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Floppy disks are becoming less and less common. These days ju7st about all computers allow you to boot from the CD/DVD drive in order to be able to repair a system that has a damaged operating system that will not allow the hard drive to boot. If you still have an older computer that doesn’t allow you to boot directly from the cd to run the repair then you may still need floppy disks to start the boot process in which case this article on howe to make or obtain bootable floppies will be of interest.

Creating a Boot Disk

The more recent versions of Windows now have a Search option rather than a Find option but what it can do is still basically the same and so the techniques described in this article on how to find where Windows has saved the information you just changed will still work even if the option to access it now has a different name.

Which File Contains my Data?

Where do your programs save their data? If you don’t know the answer to that question then you can’t back up all your data without having to back up everything. Not all programs store their data in “My Documents” (eg. your email program). Many programs do allow you to change the location you keep your data in.

Changing the Default Data Folder

Changing the Default Data Folder

Regardless of which operating system you are using these days you should have at least two logins set up on i - one with administrator access and one without. You then use the login without administrator access for everyday use and only use the administrator account when you really need to do something that needs that access. By doing this you ensure that even if something gets past all the other security you have in place nothing that requires administrator access will be able to be run without your knowledge (and most installs require that access so viruses etc will not be able to install things on your system).

One problem is that while you will give your everyday account a your own username, the administrator account gets a default username when it is first created. This means that someone only has to guess the password to break into it instead of having to guess both the username and password. It is therefore not only the account people would prefer to break into but is also the one that will be easier to break into - unless you change the username to something different from the default.

Changing the System Administrator Logonid

Two pieces of information that need to be entered when Windows is first installed are the ,b.Registered Owner and Registered Organisation. If you bought the computer with Windows already installed then this information (which gets used when you install other software) will not contain the correct values. In this article I tell you how to correct these fields.

Changing Your Registration Details

Not just Windows NT but also the more recent versions of the operating system (2000, XP, 2003 and Vista) are also covered by this article. If you have windows already installed on your computer then the chances are that you will have networking already installed but if you need to do a reinstall of your operating system for any reason then you may find it easier to do a basic install without any networking first in order to get things up and running quicker with fewer things to go wrong all at once. Once you have that done then this article will be what you need in order to go back and install the networking that you omitted from the earlier install.

Installing Networking on Windows NT

The old DOS operating system used a file system called FAT (file allocation table) which came in fat12, fat16 and fat32 variants. Windows NT introduced a new file system called NTFS (new technology file system) and that’s the preferred file system for the newer versions of that operating system such as Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Vista. These systems still support FAT though for backwards compatibility and in some instances someone configures the system to actually use FAT rather than the better HTFS. All is not lost though as you can actually convert your drive from one file system to the other as this article describes.

Converting to NTFS

When you network computers together you will not be able to gain all the benefits of doing so unless you provide some access to each computer’s hard drive from the other computers. Windows XP provides a Shared Documents folder which provides this access to some extent. In this article we look at how you can configure your computers to share whichever folders and files that you want to.

Sharing Drives and Folders