This will open a DOS prompt usually pointing to your users My Documents folder in Documents and Settings.

If you wanted to get to a folder called Movies on your E drive then you would type:

E: and then “cd Movies“. This is demonstrated in the image below.

To create the list then type “dir > movielist.txt” naming the text file anything you want. If you want to only export the file names without the file size details then use “dir /b > movielist.txt“. The movielist.txt file will be within the directory it has listed.

Firstly click on Start and then Run. In the box type in “regedit” and hit Enter.

Then click on File and Connect Network Registry as shown in the image below.

This will allow you to connect to another computers registry settings and make the needed changes.

In the next box you can enter the name of the remote computer or browse for it. This will work if you’re on either a Windows workgroup or on a domain. See the image below.

Once you’ve selected the computer click OK and the computer should now be listed in your Registry Editor at the bottom on the left. You need to navigate your way through the hierarchy and go to the following directory: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server.

Clicking on the Terminal Server folder you should see the window on the right populate with about 20 files. Look for fDenyTSConnections. Right click it and click Modify. A box similar to the one below should appear. Simply change the Value Data from 1 (Remote Desktop enabled) to 0 (Remote Desktop enabled).

Once this is changed then click OK to save the change. Remote Desktop will only be enabled once the machine is rebooted; this can also be done remotely. Open up a command prompt (Start > Run > “cmd“) and type: “shutdown -m \\WORKGROUP\PROMETHEUS -r” changing the computer name to the one you connected to.

SQL Week by Week - Now PR2

How To Audit Your Computer - Now PR2

Changing the default font in Office 2007 - Now PR2

How to add a HTML signature to Outlook 2007 - Now PR2

Javascript Wildcard with jQuery - Now PR2

How to add my blog to Google Blog Search - Now PR2

It seems that Google has ranked these pages as they are some of the older and better established pages on the site. Not only that but these pages perform the best through organic search (users typing a search term directly into Google and coming to the site). Considering I have very very few inbound links then the increased PR should greatly help the strength of the site. The How To Install Trac on Windows guide still gets the most daily traffic but this is purely from links and not Google searches.

In 2009 How To Solutions hope to provide more technology solutions. These will probably be based around more javascript, PHP/ASP, SQL, and Wordpress/SEO matters. One of these days I’ll actually put up a form on the contact page.

So the easiest solution is to create a batch file that will map to to where the shared drive is using proper Windows authentication across the domain. This is what you need in the batch file.

NET USE Z: \\targetIP\drivename password /USER:domain\username /SAVECRED /PERSISENT:YES

So for How To Solutions it could be something like…

NET USE Z: \\192.168.0.1\solutions$ passw0rd /USER:HowToSolutions\admin /SAVECRED /PERSISENT:YES

This assume that…

• 192.168.0.1 - This is the local IP address of the target machine sharing the drive.
• solutions$ - Is the name of the folder on the target machine.
• passw0rd - Is the password used for your username.
• HowToSolutions - This is the Windows domain you’ve VPN’d to.
• admin - Is the username of the Windows account
• SAVECRED - To use credentials previously saved by the user
• PERSISTENT:YES - This will connect the share the next time you logon.

Put the single line in Notepad or something similar and save it as connect.bat. Now whenever you connect remotely to a network you can access the shared drives. It will use your Windows credentials so make sure you have sharing permissions on any folder/subfolders you try and access.

By default Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) includes header and footer text onto web pages that are printed out. This is fine for most users as be default it lists the date & time and the URL. But you may want a clean page when printing or customised text for the date time etc. Here’s the How To Solutions guide.

Removing the Header Footer Text

In Internet Explorer go to File > Page Setup. You’ll see a box like the one below. In the Headers and Footers section you can remove the default text (&w&bPage &p of &P and &u&b&d). Just delete those bits and press OK.

Creating Custom Header Footer Text

You can also create custom header footer text to print out only the information you want to appear on every page. Use the set of functions below to create your own header footer text.

• &w - Window Title
• &u - Page URL
• &d - Date in short format
• &D - Date in long format
• &t - Time in regular format as shown on the clock
• &T - Time in 24-hour format
• &p - Current page number
• &P - Total number of pages
• &b - right align the next text. (You can see it in the default header, where &b is placed before the Page text)
• &b[TEXT]&b - If you surround the text in &b on either side, it will center the text.
• && - A single ampersand (&)

And that’s how to delete or edit the header footer text that appears when printing from Internet Explorer 7.

The Error Message

One or more ActiveX controls could not be displayed because either:

1) Your current security settings prohibit running ActiveX controls on this page, or

2) You have blocked a publisher of one of the controls.

As a result, the page may not display correctly.

The Fix

Firstly, let’s locate your signature folder. Copy one of the following lines (starting at the first %) depending on what your operating system is.

• Vista: %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures
• XP-2003: %userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures

Click on Start and then Run - paste the line you copied into the Run box and hit Enter.

You should see 3 files created for your signature file (in .htm, .txt and .rtf formats). If you can’t see the file extensions, go to Tools / Folder Options / View and untick ‘Hide extensions for known file types’, or right-click the file and select ‘Properties’ to determine the file type.

Open the .htm signature file in Notepad or any other text editor. Then go to Edit > Find and type in “object”. You should see that the text editor has highlighted a bit of the signature code. Look for the bit that looks something like this:

<OBJECT id=ieooui classid=clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D></OBJECT>.

Simply remove that whole bit - everything from <OBJECT to /OBJECT>. Save the file and to make sure the ActiveX object doesn’t come back I recommend making the file read only - do this by right clicking the file, going to Properties and making ‘Read-only’ checked.

Go back to Outlook and when you go to send a new message, no more annoying ActiveX object warning.

Firstly, go to your Comments page and then click on the ‘Approved’ link highlighted in the image below.

This will show all of the comments you’ve approved to be shown on your site. What you need to do is go to the address bar in the browser you’re using. It should look something like the image below.

Change the end of the URL so it reads comment_status=spam - see the image below.

Changing the URL and hitting Enter will show you all of the comments that have been marked as spam. Simply select the comment that was accidentally marked as spam and click Approve. The comment will be removed from spam and approved to be shown as one of the comments on your site. Easy as that.

1. In Windows Media Player click on Tools and then Options.
2. This will bring up the Options dialogue box and you’ll need to choose the Performance tab as shown in RED in the image below.



3. In the Performance tab click on the Advanced button towards the bottom.
4. In the dialogue box that appears uncheck the Use Overlays tick box again shown in RED below and click OK.



5. You can now capture a screenshot of any file you’re playing in Media Player with the Print Screen button.

There shouldn’t be any loss of quality or noticeable differences so capture screenshots using Print Screen at will!

I’ve been using Microsoft Office 2007 for a few months now and I’ve come to hate the default font used among the different products. They use Calibri size 11 (so bad I won’t show you what it looks like) which wasn’t even a default font in Office 2003. So let’s change it quick.

Change the default Office 2007 font for Word

1. In Microsoft Word make sure you you have the Home tab selected at the top of Word
2. In the Styles section of the menu right click in left most text box and then click Modify. See the image below.



3. You’ll get the Modify Style dialogue box appear. See the image below.



4. Scroll through Font stypes and various styling.
5. At the bottom of the image below you’ll see two radio buttons. If you want to permanently change the default font in Word then choose the “New documents based on this template” button.
6. Click OK to confirm.

Now you no longer have to format your Word 2007 font document each time.

Change the default Office 2007 font for Outlook

It’s easy in Word 2007… but in Outlook 2007 it is a little more long winded. Here’s how…

1. In Outlook 2007 click Tools then Options.
2. Select the Mail Format tab highlighted in RED at the top of the image below.
3. Click the Stationery and Fonts button again highlighted in RED in the image below.



4. A dialogue box will appear that will let you change your default font in Office Outlook

Select your favourite font, style, size, colour, and effects… and then click OK to confirm.

By looking at my Google Analytics account I am able to see the search terms people have put into Google to get to my site. These are what are known as organic searches as they come straight from what a user types into the Google search box, rather than a link to the site. It’s an incredibly useful tool as it shows you what your visitors are looking for even if your site has the information they want or not.

The search term “add my blog to google blog search” has come up a few times and upon further investigation I read up on Google Blog Search. It’s where you can use Google search technology to look specifically at blogs (user generated content) for the topic you’ve searched for. So then, how do you as a blog owner get your content listed on Google Blog Search?

The Short Answer…

All you need is a site feed! That is to say you need something like an RSS feed coming from your website. If you’re on Wordpress your theme has a 99.99% chance of having an RSS feed built into it. When Google comes along and spiders/crawls your site it will think “hey, here’s a feed…add this to Google Blog Search”. It’s all done for you! So my RSS feed(http://how-to-solutions.com/feed) was added the first time Google crawled this site and now I’m added to Google Blog Search.

How To Solutions on Google Blog Search

Just to prove that it really is that simple, let’s have a look at this site on Google Blog Search. Firstly let me say that I never “added” myself to Blog Search, it was done for me automatically by Google. Yet I’m still listed in Blog Search, sometimes in the number one spot depending on the keywords. Let’s have a look.

So we can see that for the keywords I used in my post covering a HTML Signature in Outlook 2007 the actual blog post has made it into the #1 position in Google Blog Search. Similarly the same has happened for my SEO for Wordpress Beginners Guide, also reaching #1 for certain keywords.

I hope this has helped answer a question a few people seem to have been asking recently. To find out more look at Google Blog Search Help. The help page does state “…we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven’t picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information..”. So people, get an RSS feed active on your Wordpress blog and get that site indexed.