If you've ever been unable to delete a file in Windows, and can't figure out what program's using it, Unlocker is the solution. Have you ever seen these Windows error messages?
*Cannot delete folder: It is being used by another person or program
*Cannot delete file: Access is denied
*There has been a sharing violation.
*The source or destination file may be in use.
*The file is in use by another program or user.
*Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

Unlocker can help! Simply right-click the folder or file and select Unlocker. If the folder or file is locked, a window listing of lockers will appear. Simply click Unlock All and you are done!

Please perform these instructions:
1. Download this free utility:
http://download.cnet.com/3001-2248_4-10493998.html?spi=04b0020b26165a844d759ffe91d1bd24

2. Run the downloaded file "unlocker1.8.8.exe" and install the software.

3. Navigate your way to a blocked file, right-click on it and select "Unlocker".


4. In the window that has appeared select "Delete" option and press OK button.
5. Reboot your system if your asked.

To customize your Windows 7 system you can adjust the base theme color used for window borders, the Start Menu, and the Taskbar. You can also choose whether or not the Start Menu, Taskbar, and window borders should appear semi-transparent, showing part of what is underneath.

1. Right-click an empty area of the Desktop and choose "Personalize" from the pop-up menu that appears.

2. The "Personalization" Control Panel appears. Near the bottom of the window, click on "Window Color".

3. The window changes to the "Window Color and Appearance" settings. From here you can do the following:

* Choose a base color - choose from one of the following base window colors (listed here in left-to-right order)

- Sky
- Twilight
- Sea
- Leaf
- Lime
- Sun
- Pumpkin
- Ruby
- Fuchsia
- Blush
- Violet
- Lavender
- Taupe
- Chocolate
- Slate
- Frost

* Next to "Color intensity", click and drag the slider to the right to make the color more intense - moving the slider to the left makes the color less intense.

* By checking or unchecking "Enable transparency", you can configure whether or not window borders, the Taskbar, and Start Menu appear semi-transparent.

* If you do not like the choice of colors, click the down arrow next to "Show color mixer". From here you can click and drag the sliders to adjust your desired color hue, saturation, and brightness.

4. When done, click "Save Changes" to close the "Window Color and Appearance" settings, then close the "Personalization" window.

Is a particular program or process running too slow on your Windows 7 system? If another program or process is less essential yet taking too much of your CPU time, you can lower its priority and optionally raise the priority of the more essential process.

1. Right-click on an empty area of the Windows 7 Taskbar.

2. Select "Start Task Manager".

(Or skip steps 1 and 2 and just press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open the Task Manager.)

3. The multi-tabbed "Windows Task Manager" should appear. Make sure the "Applications" tab is selected.

 4. If the process you need to change is linked to an application, right-click it and choose "Go to Process" from the pop-up menu that appears.

5. Otherwise, click the "Processes tab" to find a process you need to change.

6. Right-click a process and select "Set Priority". If you cannot find the process that needs its priority changed, click the "Show processes from all users" button. You may have to confirm your action via User Account Control.

7. From here you can select from the following possible priorities (highest to lowest):

* Realtime
* High
* Above Normal
* Normal
* Below Normal
* Low

8. If you are sure you want to change the process priority, click the "Change priority" button when prompted.

If you forget your password in Vista you may reset it using Administrator account. But here is the problem - Administrator password is locked by default. So, at first you should enable it. To do this insert  Vista installation disk into DVD drive and start your computer form CD.

After few moments you'll see following screen:

Click next and go follow to the next screen:

Click Repair your computer.

On the following screen click Command Prompt

You'll get black screen like this:

Type 1 and press Enter. Then type Administrator's password and press Enter. Usually Administrator's password is blank, so just press Enter.

As soon as you get following string: C:\WINDOWS> 

type following command: net user administrator /active:yes

and press Enter. Then reboot computer and log on as Administrator.

Go to Control Panel -> User Accounts and Family Settings, then click on your user icon. You'll get following screen:

Click Remove Password and log off from Administrators account and login to your account.

If you’re a privacy freak who doesn’t want someone random to see what kind of documents you were opening, this came in pretty handy! However, with Windows 7, there is a new feature called a Jumplist. You can read my previous post on how to create your own jumplists.

With Jumplists, that functionality basically moved from the Start Menu to the Taskbar! For example, if you open several Word documents and then right-click on the Word icon in the taskbar, you’ll get the following:

The jumplist has a list of recent documents opened in Word. Great if you want quick access to a Word doc without having to browse in Windows Explorer, but not great if you want to hide this information.

Now this is just Word! Each program can have it’s own list of recent documents or files or whatever else that show up. The only obvious way to delete the entries from the jumplist right now is to right-click on an item and choose Remove from this list.

Luckily, there is an easier way to remove multiple items from many jumplists at once. All recent items in any jumplists are stored by Windows in a hidden location. You can get to them here:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations

 Copy and paste that into Windows Explorer. Now you will see a list of files with very long and convoluted names. This is because they are all encoded. Each one represents a list of recent items for a particular jumplist.

It’s impossible to tell which entries go with which jumplists unless you open the file in a text editor and browse through. However, since all of the files are just recent items in a jumplist, you can delete all the files and it will clear all recent items on all jumplists.

You can also run a simple command from the command prompt to do the same thing:

del %appdata%\microsoft\windows\recent\automaticdestinations\*

You can then add this to a Windows batch file and run it by just double-clicking on the shortcut.

USB flash drives are great because they are really cheap and you can conveniently move data between computers. The only problem is when you store sensitive data on a USB drive and it gets lost or stolen! We will use Windows Encrypting File System to create an encrypted folder on a thumb drive that only one user account on one computer can read. Later we’ll talk about how you can view those files on another computer, but for now we’ll focus on just having a secure USB drive.

Step 1 – Format USB drive in NTFS format

Firstly, you have to make sure the USB drive is formatted in NTFS format. Most USB drives are formatted in FAT16 or FAT32 format, which does not support encryption at all.

Step 2 – Create an Encrypted Folder

Ok, now that your USB drive is in NTFS format and all the data has been erased, we can setup a folder that will contain all the encrypted data.

What I like about this method is that you can store all the sensitive files in the encrypted folder, but store other files normally outside the folder. That way, you can still pop the USB drive into someone else’s computer and they can view all the files not in the encrypted folder.

Go to My Computer, open the flash drive, right-click and choose New Folder. Name the folder anything you want, but try not to make it obvious that it has sensitive data otherwise people might be more inclined to try and get in.

Now right-click on the new folder and choose Properties. Click on the Advanced button in the Attributes section.

Now check the Encrypt contents to secure data box. Click OK and click OK again to close out the dialogs.

Now you’ll see the folder is in green, which means the data is encrypted. That’s it! Now you have a folder on your USB drive that is fully encrypted and viewable only by your user account on that one computer.

Cookies are the small pieces of text stored on a computer by a web browser. A cookie consists of information such as user preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, or other data used by websites.

As far as cookies contain personal information it is important to protect it from unwanted sharing. All web browsers has cookie management tools. It is usually referred to privacy settings.

This article describes how to Block or Allow Cookies for certain web sites.

In order to Block or Allow cookies for certain site in standard Windows browser Internet Explorer do the following.

1. Go to Start and open Control Panel.

2. Choose Internet Options applet and open it. In Internet Options go to Privacy tab and click on Sites button:

 3. In the opened window you can add or remove sites to the list with Allow or Block setting:

 4. After adding necessary sites click OK twice.

Note: these settings will override all other privacy settings for these sites. Allow Cookies for the sites that is known and trusted.

Windows 7 has some neat little enhancements, one of them being how it lets you handle dual monitors. If you’re adding a second monitor to your Windows 7 home or office PC, which is a very good idea, it’s a breeze to configure.

There are actually two ways you can currently setup multiple monitors in Windows 7, either by using a keyboard shortcut or via the traditional system properties.

I really like the first method since it’s new and is way easier than having to go into the Control Panel or anything else.

1.Simply press the Windows key and P (Windows + P) to bring up a quick menu of options.

You can pick to show only the computer, make the second monitor a duplicate of the first, extend the desktop to the second monitor or turn off the first monitor and activate the second.

2.The second way is to right-click on the desktop and choose Screen resolution.

Now you’ll see the familiar 1 and 2 to distinguish which monitor is which. There are several options and under Multiple Displays, you can choose from the same options as when you pressed Win + P.

That’s it! You can also change the orientation of the displays and change the resolution of each display. It’s pretty straight-forward in Windows 7 and a lot easier!

WinRAR is one of the most popular archive management tools. It provide support for RAR. ZIP and other formats.

Great feature of the WinRAR program is that it allows to protect the archives with the password.

This article describes a process of creating a password protected archive. You should have WinRAR installed in order to be able to create WinRAR archive.

WinRAR lets you encrypt your archive with a 128 bit key. It is recommended to set the password with more than 8 characters.

1. Select the files  you want to add to the archive and right mouse click on them. Choose "Add to archive" option.

 2. In WinRAR dialog window go to Advanced Tab and choose the option "Set password"

 3. Enter your password.
If you choose the option "Show password", you'll be able to read the password and it will not be marked with asterisks.

The option "Encrypt filenames"; will show a password prompt right when the archive is opened, without showing the files it contains.

 4. Now you have password protected archive. This type of archives are marked with asterisks.

How many times have you gone to a web site and decided you wanted to print it out, but wished it did not print with all of the extra information in the header and footer? Maybe you just want to print some text and give it to someone, but do you really need to have the web site address listed across the bottom along with the date? I have just found it to be a lot nicer looking to print a web page without the header or footer info.In IE7, you can configure these options yourself. Here’s how:

1. Open IE7 and go to the File menu and click Print Preview.

2. Now, you’ll see your page and a couple of buttons across the top. You’ll notice if you hover the 5th button from the left, you can click that to turn off headers and footers.

3.If you want to keep your settings so that headers and footers are not visible any time you print a web page, go to File and then click Page Setup. Delete all of the text in the header and footer text boxes. These are the system variables for various pieces of data such as number of pages and web site URL.

4.

&w – Window title (i.e., page title)
&u – Page address (URL)
&d – Date in short format as specified by Regional Settings in Control Panel
&D – Date in long format as specified by Regional Settings in Control Panel, i.e. Thursday, October 12, 2006
&t – Time in the format as specified by Regional Settings in Control Panel, i.e. 1:15:34 PM
&T - Time in 24-hour format, i.e. 13:15:34 PM
&p – Current page number
&P – Total number of pages
&& – A single ampersand (&)
&b – Text following these characters, in right-justified alignment
&b&b – Text following the first “&b” in center alignment; text following the second “&b” in right-justified alignment

Simply take these codes and put them into the header and footer text boxes mentioned above and you’re set with your own personalized text!