Posts Tagged ‘Windows’

Forum member RaZ0R put together a little tutorial to demonstrate how one would gain Administrator privileges on a Windows machine from within a limited user account.

In a few easy to understand steps, you can go from a limited account to power user in minutes.  This can be helpful if your administrator profile happens to be come corrupted, or if you just need to quickly get administrator access, for whatever reason.

Obviously, use this on computers that you own, on which you are permitted to have administrator access!

I have been having issues with my keyboard for as long as I can remember. The Shift, Control, Windows, and Alt keys were not functioning properly at all and were becoming quite the annoyance. It seemed as if while held down, the keys were randomly toggling themselves on and off while I pressed other keys.

For instance, I would end up replacing whole lines of text with a ‘c’ while trying to press Ctrl-C to copy the line. Similarly, the paste shortcut Ctrl-V would wipe out text in a single swoop as well. Trying to quickly save usually left random ‘s’ characters in my documents, and many words were left lower case due to my malfunctioning Shift key.

I originally chalked it up to my keyboard itself. It was a cheap PS/2 keyboard that came with my computer, so I decided to swap it out for a new, USB keyboard. I figured the problem was with the hardware, so I would be good to go once I replaced it.

Not so.

My problems continued to persist until one day I had an idea. Perhaps it wasn’t the keyboard, perhaps it wasn’t some odd Windows issue. Perhaps it was the drivers loaded by Windows for my keyboard.

I did some digging in Windows’ Device Manager and decided that the best course of action would be to see if I could remove and re-add my keyboard from the system. I removed both keyboards listed there and then rebooted. Suddenly all my problems were gone, and your can be too if you do the following:

1. Open the Device Manager – it’s under Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> System in Vista
2. Navigate to the Keyboards section as shown below
3. Right-click on any entries there and select Uninstall
4. Wait for Windows to remove the hardware and then reboot

Windows should now re-detect the keyboard and you should be all set. Now, this doesn’t work for all keyboard issues as some of them are indeed hardware-related, but it worked to fix the issue I have been struggling with for months!

Download This Guide in PDF Format

I like having the ability to remotely access my PC at home while I am away in case I want to grab an important file I have left there, or if I need to finish something I didn’t quite get around to.  For ages I simply set port forwarding on my router allowing port 3389 to be directed to my desktop PC, which let me connect to my computer using Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).  While this was not the most secure method of doing so, it worked, and I did not want to change how I did things.

That’s not to say that RDP is not secure – it does use 128 bit RC4 according to Microsoft.  However, with man-in-the-middle attacks being relatively easy to carry out, I thought there had to be a better (and more secure) way of connecting to my oh so precious home network.

In the end, I decided that I could route my RDP sessions through an SSH tunnel and sleep a little easier at night.  If you follow the directions below, you can too.

Going forward in this document, I will use the term “Server” to refer to the remote computer (in my case, my home PC) that we will be connecting to.  I will use the term “Client” to refer to my local computer, the computer I will be connecting from.

Installing CopSSH

1) Download CopSSH, Putty and Puttygen.

2) Execute the CopSSH installer, click Next to proceed, then click I agree to accept the license agreement.

Continue reading “Securing Windows Remote Desktop with CopSSH” »

I saw a recent article on Lifehacker about cleanly shutting down and restarting explorer.exe in Windows Vista. I gave it a try in XP just for the sake of it, and not surprisingly, it did not work.

I did however find a way to do it in Windows XP that I wanted to share with others.

You can see the full process after the jump.

Continue reading “Safely Shutting Down and Restarting explorer.exe in Windows XP” »