Irfanview

IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista.

It is trying to be simple for beginners and powerful for professionals.

Click here for homepage.

Add detailed information to Device Manager

When you are solving problems with various devices and components, you would like to see information such as the hardware ID of the device or its firmware revision or other information that is not available in Device Manager. This is how configure Device Manager to display more detailed information than is displayed by default:

1. Click Start | Run.
2. Type cmd.exe and press Enter.
3. Type set DEVMGR_SHOW_DETAILS=1 and press Enter.
4. Type start devmgmt.msc and press Enter to open the Device Manager console.

A Details tab will appear in the properties for each device. This tab contains the additional information that you may need.

Resize using Photoshop

Use PhotoShop to Resize, Crop, Flip, Mirror, Rotate, and Resample Multiple Images.
Click here for tutorial.

How to find Windows XP system folders

It can be difficult to navigate through files to find specific system folders. For example, the one where your cookies are stored, or the one that holds the items in the "Send To" menu. Instead of trying to slog through directory, you can use the command line and find them quickly (if you know the names) with the run command. Here's how:

• Click Start | Run
• In the Run box, type shell:<folder name>

Here are some of the commonly used shell folders:

shell:Cookies - display the cookies folder
shell:Cache - displays temporary Internet files
shell:Favorites - displays the IE Favorites folder
shell:SendTo - displays the Send To folder
shell:MyMusic - displays the My Music folder
shell:MyPictures - displays the My Pictures folder

Click Here for the names of more shell folders in XP and Vista

Convert written words to audio files

Have you ever received an email, or found an article your interested in, but don't have the time to read it? Now you can listen to it.

HearWho is a free service that converts text to MP3 files. Just copy and paste the text in the box. Then, make a few selections and click "Start Conversion".

You will soon have an MP3 file of your document. It could take a few seconds or a few minutes. It depends on the size of the document and how busy the server is.

You can load your MP3 file onto any music player. Or, burn it to a CD for listening in the car or on the plane.

http://www.hearwho.com

Remove old entries from the boot menu in XP

If you don't like having all those old choices cluttering up their boot menus, here's how you can get rid of them. You don't even have to manually edit the boot.ini file.

1. Click Start | Run.
2. Type msconfig and click OK.
3. In the System Configuration tool, click the BOOT.INI tab.
4. Click the Check All Boot Paths button.
5. The system will scan the entries to determine whether they're valid installations. You'll be shown the ones that aren't.
6. Confirm that you want to remove the invalid entries. Click Apply and OK.

When you reboot, the old useless choices will be removed.

How to take ownership of a folder

I've somehow lost privileges to a folder that I recently moved. When I try to open the folder, I get the dredded "Access Denied" dialog.

Here are the steps to take back ownership;

Note You must be logged on to the computer with an account that has administrative credentials. If you are running Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, you must start the computer in safe mode, and then log on with an account that has Administrative rights to have access to the Security tab.

If you are using Windows XP Professional, you must disable Simple File Sharing. By default, Windows XP Professional uses Simple File sharing when it is not joined to a domain.

For additional information about how to do this, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 307874 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307874/) How to disable simplified sharing and set permissions on a shared folder in Windows XP To take ownership of a folder, follow these steps:

	Right-click the folder that you want to take ownership of, and then click Properties.
	Click the Security tab, and then click OK on the Security message (if one appears).
	Click Advanced, and then click the Owner tab.
	In the Name list, click your user name, or click Administrator if you are logged in as Administrator, or click the Administrators group. If you want to take ownership of the contents of that folder, select the Replace owner on subcontainers and objects check box.
	Click OK, and then click Yes when you receive the following message: You do not have permission to read the contents of directory folder name. Do you want to replace the directory permissions with permissions granting you Full Control? All permissions will be replaced if you press Yes. Note folder name is the name of the folder that you want to take ownership of.
	Click OK, and then reapply the permissions and security settings that you want for the folder and its contents.