Try out Windows Phone on Android or iPhone

If you’ve ever even been the least bit curious about Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, Microsoft has made it easy for iPhone and Android owners to check out the experience in the privacy of their own phone without any installations.

Just point your mobile browser to http://aka.ms/wpdemo and you can access an interactive HTML5 page. The demo allows you to experience the look and feel of the Windows Phone 7.5 interface, as well as walks you through some common tasks such as checking email and sending a text message.

Overall, the page is very responsive and gives a nice introduction to Windows Phone 7.5 for a first time user. It remains to be seen if this tool will actual convert someone to Windows Phone, but Microsoft has definitely come up with a very simple and creative way to get a taste of its software into the hands of its competitor’s customers.

How to Forward Local Drives to Remote Machines Using Remote Desktop

Have you ever had a file on a flash drive that you needed to use on a machine that is situated in another building or even halfway across the world? You can do that by plugging it into your local machine and then forwarding the drive through your remote session to that machine. Here’s how to do it.

Press the Windows Key and R to bring up a run box, and type mstsc to launch the Remote Desktop Connection Dialog, or you can just search for Remote Desktop in the Start Menu.

Click on the arrow next to options to see some of the more advanced options. Once the interface has extended, switch to the Local Resources tab.

Now click on the more button, to see a more extensive list of things that you can forward to the remote machine. 


Once you have clicked  and expanded the drives, you will see a list of all the devices in your PC, you can forward anything from your CD/DVD drive to a USB drive that you have connected. Check the box next to any of the drive that you want to forward. 

Now you can connect to the remote machine as you normally would.

Now if you open explorer on the remote machine you will see your drive, it will appear as if it has been mapped. Thats it, you are done!!!

Malicious Hackers Target Twilight Fans

As the next movie in the Twilight Saga film series nears its premiere, malicious hackers are taking advantage of Twilight fans by poisoning links in Twilight-related searches with malware, Norton’s experts warn.

Some of the search terms which will return results infected with malware are “Nude pictures of Taylor Lautner,” “Robert and Kristin kissing” and “Twilight true love.”

Clicking on some of the links resulting from these searches might get your PC, tablet or smartphone infected with viruses or keyloggers, so be extra careful when searching for Twilight-related material.

Twilight Saga fans are a common target for malicious hackers. In April 2011, we’ve seen a Twilight game scam spread virally on Facebook, and similar scams have accompanied every movie in the series.

The next movie in the series, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn (Part 1) should hit cinemas on November 18, 2011. Norton‘s experts expect to see even more Twilight-related malware, scams and spam as the excitement around the movie grows.

What Are These desktop.ini Files I Keep Seeing?

Have you ever seen those weird desktop.ini files that seem to pop-up everywhere? The truth is that they do serve a purpose and Windows uses them to identify how a folder should be displayed, much like the .DS_Store files used in OS X.

When you create a new folder in Windows it is created with the standard folder icon, one common use of the desktop.ini file is to use to it set a custom icon for a folder, however this is not the only thing that it is used for. A typical desktop.ini will look like something like this:

[.ShellClassInfo]
ConfirmFileOp=0
IconFile=Folder.ico
IconIndex=0
InfoTip=Type Your InfoTip Here. 

The desktop.ini file can contain a lot of attributes but the following custom attributes are the most common:

• ConfirmFileOp
• IconFile
• IconIndex
• InfoTip

ConfirmFileOp
If set to 0, avoids the “You Are Deleting a System Folder” when deleting or moving a folder.

IconFile
Specify a custom icon file. You can use either a .ico, .exe or .dll file.

IconIndex
Specify the index for a custom icon. If the file assigned to IconFile only contains a single icon, the IconIndex should be set to 0.

InfoTip
A string of text that will be displayed when you hover over the folder.

As you can see the desktop.ini file holds folder customization information. They are hidden by default and will only be displayed if you choose to Display Protected Operating System Files by unchecking the checkbox.

You can customize your folders by creating your own desktop.ini folder in Notepad. Make sure to change the type to Unicode before saving though.

How to Reset Your Forgotten Windows Password

Forgetting your password is never any fun, but luckily there’s a really easy way to reset the password. All you need is a copy of the Windows installation disk and one simple command line trick.

Resetting Your Forgotten Windows Password

 

Boot off the Windows disk and select the “Repair your computer” option from the lower left-hand corner. Follow through until you get to the option to open the Command Prompt, which you’ll want to select.

First you’ll want to type in the following command to backup the original sticky keys file:

copy c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe c:\

Then you’ll copy the command prompt executable (cmd.exe) over top of the sticky keys executable:

copy c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe
Now you can reboot the PC.

Resetting the Password

 

Once you get to the login screen, hit the Shift key 5 times, and you’ll see an administrator mode command prompt.

 

Now to reset the password—just type the following command, replacing the username and password with the combination you want:  net user geek MyNewPassword

 

 

That’s all there is to it. Now you can login.

Of course, you’ll probably want to put the original sethc.exe file back, which you can do by rebooting into the installation CD, opening the command prompt, and copying the c:\sethc.exe file back to c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe.