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To protect your Google account (Gmail, Calendar, Google+, Documents, etc.) against keyloggers and people who try to steal your password, you can enable validation in two steps. In addition to your regular password, a single-use code sent by SMS to your phone or generated by the Google Authenticator will be required. Without this code you or anyone else wont be able to access your account. With validation in two steps, you have several methods for securing your Google Account. In this complete tutorial I will show you how to setup this service in order to protect your Google account.


There are three possible ways to get this code:

• Get the code by SMS to your mobile phone. So you must have network coverage to receive your code.
• Generate code with the Google Authenticator to your mobile phone or tablet running Android, BlackBerry or IOS. This code is generated locally and an Internet connection or telephone is not required on your phone.
• Print a list of codes for single use. Handy if you need to go abroad or you do not have your cell phone with you.

In order to get started follow steps below

Enable Validation In Two Steps

You can enable validation in two steps in the settings in your Google account.
Step 1: Go to any Google service you use, such as Gmail and login.
Step 2: Click your email address or your name at the top right of the page and from drop down menu click Account.

Step 3: In the Security section, click Edit next to the option 2-step verification

Step 4: Click Start Setup

Step 5: Select your country and make sure your mobile phone number is correct. Mark it if it is not already.
Step 6: Select and click Text message (SMS).

Step 7: You will receive a SMS with a verification code on your phone.
Step 8: Enter the code you received on the configuration page of validation in two steps and click Verify.

Step 9: The service then asks if you want to store your computer, that is to say, mark it as safe for 30 days. If you do, you will not have to do validation in two steps if you log into your Google account from this computer. However, if you connect from another computer, the validation in two stages will be much effective. Click Next.

Step 10: Finally, click on Confirm to finish setup

Enable Google Authenticator

By default, you receive a SMS with your unique code and temporary when you want to log into your Google account. To avoid not being able to receive code if you do not have network coverage or you are abroad, you can install Google Authenticator on your phone or tablet running Android, BlackBerry or IOS.
Step 1: Log into your Google account.
Step 2: Click your email address or your name at the top right of the page and click Account.

Step 3: In the Security section, click Edit next to the option 2-step verification.
Step 4: In How to receive codes, click the type of mobile device you own, an Android phone for example.

Step 5: Then go on the market of mobile phone and download the Google Authenticator.
Step 6: Once you download and install it, open it.
Step 7: If your phone has a camera, tap a barcode scanner.
Step 8: Install the barcode reader on your phone if you have not already and come back in Google Authenticator.
Step 9: Point bar code on the page.
Step 10: The application gives you a code.
Step 11: Copy it into the page and click OK.
Step 12: Finally, click Save.

Print Rescue Codes

To connect to a Google Account, you will now need your mobile phone to generate a code with Google Authenticator or to receive an SMS if you have uninstalled the software. To avoid not being able to connect without your phone, you can print a list of emergency codes used only once. This is useful if you need to go abroad for example.
Step 1: Log into your Google account.
Step 2: Click your email address or your name at the top right of the page and click Account.
Step 3: In the Security section, click Edit next to the option 2-step verification.
Step 4: Click Show backup codes.

Step 5: Print or save a text file. The important thing is to put them in a safe place.
Step 6: Each code can be used only once. If you run out of codes, click Generate new codes. Please note that the last set of codes supersedes the previous one.

Set Passwords For Applications That Use Your Google Account

Some applications that access your account from your Google phone (Android Market for example), your desktop computer (email software) or other device (such as Gmail for mobile, desktop Picasa or AdWords Editor) are not compatible with the validation codes. To use these applications, you need to enter a password that is specific in the field normally reserved for the password for your account.
Step 1: Log into your Google account.
Step 2: Click your email address or your name at the top right of the page and click Account
Step 3: In the Security section, click Edit next to the option 2-step verification
Step 4: Click Manage application-specific passwords
Step 5: Enter your password and confirm.
Step 6: In the Name field, enter the name of the application for which you want to generate a unique password, for example Android for your Google account on your phone so you can access your mail, calendar and the Market. Click Generate password.

Step 7: A password will be displayed on the screen
Step 8: Enter it in place of your usual password in the application that can access your Google account. Note that spaces do not need to be copied.
Step 9: Confirm. The application has access to your new Google Account.

Connect To Google

You set up the 2-step verification: here’s how your identification with a Google service will now take place.
Step 1: Visit the Google page that you want to open Gmail for example. Enter your username and your usual password. Click Login.
Step 2: Google will ask you a validation code. Launch Google Authenticator to your mobile phone and write down the code you receive

Step 3: Enter it on the login page to Google. If the computer on which you are not safe (it’s not yours for example), uncheck the Remember this computer for 30 days. Click Verify.
Step 4: If you do not have Google Authenticator or phone on hand, click Don’t have your phone?
Step 5: Choose whether you want to receive the code via SMS or use an emergency code that you previously noted. Confirm with OK and enter the code you received or noted.
Step 6: You have access to your Google.

When you enter a keyword in the Mozilla Firefox address bar, it offers a drop-down list of sites you’ve surfed. You can make the background of this list slightly transparent, as is the case in Google Chrome, simply by changing the browser settings and in this tutorial I will show you how to do that.


To get started follow steps below
Step 1: If you Mozilla Firefox window is open, close it
Step 2: Click Start menu button, inside search field type %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ and press Enter on your keyboard
Step 3: In the Windows Explorer that opens, double click the folder that is present xxxxxxxx.default.

Step 4: Now open chrome folder

Step 5: Double click on the file userChrome.css. If by any chance this file is missing, double click the file userChrome-example.css.
Step 6: The file is opened in Windows Notepad or your web editor if you have one installed. At the end of the file content, add the following code:
#PopupAutoCompleteRichResult[type="autocomplete-richlistbox"]
{
opacity: 0.9 !important;
}

Step 7: Click the File menu and select Save As
Step 8: Pull down the Type list and select All Files.
Step 9: Then name the file userChrome.css and click Save. Confirm your save if necessary and close Notepad.

Blocking websites has become commonplace now because of parental control or for any other reason. Browsers offer add-ons which can effectively block any web site you choose, unfortunately, if the idea is to be unnoticed (e.g. because of your children which can easily disable the addon) there is an alternative way to achieve this goal in any Windows version and in this tutorial I will show you how.


Step 1: To start, click Start menu and choose Computer (My Computer in Windows XP) and go into Local Disk (C:) or other partition depending where you installed your Windows
Step 2: Once inside, you’ll will probably see all kinds of folders (Downloads, Program Files, etc..), however you need to click open Windows folder.
Step 3: This folder contains at least fifty other files. To find the one you need, view files in list mode, look for System32 folder and open it
Step 4: System32 folder also contains thousands of files of all kinds and any extension. The folder we need is called drivers, double click on that folder to open it
Step 5: Now locate the etc folder and inside it open the hosts file using the Notepad

Step 6: Now find the line 127.0.0.1 localhost. To block a website facebook.com hit the Enter on your keyboard to open a new line and add this text in new line 127.0.0.1 facebook.com
Step 7: Save and close the hosts file.
Step 8: Last step is to restart your computer to apply the changes you just made. Once you login into Windows again, try to open a facebook.com in your web browser and you will see it wont open.

When ever you want to unplug/disconnect your USB drive or external hard drive from your desktop or laptop computer, from Windows system tray you always need to choose Safely Remove Hardware. The main reason why you should do this is to make sure Windows is not busy reading from or writing to the drive when you want to remove it. If you do this without using Safely Remove Hardware option you could damage your drive. However with just few simply modifications in Windows you can easily bypass this options and avoid those extra click when you are removing your drive.


On some computer this option may be enabled by default so this can be a good guide to find out if it is enabled or not. To get started follow steps below
Step 1: Plugin your USB Drive into your desktop or laptop computer, then click Start menu a inside search field type device manager
Step 2: Press Enter on your keyboard and Device Manager window will open
Step 3: Expand Disk Drive tree and locate your external removable drive. On my computer for example its called Kingston DT 101 II USB Device
Step 4: Right mouse click on that removable drive and from context menu choose Properties

Step 5: Now choose Policies tab
Step 6: In this new window you should have two options

• Quick Removal (Default)
• Better Performance

Step 7: If first option Quick Removal is selected you don’t have to make any additional changes and simply close the window. Otherwise if it’t now selected, do so and then click OK to save changes.

With a lot of more modern computers using SSD’s (Solid State Hard Drives), one question I often get asked is if you need to defragment a SSD. That’s a good question because up until now, pretty much everyone has defragged their computer at least once.
So why do we defragment a hard drive in the first place? Well, I won’t go into super detail here since you can read about it online, but basically it’s because spinning hard drives taker longer to read data that is “fragmented” or stored in multiple locations on the hard disk. Since spinning hard drives read and write data sequentially, it will take longer for the hard drive to read a file if parts of the file are located on different parts of the disk as compared to being located altogether in one unit/space.

So defragmenting a normal spinning hard drive can be useful depending on the size of your drive, the number of files you have stored and the size of those files. Now the question becomes is defragmenting useful if the hard drive has no physical moving parts?

Well, the answer to that question is pretty easy once you understand the difference between an SSD and a HDD. An SSD is basically non-volatile flash memory, which you are probably used to using in your digital camera, etc. An SSD is fast because it randomly accesses memory instead of sequentially like an HDD. SSD’s are great, but there is one huge caveat that most hard drive manufacturer’s never mention about SSDs and that’s their lifespan.
Because of the way they are built, an SSD wears down every time they are written accessed. If you have read reviews of SSDs before, you have probably read about how an SSD will get slower if you benchmark it after completely filling the drive and then erasing it. With a HDD, you would never have that problem. Most people mistakenly think SSDs are safer than HDDs because they have no moving parts. This is not true. Flash memory has a very finite lifespan and the more it is used, the more quickly it will fail.
So back to the question of defragmenting. When you defrag a hard drive, especially a SSD, it will end up causing tons of small write accesses, which will reduce the lifespan of the hard drive. And since data is not being read sequentially, it doesn’t matter if the file is stored in a hundred different places, the performance will remain the same.
So, no, you should not defrag an SSD. And performing one will actually reduce the life of your drive. All of the SSD manufacturer’s know of this problem and they have come up with an optimization technique with the use of the TRIM command.
Currently, with HDDs and SSDs, if you delete some data on the hard drive, the operating system does not actually remove the content from the disk, it just deletes the pointer to the address and therefore “deletes” the data. That’s probably why you’re heard of secure delete or government security file deletion, which actually overwrites the deleted data with gibberish so no one can use advanced tools to read data later on.
This issue of data not actually being deleted is what causes the lifespan of SSDs to be reduced. If the drive knew which areas of memory didn’t contain any important data, it could simply re-use it for new data. The TRIM command is supported by the latest SSDs and will optimize the hard drive so that it reduces the number of writes/deletions and therefore extends the life of your SSD significantly.
If you’re in the market to buy an SSD, make your choice very carefully. You want a hard drive that supports the TRIM command. Some of these include:

• Intel X25-M and X18-M G2 G2
• Indilinx Barefoot
• SandForce SF1200 / SF1500 Force
• Samsung RBB
• Samsung 470

There are a lot of other SSDs that support the TRIM command, but you have to check with the manufacturer. Note that Windows 7 natively supports the TRIM command for hard drives that support it, so you don’t have to do anything. Older versions of Windows do not support the TRIM command. In the case of Windows XP and Vista, the OS cannot even tell the difference between an SSD and a HDD, so it’s best to turn off the Disk Defragmenter.
You can also use third party programs that support TRIM to run on systems not running Windows 7. If you don’t believe everything I’ve said, then you can check out this post from a more reliable source that details exactly why it’s not a good idea to defrag a SSD:
http://www.oo-software.com/en/docs/whitepaper/ood_ssd.pdf

“Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window.”

http://helpdeskgeek.com/office-tips/fix-cannot-start-microsoft-office-outlook-error/

Method 1 – Delete Registry Key

Click on Start and type in regedit to open the registry editor in Windows 7.
Navigate to the following key in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem

Method 2 – Install Latest Service Pack and Microsoft Upates

The next thing you can try if that didn’t work for you is to install the latest Office 2010 service pack, which is SP 1 right now.

Method 3 – Open Task Manger/Kill Process

One really good and really annoying feature of Windows 7 is that by default a lot of files are off-limits when it comes to editing. For example, if you try to edit the HOSTS file in Windows using Notepad, it will give you an error message saying Access is Denied. And if you try to save a text file to the root of the C drive using Notepad, you’ll also get a message saying you don’t have permission to save the file to this location:

So there’s two ways of opening files in Notepad: either you open Notepad and then open the file or you simply double-click on a file and it opens using Notepad. In this article, I’ll try to cover the different ways you can run Notepad as administrator to make your life easier, especial if you have to edit a lot of system files.

Notepad as Administrator Shortcut

If you tend to open Notepad and then open the files you have to edit, then you can create a shortcut so that Notepad will open in administrator mode automatically without having to right-click and choose Run as Administrator. That’s always one way to do it, but if you have to do that a hundred times, it can get frustrating.
So first right-click on the desktop and choose New – Shortcut.

When the new shortcut dialog appears, click on the Browse button.

Next, expand Computer, then Local Disk (C:), then Windows and then choose notepad.

Click Ok and then click Next. Give your shortcut a name and then click Finish.

Now right-click on the new shortcut on your desktop and choose Properties.

Now click on the Shortcut tab and then click on the Advanced button.

Finally, check the Run as Administrator check box and click OK.

Whew! Kind of a long process for something so simple. Anyway, now whenever you click on that shortcut, it will open Notepad as Administrator. Not too bad, but this still doesn’t solve the problem of wanting to directly open a file without having to open Notepad first.

Add Open Notepad as Administrator to Right-Click Context Menu

The best way to solve the second problem is to add an option to the right-click context menu that will open the file in Notepad as administrator. This is not very hard to do, but requires a few steps. Firstly, you need to enable the built-in Administrator account in Windows 7. I won’t write all the steps here, but will simply link to a tutorial that explains it step by step:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/507-built-administrator-account-enable-disable.html?filter
Next, log out of your current account and then log into the Administrator account. At this time, it should have no password. Now go to Start, Control Panel and choose Create a password for your account.

Once you have chosen a password, we need to open the registry editor by going to Start and typing in regedit in the search box. Then navigate to the following key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\

Now right-click on shell and choose New – Key.

Name the key the following without the quotes “Open with Notepad (as Administrator)“. Now select the newly created key and create another key called “command“. Finally, right-click on the (Default) value in the right-hand pane and choose Modify.

Change the value to the following:

runas /savecred /user:HOSTNAME\Administrator “notepad %1″

Note two things here. Firstly, you need to keep the quotes around the “notepad %1″ section. Secondly, you need to change HOSTNAME to the name of your computer. You can figure that out by going to Start, Control Panel and click on System.

So this is what mine looks like after everything:

Now, you should be able to right-click on any text file and you’ll see the Open with Notepad (as Administrator) option.

The first time you do this, you’ll be prompted for the password that you created for the Administrator account.