Tutorials

[Tip] Find The Version Of Microsoft Silverlight Installed On Your Browser

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Microsoft Silverlight is a web application framework developed by Microsoft. This framework is intended for developing interactive client side web applications. It gets installed as a browser plug-in and runs the applications that are developed using this Silverlight framework. It was initially introduced in 2006 as a competitor to Adobe Flash technology. Silverlight 3.0 was released in 2009 and the most recent version Silverlight 4.0 was released in early 2010.

Installing Silverlight is as necessary as to install Adobe Flash on your computer. Websites developed based on Microsoft Silverlight will not render properly. However Silverlight nowadays gets installed smoothly, many times you might not even have noticed that it was installed on your PC. However, it is always a good practice to be aware of the version of the Silverlight installed on your computer. You can do it in many ways, let’s see all the possible methods to check the version of Silverlight:

1. Checking Silverlight Version Online:

Point your browser to http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight, and wait a few seconds until the page shows the version of Silverlight installed as shown:

Silverlight version check web

As you can see, the page shows that I have Silverlight 4 (4.0.50917.0) installed on my computer.

2. Checking Through Registry Editor:

Press Start Button + R to open Windows Run too. Type “regedit” and press OK to open the Registry Editor.

regedit via run command

Go to

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE> Software> Microsoft> Silverlight

and look for the entry “Version” on the left pane. Note down the data value shown against it. It is the version of the Microsoft Silverlight installed on your computer.

Silverlight version via regedit

As you can see, Registry Editor is also showing the version of the Silverlight as 4.0.50917.0, which is also the same as we got using the first (web) method.

3. From The Installation Folder:

Go to the folder where Silverlight got installed. Usually this will be located at:

C:> Program Files> Microsoft Silverlight

You will find a folder in this directory, whose name is the version of the Silverlight installed:

Silverlight version check through installtion folder

And again, as you can see the folder’s name is 4.0.50917.0, which once again confirmed that I indeed have the Silverlight version 4.0.50917.0 installed on my computer.

If you still need more ways to find out, you can check the version of the Silverlight installed under the browser plugins: (Firefox, Chrome..)

Firefox:

Go to Tools > Add-ons  and click “Plugins” tab.

Silverlight version installed through firefox

In Google Chrome:

Type about:plugins in the address bar to see all the plugins installed. Look for Silverlight entry in the list:

Silverlight version chrome

If you liked this post, you might also want to check the version of the .NET framework installed on your computer.

[How To] Getting Started With New Version Of Facebook Groups

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facebook logo

Facebook has recently announced the revamped Facebook Groups feature, giving you more control over the group interactions that you would like to make. Suppose you are just back to home after a holiday and you want to share the wonderful photos that you had taken during your trip to your other members of the family via Facebook. Unfortunately whatever photos or other media you share was visible to your entire friends in Facebook. With the launch of new version of Facebook Groups, you can create groups for your family, club or work etc. Once you have created the groups, you can select content that you share to be visible to only a particular group of people. This is not exactly a new concept, something of this sorts already exists in Google’s Orkut. But with Facebook groups, users can make a group chat, email subscriptions for updates from the group, collaboration features etc.

Let’s see how to get started with Facebook groups:

1. To create a group, you can visit facebook.com/groups. Alternatively, you can find groups link on the left sidebar along with “Game Requests”, “Application Requests” etc.

Facebook Groups link hiddenFacebook groups link in sidebar

2. Click on Create a group link to start creating a new group.

Create a Group link in Facebook

3. Give the new group a name (suggestions: Family, Work, Club etc.). You can add members from your friends list. Just type the name of the person that you want to add to the group, Facebook will automatically suggest people from your Facebook friends list who possess that name. You can add as many people as you can in the Members field.

Create Facebook Group

And beneath the Members section, you will have “privacy” settings for your group. There would be three options to choose from: Open, Closed and Secret.

Open: If you set your group privacy setting to Open, it means that anyone on Facebook can view the Group and its content and can join the same. The group will also appear in search results.

Closed: If a group is set to “Closed” under privacy settings, it means that anyone in Facebook can view the name and members of that group but can’t view its content. Only members of the group will have access to its content. These groups can be found in Search results though (content will not appear in results).

Secret: Secret groups can’t be found in searches. And it’s absolutely invisible to non-members of the group. Non-members can’t even see the name of the group, its members list and of course the content as well.

By default, Privacy will be set to “Closed”. You can always change it to any of the above three options discussed.

Click on “Create” button to finish creating the group.

4. Now that you have created a group, go to the groups tab, click on the group that you have just created and click “Edit Admin Settings”.

edit admin settings in facebook group

Basic Information:

You can now edit the basic information like Description and Email address for your group here:

Basic information facebook group

If you want a special email address for your group, click on “Choose for Group” next to the “Email Address” tab, these email addresses end with @groups.facebook.com. You can choose an email address depending on the availability.

Choose group email address Facebook

Profile Picture:

To add a profile picture to your group, click on the “Profile Picture” link on the left sidebar:

Facebook profile pic link

Profile Picture in facebook group

You can either upload a picture from your computer or take a new snapshot using your webcam.

Sharing Content:

You can share a text post, link, photo, video, event or a document with the members of your group. Go to the your group page and these options will be listed below the group name.Facebook content share with group

Group Chat:

group chat in facebook

Clicking on “Chat with Group” option will let you chat with the members of the group.

Facebook group chat demo

Leave The Group:

Finally if you want to unjoin from the group, just click “Leave Group” link that can be found under the group page.

Leave group link in Facebook

[Tip] Swap Stop And Refresh Button Position In IE9

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IE9 beta logo

We have been covering a lot of articles about Internet Explorer 9 beta which is refreshingly new and offering seamless integration with Windows 7. In this post, we have come up with a tutorial on how to move the Stop and Refresh button to the left of the of the address bar in IE9.

Internet Explorer until now used to show the Stop and Refresh buttons on the immediate right to the address bar. The same has been followed in IE9 as well. But Microsoft was smart this time and decided to give the users the flexibility of choosing the position of these button in their IE9. You might very well be knowing that Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome does show these Stop and Refresh buttons towards the left of the address bar (immediate left before the address bar), as shown here:

Firefox:

stop and refresh in firefox

Chrome:

Refresh button in chrome

[In Google Chrome, you will only see either one of the Stop or Refresh buttons at any instant. While the page is loading, Stop button is shown and the Refresh button takes its place as soon as the page gets loaded completely.]

If you are an avid user of Firefox and Chrome and want these Stop And Refresh buttons in the same as way as in Firefox and Chrome, follow the instructions shown:

IE9 stop and refresh button intial position

Steps:

1. Open the Internet Explorer 9

2. Right-click on the IE9 tab bar and choose “Move Stop and Refresh”.

Move stop and refresh in IE9

3. That is it! You can now see the Stop and Refresh buttons appearing towards the left of the address bar as shown:

stop and refresh right of the address bar in IE9

It’s that easy! For more tips on IE9 and Windows, subscribe to Techrena.net feeds via Email or follow @techrena or become a fan of Techrena.net at facebook.com/techrena.

[Tip] Change The Registered Owner And Organization Name in Windows 7

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When you are installing Windows 7 or Windows Vista, you will be prompted to enter your name and your organization name during the setup. Once you have given that, the Windows will be registered on the names that you had provided during the Windows initial setup. To see the current Windows owner name and organization name according to Windows, type “Winver” in the Start Menu and launch the windowsver.exe program.

Winver from start menu programs

About Windows

As you can see in the above screenshot, my Windows has been registered with my name and the Organization name (manufacturer name here).

This will show up even when you open any native Windows application and click “About”. For example, “About Notepad” from the Notepad application also will lead to the same window as shown above.

Unfortunately, Windows 7 or Vista do not provide a native support to change this data after the installation process. But then, we have the pretty useful Registry Editor , through which we can tweak this to whatever we like. Follow the steps written below carefully to to perform this editing.

Warning: As always, working with Registry Editor can be extremely dangerous. Do make a backup of the registry . Even a small mistake can lead to utter disorder of the OS.

Steps:

1. Press Start + R and type “regedit” in the text filed and press OK. Accept the User Account Control (UAC) prompt and proceed to the next step.

regedit run command

2. Navigate to the following path in the Registry Editor:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE> SOFTWARE> Microsoft> Windows NT>  CurrenVersion

Reg_key_win_owner_name

3. Find two registry key entries “RegisteredOrganization”, “RegisteredOwner” in the left pane (see the screenshot below).

regedit owner and organization

4. Change the data values against “RegisteredOrganization” and “”RegisteredOwner”  to whatever you like:

Edit owner and registered owner info

That is it. You can again open the Winver command to see if the change has happened.

[Tip] Change Default Action For The Power Button In Windows 7

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change power button action

In Windows 7 and Windows Vista, when you open the start menu, you can find the power button being displayed at the bottom of the start menu. This has been placed at the similar position where you find “Log Off” and “Turn off Computer” buttons in Windows XP. By default this power button will have “Shit down” option for Windows 7 and “Sleep” option in case of Windows Vista. But according to your usage and need, you can change the default action for this power button. This article explains you how to change the default action for this power button, with reference to Windows 7 (also works on Windows Vista).

Steps:

1. Right click on the Task bar and choose “Properties”.

taskbar and start menu properties link in right-click

2. Click on “Start Menu” tab in the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties Window

Start menu tab in taskbar and start menu properties

3. Choose your desired action for the power button from the dropdown menu. You can choose an action from the following:

Shut down, Switch User, Log Off, Lock, Restart, Hibernate

Power button action in start menu properties

4. Click on “Apply” to save the settings and click “OK” to close the window. Go and check back the Start Menu, the action for the power button should have changed to what you chose in the previous step.

Power button action

[Tip] Prevent Programs From Changing Default Search Engine In IE9

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IE9 beta logo

Once you have set a default search engine in your browser, it should remain as it is, right ? But it’s not always like that some programs can easily change your default search engine in your default browser just by adding some keys to your windows registry. It has always been a big problem. Imagine like you install a program like Yahoo Messenger (changes default search engine to Yahoo) or Windows Live Essentials (changes default search to Bing), are just examples of such programs. Even though many of these programs do prompt you when they are going to change your browser (Internet Explorer here), we can hardly notice it as it’ll be asked during the program installation and most of the time we does this in a hurry without exploring all the options provided during the installation.

In this post, I’m going to guide you about how to prevent programs from changing your default search engine in case of the Internet Explorer 9.

1. Open the Internet Explorer.

2. Click  on Tools icontools in IE(Found on the top right corner of the window).

3. Select “Manage add-ons” from the menu items.

Tools menu IE9

Alternative you can access the same settings from the “Tools” sections in the IE9 menu bar.

4. In the Manage Add-ons window, click “Search Providers” in the left pane.

Manage addons in IE9 left pane

5. Select your default search engine (Google in my case), you will find an option “Prevent programs from suggesting changes to my default search provider”. Check against it and close the window.

Manage Search Providers in Manager Add-ons IE9

That is it. Now your default search engine in IE9 (& IE8) can’t be changed by any program. You might also want to read how to change the address bar search provider in Firefox.

[How To] Rebuild Icon Cache To Fix Broken Icons

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Sometimes when you install some program, and place its shortcut somewhere on the desktop or Start Menu, the icon of the program might appear broken (display incorrect icons) in your Windows 7. As you can see in the following screenshot:

Program icon broken in Windows 7Program icon broken in Windows 7 taskbar

It is very annoying to see such broken icons for any programs. Not only that they confuse you what program is it, particularly when you pin such a program to the taskbar. Follow this step-by-step guide to fix the broken or missing icons and show the original icons of the program, works in Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

Steps:

1. Close all the folder windows that are currently open in the Windows Explorer.

2. Launch the Task Manager either by using CTRL + SHIFT + ESC or by right-clicking on the taskbar and choosing “Start Task Manager”.

start task manager

3. Go to the processes tab, find “explorer.exe” in the list. Right-click on it, choose end process.

End explorer process

4. Go to File >  choose New Task (Run..) from the menu.

Run new task in Windows Task manager

5. In the Create New Task dialogue box, type “cmd” and click OK to open the Command Prompt window.

Create new task in task manager

6. Type the following commands* one by one in the Command Prompt (Press “Enter” after each command).

IconCache rebuild commands

CD /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local
DEL IconCache.db /a
EXIT

IconCache command prompt

7. Again go to the Task Manager, launch “New Task” from the File Menu. Type “Explorer” in the text filed and hit enter.

Explorer from Create New Task in Task Manager

Your icons should appear fine now.

Background:

This method actually rebuilds the icon cache. The first of the three commands is used to go into the directory C:\Users> username> AppData> Local. The second command will delete the hidden IconCache.db file. And then we restart the explorer.exe process to rebuild the deleted IconCahce file.

You can alternatively, set the Folder Options > Views and change the settings to Show Hidden files and then delete the IconCache.db to the Recycle bin and restart the explorer.exe process.

[Tip] Disable Threaded View In Gmail

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Gmail logo

Gmail’s conversation view is without any doubt, one of the key factors that has helped Gmail emerge as the most used web based email program on the internet. While the normal users like us enjoy related email messages being grouped into threaded conversation messages thus making your inbox not to be cluttered with mails, but there have always been some people who don’t like this feature, as they like the traditional or classic way of email, the one with unthreaded messages. For those minority uses, who still want to see their mails in the traditional format, without the threaded conversation view, Google has just added the feature that lets you enable or disable this feature for their accounts.

threaded and non-threaded in gmail

Follow the steps to disable the conversation view in your Gmail:

1. Log into your Gmail account.

2. Click on the “Settings” link on the top right corner. Alternatively, you can click on this link once you are logged in, this will directly take you to the Gmail settings page.

Settings link in Gmail

3. Under the “General” tab, find

Gmail settings for conversation view

4. By default, the conversation will be set on. To disable the threaded conversation, select “Conversation view off” button and click “Save changes” button.

Conversation view off

From now on, you won’t see the email messages being threaded to form conversation view. So any reply or related message that you get to a particular mail will be shown with the corresponding symbols as the case with any other classic email clients (for instance you will get RE:.. for any reply you get to the mail that has been sent by you).

[How To] Disable Session Restore In Firefox

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firefox logo

Firefox has a pretty useful “Session Restore” feature that lets you recover the opened sites when the browser crashes all of a sudden. In the latest version (Firefox 3.5+), Firefox has even allowed the users to restore only a certain number of tabs that were open just before the Firefox had crashed.

Session restore prompt in firefox

Even though highly useful and recommended, you might want to disable this feature for your very own reasons. With a little bit of effort, session restore can be disabled altogether from Firefox.

In this tutorial, let us see how to disable the session restore feature in Firefox via Firefox configuration settings page.

Steps:

1. Launch Firefox.

2. Type about:config in the address bar and press enter.

3. Accept the warning (This might void your warranty..) and proceed to the next page (click I’ll be careful, I promise!)..

This might void your warranty

4. Type “browser.sessionstore” in the Filter and look for the entry “browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash”.

session restore firefox settings

5. By default, the boolean value will be “true”. Right-click on the entry and choose “Toggle” to set the value to “false”. Close and restart the Firefox.

Browser session restore settings in firefox

Now you have disabled the Session Restore feature in Firefox. You will not be asked to restore the last opened tabs after the browser crash, instead the homepage will be opened.

[Tip] Clear Cookies And Cache For A Particular Domain In IE9

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Internet Explorer 9

Microsoft’s latest innovation Internet Explorer 9 is slowly turning out to be the best ever browser that the Redmond based software giant has ever produced. With all the positive reviews creeping in from most of the users and experts, IE9 can now be viewed as the browser that will dominate the internet in the upcoming years. If you haven’t explored IE9 fully, yet there’s absolutely no reason why you should start doing it right away now.

There’s one useful feature in IE9 that most of us might not be aware of. Until now to delete cookies in the browser, we needed to delete the entire browser cache, in the same way, to delete cookies, we had to delete all the stored cookies. It’s not the same anymore with IE9. Thanks to IE9 developer tools, you can now clear cookies or clear cache for a particular single domain in Internet Explorer 9. It can be done if you follow the steps briefed below:

1. Open the Internet Explorer 9.

2. Press F12 to open the Developer tools. You may also access this via Tools (by pressing ALT) > F12 developer tools menu item.

Developer tools menu item

3. In the developer tools, you will see two options:

i) Clear cache for this domain

ii) Clear cookies for domain

Clear cookies and cache for this domain in IE9

These two options are very much handy especially if you are a developer.