Have you ever wanted to flaunt your picture to everyone as if it is hand painted. In this post, I will guide you how to do this in Adobe Photoshop. Install the Adobe Photoshop if not already installed. You can get a trial version from Adobe website.

For demonstration, I have taken famous Bollywood acrtress Katrina Kaif photo to make it look like hand painted.

Click on File and select open submenu to open the photo you want to work with, I have selected KatrinaKaif.jpg.

Next click on Filter menu and select Blur->Gaussian Blur

and in the Baussian Blur window select the radius of 5.0 pixel and Click on OK.

Next Click on Edit menu and select Fade Gaussian Blur

and select the mode as Darken Color and click on OK.

You are Done. Njoy!!

You might had accidental loss of data,  incase your system experiences hardware or storage media failure or because of System data corruption. The Windows XP Backup utility helps you protect data from this accidental loss.

I will guide you, how to backup System State which can be restored incase of accidental corruption of System State.

The System State data includes the registry, the COM Class Registration database, and the system boot files. For servers, the System State data also includes the Certificate Services database and the Active Directory directory services database.

To initiate backup of Windows System state. Click on start->run and type

ntbackup

OR

you can click on start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools and select Backup from the menu.

Backup utility window will popup in wizard mode. We would be using advanced mode in order to backup System State, so click on Advanced Mode to switch.

Backup utility window in advanced mode will popup, select Backup Wizard(Advanced) from the wizard.

You will be presented with different backup options. Select the option, only back up the System State data.

Now, choose the destination and name of the backup file which has to be saved in order to restore, when corruption of system files occur.

Click on Finish to complete the backup wizard.

After backup is done, you will be presented with the backup report.

You can even schedule regular backups to keep your archived data up-to-date.

Windows 7 has a  new feature called Aero Shake which is quite useful and goes one step ahead of “show desktop” shortcut. Like many users do probably have many many windows opened at once. Now what, if you want to single out one window on which you are working and hiding rest from the view.

With Windows 7 its simple, simply grab your title bar of that window and give your mouse a shake, you will notice that very quickly all other windows disappear, to bring them back shake it again and all minimized windows will be maximized again.

To get this feature in Windows XP and Vista, download Aero Shake now.

Install it and enjoy the new feature of Windows 7.

You can watch Aero Shake in live action in this video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Njoy!!

To install some Windows XP updates or upgrades like Media Player 11, you need to activate your copy of Windows XP. I will show you how you can validate your copy of Windows XP as genuine. Follow these steps:

1. Go to “RUN” and type REGEDIT.  Windows registry editor will pop up.
2. Now expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WPAEvents
3. On the right side, double-click on OOBETimer
4. In that windows, delete everything you can and exit.
   You can achieve this just by applying this registry file. Download it and double-click to apply.
5. Now, Go to “RUN” and type
   

   %systemroot%\system32\oobe\msoobe.exe /a

6. Activate Windows will pop up.
7. Choose Yes, I want to telephone a customer service representative to activate Windows and click Next
8. Now, press on “Change Product Key”
9. Enter new key as
   

   THMPV-77D6F-94376-8HGKG-VRDRQ

10. Click on “Update”
11. Now, Click on “Remember Later”
12. Restart the Windows
13. When system reboots, go to “RUN” and type
    

    %systemroot%\system32\oobe\msoobe.exe /a

14. You will see on “Activate Windows” that Windows is already activated.
15. Press OK to exit.

You are DONE, Njoy!!

Always wanted to get that killer Windows 7 look & feel to work on your desktop. You can get Windows 7 theme for Windows XP without having to shell out money to buy Windows 7 OS. Its obvious that you won’t be able to enjoy the core feature of Windows 7, but I am sure you equally like to enjoy Windows XP with Windows 7 user interface.

The excellent pack that gives you Windows 7 visual style with superbar, Windows 7 start orb, Windows 7 taskbar. Download this gorgeous Windows 7 theme for Windows XP. The package contains following:

• Visual Style
• Styler Theme
• Beautiful wallpapers
• windows 7 ViStart Skin
• ReadMe

To enable the third party visual styles, you need to first install UXTheme Multi-Patcher which you can download from here.

Once you have downloaded these files. Follow these steps to install Windows 7 Theme.

1. Unzip the uxpatcher using any uncompression utility like 7zip
2. You will get UXTheme Multi-Patcher 6.0 file after step 1.

   

3. Double click to apply UXTheme Multi-Patcher 6.0 patch file.
4. It might ask for Windows XP installation CD, so keep it ready
5. After patching, you have to reboot the machine
6. Next step, is to unzip the Windows 7 Theme package.
7. After unzipping, browse to “Windows Se7en with Superbar for XP”\Visual Styles
8. Copy “Windows Se7en” folder to C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes\

   

9. Open “Windows Se7en” folder and double click the Windows Visual Style file “Windows Se7en.msstyles”
10. Click Appy & OK.

Enjoy the Windows 7 theme For XP!

Have you ever forgotten yours Windows OS admin login password. Now you don’t have to reinstall the OS anymore. In one of the post, I had discussed about how to reveal Windows XP password? In this article I will explain how to retrieve admin password for various flavors of Windows operating system.

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor is a utility to (re)set the password of any user that has a local account on Windows NT/2k/XP/Vista/7 PC. You do not need to know the old password to set a new one.

It works offline,  i.e., you have to shutdown your computer and boot off a floppydisk or CD or USB stick. It will detect and offer to unlock locked or disabled out user accounts. There is also a registry editor and other registry utilities that works under Linux/Unix, and can be used for other things than password editing. NT stores its user information, including crypted versions of the passwords, in a file called ‘sam’, usually found in \windows\system32\config.

Steps to retrieve Windows OS password:

1. Get the machine to boot from CD/USB stick (or floppy)
2. Floppy version need to swap floppy to load drivers.
3. Load drivers (usually automatic, but possible to run manual select)
4. Disk select, tell which disk contains the Windows system. Optionally you will have to load drivers.
5. PATH select, where on the disk is the system?
6. File select, which parts of registry to load, based on what you want to do.
7. Password reset or other registry edit.
8. Write back to disk (you will be asked)

The easiest & convenient way of using this utility is through USB stick.

To make a bootable USB drive:

1. Download the CD release.
2. Mount the download iso image using any virtual CD/DVD emulation.
3. Copy all files from the cd onto the USB drive. It cannot be in a subdirectory on the drive. You do not need delete files already on the drive.
4. Install the bootloader (you may have to be administrator). On the USB drive, there should now be a file “syslinux.exe”.
   Run this from a command line,

   d:\syslinux.exe -ma d: 

   
   replace d with some other letter if your USB drive is on another drive letter than d:

Please note that you may have to adjust settings in your computers BIOS setup to boot from USB.

Once the system is booted from the USB drive, just follow the instruction to retrieve/reset/set the password.

The quickest way to launch programs or to open folder and documents can be achieved in Windows OS using the Run command line in the Start menu.

Click on “Run” in the Start menu which will open the box as shown below, where commands can be typed.

Have you ever found yourself wishing to send a secret message to someone without anyone having a peep at it?

TheLetterEncrypter is a free tool that can be used to send secret messages as encrypted text.

All you have to do is to enter a password and then a text message and press the Encrypt button. Your secret message will appear as jumbled text until decrypted using same tool and password. The messages can be exported to text files and sent to others.

To send the message either copy the text or paste it to the e-mail or chat window or you can export it to a text file by clicking “Export to text file” button and send the text file to the somebody.

This is a small application (9KB). No installation required.

Download Now

Its requires .net Framework 3.5 installed for WinXP.

It will run directly on Windows VISTA and Windows 7.

Are you bored using same static Windows XP desktop? If the answer is YES, continue reading. In this article, I will guide you to make really cool and useful desktop. You can make your favorite Web page your live desktop.

Right click on your desktop, desktop menu will pop up.

Select “Properties” which will open Display Properties dialog box.

Click on “Desktop” from tab bar.

You will find “Customize Desktop” button in this dialog box. Click on it, “Desktop Items” window will pop up.

Select the tab “Web” from tab bar.

To add a Web page to this list, click New. Now you can add live Web content or pictures to your desktop. To add your favorite Web page or picture from the Internet, enter its URL in the Location text box. I have chosen www.SparkMyLife.com.

Synchronization will start for the URL entered.

Click “OK” on all windows opened beneath the dialog box.

Now you can test your live desktop, browse just like any normal internet browser.

You also have the facility to split desktop with icons, on one half all desktop icons will be present and on other half your favorite Web page. You can achieve this by clicking on top left corner of the Web page and selecting the option “Split Desktop With Icons”.

Njoy your Live Desktop!!

When speed counts, the keyboard still rules the Windows XP.  Switching back and forth between mouse and keys can waste some time, learning few simple keyboard commands can help you work more efficiently. Almost all common tasks can be performed with different keys combinations.

Keyboard’s keys are usually organized into different groups based on the function –

• Alphanumeric keys – Letter, number, punctuation and symbol keys
• Control keys – CTRL, ALT, Windows logo key and ESC
• Function keys – F1, F2, F3, F4 and so on up to F12
• Navigation keys – INSERT, HOME, PAGE UP, DELETE, END AND PAGE DOWN
• Numeric keys – Numeric keypad on right side of your keyboard grouped in a block

Most useful keyboard’s shortcuts are listed below:

 Helpful accessibility keyboard shortcuts: