So let us see how to enable built-in administrator account in Windows 8.

1. Type lusrmgr.msc on start screen and open the app that appears as the search result. Alternatively start the Run (Windows Key + R), type lusrmgr.msc and hit enter. This will open the Local Users and Account Manager (LUSRMGR).

2. In the LUSRMGR window, double click the users folder to show the list of local user accounts.

3. Once the Administrator account is there, right-click on it and choose Properties. In the Properties dialog, uncheck the option “Account is disabled”.

4. As mentioned earlier, since the admin account enjoys all the rights and is free from UAC, it is highly recommended to maintain a strong password to ensure secured access. To change the password, right click on the Administrator user and choose Set Password.

5. You will be shown a warning stating the risks of changing the password. Read it and use the Proceed button to go to the password changing dialog.

6.  Change the password in the next window and press OK. Th password will be needed next time you want to access the administrator account from the logon screen.

Restart or log off from your current account to see the changes in action.

The administrative account is kept hidden purposefully for for making the system fool-proof against any unintended (or intended) misuse of the OS. So it is for you to safe keep the account and be extra sure while doing any configuration changes using this account. You can revert back to the default settings by disabling the the account from the properties dialog mentioned in step 3.

Activate The Hidden Administrator Account in Windows 8 originally published on Ampercent

I have a temporary dump folder on my desktop which contains word documents, photos, spreadsheets, PDF’s, application setups, torrents, videos and other files which I download from the Internet. Whenever I download something, the file goes straight to this folder dump, because I don’t like the idea of cluttering my desktop with random files, photos or documents. After a few weeks,when I need a specific file and I open the dump folder, guess what happens? I find there are thousands of files in a single folder and the document I need immediately is lost among several other similar documents.

If you ever come across a similar situation and want an easy way to organize different file type extensions into subfolders, here is a useful utility worth checking out.

Folder Axe is a superb folder splitter for Windows operating system which lets you split large folders into subfolders and organize same file types into a single folder. This software is ideal for organizing file types by size, date, type, name or file group. This is very handy when you are backing up important data from your computer or you want to find all the word documents stored on a specific directory, without having to stare in the computer monitor and do it manually.

Here is how the basic interface of Folder Axe looks like:

Using Folder Axe to split large folders into smaller subfolders is not a very big deal. First, select the source folder which you want to split and then select a condition for splitting. You are free to define your own filtering rules but the following conditions are currently supported by Folder Axe:

• Sort files by amount – This is useful when you want to organize 10,000 files into 100 small folders, each folder containing exactly 100 files. Folder Axe will automatically create 100 subfolders, and move all the files randomly to each folder. No file will be lost, modifie, deleted or destroyed during the organization process.
• Sort files by size – Have a really big folder containing a whole lot of files with different file sizes? Folder Axe lets you organize files into separate subfolders in such a way that smaller files are kept in one folder while larger ones are kept in a separate one. You have the right to choose which files are “small” and which files are “large”. This is a lifesaver when you are uploading files to your website or have to email a whole bunch of documents to your client. Use Folder Axe and automatically organize all the files by size.
• Sort Files by name – Want to organize all the files in alphabetical order? Folder Axe lets you move all the files with a specific name or extension to a separate subfolder, so this is ideal when you are dealing with thousands of images that begin or end with a common file name.
• Sort Files by type – This is self explanatory. Folder Axe makes it very easy to move files of the same file type into its own subfolder. So you can automatically filter word documents from a pile of PDF’s, spreadsheets and move them to a dedicated folder created by Folder Axe.

Recently, I decided to clean up my external hard drive and get rid of junk files which I have been gathering for months. After some manual cleanup, I realized that it was impossible to decide which file is important and which is junk. I have to hop from one folder to another, open each document and check whether it is important or not.

Then I thought – All right, lets first organize my entire hard drive by creating subfolders and allocate a subfolder to each file type. Which means, word documents have a special folder, PDF’s have a special folder, images  and photos have another special folder and so on. After my categorization was complete, I found that most of the files that were consuming huge space on my external HD was nothing but movie files and YouTube videos. Shift + Delete!

Split Large Folders Into Smaller Subfolders And Make File Management A Breeze originally published on Ampercent

After using a freeware image burner to burn a portable Operating system on my 4GB removable drive, I found that my USB drive has lost all it’s space. I opened Windows Explorer, right clicked the USB drive icon, selected properties and found that the available space shown was only 250 MB.

More than 3 Gigabytes of free space was lost in thin air !

I thought that since I have burned all the files of a portable os on the USB drive, it might have rewritten the partition on the USB drive. I performed a quick format and then a complete clean format of the removable pen drive but the lost space was not recovered. The USB drive was showing the same space status e.g “ Free space available: 30 MB”, Used Space: 3.5 GB”.

The fact of the matter is that the USB drive was completely accessible and I can easily copy or move files and folders from my computer to the removable drive. But anything more than 250 MB was not accepted as the USB drive has lost all space after trying to burn some files on to it.

Next I tried a disk wipe utility to completely delete the USB partition, formatted it again but the problem was not fixed. Again, I tried some free programs to recover hard drive space in Windows but none of them worked.

Finally, I was able to recover lost space on the USB drive using DiskPart command built right within Windows.

Recover Lost Space On a USB Partition: Reuse Unallocated Space

If you are going through a similar situation and want to get back the lost space on a USB partition or rewrite the unallocated USB partition, here are the steps you should follow:

1. First back up all the data from your USB drive to another location.

2. Click Windows start menu, type disk management in the search box and click on “Create and format hard disk partitions”

3. On the disk management window, you should see your computer’s hard drive listed under the “Disk 0” pane. All removable drives including the USB drive or any removable hard disk which you might be using shall be listed under the “Disk 1” pane.

Note: Be very careful while working over the disk management console window. If you don’t know what you’re doing, please consult an expert who has the knowledge of formatting hard disk partitions. In case your hard drive has crashed and the OS isn’t booting at all, please read our guide on recovering all the data from a hard drive in case of system failure

3. If you have lost space on the USB drive or any removable storage, you should see a large amount of unallocated space under “Disk 1” pane.

If you see that a good amount of unallocated space is shown in the Drive 1 pane, calm down. Your USB drive is perfectly fine and it is very much possible to allocate the lost space and recover it on the USB partition. The hardware is OK and neither you need to go to your computer vendor and install any firmware on it.

The Problem with Unallocated space on USB drives

The problem here is that the freeware image burner completely changed the system partition on the USB drive and after the image was burned, all the unused space has been automatically unallocated. [ Some operating systems e.g Chrome OS requires that the source disk should not have any free space available and I am very sure that the Chrome OS image is the actual culprit which unallocated all the free space on my USB drive. ]

Now all you have to do is delete the existing partitions on the USB drive and recreate a new partition from Windows Disk management console.

While there are a lot of open source and free disk management utilities available, there is no need t use any of them. You can recreate the fresh partition using any of the following two ways:

• Use Windows Disk Management console to delete the existing partition, create a new partition and allocate the unallocated space
• Use Windows DiskPart command to delete all partitions in the removable drive and allocate all the unavailable space to a new parition.

I would follow the second method because it’s more easy and takes only half a minute.

4. Click Windows start menu, type “Diskpart” and click the result to open the DiskPart command prompt window.

5. In the command prompt window, type list disk and hit Enter.

6. This will show the current hard drive as well as removable drive status of your computer. The removable USB drive or hard disk will be shown under Disk 1, as shown below:

7. Next, type in the following commands one by one:

select disk 1

Clean

create partition primary

8. The first command selects your removable USB drive while the Clean command deletes all the current partitions present on the USB drive. Next, the “Create primary partition” creates a fresh partition and allocates all the unallocated space on this fresh partition.

9. When you are done, type Exit to close the command prompt window.

10. Done !

Unplug your USB drive and plug it back again. You should now see that the entire unallocated space on the USB drive has been recovered. Here are a couple of more articles which are worth a read:

• Find out which files and folders are consuming large disk space on Windows
• Move installed programs to another partition without system format

Did you accidentally deleted your USB partition ever? How did you fix the problem? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

How To Use DiskPart Command To Recover Missing Or Unallocated Space On A USB Drive originally published on Ampercent

It might be a silly SMS message or an email notification, but the thing is that your concentration is lost. You find it extremely difficult to continue doing the stuff you were doing. The notification ringer continues whistling and the first thing you want to do at that moment is find the phone, check the notifications and silence the ringer.

Another problem with a smartphone is when you don’t remember where the phone is and it continues to ring out that notification sound. You don’t want to leave your desk, find the phone on other part of your room, how about an application which can send Android notifications to your Windows or MAC desktop remotely?

Enter Android Notifier – a simple desktop application made for Windows and MAC computers which can forward all the notifications and pings received on your Android device to the desktop computer. The advantage here is that you can either choose to skip notifications on the Android device or choose to receive notifications on both the computer and the mobile. The app sends all notifications from your Android handset to Windows system tray, so you don’t have to stand up, take out the mobile from your pocket and see all those notifications.

Here is how to set up Android Notifier on your Windows7 computer:

1. First download the desktop client of Android Notifier and install it on your Windows7 computer.

2. Go to Android market and download the mobile client using this link. It’s free!

3. Once you have installed both the desktop and mobile clients, it’s done automatically. Of course there are some settings and options to tweak through but for normal use, the app works out of the box. Sit back on your desktop and the remote app will forward all the notifications received on your ANdroid device to your desktop computer as ‘System tray alerts.”. Here is an example notification which I got when my Android was running on low battery:

There are quite a few settings which you can tweak and customize. For example: you can choose whether the notifications or alerts are sent via your home wi-fi connection or through the Bluetooth. The events for which the remote notifier app can be customized are SMS messages, phone ringing, MMS, battery alerts, voicemail and notifications from third party apps ( as and when they happen).

One exceptionally useful use case is when you are watching a movie with headphones plugged in, you don’t miss any calls or voicemail notifications. The desktop notifier, which must be kept running in Windows system tray intercepts all the notifications and alerts received on the Android device and shows them over at your desktop computer.

The only downside here is that the app can’t send notifications remotely via an Internet connection which means that the phone and the desktop computer must be connected through a local area network connection or a common Wi-Fi connection. Nonetheless, the app works fine and is recommended for geeks, office workers and anyone who finds himself too busy during work hours and needs a simple way to keep up with phone notifications, directly on the desktop.

Try this app and let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

Remote Notifier For Android Sends Phone Notifications To Your Desktop Computer originally published on Ampercent

If you are using Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 as the only operating system of your computer, these tips will help you recover data from your computer’s hard drive, when Windows fails to boot properly. Agree that reinstalling Windows from scratch will fix the problem and let you use the data stored on the normal logical partitions. But the downside here is that you will lose all the files and folders stored on the main OS partition which also includes your “My Documents”, “My pictures” and “Downloads” folder.

So here is a complete step by step procedure you should follow when any of the following things happen:

• Your computer fails to boot and shows a “Boot failure” or “Operating system not found” error.
• Windows boots properly but shows a blank screen (usually black) at start up.
• Your CD/DVD drive is broken and you are unable to use the “Repair my computer” utility found on a bootable Windows CD/DVD.
• You don’t have a floppy disk on the netbook or laptop and thus you are unable to use a Windows startup disk, created from another system.
• You are unable to install a hard drive backup utility because the only operating system installed on your computer is broken in the first place.

Disclaimer: The following steps and techniques instruct you to make changes on your system. While we test each and every step on our own, please be careful and know beforehand what you’re doing. We cannot be help responsible in case you lose data, settings or other stuff on your system.

Case 1: When You Have a Bootable CD/DVD/USB of Windows

If you have a working bootable CD/DVD of Windows XP or Windows 7, chances are that you can repair your corrupted operating system by using the System repair utility. Note that we won’t be installing a fresh copy of Windows because this will overwrite all the data on the primary Windows partition. Instead, we will try to repair existing Windows installation using Windows recovery console or Windows startup repair method. If everything fails, we will hook up into the command line and copy the entire hard drive into an external hard disk

Here are the steps that needs to be done:

Using a Bootable Disc to Fix Corrupted Operating System – Windows XP

1. Insert Windows XP bootable CD/DVD on the DVD drive and restart your computer.

2. When the computer is starting, hold down the F9 key to open the “Boot options” dialog box. Different BIOS versions can use different keys e.g Del, F9, F2 or F12, keep hitting each key one after another if you can’t open the boot menu.

If nothing works and you are unable to load the boot options panel, go to the BIOS and choose CD/DVD as the first boot device.

3. When the boot menu opens, choose the CD/DVD drive e.g select HL-DT-STDVD-RAM.

3. This will load the very famous blue format screen of Windows XP, you will have to wait for a minute or two until the system loads all the necessary files from the bootable disc. When all the files have been loaded, you will see the following screen:

4. We will ignore the first option of setting up Windows from scratch, because we don’t want to lose all the data on the C drive i.e operating system drive. Hence to start repairing your existing Windows XP installation, hit the R key on the keyboard.

5. Windows will now examine disk configuration, boot order and fire up the recovery console to repair your existing operating system and recover functionality.

6. Enter 1 and hit the return key once.

7. Next, you will be asked to type the administrator password for the Windows installation which you want to repair or recover. Key in the admin password and hit “Enter”

8. The recovery console will let you use some commands from the command prompt. For a complete list of commands, refer to this Microsoft Support page

9. Using the recovery console depends on your present situation and what problems you actually have. Here are a couple of few commands which are worth trying

• Bootcfg: modifies the Boot.ini file for boot configuration and recovery
• Fixboot: writes a new startup sector on the system partition.

In my experience, using the Fixboot command would be sufficient to fix corrupt master boot record of Windows and will let you use Windows XP as normally. After using this method, if you are able to successfully login to Windows and don’t see a blank screen on startup, be rest assured that the problem had to do something with the boot record or the boot.ini file.

10. After logging in to Windows, the first thing you would be doing is back up all the important files, folders, photos, documents and other data from all drives. Do not forget the operating system drive as well !

Using the “Repair Your Computer” Method in Windows 7

If you’re using Windows7 and can’t login to Windows due to a blank screen at start up or operating system error during boot, you should first use the “Repair your computer” wizard, which comes by default with every installation of Vista or Windows 7. The best part: you don’t need a bootable Windows7 disc or a bootable USB drive to run the system recovery of Windows 7.

1. Restart the computer and wait until the boot screen appears, Select “Windows 7” and hit the F8 key for advanced boot options. Now select “Repair your computer” and hit “Enter”

Note: It is advised to first check with “last known good configuration that worked”. If using that option solves the problem, you may skip the rest of the article.

2. Wait until Windows loads all the necessary files required for the system recovery console of Windows 7.

3. Choose “US” or your preferred keyboard input method and hit “Next”.

4, Type in your admin password and hit “Enter”.

5. Now you will be shown 5 options under Windows7 system recovery:

• Startup repair: Windows will automatically fix problems that are preventing Windows from starting – try this one and see whether Windows is able to fix the startup problem on it’s own.
• System restore: Always a handy option. If you have created a system restore point at an earlier time, use this one and instruct Windows to revert to the system image created earlier.  Please note that if the system image is outdated and created a long time back, you might lose all the recent data on your primary partition.
• System Image Recovery: If you have earlier created a system image and burned it onto a DVD disc, this option lets you clone your computer with that image. Select this option, enter your system recovery disc and follow the instructions of the wizard to restore Windows to a previous state.
• Windows memory diagnostic: This option checks whether the non responding state of Windows is caused due to a recent hardware failure or problems in your computer’s disk drive, RAM slots etc.
• Command prompt: This one opens a command prompt window where you can execute all the normal commands using Windows command line. If all of the abiove methods fails, you can use the wonderful xcopy command and backup your entire hard drive on an external storage, pen drive.

Case 2: When You Don’t Have a Bootable Windows CD/DVD/USB or The DVD Drive is Broken

When your computer’s CD/ DVD drive is broken and you are unable to boot the computer or run startup recovery from the bootable disc, the only way to backup all the data is to use the xcopy utility from Windows command prompt. Here are the step by step instructions for using xcopy in safe mode on the command prompt window.

1. Unplug any external storage device attached to the computer and boot your system. While Windows 7 is being loaded, hit the F8 key to go to Advanced boot options. Then select “Safe Mode with command prompt”, as shown below:

2. Wait a minute or two until WIndows7 finishes loading all files.

3.Meanwhile, plug in the external hard drive or any removable drive where you want to backup files and folders from the corrupted system.

4. When done, Windows will prompt you to login using the administrator account and will show the safe mode screen:

4. Find the drive letter of the external drive by trial and error method.

Example: If your system has only three partitions on the system hard disk, enter F: in the command prompt window to see whether Windows is able to enter that drive. Then enter the DIR command and see all the files and folders of the external drive.

If you can see all the files and folders of the external drive, it means that F is the drive letter of your removable storage.

5. Create a new folder on the external drive by using the following command

H:\ MD backup

This will create an empty folder called “backup’ where you will backup all files and folders from the corrupted system.

4. Now we will use Windows 7 xcopy utility. Run the following command:

H:\>xcopy C:\ H:\backup /s

The above command will copy all files from the C drive to the backup folder created in the external drive.

5. Hit the return key on your keyboard and Windows will start copying each and every file or folder from the C drive to your backup folder. You will see a random gibberish screen, hold on for a while and do not unplug the removable storage until it’s finished.

6. Similarly, backup all the files and folders from other logical partitions. Note: It would be better if you separately copy all files from desktop and “My documents” folder using the xcopy command.

7. When the backup is complete, unplug the external storage and plug it on a working computer. Open the backup folder and bingo !

You have all the files and folders successfully backed up in the external storage. No loss of data whatsoever !

Of course there are there are other ways to perform a complete backup of the system but in case your only operating system fails to respond, this one is one of the quickest ways.

How To Backup Your Entire Hard Drive In Case Of A System Crash Or When Windows Fails To Boot originally published on Ampercent

PAM is a desktop application which is designed to track down the amount of time you waste doing un productive tasks such as browsing Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, watching YouTube videos, playing online video games etc.

PAM is available as a free download and once installed, it resides in your system tray unnoticed. What it does is that it keeps track of the different applications which you spend your time on. It simply detects the active applications which you are accessing and records the amount of time a certain application stayed active. The data gathered by PAM is then displayed to you in graphical format which shows you how much time you actually wasted and how much time you spent doing productive work.

On the implementation side, it simply considers the active app the one app which you maximize. This way if you have multiple apps open at the same time, the one which is maximized is considered to be the active app. This is the reason the results gathered by PAM are quite accurate.

PAM also displays results in minutes and percentages which give a broader distribution pattern of how you spend your time using different apps. PAM also has support for exporting data as XML format to other platforms for analysis.

PAM is a great way to analyze your application usage time and optimize the time you spend in front of the computer screen. PAM is available for Windows XP, Vista and 7 and can be accessed from here.

Monitor Time Spent on Different Applications with PAM originally published on Ampercent

TED Notepad is an awesome lightweight notepad application for Windows which is surely the best friend of any programmer, coder or even a web designer. Whenever you’re writing code for the web or even writing a program segment in programming languages, you need at least 4 features in the code editor

1. Indentation and proper mark up
2. The ability to reuse codes as and when required
3. Syntax highlighting and proper sorting
4. Search and replace codes and store bulk segments for later use.

I have been using Microsoft Frontpage as my default HTML editor application for years but looking at TED notepad, I think I will make a switch.

Here are some nifty features of TED notepad which makes it one of the best code diting application and notepad replacement for Windows

Multiple Clipboards – Store Codes And Data For Later Use

Wrote a code but don’t want to use it at the moment ? TED Notepad offers an impressive Clipboard storage which can be used to save text, data in the local clipboard. You can use up to 12 clipboards at any given point of time and save multiple text notes as and when required. This is especially useful when you’re working on multiple text files and need to store a portion of data elsewhere or reuse it in the current notepad window again and again. There is no need to copy paste the clipboard data across multiple files, TED notepad’s built in code clipboard handles it all

Note: You might also want to check out our previous guide on Windows clipboard tips and tricks

Import Multiple text Files In a Single Text File Without Opening Them

TED Notepad lets you include or merge multiple text files without having to open them in separate windows, copy text and paste them in the current document. To merge or import data from another text, HTML, XML file, all you need to do is select “Tools> Include File” and browse to the file location.

That is all, the program will append all the content of the file to your current document. You can always exclude portion of a code or text and export it to a new file, without having to open another window, paste the text and save it – like we usually do with the default Windows notepad application.

Easy Case Conversions

Ever encountered a text document which is written randomly in Upper case and lower case characters ? In other HTML editors, you have to select the portion of mixed characters repeatedly and convert uppercase to lowercase or vice versa. TED notepad lets you convert mixed case characters to all lowercase, all uppercase, camel casing, word capitals and case inversion.

This is a lifesaver for anyone who wants to convert a mixed case word document to proper sentence casing and then reuse the text adhereing to proper syntax and grammar.

Advanced Search And Filtering Of Text

This is probably the biggest advantage of using a professional notepad editing application.

TED notepad offers a whole bunch of text filtering, search and replace options which is far beyond the features of Windows default notepad. Apart from searching and replacing text, you can jump to the selected text and copy it with a keyboard shortcut.

There is also a “Find later” option which allows you to store the selected text in one of the clipboards, so that you can find multiple segments of text randomly.

Moreover, the app makes it easy to keep the notepad always on top and visible; so you don’t have to minimize and maximize the code editor over and over again.

It’s Portable And Can Replace Windows Notepad

TED Notepad is a portable notepad application which can be run from a USB thumb drive or from your computer’s hard disk, without having to install anything or change Windows registry. So before you decide to replace Windows code editor or notepad with this one, drop a copy in a USB stick and test out the features yourself. Also read: portable productivity applications for Windows

To replace Windows notepad with TED Notepad, follow the instructions here

TED Notepad is a minimalist text editor for Windows, provides a clutter free user interface – there are no toolbars, ugly looking gadgets and unnecessary sidebars. The program works with all versions of Windows and is free to download.

TED Notepad Is An Awesome Notepad Replacement Program For Windows originally published on Ampercent

Microsoft ships a useful MS-Config utility with all versions of Windows, which can be used to manage which programs are pre-configured to run during Windows startup. While the MS-Config utility is good in removing unnecessary applications, services and registry values from Windows start up entries, sometimes you might want to try a full featured start up manager.

This is when the Autoruns Sysinternals utility can come handy.

Autoruns Sysinternals – More Than A Start up Manager

Autoruns Sysinternals is more than a mere startup manager for Windows and can be used to explore in full details all the services, scheduled tasks, known DLL’s, drivers, registry executable and other applications which are called and executed during Windows startup. The best thing regarding Autoruns Sysinternals is that you can find the startup entries, processes and services in the same order as Windows executes them.

Here are some of the noteworthy features of Autoruns Sysinternals and why you should opt for a more full featured program manager for Windows:

List All The Autorun Entries And Services In the order Windows Executes Them

Run the program and it will automatically load all the Windows services, software programs, registry executable, drivers, core processes, software updates and Windows scheduled tasks in the same way as executed by Windows.

For example: In the above screenshot, you can note that Windows executes the Java update, then loads the USB gamepad driver and then goes on to load startup programs in the sequence defined during their installation. Looking at the order in which different Windows services are loading, you can kill running programs one by one and manage the priority level of each entry in Windows startup.

Removing Unnecessary Windows Services, Updates From Startup

Do you really need Windows to check whether your system is running the latest version of Java or Adobe Flash ? Do you really need Windows to check for software updates of all installed applications whenever Windows starts up ? let me tell you that the processes which check for software updates and latest patches are also responsible for slow system performance.

Simply deselect the updates e.g Google Update, Java update and remove the unnecessary driver updates which are not required at all. While you can always create a batch file and kill multiple Windows processes in one shot, it’s always better to solve the problem once and for all

Removing Scheduled Tasks From Windows Startup

Switch to the scheduled tasks panel and you are most likely to find a whole bunch of unnecessary tasks and processes already scheduled to run and execute during Windows startup.

I ran the utility in my Windows7 computer, and here are the results:

Common examples include – Googleupdate.exe, Firefox, Skype, Windows Live sign in assistant, Windows defender scheduled scan and so on. To remove Googleupdate.exe from Windows startup, all you need to do is deselect the checkbox in the scheduled tasks panel.

Another notable feature is that double clicking a scheduled task opens up Windows scheduler and you can check which triggers and values are assigned in that particular system scheduled task. This becomes crucially necessary, when you want to cross check whether a third party application is secretly sending information through your computer’s network connection. Alternatively, you might want to install a network monitoring software but this one is far easy and saves the day.

Other features include managing Windows logon processes, removing toolbars from Internet Explorer and other browsers, deleting expired registry entries, monitoring printers, codecs and managing the order of core Windows processes. Autoruns utility can also be run via Windows command line.

Autoruns is a free download and works with all versions of Windows.

Which Programs Are Configured To Run During Windows Startup ? Find out And Fix Slow Booting Of Windows originally published on Ampercent

I recently discovered a free app called f.lux. F.lux works by changing the overall color of your screen based on what time of day it is. You can input a latitude and longitude, and the program will determine when your sunrise and sunset are. The overall effect is hard to describe, so I made a short video to try and show what exactly happens.

Setting Up f.lux

Setting up your f.lux installation is very easy. When you install it, it will add a small icon to your task bar, and from there you can access the setting menu.

When you click the icon, you will see this screen. There is the option to disable the product for one hour if you are doing color sensitive work. To edit the options, press the ‘Change Settings’ button.

In the settings, you can edit the levels of the each effect. Here, you can also input the location as well has change the transition speed (either 20 seconds or 60 minutes.)

Thoughts on Eye-Saving f.lux

As you can see, the interface is very simple. However, the effects are really great. As a blogger and a student, I work late nights sometimes, and I find the f.lux has changed my feeling about doing it. I really like this little application.

What are your thoughts on f.lux? Let us know any questions or comments in the section below.

Save Your Eyes From Your Monitor With F.lux originally published on Ampercent

Memorizing and managing different passwords for various accounts is a definite strain on the brain especially if you tend to be active on the internet. So if you happen to be a Windows user searching for an ideal password manager then Sticky Password Free is the perfect utility for you.

Sticky Password Features and Setup

Sticky Password is available either as a free version or as a more advanced and feature rich Pro version. Although the free version is limited to only one account and 15 passwords but it’s quite good for normal internet users. Apart from form filings and automatic login, users of Sticky Password free can also create a portable version of the app alongwith the ability to keep secure memos.

How to Setup Sticky Password?

Once you are done with download and installation of the app you have to follow certain steps before the software can be used. Here is what you have to do:

• First of all you have to create a master password so that you can access the entire database of the passwords
• As this password will be protecting all the others so make sure that this one is really strong
• In-order to make things more secure, the Sticky Password utility provide its users with a virtual keyboard so that keyloggers cant access or record your keystrokes.
• Next you will have to configure the “Locking timeout” and “ Access control”
• After doing this you will have to install all the browser plug-ins and extensions, don’t worry about this installation because the software will prompt you for all this automatically
• Installing browser extensions and plugins will help you to record and fill-in the passwords and all the other user information

How To Use Sticky Password?

Once its completely configured the application will open by itself, it will ask you to fill-in your master password so that the data within the app can be unlocked. Just follow these steps and using Sticky Password will become easy for you:

• When using Sticky Password for the first time it will offer you that whether you want to import your data from the other compatible applications and browsers. Import can also be done later on by using “import” link on the main interface
• Entire data is available on the main window and you can easily do processes like edit, remove, add and search.
• Now next step is filling some data, click on the Add button to start adding web accounts and memos.
• The software offers you to create two type of accounts i.e. Web and application accounts

Creating the portable version of Sticky Password

If you tend to be a user who wants to keep their passwords with them all the time then you can also create a portable version of Sticky Password. Just click on the system tray icon of Sticky Password and click on Portable version. It will ask you to choose a drive where you want to keep your portable version, choose that drive and click Next. Sticky Password will automatically create a portable version on the drive that you have specified.

It’s a very useful utility specially for the internet savvy users who have their presence on multitude of web platforms.

Sticky Password: Manage And Carry Your Passwords and Personal Information Effectively originally published on Ampercent