Tutorials | TECHRENA dot Net

[How To] Disable Access To Control Panel In Windows 7

September 27, 2010 by bharath

control panel restriction

If your computer is used by many of your friends or family members etc., you might want to restrict access to Control Panel of your Windows 7 (or Windows Vista) so that they won’t mess up with it. Disabling access to control panel means that they won’t be able to modify the default settings of the programs installed and other settings as well.

Here is the step-by-step by guide to disable Control Panel from your Windows 7. It not only disables access to the Control Panel, it’ll also remove shortcuts present for Control Panel in places like Start Menu etc. I’m going to discuss two ways in which you can do it. While the first method only works for Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate editions of Windows 7 or Windows Vista.

Method-I: Using Group Policy Editor

1. Open start menu and type “gpedit.msc” in the search box and open the Group Policy Editor from the results:

Gpedit start menu

2. In the Group policy editor, expand “User Configuration” and find “Control Panel” under “Administrative Templates” as shown in the screenshot below:

3. Find the “Prohibit access to the Control Panel” entry in the right hand side of the window. Either double click on it or right-click and choose “Edit”.

4. Choose the option “Enabled” under “Prohibit access to Control Panel” as shown here.

Click “Apply” and then choose “OK” to close the window.

5. Now your Control Panel will get disabled and you can’t even find the link for the same in the Start Menu. Check it yourself:

control panel missing from the start menu

When you try to open it by searching it in start menu, you will get an error:

This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.

Control panel start menu

control panel restriction error

Method- II: Using Registry Editor:

This method works on all versions of Windows 7 & Windows Vista. But this involves a bit of editing the values in registry editor. If you are not acquainted with the Registry Editor much, we strongly advise not to implement this.

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

regedit run command

2. First take a backup of the registry editor just to be on the safe side. Go to File > Export and save a backup on your computer.

Regedit export backup

3. Now navigate to the following path in the registry editor:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft > Windows> Current Version> Policies> Explorer

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

Regedit_explorer_new_key

Give it a value “NoControlPanel”.

NoControlPanel

Right-click on the new value NoControlPanel and choose “Modify”.

Change the Value Data filed value to “1” from “0” and click OK.

Edit dword value

Close the registry editor and restart your computer and check back. When you check back after rebooting your PC, you will find that the Control Panel is disabled and also is not listed in the Start Menu as shown in the first method.

If you want to enable the Control Panel again, just choose ‘Disabled" (third option) in the step 4 of the first step. In case of the second method, just delete the "NoControlPanel" DWORD Value and the Control would be back once your reboot your system.

Disabling Control Panel is just not enough to restrict users using your PC, If you want to setup advanced controls on your computer, read how to setup parental controls in Windows 7 .

[Tip] Remove Username From Windows 7 Start Menu

September 24, 2010 by bharath

User name in the start menu

Windows users might be knowing well that the Start Menu in Windows shows a username of the user currently logged on to the computer, now matter how many user accounts your Windows has. For some reasons, if you want to remain anonymous by removing your username from the Start Menu, here is the step-by-step guide of what you need to do if you are using either Windows 7 or Windows Vista.

Steps:

1. Right click on the taskbar and select “Properties”.

Taskbar right click menu

2. “Taskbar and Start Menu Properties” window opens up. Go to the “Start Menu” tab in the window. Click on the “Customize” button.

Taskbar and start menu properties

3. Another window “Customize Start Menu” opens up. Scroll the window down until you see “Personal folder” section. By default, “Display as a link” option would be selected. Now as you want to remove your username from the Start Menu, select the last option “Don’t display this item”, Click OK to save the settings.

Customize start menu

4. Click on the Apply button on the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties and click “OK” to close the window. Now your username will be delisted from the Start Menu as shown here:

No username on the start menu

You are done. Just check “Display as a link” whenever you want to revert back to the default settings to show your user account name back on the Start Menu.

[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] Fix Missing “Show Hidden Files And Folders” Option In Windows 7

September 23, 2010September 22, 2010 by bharath

Windows comes with an option to either disable or enable the hidden files and folders. This option can be usually found via Windows Explorer > Organize > Folder and search options as shown here:

Folder options windows 7

Under the View tab, you must see two options:

Don’t show hidden files, folders or drives
Show hidden files, folders and drives

Hidden files and folders items

But when your computer is infected by a virus or malware, it can change your default settings to not show hidden files and folders and more often it can even remove the “Show hidden files, folder and drives” option completely, as you can see in this screenshot:

Show hidden folders missing

Even if you scan your computer with any antivirus program and remove the virus, these settings will not be reverted back to default. Hence you must enable them manually. We had previously posted solution to similar problem but it was for showing hidden files and folders in virus affected system in case of Windows XP.

And now let me guide you on how to enable this missing option in your Windows 7 (or even in Windows Vista) folder options.

1. Press “Stat button + R” to open the run command tool.

2. Type “regedit” in the text filed and press enter to open the registry editor.

Regedit from run command

3. Follow the following path and carefully navigate to the same in the registry editor:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows> CurrentVersion> Explorer> Advanced> Folder> Hidden

4. In the right hand side, look for a key with name “Type”. It should have a vale “group” under data column. If it doesn’t show this value, then follow:

registry editor

5. Right click on the key Type and chose modify.

Modify regedit

And change the value data to “group”. If the key “Type” doesn’t exist at all, just right click on right hand side pane and select New > String Value and enter the data value as group.

Registry editor vaules

Now open Task Manager (right click on taskbar and choose Task manager), go to processes tab, find explorer.exe, right click on it and choose “End Process”. Don’t get frightened when you see all the windows explorer windows getting closed leaving you with just the windows of the opened programs.

Just go to File > New Task (Run..) from the Task Manager and enter “explorer” in the filed and click OK, Windows Explorer will be back.

Now go back to the folder options and the “show hidden folder..” option should be visible again.

[How To] Change Network Cards(Wired/Wireless) Priority Order In Windows

September 19, 2010 by bharath

change network interface card priority

Consider this scenario: You have both wireless network and wired LAN network available at your place and assume that you have enabled your wireless card and connected to the wired LAN network as well. Which one do you think your Windows will choose? Have you ever thought about it?

If you haven’t, here’s what you should know: There is a default priority order (or network binding order) that would be set for each of your network cards. You might not be knowing about this because it’s so hidden in the windows. You can only see it via a “netstat” command or through some advanced settings in the network connections.

Note: All the following operations are done in Windows 7 and they should also work in Windows Vista as well.

Checking Your Network Cards Priority:

Go to Start menu and type “cmd” in the search box and open cmd.exe from the programs list to open the command prompt.

cmd.exe from start menu

And then type the following command in the window and press enter:

 netstat -rn | more

Nestat command in command prompt

You will now see “Interface List” in the results as shown (click on the image to view the bigger image):

I tried to represent the above result that I got in the command prompt in a text format below:

Interface List

14...00 xx xx xx xx xx ......Bluetooth Device (Personal Area Network)

12...xx xx xx xx xx xx ......Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN

11...00 xx xx xx xx xx ......Realtek PCIe FE Family Controller

1...........................Software Loopback Interface 1

17...00 00 00 00 00 00 00 e0 Microsoft ISATAP Adapter

19...00 00 00 00 00 00 00 e0 Microsoft ISATAP Adapter #2

15...00 00 00 00 00 00 00 e0 Microsoft 6to4 Adapter

18...00 00 00 00 00 00 00 e0 Microsoft ISATAP Adapter #3

16...00 00 00 00 00 00 00 e0 Microsoft 6to4 Adapter #2

22...00 00 00 00 00 00 00 e0 Teredo Tunneling Pseudo-Interface

As you can see in the above screenshot (highlighted in red), the numbers against the network card interfaces (called “interface metrics”)represent the priority of that network according to Windows. The lower the number, the higher is the priority. In my case Software Loopback 1 (representing Microsoft Loopback adapter) is assigned the highest priority (lowest number #1), followed by Realtek Ethernet adapter (number #11), Wireless LAN adapter (number #12).

So to sum up, my wired network card has been set a higher priority than my wireless network card by Windows. Now let’s assume that my wireless network gives me a faster internet access than what my ISP through the wired network card does. So I’d be keen to connect to the ISP via wireless network card that is offering a faster internet access. But if you are connected to both the wired network & the wireless network, according to the priority assigned, Windows will gives you access to the internet via wired network card by default. So we need to find a way to instruct Windows to let you access the network via wireless network by default, when you are connected to both the wired and wireless networks at the same time. Read on to find out how to do this:

–Warning-: You may not want to change the default priority order unless you see some real problem with how Windows is prioritizing the network interface cards.

Changing Network Cards Priority in Windows:

You can change the network card priority in two ways in Windows:

Method #1:

To start with, I’ll introduce you the easier method first:

1. Go to Control Panel > Network and Internet (View network status and tasks)> Change adapter settings and now you will now be in “Network Connections” window.

network connections in windows 7

2. Now press Alt button and a hidden menu will appear beneath the location bar.

hidden menu

3. Under the Advanced menu, click “Advanced Settings”.

advanced settings in network connections

4. You can now see the order of preference in which the connections are accessed by network services.

advanced settings for network priority

Use “Up” and “Down” buttons to move a network connection either up or down and thus changing the order of priority of connections.

Method #2:

And now let me introduce you the second alternative method, which is a bit laborious when compared to the first one:

1. Go to the “Network Connections” window by following the step 1 as detailed in the above step.

2. Right-click on the network connections for which you want to change the priority order and choose “Properties”. In my case, I wanted to change the interface metric for my wireless network card and hence I will proceed with the changing priority order for Wireless Network Connection under my network connections.

Context menu on network connection

3. Now choose “Internet protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)” and click on “Properties” button.

Wireless network connection properties

IPv4 properties

Click on “Advanced..” button in the IPv4 properties window.

4. Look for the “Automatic metric” option in the advanced TCP/IP settings window.

Advanced tcp/ip settings

5. Uncheck against the “Automatic metric” option and enter some value other than 1 in the filed against “Interface metric” (as 1 will always be assigned to Microsoft Loopback adapter always) as shown:

Automatic metric/interface metric value

Click OK and close all the windows.

You have now changed the priority of your network card interfaces.

[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]