M.A.S. Electronics' Blog

You can change the icon used for a Windows 2000 Professional shortcut by right-clicking the shortcut, choosing Properties, and then clicking Change Icon. You can browse for the file or specify the path to the file containing the icon (.ico, .dll, or .exe files). Desktop objects like My Computer behave differently, however. You can change the icons for these objects through the Display Properties sheet. To do so, follow these steps: Right-click the desktop and choose Properties. Click the Effects…

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Joining Macs to Windows networks: Takeaway: The first step in optimizing Mac use is ensuring Apple systems can share resources with Windows systems. In addition to ensuring Mac users can access files and printers on Windows systems, technology professionals can configure Windows systems to access files and printers on Macs. In the past, Windows administrators often viewed Apple computers as eccentric systems demanded by a few quirky graphic artists. Often, Apple computers were deployed and quickly forgotten by admins, who…

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Windows Explorer and My Computer display the same font that Windows XP uses for icon titles on your desktop: Tahoma, 8 point. If you want to change the font or font size used in Windows Explorer, follow these steps: Access the Display Properties dialog box by right-clicking the desktop and selecting the Properties command. Select the Appearance tab and click the Advanced button. Select Icon from the Item drop-down list. Use the Font drop-down arrow to select a font from…

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Windows XP comes with another text editor besides Notepad — it’s called the MS-DOS Editor, and it’s commonly referred to simply as Edit. It has features similar to Notepad, as well as additional features such as the ability to work with multiple text files and change the background and text colors. Since Edit is a DOS-based application, you can easily configure it to work just like a Windows application. Here’s how: 1. Use Windows Explorer to locate the Edit.com file…

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Troubleshooting can be difficult if you don’t have the right tools. Luckily Microsoft provided some very useful command prompt tools in Windows  Server to help you troubleshoot network problems. Arp — Displays the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) cache, and adds and removes MAC addresses from the cache. Hostname — Displays the hostname of the local computer. Ipconfig — Displays the TCP/IP configuration, renews the DHCP lease, purges the DNS cache, etc. Nbtstat — Displays the statistics and connections of NetBIOS…

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The Microsoft Management Console (MMC) application provides you with an interface shell into which you can insert various tools called snap-ins to create custom consoles. While custom consoles can come in handy for performing any number of tasks, Windows XP’s MMC 2.0 convoluted console creation process often seems counter intuitive. Fortunately, Microsoft has made the new MMC interface developed for Windows Vista available for Windows XP. Version 3.0 of the MMC application provides more functionality for snap-ins than prior versions…

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Contrary to what you may have heard from the RIAA, burning a CD-R or CD-RW is not an activity restricted only to music pirates. In many business situations, the burned CD is the best way to distribute information to a target audience. For communications involving PowerPoint presentations, HTML, PDF forms, Flash animations, or a number of other applications, the portable and durable CD has become a common delivery method. The compact disk drive auto play feature, common to most operating…

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Disabling Unneeded Services A service is a software application that runs continuously in the background while your computer is on. The Windows operating system has numerous services that run in the background that provide basic functions to the system. Network connectivity, visual support, and external device connectivity such as printer services are all examples of the types of services that the windows services provide. Each of these services that are running in the background take up system resources such as…

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Home DSL routers aren’t secure from specialized CSRF attacks. Once the DSL router is owned, attackers can have their way with the internal network. Read on to learn about CSRF and what you can do to prevent CSRF attacks. A well-known attack that’s normally reserved for Web sites has found new life in subverting consumer networking devices. Nathan Hamiel, founder of Hexagon Security Group, stumbled onto a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF, pronounced sea surf) exploit that works on most consumer-grade…

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Windows XP’s compressed (zipped) folders work so much like folders that it is easy to forget that they are actually based on ZIP files. You may even remove files from a compressed folder by opening the folder and then copying and pasting the files to another folder. However, you may find it easier to use the compressed folders extraction wizard. Here’s how: 1. Right-click the compressed folder and select Extract All. 2. When you see the Welcome page of the…

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