Anyone who is an administrator knows that users often do more damage to a computer system than the actual error that prompted them to try to fix the problem themselves. Nowhere is this more frustrating for an administrator than in a networked environment where many users share certain resources such as printers.

The most prevalent peripheral in a networked environment is a printer. In fact, work in many home and small office settings can come to a screeching halt when the shared printer isn’t working. This is why it is best that only an administrator have access to troubleshooting and fixing printers connected to a network.
Why Limit Printer Driver Installation?

Printers can be finicky devices, working one minute and then refusing to work the next. Many users become impatient when a printer isn’t working and make wild assumptions about what is wrong with the printer and how to fix it.

One of the most common fixes amateurs attempt when troubleshooting a printer is to uninstall and reinstall the printer driver. They view this fix as a catchall akin to reinstalling a copy of Windows on a computer when the software starts to function unexpectedly.

By restricting the ability to install printer drivers to only administrators, you can save yourself the trouble of both having to fix the original error and undoing the damage some Mr./Ms. Fixit did when he/she tried to fix the networked printer error him/herself. The fact that Microsoft offers the option to restrict printer driver installations is testament to just how large a problem this is in many small and medium sized networked environments.
How to Prevent Printer Driver Installations

To restrict printer driver installations to administrators only, begin by logging into Windows 7 with an account that has administrative privileges. Click on Start>All Programs>Administrative Tools>Local Security Policy.

In the left hand pane, locate and click on the folder titled Local Security Policies. Then click on the folder titled Security Options.

The right hand pane lists all of the local security options you have available to you as an administrator of your Windows 7 computer. Locate a security option titled Devices: Prevent Users From Installing Printer Drivers.

Right click on this option and choose Properties from the menu. Click on the Local Security Setting tab and notice the current option that is active. By default, servers running Windows 7 set this option to Enabled while workstations running Windows 7 set this option to Disabled.

Click on the Enabled option and then click the OK button. Close the Local Security Policy window and you are almost done. Restart your computer and the new policy will take effect.

If you’ve ever been a Windows 7 administrator in a networked environment you know that users sometimes take it upon themselves to fix errors. When people want to print but can’t for some reason they get frustrated and want the quickest solution possible prompting them to attempt to fix the problem themselves.

By limiting printer driver installation to administrators only, you can help save the trouble of having to fix printer errors and undo the damage a well-intentioned user did while trying to do your job. This policy change is also good on home networks where kids may attempt the same fixes tried by those well-intentioned office workers.

Private Browsing in Google Chrome

Google Chrome calls their private browsing mode Incognito mode. To turn on this mode within Chrome, select New incognito window from the Tools menu (the wrench button in the upper, right corner of the window).

You can also select the New incognito window option by right-clicking on the taskbar button and selecting the option from the pop-up menu.

A new Chrome window opens with a notification that you have “gone incognito.”

There is also what looks like a detective icon in the upper, left corner of the window.

To stop browsing in Incognito mode, close the Chrome window.
Private Browsing in Opera

In Opera, you can browse privately in a new window or in a new private tab. The private tab feature is unique to Opera.

To open either a private tab or window, click the red O in the upper, left corner and select Tabs and Windows | New Private Tab or Tabs and Windows | New Private Window. If you have the menu bar showing, these two options are available directly on the File menu.

If you open a new private window, any new tab you open in that window is a Private Tab.

If you only want to open a private tab and not a whole new private window, you can right-click on the new tab button at the right end of the tab bar and select New Private Tab from the pop-up menu.

You can also open a New Private Tab by right-clicking on the Opera button on the taskbar and selecting the option from the pop-up menu.

A new Private Tab opens next to the tab you were viewing.

Whether you open a new private window or a new private tab, the following message displays. If you do not want to see this message display, select the Do not show again check box. If this option is turned on, Speed Dial will display on any new Private Tabs you open.

To stop private browsing, either close the private window or the private tab.

Although web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are gaining heavy momentum, many people still prefer the default Internet Explorer web browser that comes equipped with Windows 7. With all of the many websites that you visit, chances are good that you may want to block certain sites from time to time. This can be especially useful if you have young children who use Internet Explorer, or even if you want to avoid certain websites.

Blocking specific websites using Internet Explorer is very easy to do. To get started, go ahead and open up IE. From there, click the Tools listing and select Internet Options from the drop down menu. This should open up a separate Internet Options properties window.

Click the tab labeled Privacy.

You can adjust several useful settings from the Internet Options Privacy box, but for this tutorial, we will be focusing on blocking specific sites. Click the Sites button to open up the Per Site Privacy Actions window.

Enter the URL of the website that you would like to block in the Address of website: field. After you have done so, click the Block button. This should add the website to the Managed websites list.

If you have several websites that you would like to block, you can simply repeat the above step. After you are done adding websites, click the OK button to close out of the window.

Now, the above steps simply block certain websites from using cookies through Internet Explorer. However, this does not necessarily block someone on the computer from navigating to the site.

To do that, you will need to use the Windows Content Advisor option. Make sure that you have Internet Options open, and select the Content tab.

Click the Enable button, listed under the Content Advisor sub heading.

From the Content Advisor window, select the Approved Sites tab. Here, you can enter specific website URLs that you would like to block. Enter a URL and click the Never button. This will set permissions to block the site from being viewed in IE and add the site to the blocked list. Click the OK button after you have finished adding websites.

You should be prompted with a password screen. Enter a password to use for Content Advisor. Later on when someone tries to access the website, they will need to know this password to actually navigate to the site.

That’s all there is to it. You should now be able to prevent websites from using cookies and prevent access to certain websites all together. Now when someone navigates to the website, they will need a password to gain access.

In case if a user frequently accesses shared resources available on network, he may need to think of having a shortcut on a desktop or another quick approach of accessing network resources located on different PCs in different folders. One possible and simple way which allows to resolve such a task is to use drive mapping. Below is an example how to map a network drive in Windows 7,- new OS from Microsoft:

 1. Start > Computer or double-click on Computer icon on the desktop.

 2. Click on Tools menu and choose Map Network Drive... option as on the screenshot below:

3. In the Map Network Drive window select the drive letter from the dropdown list as shown below:

4. Now either type the name of the location of the folder to be mapped or click Browse to select the folder manually from the list of available. Click on the folder that will be mapped and confirm actions by pressing O.k. button in Browse window.

5. Click Finish in the Map Network Drive window:

6. Open Computer and now mapped drive(s) should be available.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) freezing often or failing to load could be happening because of several probable causes. For the most part, fixing Internet Explorer 8 is easy to do, but it may require that you check and diagnose several different areas in order to pin point the exact cause of the slow load times or freezing. Learn how to diagnose and repair Internet Explorer 8.

Internet Explorer 8 freezing or failing to load usually has to do with another program or process effecting IE8. Follow these simple troubleshooting steps to get IE8 up and running more smoothly.

1. Disable your antivirus or antispyware.

Chances are good that you have at least some type of antivirus program running on your PC. Because so many viruses and spyware threats come from the internet, sometimes antivirus/antivirus programs can do too much and stop Internet Explorer from working properly.

If your antivirus or antispyware is running, you should see an icon for it located in the Windows 7 taskbar. Simply right-click on the icon and exit out of the program. In certain cases, an antivirus or antispyware program may run silently in the background as well.

If so, you may need to open up the Windows Task Manger and quite all antivirus programs from there. Task manager can be accessed using CTRL-ALT-DELTE.

After your spyware is shut down, try closing out of Internet Explorer, waiting a couple of minutes, and reopening Internet Explorer. Often times, this will fix slow loading times and freezing.

2. Disable Add-ons or Plugins

If you have installed any add-ons or plugins for IE8, they can sometimes be the cause of making Internet Explorer malfunction, freeze, or load slowly.

Shady software will sometimes install add-ons or plugins without your notice, and sometimes browser trick websites will prompt you to install an add-on to run a certain program.

To troubleshoot this, open up Internet Explorer and select Tools > Manage add-ons. From here, click on any add-ons that are not distributed by Microsoft and click the Remove button. After you have finished, try closing out of Internet Explorer and restarting.

3. Troubleshoot Processes

In certain cases, a process or malicious app may be running in the background and preventing IE8 from working properly. To troubleshoot the process, you can try performing a clean startup.

4. Check the Time

Oddly enough, Internet Explorer 8 will run improperly and not display websites correctly if the time on your PC is wrong. Usually, if the time is off by a couple hours or even a week it does not effect IE8. However, if the calendar, time and date is off by several months, IE8 may stop functioning properly.

Click the time in the lower right-hand side of the taskbar to check the date, and select Change time and date settings to change the time.

5. Reinstall Internet Explorer 8

If IE8 is still running poorly, you can also try to remove it and reinstall it. Here are the basic steps for reinstalling Internet Explorer 8:
Navigate the path Start > Control Panel.
Click the Programs and Features icon.
Locate Internet Explorer 8 in the programs window, select it, and click Uninstall/Change. If Internet Explorer 7 is not in the programs Window, select the link Turn Windows features on or off and disable it from there.
After Internet Explorer has been removed, go download the latest version of IE8 from Microsoft and install it on your PC.

Microsoft’s popular Office suite of productivity software ships with a variety of applications that are designed to work seamlessly with one another. However, few users of the software are aware just how seamless applications in the suite can be when it comes to incorporating elements of one software title into another.

Powerful enough for commercial use and yet practical enough for the home, Word and Excel are the two most popular applications in the MS Office suite. One useful feature is the ability to display a chart in a Word document that was created in Excel.

With Office’s integration of cross-application elements, you can create a chart in Word without having to create or maintain a separate Excel file to store the data and the chart.
Advantages of Creating a Chart within Word

There are two major advantages to creating a chart directly in Word. First, you won’t have to create or maintain multiple files to create one Word document. This means you can reduce the amount of storage space it takes to create professional looking projects.

Second, creating the chart in Word boosts your productivity since it takes less time to manipulate one document than two. In addition, you won’t have to manually import the chart from Excel to Word and spend time modifying it to make it fit on the page; Word does all of this for you.
Create a Chart in Word

To insert a chart directly into Word, start by positioning the cursor at the location where you want your chart. On the Ribbon, click on the Insert tab and then on the Chart button.

Word will immediately open up a window allowing you to select the exact type of chart you want to insert into your document. Notice that you can create the exact same charts in Word as you can in Excel. The reason why will become apparent in the next step. For this example, we will insert a simple bar chart. Click on the Simple Bar Chart icon and then click the OK button.

When you clicked the OK button, Word did two things. First, it opened an Excel file that contains some sample data. Second, it placed a temporary chart into your Word document that displays the information from the generic data.

The programs are side by side so that you can make changes to the data in Excel and see the results of those changes immediately in the chart. Change the data in Excel to match the image below:

.Notice that each time you edit a cell in the Excel file, Word updates the chart to include your changes. Essentially, Word lets you see in real time how your chart looks as you make changes in the Excel data.

When you are finished editing the chart data, close the Excel file and the chart will remain in Word. You can edit the chart at any time by right clicking on the chart and choosing Edit Data from the menu. When you do, Excel will open again so you can make the changes you want.

Notice that by using this method of inserting a chart into Word, there is no need to save an external Excel file, create the chart from scratch, or manually import the chart into Word. Word takes care of everything for you to make inserting charts into Word simple and efficient.

It is no great secret that Cable and DSL service providers (most notoriously, Comcast) sometimes limit download speeds for torrents and file sharing networks in general. But, download limiting practices vary, even with the same ISP in different regions.

For example, in Manhattan, Comcast users report BitTorrent download speeds as low as 25 KPS on high speed connections that boast 10 MBPS, but our Comcast tests in rural Tennessee hit torrent download speeds of 8 MBPS on average. Testing whether or not your local ISP interferes with your file sharing habits is easy, and takes only a few minutes.

First, point your browser to: http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php – this test, called Glasnost, takes about 8 minutes to determine whether or not your ISP is interfering with your downloads.

There are several settings from which to choose for your test. We recommend choosing the P2P file sharing network you use most often. You may choose from BitTorrent, Gnutella (Limewire and others run on this network) or eMule.

You can also test how your ISP handles your emails, SSH transfers and Videos-on-Demand, though as yet, there is no great evidence that these downloads are routinely intercepted by ISPs.

When you have made your selection, click start testing. A screen will appear telling the progress of your test.

In 8 minutes, another screen will appear with your test results. If the headers for your results show in green text, your ISP is treating you fairly. If the headers show in red, it might be time to consider other ISP options. Here are our results on a Comcast 8 MBPS connection in East Tennessee:

We are concerned about the the measurement data being too noisy to detect whether or not our ISP limits traffic rate, but only slightly considering we were running five computers concurrently over a WiFi connection during this test. More than likely, our ISP has not taken to limiting our downloads…yet.

This test is a good idea if you download a great number of files over P2P networks and are noticing significant lag. While there are other reasons for lag than your ISP interfering with your file-sharing mojo, it is a possibility worth an 8-minute exploration.

This registry hack is nothing new, it's been around forever… think of this as a refresher course. Also note that you can use this same technique to substitute any other application that you'd like by adjusting the path in the registry to point to the different editor.

Manual Registry Hack

Open regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:

Code:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell

Right-click on "shell" and choose to create a new key, calling it "Open with Notepad". Create a new key below that one called "command". Double-click on the (Default) value in the right-hand pane and enter in the following:

Code:
notepad.exe %1
The change should take effect immediately… just right-click on any file and you'll see the next menu entry.

Since Windows 95, there has been a missing feature in the operating system that frustrates many users. Microsoft has never given us an easy way to print the contents of a folder. There are several workarounds to this problem but some solutions are easier than others are.
Why Print Folder Contents?

Any folder in Windows 7 can contain a collection of files or other folders. In fact, the folder structure of the Windows operating system is quite a complicated menagerie of files and folders. Printing the contents of personal folders such as My Documents has several useful applications.

First, printing folder contents lets you keep a hard copy record of all of your files and folders in any folder you choose. This is especially useful if you take a snapshot of the contents of your Program Files folder. This way, you have a record of the applications you had installed on your computer in the event of a hard drive or operating system crash.

Second, if you often find yourself having to edit many documents in a folder, having a printout of the contents of the folder allows you to check off the files you’ve edited and make brief notes to yourself about the editing you’ve completed. This is especially useful for students and copyeditors who must make minor adjustments to many documents at a time.

Finally, printing folder contents can help administrators compare the contents of an infected folder with the contents of a healthy folder. Many viruses and other malware add or delete files and folders to do whatever it is they are doing to your computer. By comparing copies of the contents of two folders, an administrator can easily check whether everything that should be in the folder is indeed there.
Printing Folder Contents with Screenshots

One popular method of printing folder contents in Windows is to take a screenshot and print the resulting picture using a graphics program. This is inconvenient for two reasons. First, you have to paste the picture into a graphics program. If you don’t have a graphics program, you are stuck using MS Paint or some other underpowered application. Second, the image quality from such a screen capture is usually quite low. The actual printout you get may be grainy, too small, or go beyond the limits of how far your printer can print to the edges of the paper.
Print the Contents of Folder in Windows 7

Luckily, there is another way to print the contents of any folder in Windows 7. However, there are a number of steps involved to get a nice, clear printout of your folders. Begin by logging in to Windows 7 with an account that has administrative privileges. Click on Start>All Programs>Accessories and locate the application titled Command Prompt. Right click on Command Prompt and select Run As Administrator from the menu.

Windows 7 asks you if you indeed want to Run the Command Prompt as an administrator. Click Yes and the Command Prompt will open. Navigate to the location of the folder whose contents you want to print. In this example, we will print the contents of the Program Files folder. To get there, type the following and press the Enter key:

cd\program files

Now you need to clear the Command Prompt screen. The clear the screen, type the following and press the Enter key:

cls

Your Command Prompt display should now look like this:

Now type the following into the Command Prompt:

dir> contents.txt

Windows 7 won’t give you any indication that anything has happened. However, if you navigate to the Program Files folder using Windows Explorer, you will notice a text file there named “contents.txt” in the folder.

Open the file and you now have a complete and detailed list of all the files and folders within the Program Files folder.

Of course, this trick works with any folder. Just remember that the file you create that contains a list of the folder’s contents will always be saved in the folder you are trying to print.

Also, you can name the file anything you want and you can give it any file extension. If you prefer, you could name the file “Program Files Contents.doc” so you have a more descriptive name and can open the file up directly into Microsoft Word.

1. Software Update checks for available updates. In the Software Update window, select the items you want to install, then click Install. Usually, you should install all available updates. (Mac OS X v10.3 only: Click the Check Now button.)
2. Enter an administrator account name and password.
3. After installation is complete, restart the computer if required.

You can repeat these steps to see if more updates are now available. Because some software updates are prerequisites for others, you may need to repeat these steps several times to complete the software update sequence.

Note: Mac OS X v10.5 and later can automatically run Software Update checks in the background and let you know when an update is available for your computer.

Getting updates immediately (Mac OS X v10.2.8 or earlier)

1. From the Apple () menu, choose System Preferences.
2. From the View menu, choose Software Update.
3. Click Update Now.
4. In the Software Update window, select the items you want to install, then click Install.
5. Enter an administrator account name and password.
6. After the update is complete, restart the computer if a restart is required.

You can repeat these steps to see if more updates are now available. Because some software updates are prerequisites for others, you may need to repeat these steps several times to complete the software update sequence.