IT Knowledgebase Articles

How can I display hidden (phantom) drivers in Windows 2000/XP/2003? There are times when you’ll need to manually remove old, obsolete, hidden (phantom) drivers from your system. Looking in Device Manager does not show all the installed drivers, just the ones that are configurable by the GUI. (Before) (After) To force your system to display…

USB removable disks (also known as flash drives or “Disk on Key” and other variations) are quickly becoming an integral part of our electronic life, and now nearly everybody owns one device or another, in forms of small disks, external hard drives that come enclosed in cases, card readers, cameras, mobile phones, portable media players…

USB removable disks (also known as flash drives or “Disk on Key” and other variations) are quickly becoming an integral part of our electronic life, and now nearly everybody owns one device or another, in forms of small disks, external hard drives that come enclosed in cases, card readers, cameras, mobile phones, portable media players…

Can I stop Windows XP from bugging me about creating an MSN Passport? Windows XP can drive you nuts with the idiotic Passport reminder balloon. You can do what it wants you to do – register with MSN, or, if you don’t want to, you can easily disable it: Start Registry Editor (Regedit.exe). Locate the…

Can I disable the Windows Mail splash screen in Windows Vista? Windows Mail is the Windows Vista equivalent of Outlook Express. Although it’s got a fast search feature, good junk mail filtering and it’s got Microsoft Help and Support Newsgroups installed by default, loading it seems to be a bit slow because of the lame…

Daniel Petri shows you how to block the use of USB drives on client machines by using Group Policy Objects (GPO).

Disable USB disk drives without having to also disable USB devices with this simple trick from Daniel Petri.

Windows Vista has the built-in ability to automatically reduce the potential of security breaches in the system. It does that by automatically enabling a feature called User Account Control (or UAC for short). The UAC forces users that are part of the local administrators group to run like they were regular users with no administrative…

How can I disable the Welcome Screen in Windows XP Pro? To turn the Welcome Screen on or off: You must have a computer administrator account on a computer that is a member of a workgroup or is a stand-alone computer to turn on or turn off the Use the Welcome screen feature. Logging on…

Do I need the Guest account in Windows XP? Can I disable it? Yes you can disable the guest account, but you shouldn’t. You need it. The Guest account in Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional (when not joined on a domain) serves several special functions that relate to security and network shares….