Today, Google just launched Google Buzz, a social networking service that allows a user to share; for example links and status updates. This service is integrated to GMail webmail interface.

Of course, Google Buzz is not for everyone. Some might having trouble to catch up to another social networking service.

This tips is only for Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit) and Vista (32 bit only, using this trick on Windows Vista 64 bit will cause Windows to crash). Well, this god mode is not going to make your Windows installation immune to virus or something like that, but instead it provides you with shortcuts to useful system settings.

Enabling GodMode on Windows 7 / Vista

1. Right click on any blank area on your desktop and choose ‘New’ > ‘Folder’.

2. Rename the folder to:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

3. Magically the folder transformed into GodMode!

4. You can actually change the ‘GodMode’ text to something else, for example, if you want to name it ‘System Settings’ just name the new folder to this:

System Settings.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

[via Web Talk]

Quick tip for Windows Vista and 7 only. You can make your Windows installation a little bit different from others by putting a custom text (your name for example) next to the clock on your taskbar.

1. To put a custom text next to the clock on your taskbar, go to Start Menu > ‘Control Panel’ > ‘Region and Language’ options. Click ‘Additional settings…’ (1) and then click the ‘Time’ (2) tab.

2. Change the AM and PM field (3) to the text that you wish to be displayed next to the clock on your taskbar (maximum of 12 characters). Press ‘OK’ (4) to save the options.

3. Make sure ‘Short’ and ‘Long’ time format field have ‘tt’ at the end of it (5) (‘h:mm tt’ for ‘Short time’ and ‘h:mm:ss tt’ for ‘Long time’ format).

4.

Quick tip. When we are trying to access our favourite website and the website is down, sometimes we might think, “Is the website is down for everyone or just me?”. If the website is down for everyone, you probably don’t have to worry because the problem is not at your end. If it is just you, then you might have a problem and you need to check your Internet configuration. In this post, you will find 5 websites that let you quickly check if a website is down for everyone or just you. The first 3 are my favourite.

1. downforeveryoneorjustme.com

Plain simple! Just enter the website address that you want to check and the result will be displayed in a simple way.

2.

Quick tip (Windows only). I’m sure most of us sometimes are unable to cancel a printing job and the print job is stuck on your printer print job list. This is sure a frustrating problem especially if you need to print something urgently. The method below will delete the entire print job queue and cancel all print jobs by stopping the print spooler service and delete its print job files. It should work on most versions of Windows.

1. Run Notepad (Start Menu > Run, type notepad and press ‘Enter’).

2. Copy the command below to Notepad (click the view source icon):

net stop spooler
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.shd
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.spl
net start spooler
pause

3. Save it as a .bat file. Make sure you select ‘All files (*.*)’ (1). Give it a meaningful name, for example, ‘cancelprint.bat’ (2) (without the quotes ‘’) and save it to a location where you can easily find the file, maybe on your desktop. The .bat extension is important! For example, if you want to name it as ‘stopprint’, make sure you put ‘stopprint.bat’. Press ‘Save’ (3) to save it.

4.

There are various tools available to help you encrypt and protect your personal private files. On-the-fly-encryption (OTFE) is one of the popular methods used by disk encryption software. This method allows the data to be encrypted just before it is written to disk and decrypted after it is read from the disk transparently on the background.

R-Crypto is an easy-to-use disk encryption software for Windows to protect your personal and private data, in fact, it is very easy to use. R-Crypto can protect your personal confidential files by creating encrypted virtual disks and each disk is a single file-container. This virtual disk is protected with password. A user can only access the files inside the virtual disk when the correct password is provided. After a user provides the correct password, the virtual disk can be mounted and the user can use the encrypted virtual disk just like a normal drive.

To use R-Crypto to protect your personal files, you must first create a new R-Crypto encrypted disk. R-Crypto encrypted disk is a container file which can be mounted as virtual disk. The container file is stored on your system just like a normal file.

1. In R-Crypto Management Panel, click ‘Run new encrypted disk creation wizard’ [1] and click ‘Next’.

2. Specify the name of the container file [2] and choose the location where you want to store the encrypted disk container file [3]. Choose the size for your encrypted disk [4] and click ‘Next’.

If you are using Windows, you probably ever encounter error message saying that a file is being used by other person or program when you are trying to delete, move or rename a file, or ejecting a USB drive. For example, if Windows Explorer is viewing the thumbnail of a video, then the video file is likely being locked by Explorer.exe. Before this, I use Unlocker to force the delete and move operation of these locked files, or when trying to eject a USB drive with opened files. Unfortunately, I can’t get Unlocker to work on Windows 7, even on the 32 bit version of Windows 7.

LockHunter is a similar tool to Unlocker. LockHunter allows you to release a file or directory that being opened by other application. LockHunter integrates itself to the right-click menu just like Unlocker. LockHunter also allows you to kill or even delete the process that is opening the file that you want to delete.

Keeping software installed on your Windows system up-to-date with the latest version is important. One of the main reasons to keep software updated with the latest version is because the latest version usually come with bug and security fixes. Security fix is very important because unfixed security flaws in the software installed on your system may lead your system to be compromised by hackers. Keeping software with latest version will also allow you to use new features that came with the latest version of the software. Checking each software that installed on your system manually for latest the version is a tiresome thing to do.

While Linux operating system have their own package manager that connects to software repository that allows users to keep the installed software on their system up-to-date with the latest version easily, Windows users don’t have this. Update Notifier is a small utility that checks if there are updates available for the software installed on your system and display the updates to you in a simple way. If update is available, you can click the download button and you will be directed to the download page for the software. Then, you can download the latest version of the software using your web browser.

Update Notifier is easy to use and straight forward. Update Notifier can be installed as portable application.

Standard keyboard has 3 main light emitting diode (LED) which are used to monitor if you activate the ‘Num Lock’, ‘Caps Lock’ and ‘Scroll Lock’ function. If you feel like changing these LEDs function into something else, you can use it as a network traffic network indicator. Talking about the good old Windows 98 dial-up tray icon days =)

A small tool called Network Lights will allows you to use your keyboard LED as network traffic indicator. When there is download or upload network activity, Network Lights will make the ‘Num Lock’ and ‘Scroll Lock’ LEDs blinking. You can impress your friends with your new cool network activity indicator LEDs. Network Lights also works on laptop’s keyboard LEDs (tested on my friend's Compaq Presario v5000).

Network Lights is small, version 1.1 is less than 100KB. When you run Network Lights, it will sit on the system tray. The program uses around 1.3MB of memory. Network Light is freeware and available for Microsoft Windows operating system.

[Download: Network Lights via Raymond.cc]

CHKDSK is a tool on Windows operating system that displays the file system integrity status of a hard disk and CHKDSK can fix logical file system errors. CHKDSK can fix file system errors without the need to restart your system if it can get an exclusive lock on the drive. If CHKDSK cannot lock a drive (usually the C: drive), the check will resume the next time the computer starts. By default, when CHKDSK starts automatically when your system starts, there is a 10 seconds countdown that allows you to press any key to cancel the CHKDSK process during the 10 seconds period. The 10 seconds countdown value can be easily changed.

WARNING! This method involves editing the registry. Make sure you backed up your registry and system before proceeding with caution.

1. Open Registry Editor. Go to Start > Run and type regedit.

2. In Registry Editor, navigates to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager (1).

3. If AutoChkTimeOut value does not exists, you need to create it. To create AutoChkTimeOut value, right click in an empty area on the right panel of Registry Editor, choose New > DWORD value (2).