February, 2011 | TECHRENA dot Net

[Tip] Link Google Analytics Profile To Webmaster Tools

February 8, 2011 by bharath

If you own a website or blog and using Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools services on your site, you can now link both these services to more quicker access within one service to the other. A post on Google webmaster central blog describes that once you link your site’s Google Analytics profile to the corresponding Google Webmaster Tools account, even though you won’t be able to see data sharing like your linked Adsense – Google Analytics account, you can still see some quick links to access few Analytics features right inside the Webmaster Tools. For instance you can now see the referring pages report of the Google Analytics profile from the “Links to your site” page in Webmaster Tools.

Links to site in Google Webmaster Tools

Follow the steps to link the Google Analytics profile of your site to the Webmaster Tools provided you have both of them on the same Google account.

1. Go to Google Webmaster Tools dashboard and locate the site for which you want to link.

2. Click on the “Manage” drop-down button to expand the menu and click on the “Google Analytics profile” link.

3. Choose your site’s Google Analytics profile from the list and click the “Save” button.

That is it.

Set Up Hotmail Email Aliases

February 7, 2011February 5, 2011 by bharath

An email alias is basically an alternate email address which is mapped to a original and used email address in order to save your email address from spam. If you ever have to share your email address but hesitant to do it for of the fear of spam, having an email address alias could be handy.

Most of the email services allow us to easily generate a dummy email alias by adding a “+” sign to your primary email address. For instance, if your email address is “myemail@hotmail.com” is your primary email address, you could always add a “+” sign to your ID to make it “myemail+newsletters@hotmail.com”. Even though this method works well, one big problem is that one can easily find out your actual primary email address from the structure of this kind of alternative email address. To solve this issue, Microsoft has started to let the users choose completely different set of email addresses as your aliases that can be used to receive emails into your primary email address without anybody knowing a detail about it. Google offers such email aliases for Google Apps user but not for Gmail users. Here is how you can setup an email alias for your Hotmail.

1. Open Hotmail email alias page and log into your Hotmail account using Windows Live ID.

2. You will now be asked to choose an email alias for your existing email, and the it is subject to the availability i.e Hotmail checks whether the ID is available. Choose your desired ID and click “Create an alias” button .

hotmail alias

3. If the ID chosen is available, you will be taken to your inbox and will be asked to choose a folder for this alias. You can either choose to receive mails from this email alias directly to your inbox or you can create a new folder to direct the email messages to it.

Hotmail email alias setup

4. You are done. If you had chosen to create a new folder, it will appear in the left-hand side pane.

hotmail alias folder

You can create up to five aliases per year until you reach as many as fifteen aliases in your account.

[via] Windows Live blog

[Download] Windows Home Server 2011 Release Candidate

February 5, 2011February 4, 2011 by bharath

Microsoft has yesterday released the release candidate version of the upcoming Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS 2011) for testers. The product which was codenamed “Vail” during its development was previously in the news because of Microsoft’s surprise and controversial move to not to include the popular Driver Extender (DE) feature in WHS 2011. For starters, Drive Extender was a handy feature in WHS which allowed the users to merge hard drives into a storage pool that made it easy to manage all the drives. Microsoft has decided to drop this feature apparently because it thinks that the drives coming these days are big enough (storage wise) and the users may not go for the drive pooling via Drive Extender. The another limitation in WHS 2011 is that the maximum size of a partition can only be 2TB. To makeup for these limitations, Microsoft has added few new features like Move Folder Wizard which makes you to move data from one drive to another and the other being Shadow Copy which allows you to quickly return to a previous version of existing files.

If you want to test the Windows Home Server 2011, you must sign up for the Windows Home Server Connect Program using a Windows Live ID.

[via]

[Download] Valentine’s Special Windows 7 Themes

February 3, 2011 by bharath

2011 is already a month old and we are into the beautiful month of February. The first thing that comes to the minds of most people when they think about the February is the valentines day. As with Microsoft, the practice of releasing some new free themes for all seasons and important occasions continues and Microsoft has already released a new “Lovebirds” theme for Windows 7 keeping the upcoming 14th February’s valentines day. Lovebirds theme has five beautiful high resolution desktop backgrounds filled with the valentines colors (pink & purple) decorated with flowers, birds, etc.

Download Lovebirds Theme For Windows 7

And by the way, you must also check out the Lacey Hearts Valentines Windows 7 theme (released last year) which still looks great and suits your valentine mood.

Download Lacey Hearts Windows 7 Theme

Search The Internet Right From The Windows 7 Start Menu

February 3, 2011 by bharath

Searching the internet is fun and it would more fun if it could be made easily accessible. We all by default use browsers to search (through the address bar, search box or using the search engine website) the internet. But the modern gadgets like Android phones, tablets and others are coming up with more quicker ways to search right from their home screens. In fact, you will find a Google search box on the homepage of most Android devices. Wouldn’t it be good if we have such quick access to any search engine like Google from our desktop? Of course we have few third party applications like Google Desktop to serve the purpose. If you are on Windows 7, you don’t even need any special software to achieve this. Windows 7’s Start Menu has integrated the web search feature right in it. Let’s see in detail, how to enable and search the internet directly from the Start Menu in Windows 7.

>> Method –1: Using The Registry Editor

This method works on all the different editions of Windows 7 as we make use of the Registry Editor that’s key ingredient of all the different editions of Windows 7.

1. Type “regedit” in the Start Menu and open the regedit.exe from the results under the “Programs” section.

2. Navigate to the following path in the registry editor:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer

3. Right-click on the right-hand side pane and choose New > DWORD (32-bit) value and name it as “AddSearchInternetLinkInStartMenu”.

4. Now double-click on the DWORD and edit the “Value data” filed to “1” and click OK.

Now either log off from your user account and long back in or just restart the “explorer.exe” process from the Task Manager.

You can now search for anything in the Start Menu and you will see the “Search the Internet” option below the “See more results” link. Clicking on it would open your default browser (Firefox in my case) and search the web using your default address bar search engine for your browser (Google in my case).

To rollback or undo this change, just change the Value data back to “0” or completely delete the DWORD in the step 4.

>> Method- II : Using The Local Group Policy Editor

Local Group Policy Editor (GPEdit, as it is also known as) is not available in the Hone editions of Windows 7. So if you have Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate editions, you can go ahead with this tweak.

1. Type “gpedit” in the Start Menu search and open the “gpedit” from the results under the ‘Programs’ section.

2. Local Group Policy Editor window will open up.

Scroll down to “User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar” and find “Add Search Internet link to Start Menu” entry in the list.

3. Double-click on it to change the settings. Change the value to “Enabled” and click “OK” button at the bottom to save the settings and close the window.

That’s it. As said in the earlier method, either log off and log back into your Windows user account or restart the explorer.exe process from the Task Manager to effect the change. Now you will find a link in the Start Menu itself to search the internet for your keyword/query as shown in the screenshot.

Solve YouTube Rebuffer Problem When You Switch To Full Screen Mode

February 2, 2011 by bharath

YouTube video resolutions

YouTube lovers on slower internet connection are very much disappointed by a recently changed settings that went into live in the video sharing site. The new settings (known as Auto HD) force the video to re-buffer from the beginning when you switch to full screen mode when watching a video. Just imagine a situation where you load a full video in normal mode in 360 pixels resolution. Now you wanted to watch it in full screen, the video switches from 360p to 480p automatically and starts buffering from the starting point again! Very annoying, isn’t it? Not so much when you are on a high speed internet connection, but if you are on a slow connection, you have every reason to feel so. Though YouTube doesn’t really offer any fix for this, we have few tricks which can solve this issue for you.

Method-1: Changing Settings In Your YouTube Account

Click on the “Settings..” link found atop when you click on the video resolution (240p, 360p etc.) button.

YouTube video resolution settings

If you are already having an YouTube account, sign in to the account and go to your YouTube account settings page, where you’ll find settings for “Video Playback Quality”. Choose the first option “I have a slow connection. Never play higher-quality video.” and click the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page.

Now, videos will never get into the higher resolution mode when you switch to the full screen mode. On the downside, this method only works when you play the videos while you are logged into your YouTube account.

Method-2: Using GreaseMonkey Script

Install GreaseMonkey add-on for Firefox and restart your browser. If you are on Google Chrome you need not install any extension.

Install this GreaseMonkey script (YouTube Auto Buffer & Auto HD & Remove Ads) in your Firefox or Chrome browsers and it will take care of the rest. Now test the script by playing and switching any YouTube video into full screen. The problem should have been fixed now!

[Tip] Change Microsoft Security Essentials Update Frequency

February 1, 2011 by bharath

Microsoft Security Essentials is easily one of the top free antivirus / anti-malware products available for Windows. If you are already using Microsoft Security Essentials, you might be aware that the program regularly checks for updates at least once in 24 hours. No problems with this setting as long as you are connected to internet and your PC is on most of the time. But at times you miss out on updates when your computer or laptops is not switched on or in sleeping mode or experiencing some internet connections issues. If your computer is not able to download updates when the regular MSE update check happens, the next update check will only happen after 24 hours. In such cases, the best thing to do is to check for updates manually. But you might also want to tweak the settings so that the program checks for updates more often.

Follow the steps to learn how to do it using task scheduler:

1. Type “task scheduler” in the Start Menu and open the “Task Scheduler” from the results under the Programs section.

2. In the Task Scheduler, click on the “Create Task…” link on the right-hand side pane.

3. Give the task a name under the “General” tab, then click on the “Actions” tab. Click on the “New..” button under the Actions tab.

new-action-task-scheduler

Browse the MpCmdRun.exe (Microsoft Essentials command line client) file. Usually it sits inside the Microsoft Security Client > Antimalware folder. In my case this where I found it:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Security Client\Antimalware\MpCmdRun.exe

It may vary depending upon your Windows version and the location where you chose to install it. Now select the file and add a “-SignatureUpdate’ to the program path so that it looks like

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Security Client\Antimalware\MpCmdRun.exe -SignatureUpdate "

new action program path in task-scheduler

Tip: You may also specify the “-SignatureUpdate” in the arguments field instead of embedding it in the program path.

Click OK once you are done.

4. Then go to “Triggers” tab, under the settings tab, select “Daily” and then set the values for “Repeat task every” field (like 5 hours or 6 hours etc.) and click OK.

new trigger in task schedule

5. Now go back to the “General” tab and click on the “Change User or Group..” under the Security Options. Type “SYSTEM” as the object name and click OK.

system-user-task-scheduler

Now we have set the task to run on “System” user account

MSE update check task scheduler properties

That is it! You are done with configuring the update checks settings for the Microsoft Security Essentials.

[via]

[Tip] Delete Windows 7 Log Files The Easy Way

February 1, 2011 by bharath

Maintaining is a Windows PC isn’t a cakewalk. You often need to take time to remove all the clutter from your Hard drive in order to make the Windows run more smoother and efficient. PC experts often advise that you should do such maintenance tasks in a regular manner to get the most out of your current operating system.

In this post, we are going to talk about the Windows log files. Windows log files keep a record of various activities of your PC. These include list of errors/exceptions, internet browsing history etc. Even though they don’t create a problem but with time these logs grow bigger in size and thus reducing the amount of free space on your hard disk. Most of these logs are not essential and you can safely delete them manually or using clean up utilities. Windows 7 has inbuilt utility “Disk Cleanup” to delete these log files. You can also make use of third party programs like “CCleaner’ to perform the same task. However, even after performing clean ups, there would still be some traces of these log files left on your disk. In such cases deleting the log files manually would be a better option. Let’s see how to delete the Windows 7 log files manually.

>> Go to your Windows folder (usually at C:\ Windows, that’s where all the logs are stored!, where ‘C’ is the Windows installation drive) in the windows explorer and type “*.log” in the search box at the top right corner of your window and hit enter. The results comprise of all the log files stored in the “Windows” folder. Delete the all the log files by selecting them.

Log files in windows folder

>> This can also be done using a command prompt. Type cmd in the Start Menu search box and use CTRL + SHIFT + Enter to open the command prompt with elevated rights (administrator mode).

Command Prompt Administrator mode

By default, command prompt would start from “C:\Windows\system32”. We need to go one folder down to C:\Windows. For this type “cd..” hit and press enter.

Windows folder in Command Prompt

Now that we are in the “Windows” folder, we are just one command away from deleting all the log files. Type

Del *.log /a /s /q /f

in the command prompt and press enter. Now all the Windows log files will be deleted in few minutes.

Delete log files in Windows from Command prompt

In the command, “a” stands for selecting all the log files,

“s” for deleting all the files inside sub folders

“q” for skipping the Yes/No prompts before deleting the files

and "f” for forcibly removing the files