1. "The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded" [SOLVED]

    This problem usually happens when you do a partial OS recovery on your computer or did not configure Windows properly during first boot, or as in the case when temporary user profile is disallowed in group policy.

    If you have another Administrator account that you can log into, go here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947215 and follow the instructions.

    If you have a fresh install or fresh recovery of Windows 7 or Vista, try these steps.
    1. Restart your computer and press F8 continuously until you reach the Advanced Boot Options. If you see the Windows boot logo instead, repeat this step.
    2. Choose "Safe mode with Command Prompt" and press enter, and try to login.
    3. If you can login, a command prompt should appear, type

    net user administrator password /active:yes

    4. You should see "The command completed successfully", an administrator account with password "password" is created. Reboot your computer by typing

    shutdown -r -t 0

    5. After the reboot, login using administrator account, then try fixing your account using Method 1 from instructions here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947215

    When you do a partial recovery (reverting the OS to factory state while preserving user data), the recovery tend leave some bits of old data and may result the inconsistency in user profile.

    When I tried to do a partial recovery using the OEM recovery manager, I faced this problem and tried to rectify the problem by doing the regedit method, but I did not have the .BAK or .BK entries. Thought about dumping that corrupted account and use the newly created account, but the new account is pretty broken anyway because that account is a what Windows define as default account and I cannot do any changes to it. So in the end I backed up everything to a second partition and did a full recovery, after that no more problem.
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  2. Document Image Writer workaround for Windows 7

    If you use Windows 7, you will find yourself frustrated with the lack of option to print documents to TIFF or other image formats using the ol' Document Image Writer. Do not despair my friend. Instead of 'printing' the document, you can 'Fax' the document instead.

    To 'fax' a document to image, just select the Fax option at the printer option at the Print dialog.

    Then 'fax' the document. Ignore all the Fax setup and press cancel all the way. Then you will be presented a New Fax window here.

    Drag and drop the Attachment, and the TIFF file is yours.

    NOTE: if you are 'faxing' a multi page document, it will produce a TIFF file with all the pages inside, view the pages with 'Windows Photo Viewer'
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  3. Grooveshark Anywhere account for free

    I recently sent a support ticket to Grooveshark and got a reply a day after. (however i only noticed the email reply about 2 weeks later)

    And guess what, I got upgraded to a Grooveshark Anywhere account for nothing.

    The support ticket I sent was about the surveys that I have been taking on Grooveshark, as they said that surveys will be released everyday and you can gain points by completing the survey, but at that time I wasn't able to see any surveys available for me to answer.

    And the reply from Grooveshark was that they were in the process of rolling out a new survey system, and I was given a month of Anywhere upgrade to 'compensate for the trouble'.

    Well the heck I tried to sign into my account on my phone and it works.

    Actually I do not really mind about the surveys and just sent a support ticket to them to just inform them about the problem.

    Grooveshark Anywhere costs 9 dollars/month.

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  4. Data Recovery for free

    You lost that whole memory card of images and videos due to unforeseen accidental actions, or rather you'd reformatted a storage media, only then you realized it's the wrong one being formatted.

    No point trying to search recovery software online, because the first 2000 results you get are either shareware or payware. Try searching for opensource alternatives, and I have one pretty nifty, functional and free data recovery software.



    Photorec/Testdisk
    This one works flawlessly in my case, when I accidentally deleted some files on my phone's MicroSD card. It works on a wide range of file systems such as FAT, NTFS, the linux EXT2/3 and HFS, and recovers over 390 known file formats, and even works on DVD/CD and floppy media! It does it's job, without any quirks, and recovered my files all in one piece. You can even choose the specific type of file to recover, so you wouldn't need to sift through tons of cache or temp files and speed up recovery. The performance was quite reasonable, unlike other recovery software, Photorec/Testdisk recovers as soon as it starts reading the first block of the storage media and dumps all uncorrupted files into a specified folder, or if you prefer you can also choose to force it do a partial recovery on corrupted files. It took about 5 minutes to recover a 2Gbytes memory card. Testdisk, which comes with the package, is designed to recover lost partitions such as the case when you removed additional partitions on a harddrive during OS installation. Photorec/Testdisk does not need installation or any registration, just unzip and run, and runs on Windows, Linux and Mac.


    FreeUndelete
    FreeUndelete from officerecovery is a commercial software that does data recovery. It can recover files from NTFS and FAT file systems, and from HDD and flash media. It does not recover partitions though. It offers basic file recovery and has a easy to use GUI that is just point and recover. On recovery, it needs to scan the whole drive first only then you can choose what you want to recover. I have not tested this software, but I suppose it will work. The personal version is free. You have to run a setup prior to using it. Since it is not OpenSource, don't expect free updates and bug fixes or support.
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  5. Speed up your Windows 7

    It is not recommended to do DIY stunts like this on your Windows 7, because Windows 7's services depend on each other. Windows 7 is a lot lot lot more chaotic and messy than your plain ol' Windows XP and turning off a few services can mean your whole computer cease to function completely. So, please refrain from doing the customizations yourself, and if you still really want to make your win 7 faster, start using Add or Remove Programs and uninstall all unnecessary bloat, or even better, don't install things you don't need.


    You have now yourself a really non-responsive and slow-than-usual computer and you just don't know what the heck is causing it or don't really know how to deal with it. There are lots of ways to get your computer back to the younger days. Here I show you my method.

    My method assumes that you use your computer just for web-browsing and running regular Windows applications.

    You know how breezy your Windows feels when you boot into safe mode? However safe mode gives you a really stripped down experience, as essential drivers and services are disabled in safe mode. However, you still can have your regular Windows but with the breezy safe mode experience.

    Firstly, boot into safe mode by pressing F8 constantly on boot up, then select 'Boot Windows with networking'. After the desktop loaded, run 'msconfig.exe', and go the services tab, there you will find a list of services, then click 'disable all services'. Sort the services by clicking the 'status' title, then tick all the services that have it's status 'running' (these are the networking services).

    Then look for these services and enable them (put a tick beside the service):
    Audio
    Windows Audio
    Remote Prodecure Call (RPC)
    Windows Audio Endpoint Builder
    Multimedia Class Scheduler
    Aero Interface
    Desktop Windows Manager Session Manager
    Themes
    Performance
    Superfetch
    Turboboost (if you are using a Core series processor)
    Printing (enable this only if you do printing)
    Printer spooler

    Then, click on the Startup tab and click 'Disable all'

    After all that done, just click apply and restart your computer.

    After: Less processes and less memory usage = a more happy computer

    In the event your applications stopped functioning properly after the tweak, which is quite rare, you can just revert the changes you made by going back to msconfig.exe, and select 'Normal startup' at the startup selection.
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  6. "20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web" look-alike

    Having seen that great HTML5 demo made by Google Team, I decided to emulate their idea by utilizing more or less the same methods used by them which is to implement interactive web content using open standards.

    So here you have it, a look-alike of the Google's book which I call it Brownbook.

    It consists of Javascript for the page turning animations and the transition of text, while CSS is used to anchor and position all the web elements, and HTML serves as the content structure.

    While it does not look exactly fancy and much more interactive than the Google's one, but hey it can be done and it's possible to make one of those books yourself. I did not manage to include the hardcover, because I'm very inexperienced in JS.

    The javascripts credits to Hakim El Hattab, one of the developers at F-i.com for the Google's book, who gave quite an insight to how the book is made and provided snippets of the codes.

    http://smartypants.dlinkddns.com:8888 Brownbook




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  7. Managing Old Computer(s)

    - a typical day at file management (fail)

    Is quite a headache. Being a computer user for so long, I've never done backup or file management myself ever, mainly because the files and programs I use are usually redundant and does not have any importance at all, such as games and miscellaneous schoolworks., and when I do not need them, the files will just be deleted without much second thought, but they never got deleted anyway because the harrdrive failed and did it for me (a few times).

    Now, as file size of the programs I use grew substantially, and of course the collection of music, photos and videos are becoming larger, it's a pretty messy job to sort them out one by one, because I never had the habit of saving files I need in a systematic manner and for example unrar files wherever they are, now both the computers I'm using are in a state of chaos in terms of file management. Now only I realize, I'm paying the price of inefficiency for the collective laziness. The situation is much worse at my older Asus laptop, and now I'm painstakingly sorting files and deleting unnecessary ones. The process is slow, much due to the dilemma of 'to save or not to save'. Like some of the legacy exe files I used to use, I cannot decide whether to get rid of them or save them for archive. Very frustrating.

    But to think of it, if you still insist on using your old computer but is lazy to deal with the mess, why not use the ultimate method of getting an image or snapshot of the harrdrive, by swapping the whole old harddrive and store them, and replacing them with a new harrdrive.
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