CBT Bazar

I recently did a clean install of Windows 7 on my PC and downloaded all the drivers from the manufacture’s website and thought everything was good to go. I happened to go into Device Manager and noticed that there was a problem with Base System Device.
Actually, there were several Base System Device driver errors, all with question marks. I was surprised because I thought I had downloaded the important drivers for the system such as the graphics card, touchpad, network adapter etc.

Unfortunately, I didn’t seem to have downloaded all of the drivers. I eventually figured out what the problem was and didn’t get the error in Device Manager anymore. In this article, I’ll show you how to fix the driver issue in Windows.
Even though I installed most drivers, there were a couple that I didn’t install thinking that they were not necessary. The Base System Device is usually related to one of three pieces of hardware: the chipset, bluetooth or the SD card reader.

Go to the manufacturer website and find the drivers for your specific model. Make sure to download the chipset drivers and install the latest version. Also, find the the drivers for bluetooth and SD card reader, if you have those on your system.
Also, you can figure out what driver is needed by finding the hardware IDs for any device that shows up as unknown or with a question mark in Device Manager. To do this, double-click on the Base System Device and choose Details. Then click on Hardware IDs from the drop down.

It should look something like this:

PCI\VEN_15AD&DEV_0405&SUBSYS_040515AD&REV_00
PCI\VEN_15AD&DEV_0405&SUBSYS_040515AD
PCI\VEN_15AD&DEV_0405&CC_030000
PCI\VEN_15AD&DEV_0405&CC_0300

Now you can go to a site like PCIDatabase and type in the vendor ID and device ID. Where are those numbers? The part after VEN_ is the Vendor ID. In the first line above, it’s 15AD. The device ID is the part after DEV_, which is 0405 in the above case.

Now if I type those IDs into the respective Vendor search and Device search boxes on the PCIDatabase website, I’ll get the following results:


As you can see above, it’s a NVIDIA graphics card running under VMware. Since I have installed Windows 7 in a virtual machine, VMware is the the vendor. The device is the graphics card installed on my host PC. Pretty neat huh? The next time you see a big question mark or Unknown Device in Device Manager, you can now figure out exactly what piece of hardware is missing a driver.
Now just go through all the Base System Device listed there and figure out exactly which driver you need to download. If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment. Enjoy!

I this tutorial I will show you one really cool trick which you can perform inside Windows. You will learn how to hide a compressed .zip archive inside .gif image without using any third-party apps or changing image appearance. Note that for safety reasons, you can even add a password protected or encrypted .zip archive. By opening the image, it will display normally. However by opening the image with an archive manager such as 7-Zip, you can access the contents and unpack your .zip archive.


If you do not have image in GIF format, I will show you how to use Windows Paint to convert image from .jpg to .gif format.
Step 1: To open Paint click the Start button -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Paint.
Step 2: Click the Paint menu and then click Open.

Step 3: From your hard drive select image which you want to convert from .jpg to .gif and click Open.

Step 4: Again click Paint menu, mouse over Save As and click GIF picture.

Step 5: Click OK and now have a copy of your image in GIF format.
Now you have .gif image, continue following steps below to find out how to hide ZIP archive into your .gif image. Note that for security reasons, your archive can be completely protected by a password. If you prefer, you can even encrypt your sensitive files before putting them in your archive.
Step 1: At the root of your hard drive (C:\User\Account Name\), create a folder, for example techjournal and in that same folder put the ZIP archive and GIF image that you want to merge.

Step 2: Click Start menu, type cmd and press Enter on your keyboard.
Step 3: Now inside Command Prompt window open the folder where the GIF and ZIP archive are located using the command cd \ followed by the name of the folder where your files are located. Confirm with Enter.

Step 4: Then enter the command you can see below, replacing ttj-test.gif with the name of your image, and test.zip by the name of your ZIP file and merge.gif by the name of the final image which is a fusion of image and ZIP archive. Confirm the command with Enter.
copy /B + ttj-test.gif+test.zip merge.gif

Step 5: A new .gif image (merge.gif) is created with integrated ZIP archive. When you look/open at your image nothing suggests that a file is hidden inside.

Step 6: If you or a friend to who you have sent this image want to extract hidden ZIP archive, continue following steps below.
Step 7: Open 7-Zip File Manager app. If you don’t have it installed on your computer you can download it from this link.
Step 8: Browse your hard drive for the GIF file we previously created from Command Prompt and select it.

Step 9: Then click the Extract button.

Step 10: Choose the folder where you want to unpack the archive and click OK.
You can now open the folder used for decompression and your file(s) from ZIP archive which was hidden inside GIF image are available in there!

In today’s tutorial for Windows 8 I will show you how you can reset the folder view settings of all folders or only folder that are using the same folder template back to default.


Step 1: First you need to open File Explorer and then open the folder for which you want to reset view settings back to normal.
Step 2: Now choose View tab from top navigation.

Step 3: Click on last option in ribbon called Options (don’t click on arrow button on option icon)

Step 4: A new window will open, choose View tab.

Step 5: Now click on Reset Folders button.

Step 6: A confirmation window will appear, click Yes and then click OK.

There are several people who use your computer and you want to prohibit some of then to use a certain software or a particular game. To do this, Windows 7 has a new handy feature called AppLocker. By defining rules of restrictions, you can prevent one or more users to launch an application, game or all software from a particular folder. In this tutorial I will show you how to enable and setup AppLocker in your Windows.


Let me note before you start to follow below steps that AppLocker is only present in the Professional and Ultimate editions of Windows 7 so if you don\t have one of these two Windows 7 version you won’t be able to use AppLocker and I suggest you to try some other alternatives such as Parental Control or third-party apps
Step 1: First we meed to enable AppLocker, for that click the Start button, inside search field type gpedit.msc and press Enter on your keyboard.

Step 2: Local Group Policy Editor window, in left pane expand following path Computer Configuration/Windows Settings/Security Settings/Application Control Policies and then click AppLocker.

Step 3: In the right pane, under Configure Rule Enforcement section click the Configure rule enforcement link.

Step 4: Under Executable rules section check the box Configured and press OK to save changes.

Step 5: Now when we have successively activated AppLocker, go back to Local Group Policy Editor window and the path we opened in Step 2.
Step 6: In right pane under Overview click on Executable Rules link.

Step 7: From top navigation click the Action and from drop down menu select Create Rule.

Step 8: The rule wizard opens. Check the box in front of Skip this page by default and click Next.

Step 9: Under Action select Deny and click Select button.

Step 10: From bottom left corner of small window that appears click the Advanced button.

Step 11: Then click Find Now button.

Step 12: Under Search results at the bottom of the window select the name of the user you want to restrict and click OK.

Step 13: Under Select User or Group window click OK again.
Step 14: In Create Executable Rules window click Next.
Step 15: Now select Path and click Next.

Step 16: Click Browse Folders.

Step 17: Select the folder of the game or software you want to block. By selecting a parent folder, all software and games located in that folder will be blocked to the user. Click OK to continue.
Step 18: Click Next and in new window you can define exceptions. Under Add exception drop down menu select the type of exception (Path for example) and click Add button.

Step 19: In small window that shows up select the folder you want to exclude from blocking and then click OK. Click Next to continue.

Step 20: Give a name and a description to this rule and click the Create button.

Step 21: Click Yes to create the default rules. These rules allow Windows to run properly. Your new rule is added to the list.

Step 22: Now that your rules are ready, you must start the service so that they are effective on the user accounts on your computer. To do that click the Start button.
Step 23: In the search field, type the command services.msc and press Enter on your keyboard.

Step 24: Inside the right pane open the service called Application Identity.

Step 25: Click Startup type and from drop down menu select Automatic. The service will then automatically launched at Windows startup.

Step 26: Under Service status click the Start button to launch it.

Step 27: Click OK and close all opened windows.
Step 28: Now to see if its working correctly lunch program or software from the account you have added to restrictions. If it works correctly you should see a warning window.

I recently ran into a problem on one of my Windows 7 machines where I could not change the date and time. Every time I clicked on the Change Date and Time dialog box shown below, I kept getting an error message.

The message that kept popping up was:

Unable to continue. You do not have permission to perform this task.

I had previously had some problems with this machine and thought it might be related. In the end, I had to try a couple of different solutions before I stopped getting the error message about not having permission. Hopefully, one of the solutions will work for you.

Method 1 – Safe Mode

One thing you can try is to change the date and time in Safe Mode. If you are able to change it here, you then know it’s a problem with either a startup item or a Windows service. You can then perform a clean boot of Windows 7 to narrow down the issue.
You can check out this article from Microsoft that details how to perform a clean boot in Windows 7:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

Method 2 – System File Checker

The next thing you can try is to run the system file checker. If you’re having strange permission issues in Windows, it’s probably some type of corruption of system files and settings. You can run SFC by opening a command prompt and typing in the following command:

sfc /scannow

System file checker will verify all system files and will replace any file that is corrupt, modified or damaged.

Method 3 – Command Line

You can also change the date and time in Windows using the command line. Open a command prompt and type in the word date and press enter. You’ll be prompted to enter a new date.

What about the time? Pretty easy too. Just type in the word time and you can change the time too:

Note that the time is in 24-hour format and you can specify it down all the way to milliseconds. You should be able to change the time without having to open an elevated command prompt. If you get an error, however, then try running the command prompt as Administrator.

Method 4 – Local Security Policy

If you get an error message like “A required privilege is not held by the client” when trying to use the command prompt, go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Local Security Policy and then navigate to Local Policy\User Rights Assignment and ensure that Change the system time and Change the time zone privileges are given to Administrators.

Note that if you are in a domain, you may simply be restricted by the group policy set by your company. If you’re not on a domain and Administrators don’t have the two privileges shown above, then adding the group to the security setting should fix the problem.

Method 5 – Windows Time Service

If you’re still having problems changing the date and time in Windows, go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools and click on Services. Scroll down to Windows Time and right-click and choose Properties. Click on the Log On tab and make sure it’s set to This account – Local Service.

The password fields should automatically be filled in, so there is no need to type in any passwords. Go head and restart the computer and see what happens.

Method 6 – Uninstall Third-Party Clock Applications

If you have any third-party clock manager or time programs, go ahead and uninstall them and see if that resolves your issue with changing the Windows date and time. Sometimes a conflict can occur and a third party program might prevent you changing the time.
Hopefully one of the solutions above fixes your issue. If not, post a comment here and I’ll try to help. Enjoy!