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[Tip] Change The Default Menu Bar Position In Internet Explorer

September 27, 2010 by bharath

Internet explorer logo

If you are using Internet Explorer 7, 8 or even the latest IE9 beta, you might have noticed the change in position of the menu bar from IE or even from other browsers like Firefox, which shows the menu bar above the address bar. Of course, even though there’s no harm when the menu bar is at the top or beneath the address bar, but given the fact that you might have been accustomed to using it at the top. Here we have come up with a small tweak involving registry editor, which can change the position of menu bar in the Internet Explorer.

Default menu bar position in IE:

menu bar position in IE

As you can see the menu bar is located beneath the address bar (location bar) in the Internet Explorer. Follow the steps mentioned below to change its position:

Steps:

1. Press Start button + R to open the run command bar. Type “regedit” and press enter.

regedit run command

2. In the registry editor, navigate to the following path:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER> Software> Microsoft> Internet Explorer> Toolbar> WebBrowser

3. Right-click on the right hand side pane and select “New > DWORD (32-bit) Value“.

New DWORD

4. Give the DWORD value ITBar7Position:

ITBar7Position

5. Right click on ITBar7Position and choose “Modify”.

Modify DWORD ITBar7Position

6. Enter “1” under the value date filed instead of “0” and click OK. Close the Registry Editor.

Editing DWORD Value Data

You are done with the tweaking. Open Internet Explorer now and you should see the IE menu bar being moved to top like this one:

Menu bar at top in IE

Warning: If you are a novice user of Windows and doesn’t know much about Registry Editor, stay away from this tweak. A wrong edit at the wrong place in Registry Editor can make your Windows corrupt. Always take a backup of the registry editor before working with it (use File > Export > save location).

[Tip] Change Default Download Location In IE9

September 24, 2010 by bharath

IE9 downloads

As promised earlier, we have come up with another tip for the new Internet Explorer 9 users. Internet Explorer 9 (as it is only compatible on Windows 7 and Vista) by default stores the files downloaded to %windir%/Users/Username/Downloads (C: > Users> Username> Downloads is the most common path). But you might want to keep all the downloads through Internet Explorer to a different folder other than the default “Downloads” folder. Follow the steps given below to get this done:

1. Open Internet Explorer 9 and hit Ctrl + J to launch the “View Downloads” window. Alternatively, you can open the same via Alt > Tools > View Downloads from the Tools menu.

Tools menu options in IE9

2. In the View Downloads window, click on “Options”.

View Downloads in IE9

3. In the “Download Options“ window, change the default folder by browsing and selecting a custom folder. Click OK once you have chosen the desired folder.

Download options in IE9

Select download folder for IE9

4. Click OK and close the “Download Options” window and “View Download” window.

[How To] Clean Up Context Menu In Internet Explorer

September 24, 2010 by bharath

IE context menu mess up

We have earlier covered how to clean up unwanted items in context menu in Windows Explorer and for Firefox. Now in this tutorial let me take you through the process of removing items from right click context menu in Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer is by far the most widely used browser in the world. And the IE lovers worldwide are excited by the release of new beta version of IE9. So we thought this might be the right time to post some tips on tweaking Internet Explorer.

Context menu in Internet Explorer consists of two sections:

1) Accelerators (only for IE8 & IE9)

2) Menu extensions

1) Accelerators:

Accelerators are webpage specific and they will have their own action set up based on the webpage data. These have become a part of IE since the release of Internet Explorer 8. Some examples for Accelerators in IE8 & IE9:

Blog with Blogger
Email with Windows Live
Define with Google Dictionary
Translate with Windows Live

Accelerators in Internet Explorer

If you don’t use these Accelerators much, follow the steps outlined below to disable them:

1. Go to Tool > Select Manage Add-ons

Tools menu in Internet Explorer

2. Under the “Add-on Types”, click on Accelerators tab on the left hand side pane. You will the full list of Accelerators available.

3. Right click on the Accelerator that you want to disable and choose “Disable”.

disable accelerator in IE

You may also want to disable or remove other unneeded toolbars and add-ons by clicking on “Toolbars and Extensions”.

2) Menu Extensions:

Menu extensions are stored in the Windows registry and these are present in all versions of Internet Explorer, not just IE8 & IE9.

Examples for Menu Extensions many include:

Download with IDM
Send to OneNote
Send page to Bluetooth Device..

To disable unnecessary Menu Extensions, follow these steps:

1. Press Start button + R to open the run command bar. Type “regedit” and press OK.

regedit run command

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

HKEY_CURRENT_USER> Software> Microsoft> Internet Explorer> MenuExt

HKCU in regedit

HKCU expanded in regedit

3. Right click on MenuExt folder and choose “Export” and save a copy as the backup, to be on the safe side in case something goes wrong.

MenuExt export

4. Collapse the “MenuExt” folder and start deleting the items that you don’t need:

MenuExt items

5. Close the registry editor and restart the Internet Explorer to see the changes.

That is it. If you wonder “why do I need to mess up with registry editor? Isn’t there any freeware available?” ; Yes, there’s a freeware (actually IE add-on) called ToolbarCop which will remove the unnecessary items from the IE context menu with a few clicks.

[How To] Uninstall Internet Explorer 9

September 17, 2010 by bharath

Internet Explorer 9

Recently I have downloaded and installed Internet Explorer 9 beta on my laptop to see what Microsoft is up to with their new browser. But since then I had problem while opening some programs like Windows Live Writer (it is the older version of WLW of course), which was getting crashed even before it could start. I was quite sure that the IE 9 could be the culprit and in fact an article at Windows support knowledge base suggested me that I was right. Ok, all I need to do is to uninstall the Internet Explorer 9 from my PC. I followed the usual routine: Control Panel > Programs> and clicked Turn Windows features on or off.

But I was rather surprised to see that there’s no Internet Explorer in the list !

IE 9 missing in Windows features

The fact is that when you choose to install Internet Explorer 9 beta, it’s going to be installed as an windows update. So if you want to uninstall this program, you need to uninstall from the installed windows updates list.

Steps:

1. Go to Control Panel > Programs > Click “Uninstall a program”.

Uninstall program in control panel

2. And yes, you don’t find it under the installed programs list. Click on “View installed updates” link.

Programs and features and installed updates

3. Now search for “internet explorer” in the installed updates list.

ie 9 uninstall

4. Just right-click and choose “uninstall” and accept the confirmation.

IE9_uninstall_confirm

Just restart the computer once the uninstallation is over and there you go, you have Internet Explorer 8 back on your PC instead of Internet Explorer 9.

This marks our 500th post at Techrena.net. To receive the updates from our site subscribe to Techrena’s RSS feeds via email.

[How To] Change The Favicon In Blogger

September 15, 2010September 15, 2010 by bharath

Change default favicon in Blogger

If you have landed here while searching for changing the favicon in blogger, this itself is a indication that you know something about the favicons. Even though I assume that you know a bit about favicons, let me quickly introduce the concept of “favicon” :

Favicon (pronounced fav-eye-con) is the short name for “favorites icon” and is otherwise called as a shortcut icon. It is a 16×16 (most common) or 32×32 pixel square icon that is shown next to the URL of any webpage in a browser that supports tabs like Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera or Internet Explorer 7/8 etc. It is also shown in bookmarks or favorites, when you bookmark (in Firefox, Chrome or Opera) or when you add a site to favorites (in Internet Explorer). Many websites use well designed favicons as branding for their site and it also enables their site to be distinguished from other sites easily.

Wikipedia Favicon

If you are using Blogger blog, you might have already noticed that Blogger shows default favicon next to the URL of your blog as shown here:

Usually if you want to change the favicon of a website, you need to upload the new favicon file to the root folder of the website and the new favicon appears in your website immediately. But it’s not the same case with Blogger. As the user doesn’t have control over the files hosted on Blogger, the only way you can change the favicon in a Blogger blog is to upload that favicon to a free image host that supports uploading of .ico formats and then tell the Blogger to use this favicon instead , by specifying it in a short code inside the HTML source code of your blog template. Let’s look into the step-by-step guide on how to get this done.

Steps:

1. Design an attractive favicon for your site using many online favicon generators online. I’m quoting a few such tools here:

favicon.cc

favicon.co.uk

antifavicon.com

iconj.com

2. Once you have designed and downloaded the favicon on to your desktop, you need to upload it to a host site where you have access to upload the favicon file and retrieve it later. I suggest you try some image hosting sites that allow the uploading of .ico files. Iconj.com mentioned in the above list supports uploading and hosting your .ico files as well.

3. Now note down the URL of the file located on the image host.

4. Login to blogger.com and go to your dashboard. Click on the “Design” tab under your dashboard.

design link in blogger dashboard

5. Now click on “Edit HTML” tab found under the “Design” tab.

Edit Html under design in blogger

6. Find the <head> and </head> lines in the HTML code.

7. Copy the following code:

 <link href='http://www.your-icon-url' rel='shortcut icon' /> 
 <link href='http://www.your-icon-url' rel='icon' />

Replace “www.your-icon-url” in the above code with the actual URL pointing to the new favicon file of your site. Example:

<link href='http://www.techrena.net/favicon.ico’ rel='shortcut icon'/>
<link href='http://www.techrena.net/favicon.ico’rel='icon'/>

8. Paste the modified code anywhere in the HTML code, but it should be placed after the <head> and before </head> section [Tip: Use Ctrl + F to find these lines] in the HTML code. Click “Save Template” to save the changes to the code.

favicon code in blogger html design

9. The new favicon may take some time to appear in your browser. You may not see it until your browser clears its local cache. To see the new favicon instantly, try Ctrl + F5. If it doesn’t show up, try opening your blog in another browser and you will see the change

New favicon

If you liked this post, you might also want to read our earlier exclusive posts about Blogger : How to verify Blogger blog in Webmaster tools, Blogger title tweaks for SEO and swapping Blogger blog title and post title.

[How To] Find The MAC Address Of Your Computer

September 14, 2010September 14, 2010 by bharath

what is my mac address

Media Access Control address (wiki: MAC address), also known as physical address or hardware address is a unique identification number assigned to each of your local network adapters or network interface cards like Ethernet card, Wireless LAN card, Bluetooth device etc.

As said earlier, MAC address is unique for each of the network adapters and will not match MAC address of any other device in the world. MAC address will generally be in the form “xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx” (12-digit alphanumerical). The address will tell many things about the network adapter card installed in your PC. The first six digits of the MAC address belong to the manufacturer of that adapter card. Of late, MAC address are sometimes used to register your computer to your ISP.

An example for such MAC address may be of the following three forms:

“0C:60:76:42:0A:3B” or “0C-60-76-42-0A-3B” or “0c6076420a3b”

Here the first six digits “OC6076” denote that it is being manufactured by the vendor, a Taiwan based Hon Hai Precision Ind. limited.

[Tip: Use online MAC Address Decoder to find details about your network card after find out the MAC address following this tutorial.]

Now get into the details of how to find the MAC address for network adapters in your computer. Before proceeding, you should know that the MAC address can only be traced if that network adapter is being enabled and connected to a network.

Finding MAC Address in Windows [Windows 7 or Vista]:

You find physical address of your computer’s network adapter in the following methods:

Method ONE:

Open the “Network and Sharing Center” from the Control Panel
Click on “Change adapter settings”

network sharing change adapter settings link

Now all your Network connections will be shown in the window. Those that are in grey denote that that particular network connection is currently disabled. The adapters which are currently enabled will be shown in blue. The network adapter or connection which is enabled but not connected to any network right now will be shown with a “X” mark below it.

network connections list

Right-click on the Network connection for which you want to find out the MAC or physical address. Select “Status” option from the popup. The network connection status window will open up. Click on the “Details” tab in the status window.

Wireless network connection status

In the “Network Details” window, you will see the physical address as marked in the screenshot.

Physical address Network connection details

Method TWO:

Using the “ipconfig” command:

Go to Start menu(press ) and type “cmd” in the search box and open cmd.exe from the results.

Cmd in start menu search

cmd.exe from start menu in programs

Type “ipconfig/all” (without quotes) and press enter.

ipconfig command

Physical address using ipconfig command

The command prompt window will show you the full list of your network adapters and their properties. Adapters that are disabled will be shown as “Media disconnected” against them. Carefully scroll the window to find the network connection for which you want to trace the physical (MAC) address (that is enabled and connected). While scrolling the window ignore all the network connections that are shown as “Media disconnected”. In my case I want to find the MAC address for my wireless network connection which is currently enabled is connected to a network. So I have scrolled the window until I could find the properties for Wireless LAN adapter and figured out the Physical address. Note down the MAC address value listed against the Physical Address (Right-click on the window, choose Mark select the physical address value and press “Enter” to copy the value to the clipboard) it as highlighted in the above screenshot.

Method THREE:

Using the getmac command:

Open the command prompt window as shown in the previous method and type “getmac” (without quotes) and press enter. Notice the MAC address of the device listed under “Physical Address” for the adapter that has not been marked as “Media disconnected” under “Transport Name”.

getmac command

You will find the mac address of the devices that are connected as well as disconnected.

Finding The Physical Address on a Mac OS X:

1. Click on the Apple Menu > Select System Preferences.

2. Select “Network” tab under the Internet & Network.

3. If you are connected to a wireless network, select “AirPort” from the drop down next to “Show” tab. The AirPort ID shown there is your physical address for that wireless adapter.

AirPort id in mac

4. If you are connected via a wired connection, select “Built-in-Ethernet” from the drop down under “Show” tab. The Ethernet ID shown there is the MAC address of your Ethernet card.

Ethernet id in mac osx

Finding MAC Address in Linux or in any UNIX based systems:

1. Launch the Terminal and type ifconfig and press enter.

Terminal in linux

2. Now you will be shown the MAC address next to “HWaddr” (shortcut for Hardware address) as shown:

ipconfig command in linux

Alternatively, you may also type “/sbin/ifconfig”in the console and press Enter. You may need to provide credentials if you get “permission denied” error, by using su –c “/sbin/ifconfig” in the console.

These are the ways you can find the MAC address without using any external software. However, there are many third party programs available to do the same, you may also use them to find our MAC address.

BTW, do you know that you can actually change the MAC address (read spoofing MAC post) to show a dummy number instead of the actual value? If you liked this post, do take time to read our earlier tutorials.

[How To] Set up Custom Domain Name For Your Blogger Blog

September 13, 2010 by bharath

Blogger logo

This for those who has a Blogger (..blogspot.com) blog and want to upgrade it to use your own custom domain like www.example.com instead of your current example.blogspot.com. First up, you should know why should you migrate your blog to a custom domain. The advantages with using a custom domain instead of a Blog*Spot (..blogspot.com) subdomain are:

Your blog URL becomes reasonably short and you can choose a catchy domain name that will make your regular blog readers to remember the blog URL easily.

You can have a blog at the domain root folder (like example.com) and this has clear advantages in terms of SEO and PageRank aspects. For instance Alexa sometimes may not rank blogs that are located on subdomains like blogspot.com, it only works well with the sites that are hosted on the root folders.

Fortunately, Blogger supports publishing on a custom domain and offers free unlimited hosting and bandwidth for all of your content associated with your blog. So you don’t need to look for a hosting service and pay it for hosting. Let’s see how a naive Blogger user can start using a custom domain name for his/her Blog*Spot blog.

The Actual Process

>> To start with, login to blogger.com with your Google account and go to your Blogger dashboard. Click on “Settings” link under your Blog entry in the dashboard.

>> Find “Publishing” tab under the Settings and click on it. You will see the following:

Publishing on blogspot.com settings

>> Click on “Custom Domain” link to get started with the custom domain.

Now you have two options. You can either buy a domain name for your blog from Google (Blogger) itself (charges $10 per year via Google Checkout) or you can buy through some dedicated domain name/hosting registrars, for instance Yahoo Small Business.

>> If you choose to buy the domain from Google, it’s very straightforward and you need not worry about other settings like DNS settings plus you will also get Google Apps for your domain.

However, if you have bought the domain from external domain name registrar, first you need to configure DNS (Domain Name Server) settings for your domain.You must have an option to change your CNAME and A NAME records for your domain, if you find difficulty in changing these records, contact your domain name registrar.

1. Creating CNAME record:

Create a CNAME record for your blog with the following CNAME:

ghs.google.com.

Adding CNAME record

2. Creating an ‘A’ NAME record: ‘A’ NAME records are helpful in redirecting non-WWW URL (naked URL) of your domain (your-blog.com) to a WWW version of your domain (www.your-blog.com).

Create a three ‘A’ NAME records with the name of your domain without the ‘www’ as shown here:

Add the following four such records pointing your naked domain (ex:your-blog.com) to the IP addresses listed below:

216.239.32.21

216.239.34.21

216.239.36.21

216.239.38.21

add A NAME record

>> Now, click on the “Switch to advanced settings” at the top corner on your right hand side.

>> Enter your domain name (with www) in the “Your Domain” filed. And also select “Redirect your-blog.com to www.your-blog.com” option. You may keep the default options “No” for “Use a missing file host? ” filed.

Advanced settings for custom domain in Blogger

>> Enter the word verification and click “Save Settings” to finish the process and save your settings. Now you are done with setting up for your custom domain for your Blog*Spot blog. Now Blogger will redirect all Blog*Spot subdomain visitors to your own custom domain.

Blogger custom domain output

Initially your new domain won’t redirect itself to your blog as it takes nearly 24 hours for DNS records to be updated. Tip: Use DNS Propagation checker to check how your DNS information has been propagated around the globe in the internet.

Please note that you can only use this feature on domains or subdomains (like your-blog.com or diary.your-blog.com etc.) but not on subdirectories (your-blog.com/diary). All your existing content including images will continue to work as they used to be.

Let’s know if you find any problem while following this tutorial.

[How To] Configure Microsoft Outlook 2010 With Gmail

September 8, 2010 by bharath

A tutorial for Outlook 2010 beginners:

Gmail in Microsoft Outlook 2010

It’s true that Gmail’s web interface is great and feature rich and for the same reason it is gaining lot of popularity among the users when compared to other web based email services. Some of you may want to read your mails through an email client like Microsoft Outlook. With this you can not only use Gmail via your favorite email client, you can also setup and read email messages from multiple email accounts. This also gives you the convenience of added features like searching, filtering, organizing mails and offline mail storage options. Although Google of late trying hard to offer most of these features to it’s web version, the main reason that you may opt for Outlook is to handle mails from Gmail account as well as from other email services simultaneously at one place. Whatever may be the purpose, if you would like to configure Microsoft Outlook 2010 with your Gmail account, follow the steps: [There’s nothing much to do just follow the wizard]

1. Go to Start Menu and type “o l” (without quotes) and open the Microsoft Outlook 2010.

2. Start the new email account configuration wizard and in the second step you need to enter your email account details:

Add New email account in Outlook

3. Click Next after entering your details. Let the Outlook configure itself properly for your email account. This may take a few minutes. Outlook automatically searches and finds server settings online.

Online search for server settings in Outlook for Gmail

4. You are done with configuring Outlook. However you may also configure settings manually by clicking on the “Manually configure server settings” and clicking Next button.

Gmail settings in outlook

Your settings should be identical to the ones shown in the above screen shot. Click on More Settings button to find some more settings under the “Advanced” tab which should be identical to the following:

Advanced email settings in Outlook 2010

IMAP Settings for Gmail in Outlook 2010:

Incoming mail server: imap.gmail.com

Outgoing mail server: smtp.gmail.com

Server Port Numbers:

Incoming server (IMAP): 993 [Using SSL encryption]

Outgoing server (SMTP): 587 [Using TLS encryption]

[Tutorial] Using Priority Inbox In Gmail

September 6, 2010 by bharath

Gmail priority inbox overview

Google has just launched this brand new “Priority Inbox” feature inside their popular email service Gmail. The above an illustrative image taken from the official Gmail blog shows the quick overview of the what this new feature has to offer for you. If you are one of those who gets thousands of emails most of which are “not really” important, Gmail’s priority inbox lets you organise them in a better way by showing the emails that you should probably be reading first in a sorted manner based on your priority and on Gmail’s knowledge of picking the important mails based on your reading over the time. Without wasting much time, lets get straight into the details on making it ready for the first time for your inbox.

Steps:

Find “New! Priority Inbox^Beta” link in red at the top right corner of your Gmail inbox window.

When you click on the link, a window with a video pops up, quickly go through the video to get to know about this new feature or you may totally skip it as well.

Click on “Try it now!” link at the bottom of the video and you will be shown a initial configuration window.

The window will show some of your mails that Gmail thinks as “Important” or “Not Important”. If any one of the mails are shown in the wrong category, you can tell the Gmail it by clicking on the appropriate buttons : click on minus sign in case if the mail is wrongly placed in the “Important” category and click on plus signif there is any wrong mail in the “Not Important” category.

Once you have done the required changes, click on the “That looks right. Go to Priority Inbox!” link at the bottom of the window. Be patient until priority inbox gets activated for you.

Activating Priority inbox

Here you go…Priority inbox has been activated and a new “Priority Inbox” label appears just above the classical “Inbox” label inside your Gmail.

Priority inbox label

And here’s how your new priority inbox should look:

It will have three sections: “Important and unread”, “Starred” and “Everything else”. You can still click on at the top of your mail to train Gmail work smart in choosing the important and unimportant mails for you.

You can still customise your inbox from the pop-up window that appears when you click on any of the sections mentioned above. For instance, if you click on the down arrow present next to “Important and unread” label, you will see the following set of options:

Priority inbox pop-up options

Let us know your feedback on the new Gmail priority inbox through your comments.

[How To] Use Google Multiple Sign-In Feature

August 17, 2010August 16, 2010 by bharath

Google Mutiple sing-in

If you use Google products a lot and that too with different logins (may be one for personal use and other for business purpose etc.), you would be knowing there’s absolutely no way to use both accounts on the same browser. Until recently you need to go through some workarounds or use another browser and keep switching between the two windows often. Times have changed, Google has listened to users like you and enabled this glorious multiple sign-in feature for selected Google products.

You wouldn’t even be knowing that such a feature exists until you open your Google account settings page. This tutorial explains you how to enable and use Google multiple sign-in feature for your account.

To begin with, visit Google account settings page,

Google account personal settings

Find a “Multiple Sign-in” tab under your personal settings, by default this feature would be set to “Off”, click on the “Edit” link to change the multiple sign-in settings.

You will be taken to multiple sessions page,

You need to read and understand the four aspects listed there (as shown in the screenshot) before adding a “check” to each one after which you can enable the Google multiple accounts feature. After you checked the each option, the “save’ option would be enabled. Click on it to save the settings and enable the multiple sign-in feature.

Now the Google multi-login feature gets enabled for you. Open any multiple sign-in supported Google product page(ex: Gmail) and you can figure out a drop down menu next to your Google account username. Click on it to see “Sign in to another account” link and click on it.
multilogin menu sample

You can sign in up to two additional accounts (so in essence, you can simultaneously access up to three Google accounts, while the first being your default account) and you can also open the same product in multiple tabs with different tabs.

Please note that the multiple sign-in option is currently available to only few products listed below and also it is not fully supported for use with Offline Gmail and calendar , for the same reason you wouldn’t want it to enable yet if you use offline Gmail.

Multiple-sign in feature supported Google products:

Code
Calender
Gmail
Reader
Sites
Voice
Docs

If you want to use multiple sing in with other products, you still need to either use tricks like using private browsing mode in supported browsers or use another browser as you have been doing all through.