WINDOWS XP SUPPORT ENDED LAST YEAR, 2014

Microsoft first released Windows XP on October 25, 2001 and after over twelve years of supporting the operating system announced it is ending Windows XP support April 8, 2014 which means that they will no longer be providing any updates, patches, or further software security related support.

If you are still running Windows XP it will continue to work after this date, but if a security vulnerability is discovered after this date it will not be fixed by Microsoft. However, Microsoft has indicated it will continue to offer anti-malware support (MSE) for Windows XP until July 14, 2015 and other anti-virus manufacturers have also announced that they'll be extending their support of Windows XP for up to a year. While this will offer some protection for your computer it still will not protect against any new vulnerabilities not yet released or discovered.

Some people argue that since Windows XP is such an established operating system that it is not likely that any new security vulnerabilities will be discovered. However, most experts recommend upgrading to a later version of Windows, either Windows 7 or the latest version of Windows, Windows 8.

If your computer is over four years old or does not meet the system requirements of a new versions of Windows we suggest getting a new computer with a more up-to-date version of Windows. Alternatively if you want to keep the older computer and don't need Windows you may also consider switching to Linux distro.

Tip: Microsoft is offering a free data transfer program for users upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7, 8, or 8.1.

Tip: If your hesitation of going to a new version of Windows is because you have an older program that is designed for Windows XP, Windows XP Mode can help older programs run in new versions of Windows.

What if I still want to run and use Windows XP?

If you plan on continuing to use Microsoft Windows XP after April 8, 2014 following the below suggestions.

1. Don't use an administrator account - Use a limited account and not a adminaccount. If you use an account with not enough rights spyware, malware, and other exploits wont work or be much less likely to work.
2. Use an alternative browser - Don't use Internet Explorer and instead use an alternative browser such as Chrome or Firefox, which will continue to be updated and remain secure.
3. Keep your browser plugins and extensions updated - Plug-ins like Java and Flash are one of the most common methods of attacking a computer. Keep your browser and all of its plug-ins up-to-date. You can find the latest version of all your plug-ins through our system information tool. If you don't use a plug-in that is installed (e.g. Java, uninstall it from the computer.)
4. Keep the computer offline - If this is a work computer that doesn't need to be online keep it offline. Without having access to the Internet the computer cannot be attacked.
5. Follow all the steps on how to protect yourself while online.

Related questions

Can Windows XP still be installed and activated after April 8, 2014?

Yes. You'll still be able to run, install, and activate Windows XP after April 8, 2014.

What about Windows XP Embedded?

Windows XP Embedded support will remain until January 12, 2016.

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MICROSOFT KEY BOARD SHOTCUTS

Ctrl + 0	Adds or removes 6pts of spacing before a paragraph.
Ctrl + A	Select all contents of the page.
Ctrl + B	Bold highlighted selection.
Ctrl + C	Copy selected text.
Ctrl + D	Open the font preferences window.
Ctrl + E	Aligns the line or selected text to the center of the screen.
Ctrl + F	Open find box.
Ctrl + I	Italic highlighted selection.
Ctrl + J	Aligns the selected text or line to justify the screen.
Ctrl + K	Insert link.
Ctrl + L	Aligns the line or selected text to the left of the screen.
Ctrl + M	Indent the paragraph.
Ctrl + P	Open the print window.
Ctrl + R	Aligns the line or selected text to the right of the screen.
Ctrl + T	Create a hanging indent.
Ctrl + U	Underline highlighted selection.
Ctrl + V	Paste.
Ctrl + X	Cut selected text.
Ctrl + Y	Redo the last action performed.
Ctrl + Z	Undo last action.
Ctrl + Shift + L	Quickly create a bullet point.
Ctrl + Shift + F	Change the font.
Ctrl + Shift + >	Increase selected font +1pts up to 12pt and then increases font +2pts.
Ctrl + ]	Increase selected font +1pts.
Ctrl + Shift + <	Decrease selected font -1pts if 12pt or lower, if above 12 decreases font by +2pt.
Ctrl + [	Decrease selected font -1pts.
Ctrl + / + c	Insert a cent sign (¢).
Ctrl + ' +	Insert a character with an accent (grave) mark, where is the character you want. For example, if you wanted an accented è you would use Ctrl + ' + e as your shortcut key. To reverse the accent mark use the opposite accent mark, often on the tilde key.
Ctrl + Shift + *	View or hide non printing characters.
Ctrl +	Moves one word to the left.
Ctrl +	Moves one word to the right.
Ctrl +	Moves to the beginning of the line or paragraph.
Ctrl +	Moves to the end of the paragraph.
Ctrl + Del	Deletes word to right of cursor.
Ctrl + Backspace	Deletes word to left of cursor.
Ctrl + End	Moves the cursor to the end of the document.
Ctrl + Home	Moves the cursor to the beginning of the document.
Ctrl + Spacebar	Reset highlighted text to the default font.
Ctrl + 1	Single-space lines.
Ctrl + 2	Double-space lines.
Ctrl + 5	1.5-line spacing.
Ctrl + Alt + 1	Changes text to heading 1.
Ctrl + Alt + 2	Changes text to heading 2.
Ctrl + Alt + 3	Changes text to heading 3.
Alt + Ctrl + F2	Open new document.
Ctrl + F1	Open the Task Pane.
Ctrl + F2	Display the print preview.
Ctrl + Shift + >	Increases the highlighted text size by one.
Ctrl + Shift + <	Decreases the highlighted text size by one.
Ctrl + Shift + F6	Opens to another open Microsoft Word document.
Ctrl + Shift + F12	Prints the document.
F1	Open Help.
F4	Repeat the last action performed (Word 2000+)
F5	Open the find, replace, and go to window in Microsoft Word.
F7	Spellcheck and grammar check selected text or document.
F12	Save as.
Shift + F3	Change the text in Microsoft Word from uppercase to lowercase or a capital letter at the beginning of every word.
Shift + F7	Runs a Thesaurus check on the word highlighted.
Shift + F12	Save.
Shift + Enter	Create a soft break instead of a new paragraph.
Shift + Insert	Paste.
Shift + Alt + D	Insert the current date.
Shift + Alt + T	Insert the current time.

In addition to the above shortcut keys users can also use their mouse as a method of quickly do something commonly performed. Below some are examples of mouse shortcuts.

Mouse shortcuts	Description
Click, hold, and drag	Selects text from where you click and hold to the point you drag and let go.
Double-click	If double-click a word, selects the complete word.
Double-click	Double-clicking on the left, center, or right of a blank line will make the alignment of the text left, center, or right aligned.
Double-click	Double-clicking anywhere after text on a line will set a tab stop.
Triple-click	Selects the line or paragraph of the text the mouse triple-clicked.
Ctrl + Mouse wheel	Zooms in and out of document.

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5 Essential free Software for Windows PC

5 Essential free Software for Windows PC

Imagine, you have a new high end PC with Windows installed. You switch on the PC in excitement only to ask yourself the question, what should I do now? Even the most high end hardware is useless without the right software. This article deals with such five essential software for your PC that do not put any dent on your pocket. For convenience purposes, each software is provided according to the category of its usage. So lets begin.

All the freeware mentioned support all versions of Windows including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

1.  Browsers: It is fair to say that for majority of PC users, surfing the internet is the only major use for their PC. So, it would have been unfair to begin this list with any other category. Although, Windows comes with Internet Explorer, it would not be totally wrong to say that IE is no more than an average web browser. So an alternative web browser is an absolute necessity. Coming to the point, there are two major contenders for inclusion in this category. So, I was unsure which one to choose. So I decided to include them both. (I have intentionally not numbered the browsers)

a. Mozilla Firefox: Mozilla is not totally wrong to say that the Firefox Web browser is the faster, more secure, and fully customizable way to browse the web. Firefox is one of the most complete browsers available. It is considered to be the first browser to shake Internet Explorer's dominance. One of the good things about Firefox is that it keeps up with the needs of time. Another cool thing about Firefox is that it has a perfect score in Acid 3 test. Firefox wins the race with other browsers in terms of available themes, plugins, and security. Overall, Firefox is a must have browser on your PC.

b.  Google Chrome: When Google does something, it is huge and the same is true for Google Chrome. Everything was looking settled in the browser market when Google all of a sudden came up with their new browser with the unique thought of building it almost from scratch. Google's Chrome is currently the fastest browser on the planet with tremendous JavaScript rendering capabilities. Like Firefox, Chrome has a perfect score in Acid 3. Themes and plugins also make Chrome a totally customizable browser. Overall, Chrome is fast, safe and customizable. If you have no problem with Google's products, Chrome is a must have browser on your PC.

2.  Media Player: If we check our hard drives, one thing which most of us will find on them is media. To play that media, we need a media player. So a media player is important for most PC users. One can say that Windows comes with Windows Media Player, so why is another media player needed? To them, I say that Windows Media Player does not have the ability to play all the media formats unless you install the necessary codecs. So, a media player which comes with almost all codecs installed is needed. There is one such media player available. It is VideoLAN's free offering, VLC Media Player.

 VLC  Media Player: VLC Media Player is an open source, multi-platform media player that comes with almost all of the codecs required to play all different types of media on your PC. So you do not have to worry about installing codecs to play your files. Moreover, the best part about VLC media player is that being open source, you can install it on almost any operating system. Moreover, VLC media player is portable so you can carry it in your flash drive. All this combined with stability, performance, ability to convert and cut videos make VLC Media Player an absolute essential software.

3.  Image Viewer: Well most of us like to take images, and most of us like to edit them as well. This leads to a large amount of images in different formats. The inbuilt image viewer in Windows is not all that bad but the problem arises when we try to open files of different formats. Imagine this situation, you have a great collection of images which are of different formats. Now you invite your friends to show those images. But you have one problem, Windows Image Viewer is not opening the images as they are of unsupported formats. What do you do? Well you install Irfan View with plugins.

Irfan View: Irfan View is developed by Irfan Skiljan, a student at the University of Vienna in 1996. Irfan View is one of the most popular image viewer worldwide. Irfan View gets downloaded over 1 million times each month. One of the major advantages of Irfan View is that it has a light interface, is fast in opening images and can open virtually every type of image image file possible. It can even open Flash files and also serves as a small media player as it can play movie files and mp3 files as well! And that is not all, Irfan View can be used to do minor image editing as well.

Some of its features are:
Slide show, batch conversion, Acquiring from a TWAIN source, Batch acquire or scan, adding text to photos, converting to greyscale, enhancing colours and even capturing screen shots. Honestly, that is not even 5 % of what Irfan View is capable of. All this at a tremendously small size make Irfan View a must have essential.

Irfan View Plugins can add further functionality to this already great software.

4.  Security: This could well be the most important category of this article. Security of a PC is the most important thing in the cyber world now. There was a time when this was not essential but those were the good old days. Now one cannot even think of browsing the web without having an anti virus or anti spyware installed. Big organizations and corporate companies spend millions for securing their network but you don't have to. There are some free tools which do the job equally well without costing you a penny. (To read a full article on securing your PC, visit How to Improve your Cyber Security.)

There were many alternatives to include in this category. So I decided to include the most popular one which is presumably AVG Free Edition.

AVG Free Edition: AVG is a popular antivirus with a slick interface having the ability to detect viruses and spywares. It receives updates frequently and is light on resources. Some of its key features are Automatic Update Functionality, Resident Shield, Email Scanner, free lifetime database updates for home users, Anti Spyware, Anti Virus, AVG toolbar and Search Scan. All these premium features are available free of cost in AVG making it a must have free anti virus/spyware for your PC.

 
5.  Office Suite: An office suite has become an absolute necessity these days. We use it to create text documents,presentations, making tables, graphs, recording data, managing schedules,creating spreadsheets and workbooks. A full fledged Office Suite like Microsoft Office will cost you no less than 500 USD (Rs. 25000). That is too high a price for any user. So what should one do? Well, use the Open Office Suite instead.

Open Office Suite: Open Office Suite is an open source, multi lingual, multi platform project developed by Sun Micro systems. Among all the Office Suites available, Open Office is considered to be the only worthy competitor to Microsoft Office. It is fast, available in many languages, works on all computers, stores all data in an international open standard format, read and write files from other common office packages and the best of all, is free of charge for any purpose(commercial or private). It can even edit PDF files.

These freeware will definitely help you to make your PC more usable. Although there are many more free software for Windows that are worthwhile, these 5 are an absolute must for a freeware dominated Windows PC.

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CONVERT, RESIZE AND CUT VIDEOS WITH VLC MEDIA

VLC, the free and open source media player is great at playing media of even the most obscure formats. However, that is not all it can do. It can be used to easily convert videos from one format to the other. Converting videos with VLC media player is pretty fast and is in the league of most premium video converters in terms of quality. It can also be used to resize videos from one size to other for when you need to shrink videos to fit in your mobile devices. It can also serve as a quick video cutting tool.

Convert Videos with VLC Media Player

To convert videos with VLC media player, follow the steps given below:-

1) Open VLC media player.
2) Click on Media in the Menu bar.
3) In the dropdown menu, click on Convert/Save. Alternatively, you can directly press Ctrl+R to reach media options.

4) Click on the Add button on the right of the File selection box to load the video whose format you want to change.
5) In the following dialog box, click on browse to select the destination where your converted video will be.

6) In the profile selection option, select from a pre-configured profile of the output or customize it by clicking on the Settings icon on its right. You can select from a range of encapsulation, video and audio formats in the following dialog box if you wish to customize the output.
7) Click on Start to begin conversion.
8) VLC's progress bar will show progress. Do not close the player when it is converting videos as it will result in output video getting corrupted.

The speed with which VLC converts videos depends upon your computer's specifications. A faster computer converts faster while slower PCs take a lot of time. At the end of the conversion process, you will get the video in the format that you have selected in step 6.

Resize and shrink videos with VLC media player

Resizing the video involves making minor changes in the steps followed in conversion. While customizing the profile in step 6, go to the Video codec tab. Inside the Scale option, enter the desired width and height that you deem fit for your needs. After that, just convert the video as you normally would. This would result in the output video having the same dimensions that you specified. However, it is important to note that exact dimensions would only be achieved if the aspect ratio of the video is maintained. If the correct aspect ratio is not satisfied by your dimensions, VLC will take one of your dimension and change the other to satisfy it.

Cut videos with VLC media player

To crop videos with VLC media player, go to the menu bar and click on View menu. Inside it, check Advanced Controls. This will result in a few extra buttons over the normal toolbar. Play the video of your choice and press the record button (from the newly added buttons) at the point in the video from where you want to start. Then, again press this button when the video reaches the point at which you want to stop it. The cut video will automatically be saved in your Videos library. It is located at Libraries/Videos in Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7 and Windows Vista. In Windows XP, it is located at My Documents\My Videos. You can use the Frame by Frame button to get a high degree of accuracy. You need to install the newer versions of this program as older versions do not support this.

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HOW TO LOCK YOUR FOLDER WITHOUT ANY SOFTWARE

This tutorial will guide you through the steps required to create a locked folder in Windows 7 – without installing any additional 3rd party software.

The steps below will guide you in creating a hidden and password protected folder, this method is not 100% secure. It will however deter the average computer user enough, but an advanced user may be able to access the contents of this folder.

HERE WE GO

1. Create a new folder and name it whatever you would like.


2. Open the folder, right-click on a blank area in it, then select New -> Text Document from the pop-up menu.


3. Open the text file you just created by double-clicking it and copy/paste in the following text:
   

   cls

   @ECHO OFF

   title Folder Private

   if EXIST "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}" goto UNLOCK

   if NOT EXIST Private goto MDLOCKER

   :CONFIRM

   echo Are you sure you want to lock the folder(Y/N)

   set/p "cho=>"

   if %cho%==Y goto LOCK

   if %cho%==y goto LOCK

   if %cho%==n goto END

   if %cho%==N goto END

   echo Invalid choice.

   goto CONFIRM

   :LOCK

   ren Private "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}"

   attrib +h +s "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}"

   echo Folder locked

   goto End

   :UNLOCK

   echo Enter password to unlock folder

   set/p "pass=>"

   if NOT %pass%== PASSWORD_GOES_HERE goto FAIL

   attrib -h -s "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}"

   ren "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}" Private

   echo Folder Unlocked successfully

   goto End

   :FAIL

   echo Invalid password

   goto end

   :MDLOCKER

   md Private

   echo Private created successfully

   goto End

   :End

4. In the above code, replace the key PASSWORD_GOES_HERE with the password you want to use to unlock the folder. For example if you want the password to be 123456, the line should look like:
   

   if NOT %pass%== 123456 goto FAIL

5. Save your new file in the .bat format with the complete file name being locker.bat. To do this, make sure to change the Save as type: to All Files (*.*).

 

 6. In the folder you created back in Step #1, double click the locker.bat file and there will now be a new folder named Private where you can put anything you want.

7. Upon exiting, double click the locker.bat file again. It will prompt you to answer whether you want to lock your folder or not. Press Y and the private folder will disappear.

 

 8. In order to retrieve the Private folder, all you have to do is double click the locker.bat file and enter the password which you set in Step #4 and the folder will appear again for you to access.

 

9. That’s it!

 

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HOW TO USE ANY SIM CARD IN YOUR MODEM EVEN WITHOUT DECODING/UNLOCKING IT

I received so many comments/complaints concerning my previous publication on HOW TO DECODE HUAWEI MODEMS. After some research works I decided to come out with this tutorial which I hope would help solve most of your problems.

STEPS.
1. Insert any SIM in your modem and connect to pc (modem drivers/software should be installed)

2. It will show something like ‘Invalid SIM’ or similar.
3. Ignore it and close the modem software.
4. Now open Nokia PC Suite. If you don't have Nokia PC Suite then download one here and install.
5. Now click on Internet option circled in black in the below figure and click on the Spanner-like icon below



6. Now go to configure and select your data card modem  in the dropdown list and input your operator APN settings as if you are using a Nokia phone.



7. After configuring, connect to the Internet via PC Suite.
You will find that your internet is now connected.



NOTE: If our tutorials work for you, then don't forget to be our Facebook fan.

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HOW TO DISABLE ACCIDENTAL CLICKS WHILE TYPING ON YOUR LAPTOP

Working on a laptop computer with a touchpad becomes annoying sometimes. It is inevitable that you will mistakenly touch the touchpad while typing, causing the mouse to jump or cursor to move and interrupt your typing. Very annoying huh...?

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