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You might often want to send files to your friends, or anybody or host a file, and people usually resort to online storage service such as Windows Live SkyDrive, or Mediafire and the such. But those services do not give you full control on how the files are served and accessing those sites are usually slow and clunky or require registration.

This post will guide you step by step on how to set up a ftp server on your computer so you can access it anywhere.

Step 1.
Grab yourself Filezilla FTP server and install it. After installing it, you will be presented with a login prompt. This is the login prompt for the server control interface.

Just leave the password blank and press 'OK'. Then you will be presented with the server control interface.

Now you will have to setup the server for use. Of course you have to start adding user first. Click the icon with one user at the top bar.


At the user account control dialog, go to the 'Shared Folder' page.

Then click on 'Add' under 'Users'


Then an 'add user account' dialog appears. Here you can enter your desired username. You can just leave the group as none.



Tip: Use the username 'anonymous' if you want to make the server accessible without a password.

You can add more users later if you want by repeating the steps.

Press OK when you're finished.

Then now you have to assign the folder accessible by that user. You can do that by clicking 'add' under the 'shared folder'.


A 'Browser folder' dialog appears. Here you can specify the folder that is accessible by the user.

For example, you can choose to share 'My Music' folder. Press 'OK' when you are done.
You can choose to share multiple folders for that user by clicking 'add' and choosing another folder.

After adding the folder for that user, you can specify actions allowed to be done on the folder by the user. The tick boxes beside the 'shared folders' allow you to control what the user can do to the folder.

Description of the tickboxes.
Files
Read - allow user to see the folder
Write - allow user to put files into the folder
Delete - allow user to delete files in the folder

Directories
Create - allow user to create folders inside the folder
Delete - allow user to delete folder inside the folder
List - allow user to list folders contained inside the folder
+ Subdirs - apply the rules to the folders inside the folder.

Tip: You can set different rules and permissions for different folders by clicking on the folder and ticking the desired boxes. You can also set shared folders and their properties for different users by selecting the user from the 'Users'

After you're done, it's time to set a password for the user.

You can do that by first, clicking the 'General' page.

Under the 'account settings', tick the 'Password' box and make the password field active. After ticking, type in your desired password and remember. The other settings can be left as it is.

Tip: If you have more than one user, select the user from the 'Users' to view and change settings for the specific user.

When everything is done, just press OK.


You FTP server is now configured and ready to be used. To test out your server, simply go to 'My Computer' and type "ftp://localhost" at the address bar.


And then just press enter and a login prompt appears. Just supply it with the username and password you set earlier.

After logging on you should see the contents of the folder you shared for that user.

Part 2.
Your ftp server is now only accessible on the local network, that is only the computers connected to the local network can see and access the ftp server. In order to make the server accessible outside the local network, just follow the steps below.

Tip: If the computer is directly connected to the internet, you can skip these steps. How can I tell if my computer is directly connected to the internet?

We now will setup port forwarding for your router. Firstly, go to the router configuration page of your router, which are usually http://192.168.1.1, http://192.168.0.1, http://192.168.1.2 or http://10.0.0.1. Just click on one of the addresses and if one of it responds then use that is the router configuration address.

At the router configuration login, just supply it with the username and password. If you don't know them, just use the default credentials by referring it here.
[If you happen to be a Malaysian streamyx user, and happen to be using a TM supplied router, the username is either "tmadmin", or "tmuser", with password "tmadmin" or "tmuser"]



 You should look for something called 'NAT' or 'Port Forwarding' or 'Virual Servers' For my router, it is 'Virutal Servers' located under the 'Advanced Setup'.


At the virtual servers config page, click on 'Add'

Then you should see something like this.


Click on the 'Custom Service' radio button and give the forwarded port a name. The 'Server IP Address' is the address of your computer locally, just put in '192.168.1.254' as this address will be configured as a static address for your computer.

At the Dynamic DNS config page, select your DDNS provider as 'dyndns,org', or 'dlinkddns.com'. They are the same for the two. Enter the URL you created earlier to the hostname field (without www and http:// prefix), and supply it with the credentials you used for the account you created at dlinkddns.com.

To access your ftp server from the outside, just type in 'ftp://[YOUR URL HERE].dlinkddns.com' into a browser's address bar or the address bar of 'My Computer'.

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.

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'

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.

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.

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.