10 Registry Editing Tricks To Increase Your Windows XP performance

Everyone gets exasperated when their computer is slow. However, There are a number of editing tricks you can do with the Windows Registry that will improve the performance of Personal computers, especially Windows Pro and Home XP.

Before you attempt to use the registry editor utility, make sure you backup your system.

Ok, here’s a few registry editing tricks to you can use to help increase your Windows performance:

Trick No 1: Removal of unused fonts, program and protocols

Take stock of the programs that you use on a daily basis. Remove or uninstall those that are not required. You may keep your favorite fonts and remove the rest. After all, if you are using them and these can be loaded at anytime, there is no point in cluttering up your hard disk. Remove temporary files. These will be located in the C:\Windows\temp or C:\TEMP, c:\windows\prefetch directories. Also remove Network protocols like NetBEUI or IPX. Removal will free disk space and your personal computer will work faster.

Trick No 2: dll files that a program has used are not unloaded by Windows.

These will be available if you restart a program. So unload these dll files, use Regedit. Run Regedit and set the DWORD value as ‘AlwaysUnloadDLL and set to 1’.

Trick No 3: You change the way Windows XP uses memory in three ways.

Stop the XP from paging data from RAM onto the hard drive by disabling the paging executive. Change the value of the key to 1 from 0. Changing the value of the LargeSystemCache to 1 from 0 will help free up memory. Speed for Large file transfers can be improved by setting it between 8 and 16 megabytes.

Trick No 4: Use Regedit and adjust the network bandwidth reserved for various programs.

Create REG_DWORD key “DisableTaskOffload”. This should be set to 0.

Trick No 5: Shorten the menu delay by using Regedit.

Run regedit, edit HKEY_CURRENT_USER / Control Panel / Desktop / MenuShowDelay . The value is generally set to 400. Changing this to 100 will help speed up the process.

Trick No 6: Sometimes, after you install Norton Anti Virus, you may not be able to access your XP.

In such situation, use Regedit. Run regedit and go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters. Edit the IRPStackSize by giving it a value of 15 and then reboot. This should solve the problem.

Trick No 7: Unwanted entries in the Startup (MSCONFIG) should be removed.

Run regedit. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\MSConfig\services
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\MSConfig\startupfolder
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\shared Tools\MSConfig\startupreg

Trick No 8: You can turn off Fax viewer and Windows Picture from appearing by default.

Run Regedit and go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT / SystemFileAssociations / image / ShellEx / ContextMenuHandlers and delete ‘ShellImagePreview’.

Trick No 9: Turn off balloon tips.

Run regedit. Go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced. Create a DWORD value ‘EnableBalloonTips; and give it a value of ‘O’

Trick No 10: If you are the only person using your XP, you can reduce log in time by configuring your XP for automatic log in.

These are only a few tips to improve your system’s performance. As you read and explore the registry and come across specific problems, you can change the settings for speeding up the performance of your XP. Take care to take a backup before attempting any change.

Top three Most Useful Windows Registry Tricks

Disable Run or Find from Start Menu

1. Start Regedit
2. Go to HKey_Current_User \ Software\ Microsoft \Windows \ Current Version \ Policies \ Explorer
3. Right click on the right panel and add a New / DWORD
4. Name it NoFile or NoRun
5. Give it a value of 1
6. Reboot the computer

Change the Registered Owner in Windows

1. Start Regedit
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion.
3. Find and Right click on the registeredOwner or RegisteredOrganisation and click Modify.
4. Just rename and congrats you are done..!!

How to Add Application to Desktop Right Click Menu

1. Open the registry editor searchng "regedit" in the start menu.

2. Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell.

3. Right click on shell go to new and click on key and name the key as "your application (notepad in this case)".

4. If you want to assign an alternate key for this menu you can change the (Default) value on the right and put an & character in front of the key name. For example in this case if you right click on desktop and press N, Notepad will open up.

5. Right click on your application key folder (the one you made earlier) and make a new key under it and name it command.

6. Now go to your application, press "shift + right click" on it and click on copy as path.

7. Now go back to registry, click on command and double click on (Default) key and paste the path (copied in last step) in the value data and click OK.

8. Its done!! You can close the registry editor and right click on the desktop to check.

Now this brings to the end of this series Registry A - Z  though i will keep you posted about the newer and more interesting tricks & tweaks on the registry very frequently afterwards too. The purpose of this series was to understand the Registry and to enable them to use it. This series was specially dedicated to people who had absolutely no knowledge about registry. Well, I seriously hope the purpose was fulfilled. Comments & suggestions are very invited. And All the best at game with your registry. :P

Customize the System Tray

You can add your name or anything you like that consists of 8 characters or less. This will replace the AM or PM next to the system time. But you can corrupt some trial licenses of software that you may have downloaded.

1. Open RegEdit
2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\International
3. Add two new String values, "s1159" and "s2359"
4. Right click the new value name and modify. Enter anything you like up to 8 characters.

If you enter two different values when modifying, you can have the system tray display the two different values in the AM and PM.

How to Hack a Website in Four Easy Steps

Every wondered how Anonymous and other hacktivists manage to steal the data or crash the servers of websites belonging to some of the world biggest organisations? Thanks to freely available online tools, hacking is no long the preserve of geeks, so we've decided to show you how easy it is to do, in just four easy steps.

Step 1: Identify your target

While Anonymous and other online hacktivists may choose their targets in order to protest against perceived wrong-doing, for a beginner wanting to get the taste of success with their first hack, the best thing to do is to identify a any website which has a vulnerability.

Recently a hacker posted a list of 5,000 websites online which were vulnerable to attack. How did he/she identify these websites? Well, the key to creating a list of websites which are likely to be more open to attack, is to carry out a search for what is called a Google Dork.

Google Dorking, also known as Google Hacking, enables you find sensitive data or evidence of vulnerabilities by querying a search engine like Google or Bing. It basically allows you to enter a search term into Google and find websites which may have these vulnerabilities somewhere on the site.

Don't worry about needing technical expertise to know what to look for. Kind-hearted hackers have produced lists of these Google Dorks, neatly categorised into the type of vulnerability you are looking for. Looking for files containing passwords? There's got a Dork for that. Login credentials? There's a Dork for that.

For example, if you are looking for files stored on websites containing passwords, then a sample search query we found openly listed on one indexing site was: intitle:"Index of" master.passwd. This returns the results shown in the screengrab above.

So now you have a list of potential victims. Next you need to narrow this down even further.

Step 2: Check for vulnerabilities

Having a huge number of sites which may or may not be vulnerable is not much use unless you can pinpoint one which is actually open to attack. This is when a programme called a vulnerability scanner comes into its own and the most popular is called Acunetix.

Acunetix, developed by a UK-based company, was designed, and is still used, as a tool for web developers to test sites they are building. However the hacking community has commandeered the tool and uses it to identify existing vulnerable sites.

You can download a trial version of the software for free from the official Acunetix website or if you venture into the murky depths of a hacker forum and search for Acunetix, you can find cracked versions of the full application freely available.

Acunetix, as you can see from the screen shots above, is a simple, straight-forward Windows application and all you need to do is enter the URL of the site you want to target, and press Process. Acunetix will scan the entire website, including all pages associated with it, and return a list of vulnerabilities it finds. If you find the type you are looking for, you will need to move onto Step 3, as Acunetix does not perform any website penetration.

Step 3: Attack the website

Attacking a website is done by two main methods. The first is by carrying out a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack which overwhelms a website's servers and forces it to shut down. We will deal with this type of attack later, but first we will look at how you can hack into an account and steal some information contained within databases on the site.

This type of attack is known as a SQL (pronounced sequel) Injection. A SQL Injection attack aims to capture information stored in a database on the particular website by introducing some SQL code. SQL is a programming language designed for managing data in a database.

But fear not, you won't need to understand a single line of SQL to carry out this attack. Thankfully another freely-available and easy-to-use application, originally developed in Iran, can be downloaded from the web saving you the trouble of dealing with any complex code.

The program is called Havij, the Farsi word for carrot, which is also a slang word for penis and so, unsurprisingly, this is the piece of software required to penetrate a website.

Again there are free and paid-for versions of Havij available with the paid-for version having more powerful capabilities. Again the world of hacker forums is your friend here and cracked versions of the full Havij application are available if you look for them.

The Havij interface is once again like any other Windows program and all a virgin hacker needs to do is simply copy-and-paste the address of their target website and press a button.

Havij allows you to perform a number of different types of operation including one called a Get, which unsurprisingly gets all the information stored on databases on that particular site which can be usernames, passwords, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and bank details.

And that's it, within minutes you can search for, download and use a couple of automated tools which will allow you to access websites which are vulnerable to this type of attack. While most high profile companies' websites will be protected from this type of attack, the fact that Sony's website and the personal information of its customers was stolen in a manner similar to this, shows just how vulnerable the web is.

Step 4: If all else fails, DDoS

Hacktivist collective Anonymous changed their tactics in the last 12 months moving away from DDoS as their primary tool for attacking websites, preferring if possible to use SQL Injection instead. However, when this is not possible, they will revert to DDoS attacks, and you can to, with the help of another freely available tool.

And it turns out that DDoSing a website is no more difficult than carrying out a SQL Injection. The programme used is called Low-Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC) which was developed for web designers to stress test websites, but has been high-jacked by hackers in order to attack websites.

Available as a free download from Source Forge, LOIC employs a very user-friendly interface and all potential hackers need to is type in the URL of the site they want to crash and LOIC will do the rest. What the application will do is send up to 200 requests per second to the site in question.

While most bigger sites might be able to deal with this request without crashing, most websites out there will not, especially if you get together with some other hacking virgins and combine your efforts.

So easy is it to use this technology that you can even control it from your BlackBerry, meaning you can be enjoying a pint in the pub with your friends while carrying out a DDoS attack on a website of your choice.

How to crack a Windows XP password

To crack Windows XP password we’ll use a program I personally used a hundreds of times, called Ophcrack

Well, to crack a password there is one big science discipline called cryptography. Here we won’t get into details but rather explain how this program works.

So, if you lock your account in Windows with a password for example admin, here is what happens. Windows takes that password and encrypts it with one of the methods of encryption and then saves it into a file(with Windows XP it’s a SAM file located in system32). Now your password is no longer stored as admin, but rather something like 3ujf92+*?jdhsa=)jsadn , depending on the encryption method. However, we ask ourselves, why don’t we just take that encrypted password and decrypt it back to admin. The thing is we can’t because it’s a one way encryption and that is actually the point of it all. So how do we actually crack it?

There is a number of methods but the most famous one is brute force attack. Brute force actually means to start with a letter a and encrypting it. Then see if the encrypted strings match. If not then b, c, … until we’ve gotten to admin. Then the encrypted strings will match and we’ll know that is the right password. Brute force attack is the slowest method of cracking, but there is no risk that you’ll not find the password. The thing about brute force is that the time of cracking rises rapidly depending on how long the password is, how many characters are being used in it and so forth.

Other methods, such as dictionary attack and an attack using rainbow tables are a better option. Ophcrack itself works using rainbow tables and brute force combined.

1. Download http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/

2. This program is now an ISO image. Just burn it with Nero or whatever you’re already using for burning images( for burning only ISO images download this burning program – ISORecorder)

3. Now reboot your computer with the CD inside (if the CD will not boot you need to set the boot priority inside BIOS, so that the CD-ROM is the first in the list)

4. A menu like this will appear:

Select the Ophcrack Graphic Mode

5. After the CD is done loading, a user interface like this will appear:

The last right column are the passwords for the given users.

Now depending on many reasons, the cracking of the password could take a long time. So the thing I mostly do is go to sleep and by the time I get up in the morning, Ophcrack has cracked it.

Now just reboot your computer and log into Windows. :)

Test the strength of your anti-virus

• Do you want to know if your anti-virus is really protecting your PC? Open your notepad and copy-paste the code below.

X50!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

• Save the file as eicar.com. If your anti-virus is really protecting your PC, it will warn you about this “virus tester”.

NOTE: This isn’t harmful to your PC. This is just a simple test to check if your anti-virus can detect virus

How to create your own customized RUN commands

Create your own customized RUN command in just 5 easy steps :-

By this you should be able to run your programs directly for eg. you want to open windown media player.You need to type only   wmp    in the Run dialog box. Its your wish what name you want to give  the command.  

----Right click on the desktop screen and click on "New" then click on "Shortcut".

----Browse for the program for which you want to create the command.(Navigate where the program is installed. In my case location is "C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe") . Target to the main file of the program such as wmplayer, iexplore etc. 

----Click "OK". Type a name for the shortcut. Then click "Finish" .

----Cut the shortcut and paste it to C:\Windows ..

-----You are done. Just open the Run dialog box, type wmp and hit Enter to open the Window media player.

Just like this you can create various othercommands for other programs such as "ff" for firefox, "idm" for internet download manager etc.

What are Captchas?

"Because we care, we're security aware"

Whenever we create an account on any website or comment on any blog we see scrambled words 
which we have to type and continue these are CAPTCHAs .  

What are CAPTCHAs and what they do?
It stands for Completely Automated Public Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.These tries to test that you are a person and not a auto filling software.

Why CAPTCHAs are necessary?

These are used to prevent hackers from avoiding misuse of online services.

There are some examples of activities which are undertaken by hackers are given below :-

-Opening someone's account  by attempting different  password again and again.

-Creating  hundreds of  free accounts

-Swaying an online poll by robotically submitting hundreds of false responses. 

-Spamimng blogs by posting dozens of bogus comments.

These CAPTCHAs test prevent about 90% of hackers attacks. 



What is a logic behind this CAPTCHAs?

 Commonly, these CAPTCHA phrases are .gif pictures of scrambled words, but can also be .mp3 voice recordings. These pictures and recordings are very hard for conventional software programs to understand, and hence, robots are usually unable to type the phrase in response to the picture or recording.

 

How to remove or modify the ugly arrows from the shortcut icons?

Arrows from the shortcut icons can be removed by two ways :
-Using an application (Vista Shortcut Manager).
-Another by creating some keys in  registry editor(manually).




-----Using an application 
-There are various applications using which we can remove and modify the shortcuts. 
-Vista Shortcut Manager is one of the application  using which we can remove or modify the shortcut arrows.

 

-This application is easy to use. Just open this application choose what you want to do.
-After selecting the desired option. Click on apply.
-Restart the computer settings will be applied.

It also works on Windows 7



-----Doing Manually
-Click on start button.
-Type regedit. or  go to run and type regedit.
-Navigate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>Software>Microsoft>Windows>Current Version>Explorer>Shell icons.
-Create a new string value under this key by right clicking and name it as 29
-Set its value to C:\WINDOWS\system32\shell32.dll,52
-Close the Registry editor, and restart your computer for changes to take effect

Read more: http://computertechtrick.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-12-26T08:24:00-08:00&max-results=7#ixzz2RwIHCjtm

How to remove the drive letters?

For windows 7
-Open My Computer. 
-Click on Organize below the address bar and click on "Folder and search options".
                         Or
Press "Alt" key. Menu bar appears. Click on tools on Menu bar Then click on "Folder options"

-In Folder options Click on View.

-Look for "Show Drive letters" in Advanced settings.
-Uncheck the box.
-Click Apply then click Ok.

For windows XP.
-Click on Tools in the menu bar.-Then Click on Folder options.
-Click on View.
-Look for the "Show Drive letters"
-Uncheck the box.
-Click Apply then click Ok.

Transform your windows to Macintosh.

Get Lion Transformation pack 1.0 which transforms your Windows OS to Apple's Macintosh OS.

It is a nice theme check out some of the screen shots here : -

Click download button to download the theme.

Wireless Electricity

"It is Possible To get Electricity without wires"

The ability to direct and transmit electrical power through the air, without wires, took a further step from the theoretical to the practical in June when a group of MIT researchers demonstrated their "WiTricity" concept.

The technology works by transmitting electricity as a magnetic field oscillating at a specific frequency. Through "magnetically coupled resonance," the "receiver" can capture the electricity, making for an efficient and safe method of over-the-air transfer.

Wireless transmission of electricity has been understood in theory since the work of Nikolai Tesla in the 19th Century. Safe, efficient and cost-effective wireless electricity could hold countless beenfits, from eliminating the need to install costly copper wiring to lowered reliance on batteries for small devices. However, despite the success of WiTricity, the technology has a long way to go before it is deployed commercially... not to mention the need to better understand side effects such as interference and possible effects on health and the environment.

Simple But Amazing Tricks In PC

Go to Run command and type ... See what it opens

Type 3 Dots ... See what it opens

Type 2 Dots .. See what it opens

type 1 Dot . See what it opens

Harmless small trick.. Use it for fun..

Open Microsoft Word

Put this =rand(200,99) then Press enter

Even Bill Gates dint said about this i guess !! 

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TURN ON UR PC IN JUST 10 SECONDS........

So u wanna know how to turn the pc on in 10 seconds (may vary)
here's what u have to do to turn ur pc on in 10 seconds
Click on the start button then press R it will take u to Run well go to run
n type Regedit
press enter
this will open Registery Editor
now look for the key
HKEY_LOACAL_MECHINE\SYSTEM\Cur rentControlSet\Contr ol\ContentIndex
now there find the Key Called
"Startup Delay"
Double Click On It
Now where its Base
Click Decimal
Now its Default Value Is 4800000 (75300:hexadecimal)
Change The Value To 40000
here u go u have done it
now close the Registery Editor and Restart Your Computer
You'll See The Result

Make frnds scare for VIRUS

Open notepad and type this:

lol=msgbox ("Warning a virus has been detected on your PC. Press YES to format your hard disk now or press NO to format your hard disk after system reboot",20,"Warning")

Then save it as Virus.VBS

and go to the folder that contains it and open it if a window pops out saying a virus has been detected it's working. Press yes or no to close the window and put it in the startup folder of the victim's account.
On startup the window should appear.
Note: This does not harm your computer as it does not contain virus.

The Yes and no button does not do anything except closing the window. And you can edit the virus in the sentence: Warning a virus has detected on your PC to any kind of virus eg.Trojan Horse like this lol=msgbox ("Warning a Trojan horse has been detected on your PC. Press YES to format your hard disk now or press NO to format format your hard disk after system reboot",20,"Warning")

Oh in between make sure your victim does not panic and really reformat his harddisk. hahaha :) 35