M.A.S. Electronics' Blog

Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) remains one of the most compelling targets for hackers and script kiddies. By default, these Web servers must allow public access to their resources. If I had to guess, I’d say these servers spend more of their time fending off attacks than actually serving up Web pages. Unless your organization’s Web site has been the victim of defacement or injection of some hostile code, a hacker’s attempt to break into your Web server can often…

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Add Copy To and Move To Windows Explorer This Microsoft Windows Registry edit put add Copy To and Move To on the right-click context menu of Windows Explorer. Adding Copy To and Move To functionality to the Windows Explorer right-click menu starts with the finding the key in the Windows Registry file. (Be sure to back up the Registry file before you begin.) 1. Start Regedit by navigating Start | Run and typing regedit in the dialog box. 2. Navigate…

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The original IBM PC came with any CPU you wanted, so long as it was an Intel 8088. Today, just as you can get a car in just about any color you want, it seems like there’s an almost endless array of CPU options. Intel and AMD are competing so hard and introducing new product so fast that it’s next to impossible to keep up. Consider some of your options from Intel alone. Just on the desktop, from the Intel…

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The Administrator account exists on all computers running Windows XP Professional and Home. This gives potential hackers, half the information they need to access your computer—all they have to do is guess your password. You can make it more difficult for unauthorized persons to get into your system by renaming the Administrator account. Follow these steps for a Windows XP Pro machine: Go to Control Panel and open Administrative Tools. Double-click the Local Security Policy. When the Local Security Settings…

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Have you every blue screened your computer and a cryptic stop code was delivered. What do you do now? Well, next time that happens, use Windbg to find out which application or driver is the culprit. You can download Windbg from Microsoft’s web site. Simply set the debugger symbol path as follows, substituting your downstream store path for DownstreamStore. SRV*DownstreamStore*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download /symbols For example, to download symbols to c:\websymbols, you would add the following to your symbol path: SRV*c:\websymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/ download/symbols and…

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Years ago, it was possible to figure out how faster processor was going to be by just looking at its clock speed. Granted, there were a couple of other factors that determine the processor’s speed, such as wait state. For the most part though, you could be reasonably sure that a PC with an 8 MHz processor was going to run faster than a comparable PC with a 4.77 MHz processor. As time went on though, a processor’s clock speed…

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If you’re working with multiple Windows XP disk drives, you can easily create a pie chart to show the amount of free and used space on each drive—both removable and floppy. Read this tip to learn how to utilize free drive space. You can obtain detailed information about the amount of available and used space on your Windows XP disk by right-clicking any drive icon in My Computer and selecting Properties. You also get a nice pie chart display that…

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Do you occasionally find yourself needing more room on the taskbar in order to view your applications running on Windows XP? While the Group Similar Taskbar Buttons option allows you to consolidate the amount of space that applications use on the taskbar, you still might need more space. For instance, the clock and the Quick Launch toolbar are extremely useful features, but you may want to temporarily disable them to free up some room on the taskbar. Here’s how: Right-click…

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You may already know how to use command-line options with Windows Explorer (Explorer.exe) to specify the folder in which Explorer starts, have it focus on a particular folder or file, and other options. But if you simply want to know how to make Explorer open a specific folder or volume in Windows each time, there’s an easy method. For example, assume you keep most of your documents on drive D: for reasons of performance or disk space, and you want…

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Do you often use special characters in your word processing documents? For example, suppose that you frequently use euro currency figures and use the euro sign. If so, chances are good that each time you need to use the euro sign, you access Character Map from the Start | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools | Character Map menu, select your font, and scroll through the table to locate the euro sign. Then, you double-click the character to copy…

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