• Dialup & VPN Setting.
  
• Messengers Accounts
  
• Windows & Applications License Keys.
  
• and much more...

Data such as Documents and Media files are simple to backup. But how can I know what's behind those asterisks to save their passwords? You ask how can I collect all those licenses and other hidden data ???? And how can we do it FAST and efficient? We definitely don't want to end up like lost password Lucy below...

Well, the solution comes from a great site for small and useful freeware utilities called NirSoft. The site includes many utilities that reveals your precious information. It's like the missing piece of the puzzle. Some of us have used the Windows documents and settings migration tools - but this is so much better.

But wait! What I need to satisfy the inner admin in me IS - Automation !!

So I've collected some of the utilities, added my own batch script and packed it all to an automated self-extracted archive called: SaveMyData


When you run it, this batch will:

• Collect all your private settings.
  
• Export the data to text files.
  
• Save the files in a Backup folder in your system drive.
  

The Settings includes:

Mail Settings, VPN & Dialups Passwords, Product Keys, Messengers Passwords , IE AutoComplete Passwords, Network Passwords, Wireless Networks Keys (WEP/WPA)

* note: one of the tools (Pspv) exports the data to a Text file and also to a Data file that can later be manually imported back using that same tool.

I know that these utilities drastically changed the amount of time I need to dedicate to the pre-format actions.

I sure hope it will help you guys too :-)

Cheers,
YaronM

Open Source E-Mail Encryption

"...Perhaps you think your email is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? If you hide your mail inside envelopes, does that mean you must be a subversive or a drug dealer, or maybe a paranoid nut?..." -Philip Zimmerman, Creater of PGP

Of course it doesn't, it simply means you value your privacy.

PGP, or more specifically OpenPGP is a great, and more importantly FREE method of securing your data and your e-mails. You don't want "The Man" reading your e-mails, and neither do I.

There are many PGP and OpenPGP programs out there, but the one that is the most versatile that I have seen is called GnuPG. It comes in some form for every operating system. It comes standard with Ubuntu Linux, and there are versions for Windows and MAC.

If you are a fan of Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird like I am, then you will be happy to know that there are GnuPG plugins for both of them. Enigmail for Thunderbird, and FireGPG for Firefox. Of course you have to have GnuPG installed for the plugins to work.

If you have any doubts on the strength of the encryption, it uses PKI and the encryption keys can go up to 4096 bits, which is so strong that if you take all of the computing power on the planet it would still take something ridiculous like 10 billion years to crack (Give or take). I also found a quaint little article here about how the FBI has problems cracking PGP.

"So ya ya ya, yackity smackity... where do I download this fantastic software?"

I thought you would never ask. You can download it from the following sites:

Windows

Mac

Linux

Enjoy!

Written by El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power

How to recover from a HD crash for free.

I Did something pretty cool the other day that I think AtA readers will appreciate.

I Had a hard drive die on a guy in the accounting department. Lets just say he does payroll for the company and I still want to get paid!

Cyclical redundancy check failed was the message. BSD on boot, all that jazz.

Yikes....

Used my Winternals recovery disc and tried to run a chkdsk on it to fix it. No joy.

Mounted the drive in an identical PC that was working and I found a tool online: http://www.partition-recovery.com/download.htm

Used it to gain access to the partition and it has a utility to create a RAW image of the disc. Sucked up 36GB of NAS space, but c'est la vie.

Now WTF am I to do with a RAW drive image??? I figured I could ghost it elsewhere and hope to god the bad sectors do not kill the ghost.

Then I found this: http://liveview.sourceforge.net/

This tool took the RAW disc image and converted it(with the use of VMWare's VMount utility and Java to a bootable VMWare Virtual Machine. You can use their player or server product which is free to d/l to do so.

Booted the machine and installed the right tools and a network card into the VM...bang. PC was back and running in its previous state with some minor corruption of some stuff under the start menu, but pretty much all the data was there!

Made a backup of the data and pushed it to the network, booted the other machine that will replace this girl's box and restored all the data back where it belonged....voila!

Pretty nifty little way around a hard drive crash.

Now I realize all data should be stored on the network, with back up tapes/etc. But this is the way that management wants her to work...so, it is how we have to do it. The machine in question was a P4 IBM desktop running 2000 Pro with NTFS drive.

Hope this is something you guys can add to your toolkits. Do you have another method to solve this madness? Leave it in the comments.

Firefox Plugin: RSS Ticker creates a news ticker comprised of your feeds! (all platforms)

A Firefox extension called RSS Ticker turns your Firefox live bookmarks into a scrolling RSS ticker. Thats right! You wind up with an amazing bar of scrolling RSS goodness. The RSS Ticker sits below the status bar and shows your live bookmarks as they are updated. Almost every thing about RSS Ticker is customizable, like placement of your feeds, update intervals, number of feeds shown, scrolling speed,width, etc.

That's right no more waiting to go check out the AskTheAdmin.com RSS feed - get updated information ASAP! I know this may stop some of you from dropping by the site as often - but to make our readers quality of life (tech) a little better we will risk it!

If you check your feeds any where as frequently as I do this will do wonders for you! Now your browser will check your feeds without interrupting you.



RSS Ticker is a free download for all platforms that can run FireFox. Awesome app Chris! Keep up the amazing work. [ChrisFinke]

And if you haven't noticed that character is from a new cartoon strip called Being Five that we are syndicating at the bottom of any AtA page!

_TheTickingAdmiN_

Is there such a thing as a Throw Away E-mail address?

How many times have you been asked online to provide your personal information, such as your name, number and e-mail address? If you are like me, thousands of times, almost everyday. Each time you do it too, you have this aching feeling in your stomach, because you know you are about to get about a thousand spam e-mails now.

So, what are you supposed to do? Give them a fake e-mail address? Perhaps, but what if they require verification. You know, they send you an e-mail and you have to open it up and click on some link. What are you supposed to do then?

I'll tell you what I do, I go to a little website called 10 Minute Mail. The name says it all, they give you an e-mail address that is literally only good for 10 minutes. If you need additional time, there is a link that resets the timer. After the time is up, the e-mail address self destructs. No muss, no fuss, and more importantly, no spam!

This service is absolutely free. However, if you decide to use it, they ask for a small donation through paypal. The donation isn't mandatory, but it is a nice gesture.

By El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power.net

Can I shrink a really long URL to make it easier to share?

They say necessity is the mother of all inventions, except for the bastard children of people looking to be lazy and productive.

Tinyurl has been around for a long whiles now and many of you probably use it on a daily basis and don't even know it. Websites use it to hide links, people use it to make it easier to tell someone a link over the phone as well as using it to overcome the limitation of how many characters you can type in a mobile browser.



It is very straight forward and best of all it is free. As we say at Ask the Admin - Free is for me!

Just go on over to http://www.tinyurl.com Input the link and boo yah you are returned with a short link.

Use it how you will. For good or evil - to get porn links through email filters, freak out your friends with unexpected goatse or something equally as disturbing (Rick Rolling) ... Any ideas?

Do you use tinyurl or something similar?

_TheHoneyIshrunkTheUrlAdmiN_

Vista Tip: Mount ISO (DVD, BIN, IMG,CCD, ETC.) images in Vista for free

Have you been a busy little bit-torrenter lately?

Do you have tons of ISO's laying around? Trying to mount them in Vista like you were used to in XP and not having any luck?

Our reader Tom in Wisconsin is and this sounds like a job for dum dum dum (key theme music)... AskTheAdmin!

Well it turns out the freeware utility offered from Microsoft to mount ISO Images doesn't work in Windows Vista. Thankfully there's another free utility that does work.


The utility that we will use is called Virtual Clone Drive. This utility will let you mount .ISO, .CCD, .DVD, .IMG, .UDF and .BIN files. Download the utility and start the setup process.

Select Yes or OK at the hardware prompt and continue. You might have to restart your computer. Now you should be able to mount any ISO image by just double-clicking on the file.

Note: If you are going to reinstall this utility, make sure you uninstall it first, or you'll BSOD yourself repeatedly.

Double Note: This utility does not work on Windows Vista 64 bit edition.

_TheIsoLovinAdmiN_

Can I add random quotes to my blog or website for FREE?

The title of this question here is a little misleading because you can use this little web app to serve lots of stuff besides quotes, like random ads or words of wisdom.

Get your geek on and swap out scripts and images galore!

Originally we used the free RandomQuote ASP generator to feed our geeky quotes in our sub header above. Have you seen it before?

Pretty cool stuff huh? Now what if I told you the Busted Tee Shirt Ads on the right bar were also served up by this generator?

Result: Different ad and quote ,out of our database, on every refresh!

After tweaking, pushing, prodding (our coder not the program) this proved to work very well and we have been very happy with the results. But after a while we realized that this handy little random generator, complete with a very aesthetically pleasing back-end editing system, (pictured to the bottom) would be perfect to randomly feed out anything our geeky little hearts desired.

You'll see a different quote, different ad on every page load, and all the same geeky love in front and behind it. You'll need an .ASP compatible web hosting plan at the very least to get started. Don't get scared - all this means is that you need a web hosting plan on the side but it doesn't necessarily have to point to your site. Just a server that supports ASP. This is because the files need to live somewhere on a server with Microsoft extensions. It also needs to give you a few MySQL Databases to make this easier but you can also pull it off with a connection to an Access Database, and with some basic ASP knowledge you can probably modify it to work with an Excel file as a data source as well.

The first thing you need to do is go to here and snatch this free package called RandomQ from Expirion.Net:

The directions are fairly simple. Here's the skinny:

• First copy the files/folders to your (ASP Compatible) web server.
  
• Then modify the config.asp file to point to your database and give it the correct credentials to do so. Refer to your web hosting control panel to see various details about your DB - you'll need that info to put into the config.asp file.
  
• The package comes with a convenient little script that creates all the necessary tables/columns when run against your database. Your DB will need this structure to properly communicate with the application.
  
• Now open the index.asp file in the /admin folder in your RandomQ directory to see if any errors arise. If they do arise, the problem is most likely with your config.asp file. Be sure it points to the correct place and that the credentials are correct. Next be sure the tables were created properly by browsing thru the database using the web interface usually provided by your web hosting service. If it's not provided you'll need to get into some of the graphical database management proggies, provided at MySQL.com, to connect to and be able to view your DB data.
  
• Once you get the inc_random.asp file to display properly and you can login successfully to the /admin/index.asp file, your in business. All in all, barring any technical issues, this whole process should take no more than 10 minutes.


• Now you have to get the inc_random.asp file to display on your blog, so the only way to accomplish getting information to be displayed cross-domain is with the use of an html iframe as follows (we've removed the html open and close brackets so the code won't get munched by blogger's server and you'd still be able to copy and paste the code for your own evil doing):
  

iframe src="http://www.YOURWEBHOST.com/RandomQ/inc_random.asp" vspace="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" hspace="0" frameborder="0" height="40"scrolling="no" width="100%".

Make sure you close your open Iframe tag with a /iframe

Now the fun part - put in your data by logging into the RandomQ admin console and get to steppin!

Which of our quotes do you like the best? Got any ideas?

Damn son!! Let us know in the comments! Why are you all quiet and shit?

Oh and thanks to Mike aka Commodore64 for his assistance on this article and a great find on the application as well as implementation of it.

_TheOn2HoursSleepAdmiN_

Why my new favorite web browser is FLOCK

I was a hard core Netscape user before the days of FireFox and before that I was all about IE4 . (Sorry for the re-run but Kayla didn't let us sleep this weekend!) So I have realized change is good and you live and you learn. So when I heard about Flock, I decided to give it a go. For you Face-bookers. Flickr'ers and Bloggers you can take advantage of the built in blog editor, Facebook galore in your sidebar and the ability to view yours and your friends photo streams right from Flock. Its neat, has a cool GUI. Flock is Fire Fox like but quicker and customized for what I do. I really dig it so far.

Oh did I mention it not only uses existing Firefox plugins but has its own as well??

This truly is the social web browser. There are downfalls to parts of it like no image uploading using their blogger interface but hey, this is only a beta. It does show integration with the top blogging software and has lots of new stuff I will be exploring throughout the week. If you want to give Flock a try you can grab it here.

From their website:

Flock is a social web browser based on the open source project Mozilla. It can be called a social browser, because of its tight integration with many social networking and social media services. Changing the purpose of a browser from a non-integrated window into the web to a more participatory portal to your favorite interactive sites, Flock seeks to gain significant market share by bringing your favorite social applications one step closer.

With Flock users can do many community involved activities such as uploading photos directly to Photobucket and Flickr, accessing news aggregation services, or using blogging tools. A full list of social media/networking extensions for Flock can be found here.

_TheSocialBrowsingAdmiN_

Codec issue for videos downloaded via Bit Torrent. Why dont my videos have audio?

Today's question is a very common problem that most of you have had one time or another. It is especially annoying if you are about to sit down to watch a video and you can't... Then you have to venture out onto the world wide web to try and hunt down a solution.

Look no further pirate video lover...

Help me Admin.

I downloaded some videos my family would love to watch. My buddy showed me how to use Azerus (a Bit Torrent client). I downloaded the files just like we did on his computer. They finished but the audio doesn't work on one file and neither the video or the audio work on another.

Both files played on my friends computer but he is away for a few days now. I can't go home without these files working! Please help.

Desperate in Denver

The first thing I recommended to Desperate in Denver was to download a free utility called G-Spot to analyze the file and also more often than not the K-lite codec pack fixes your issues and it is a free download here.

Anyone have any other answers to the codec issue of the day? What do you do when your precious educational videos pornography Bootlegs won't work?

_TheEncodingAdmiN_

Hey Cheapskate, Burn ISOs for free on any Windows Platform!

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 way this little free solution should float your boat. Check it out!

Reader NotBurntYet wrote in:

I need to burn an ISO on Windows Vista. Long story short I uninstalled the 7gb cd burning suite that came with the machine. I have been able to burn cd's from Explorer with Windows built in capability. BUT (you knew that was coming) I can not burn ISO's! I have a older copy of Nero but it is not compatible with Vista! HELP ME! I need to burn my game and can we make it free??

NotBurntYet, Ohio

Hey NotBurntYet, we have a solution for you - real simple like and best of all FREE! It is called ISORECORDER. ISO Recorder is a Window's power tool that's installer is around 1.2 mb. It seems to work for all the newer operating systems - XP or better. After you install it you can now automagically "burn CD and DVD images (DVD support is only available on Windows Vista), copy disks, make images of the existing data CDs and DVDs and create ISO images from a content of a disk folder" And all this from the context menu (Right Clicking). Lets check it out:

Download the appropriate package for your Operating System:

XP SP1 or No Service Pack
XP SP2, XP SP2 64 bit, and 2003
VISTA 32
VISTA 64

Next right click on the image you want to burn:


From there the steps are self explanatory - asking you where and how you want to burn from a simple little interface that looks like this:

You can also use ISORecorder as I said to make images dumb quick from cd's or dvd's in explorer as well like so:


Cool free stuff with a tiny little foot print! Add this to the how to get Windows XP running on an older machine and yourself a powerful older machine (with burner!) that does not need a huge amount of memory to run!

_TheLovesFreeStuffAdmiN_

Is there a tool to show me relevant information from specific sites about the website I am looking at?

This question made me go "huh?"

Then I thought about it a little and found a FireFox extension that does just that!

Yeah we know that you don't have time to read ALL the Blogs that you want to! At last check my RSS reader had over 300 feeds. We found a little FireFox extension that made us go "wow, that's pretty cool." And they called it RovR.


Let RovR fetch (get the play on words?) relevant information from your selected blogs about the page your are currently reading. Rovr fetches posts from your favorite blogs about anything you're browsing, and shows you summaries where you can open and read posts without leaving the web page you were on. Blogrovr also suggests popular items AND lets you Twitter about any site you're on too.

BlogRovR is a blog reader’s best friend.

BlogRovR shows you what YOUR favorite bloggers have to say about anything you're browsing, discreetly and on-the-fly as you browse.

Tell BlogRovR the blogs you like, and from then on, as you browse the web, Rovr instantly fetches you posts from them which link to whatever web page you’re viewing.

Rovr’s resizable tray slides in to show you summaries of posts about the current page. Click on a summary to read the full post, right on the page it’s about, or CTRL-click to open a new tab on the blog post.

Rovr helps you discover content from particularly relevant blogs.

BlogRovR also lets you Twitter about the pages you're on from the toolbar, search through just your blogs from your Blogrovr homepage, and get personalized suggestions from new blogs. Download it here.

TheWhereMyDogsAtAdmiN

Can I get Vista's fonts for free on XP...Legally?

The guys over at Ghacks are awesome and obviously not just for Google hacks check out this gem...

Today boys and girls we are going to learn how to get Vista's Clear Type fonts for FREE! Just like AtA likes it!

As I said before the guys over at Ghacks helped me out today when I needed to get these Vista-esque fonts for a sales rep on the go. They were using XP and being very adamant about having the clean looking smooth Vista fonts for his presentation. Wait there's more! The presentation was in 10 minutes! ..Gasp..


Sure on a normal day when I had more time I might have gone for one of my Vista install cd's or hit up some of my less reputable search engines. But after a quick google I found the above article pointing me to download the FREE Power Point 2007 Viewer.

I remotely connected to the sales dude's laptop via my single click vnc link. I pushed the small installer on over to his machine. Installed it and just like that... We had Vista fonts! Score.

In case I didn't say Ghacks enough let me say it again... Thanks GHACKS you guys rock.

_TheLovesFreeStuffAdmiN_

Access your Tivo's hidden webserver! Download, strip and rip. Part One.

After figuring out I could edit Blogger blog posts from my mobile I decided to see what I could do with my TiVo while I am away. I went online and did some research. I found this tid-bit from Dave Zatz (Sling Media) and gave it a shot.

Allow me to bring you kids up to speed. Essentially, TiVos are just nicely packaged Linux boxes with TV capture cards, hard drives, and a cutesy visual operating system that everyone has grown to love. It's nice to know the open Linux spirit is in full swing at Tivo, because the developers at Tivo have happily included an already running, https, port 80 web server!

You heard me correctly, I did NOT stutter. As long as you enabled the transfer option from TiVo online you can access a web server built into your Tivo. To do this all you need to do is simply point your browser at your TiVo's local IP address using https://...

The address bar would look like this:

https://192.168.0.3/

I simply entered this address into my browser and it prompted me for a username and password. The username to use is always tivo and the password is your Media Access Key.

Your media access key can be found via your tivo interface or on your TiVo.com account.

Now how can you use this information while you are away?

Point your router to forward port 80 and 443 to your TiVo, Now by typing in your routers external IP address from any where in the world you can download your .TIVO files.

I hear you all saying:

They are encrypted and all Admin what good is that? and How does this help me?

Well these .TIVO files are just MPEG2 files with a shiny restrictive layer of prohibitive crap. But, no worries lets get that file cracked open so you can burn it to DVD or move it around at your own will. TiVo to go lets you do some of this stuff but The Admin hates being restricted to, well, anything.

Lets get you Downloading, Stripping and Ripping... (This is for your own access we are not teaching you to be nor advocating piracy...)

Tune back in for part two of our TiVo - download, strip and rip series tomorrow.

_TheTiVoHappyAdmiN_

Troubleshooting using Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset

We have all been stuck between a rock and a hard place at one time or another... Stuck staring blankly at a Windows machine that just won't boot. I have been recommending this re-branded toolkit left and right recently so here is a little more information on it for you guys:


This nifty tool allows you to boot from a CD into a special diagnostics environment which enables you to:

• Fix boot problems (boot.ini/Chkdsk)
• Edit the Registry offline
• Change Services/Drivers startup state
• Restore to an earlier Restore Point even if Windows fails to start in Safe-Mode
• Reset the administrator password (or any other account)
• Easily remove malware & viruses while scanning the system offline
• Recover lost data while the system is offline (undelete files, folders or partitions)

The tool fully supports TCP/IP networking for sharing folders and remote troubleshooting.

The environment partially-supports running other Windows applications for Virus cleaning, un-deleting files and more. Most applications that will work flawlessly are the one that designed to run without installation and no run-time libraries (.Net framework, etc.)

The original name of the product is "ERD Commander" from Winternals. Microsoft bought the company and now calls that same product by the name:

Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset

The download link above is for a fully-featured 30-days evaluation version of the product. this application is intended for Enterprise IT Professionals (as a Volume Licensing Extra).

I recommend on playing with it inside a Virtual PC/VMware workstation. you will be thankful that you've heard about this tool on your next BSOD!

Note that this product officially support the Windows 2000/XP systems only (although it can be used for any other version too...)

Enjoy!

YaronM

Can I run WinIpCfg on Windows XP or 2000?

Mary Ann writes to us that she misses the graphical WinIpCfg.exe that came with Windows 98 and ME. She wants to throw it on a memory stick for quick access to IP information and a GUI for editing those numbers - you know like back in the day.

No worries Mary Ann we have got an exact replica from Microsoft's Windows 2000 Resource Kit that will have you feel like you are time traveling back to use IpConfig! Feeling Nostalgic?

That's right you too can be typing in WinIpCfg in your run bar once again!

We Do find it strange the big MS gave it the Axe in 2000. But they have done weirder things - these are the same people that gave us, Clippy the dancing paper clip, to be your virtual personal assistant.

You can grab the installer right from Microsoft here.

_TheFlashBackAdmiN_

Backup your Windows Mobile device

Hey Boys and Girls,

Commodore here bringing you another installment of geeky goodness.

Every once in a while an application comes along that simply becomes a staple in your data diet. A requiem for your software library that just seems to always be useful, especially if you follow the advice and antics of The Admin here at AskTheAdmin.com.

One of the most talked about subjects here is the issues that arise from being caught without a backup. Now, usually we talk about backups in the PC or laptop sense, but these days PDA's , especially Windows driven ones, are becoming more and more prevalent in society and in our every day life.

It's also inevitable, especially under any build of Windows, that you chance losing your data. Notwithstanding the inherent faults in Windows; having all your life's info in a device that can be dropped, stepped on, kicked, flung accidentally while speaking in an animated fashion (git her done), melted, forgotten and otherwise mistreated can be very precarious.

Yes, People use ActiveSync to "Sync" their data up to a computer but what if you want to do it on the fly or you simply detest Microsoft Activesync. What if you are a MAC or Linux user?

The need for a backup solution for Windows Mobile has arrived. And along with it is the need for our beloved readers to have access to a totally FREE solution that will allow them to breathe a little easier next time something happens to their phone. Outlook is both costly and sucks up your memory And does not help our everyday users on the go.

Enter PPCPIMBackup (Authors HomePage), This tiny little program, with its itsy-bitsy little footprint, does everything you need in a PIM backup solution. Scheduling, an intuitive and simple interface, and the level of depth to name a few; it has all the options you could think of for a PIM backup and more. After all is said and done it will give you a single small file with your data in it.

As the picture shows above, it handles appointments, call logs, contacts, messages, tasks, speed dial, AND it also sports a nifty little custom field, shown above, which you can set to a filter for certain file types or you can choose a folder, or subset of files. This program really has everything one would need in a backup solution.

Best of all I can back up to my memory card while I am outside, keep a copy of my installable file with me and always be good to restore my information on the fly! This baby even does scheduling!

The backup took mere minutes, but the piece of mind involved in knowing my PIM data is safe is priceless. All the options, shown left, are pretty much self explanatory.

PPCPIMBackup supports file compression, scheduling and best of all, it can be installed OTA (over the air, for you noobs out there) which means you don't have to run it through Activesync for it to work. In fact, the program has such a small footprint it ran right out of HTC Zip's temp memory. The process took less than 5 minutes and ran smoothly all the way through. Although I'm pretty sure if I ran the backup using compression, it would have been slower, but I have TONS of appointments and contacts and even uncompressed, the file was tiny at a mere 218k.

Though in all fairness, had I enabled attachments in the backup options, I'm sure that 218k would have been much more.

Also worth noting is the FREE screen shot software I discovered today, which runs on Windows Mobile! Ilium Software's Screen Capture app is definitely worth mentioning because it helped me capture the beautiful shots for our review of PPCPIMBackup. This program too, will be a staple program in my collection, simply for blogging about Windows Mobile devices. FREE, quick, easy, and tiny footprints are what we love to see here at AskTheAdmin. - C64

I am signing out for the night kiddies. Pull your teddy bears close, and snuggle into your pillows, because now, thanks to AtA, you can rest easy knowing all your data is safe, and all is well with the world.

Peace
Commodore 64 (the one you used to play Bruce Lee on)