DIY PC Tower Case Using LED Christmas Lights & USB Cable

Lighting up the internals of your PC may be a bit geeky but it doesn't have to be expensive. Taking advantage of post-Christmas decoration sales, you can light up your PC tower for under five bucks. After returning a gift to Target today, I checked out the Christmas section to see what they had left. Turns out they have a TON of left over battery powered LED strands and are selling them for only $3.50 each! I grabbed a blue and multi-colored strand and headed home to warm up my new soldering iron. I've been wanting to light up my tower for awhile now but figured it would be too expensive, but this really worked well. After cutting the LEDs off the battery pack and chopping a USB power cable in half; I soldered the two wires on the LEDs to the black and red wires of the USB. After testing it with a USB AC adapter (to not fry my PC), I strung them inside my tower, put the USB cable through an extra slot in the back and plugged them in. My case is now glowing blue after spending only a few bucks and 30 minutes of my time.

Sync Your Passwords with Keepass & Dropbox

Everyone has a lot of password and you most likely, like me, can't remember them all all the time. There is a great piece of software out there called Keepass that lets you keep all your passwords locked up in a digital "password safe" encrypted and all. Keepass is simple to use and works really well. Too well in fact, since you will most likely forget all your passwords once you start using it! Having a local copy is the way to start off, but when you have multiple computers you will most likely want your Keepass database to move along with you. This is where Dropbox comes in. If you're tech savy you most likely already have a Dropbox account. The way that Keepass and Dropbox unite is to allow your password database to sync between all machines as you update it. Before you start anything, make sure you have Keepass and Dropbox installed on all computers (and mobile devices) you want your database to sync to. Then just drop your Keepass database file into a folder on your Dropbox account and make sure all devices are set to sync that file. Once the database is there, just point Keepass to the new, Dropbox location of the database file and any changes you make will not be made to all machines.

Get Dropbox Here: Dropbox.com
Get Keepass Here: Keepass.info

Regaining Unusable Space On USB Drives

After playing around with a few USB-Bootable operating systems I found that some of my once 2GB flash drives were down tremendously in size. For instance I popped in a USB drive and was shocked to see it only had 250MB of space. Not just usableable space but 250MB TOTAL space. After reformatting a few times I checked Disk Manager only to find the space was still there, just "Unallocated". There was no easy way to expand the usable space or combine the two. So I did some Googling and found something that actually works: BootIt. It's meant to create a bootable USB drive but works just as well for regaining the space that was missing. Here's how to get it and how to make it work for you.

1. Download BootIt.exe from http://tinyurl.com/bootitexe
2. Plug in the USB drive that is having the issue
3. Unzip the file and launch the BootIt.exe file.
(If you are using Vista or Windows 7 make sure to run it as administrator)
4. When BootIt loads, select your USB drive under Devices
5. Make sure to select Non-Active under the Partition option
6. Press the Format button
7. When the formatting is complete, remove your USB drive and reinsert it into the PC
8. You will be asked to reformat the drive again, select Yes and your USB drive should now be back to full capacity

Microsoft Exchange 2010 & Mobile Device Control

Being new to working with Microsoft Exchange 2010 I was surprised to see how much power it has over mobile devices that are connected to an Exchange server. While doing some work for an upcoming audit I found that not only can you control WIFI, Bluetooth and even camera settings on connected phones, but completely wipe the phones as well. Now when finding this out of course it had to be tested, and thankfully my boss offered up his iPhone to be the "test device". It was more just to see if it actually worked then anything and oh did it do its job.... too well. Just by clicking the "Wipe Drive" option the phone suddenly powered off and rebooted. It was stuck on the Apple logo for about half and hour and when it came back it was if he just bought the phone. We were both shocked since we just assumed it would wipe out any emails or contacts that were associated with the company but no, EVERYTHING was gone. All his apps, all his contacts... everything.

This small but powerful feature is phone to test out but gets very scary if you think about it. Someone could very easily erase an unsuspecting users enter personal phone by accident, or even on purpose if they really wanted to. It does come in handy when a phone is lost, stolen or someone is fired without getting a chance to clear out any settings. But when it comes to a setting such as a college campus where thousands of students can be connected to the Exchange database makes it very scary. Being that I used to work for a college IT department the idea that someone has the power to wipe a students phone, who really has no idea how they are connecting to the network, makes me nervous. I'm surprised we haven't seen stories about more accidental wipes happening but I'm sure the time will come when something goes kind of screwy and hundreds of phones get wiped.

Fixing the Active Desktop Recovery Error

If you live/work in an area where the power just isn't too great, possibly gets knocked out by wind say 7 times in one day or even just every now and then, you probably have seen this error. The dreaded "Active Recovery Desktop" white background with a button that SAYS it will restore your Desktop back to normal.... but never works. This can be annoying as most people think there is something terribly wrong with their machine and they've lost everything. Turns out the background just goes away and you get the wonderful white screen with a big exclamation point on it. It's an easy fix, as long as you are comfortable editing the registry. And if you're still reading this I'm pretty sure you are. So here's the fix:

1) Open up the registry by running regedit from the run box

2) Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Desktop\SafeMode\Components

3) Change the value of the HTMLDesktopVersion from whatever it is currently set to to 0

4) Right click the Desktop and click Refresh

5) Your wallpaper and icons should now be back to normal

Spring Cleaning for Your Noisy/Slow PC

Recently I've been noticing one of the workstations in my house has been running very slowly and actually pretty loud as well. By "loud" I mean noisy in the sense that the fan is constantly running. Now a quick smack to the side of the case sometimes stops the noise... but it always comes back. So I've resorted to finally cleaning the thing up. First thing to do is blow out all the dust and trust me, no matter how clean your house is your computer WILL have dust in it. It's very easy to clean, just open up the case (most are easy to open these days but if you have an older computer you may run into some issues) and grab a can of compressed air. Just be careful that you don't blow any cables or random pieces out of place, maybe take a picture of the inside just in case something does get loose.

Next is actually cleaning off the software installed on the PC. This can be done through Windows built in Remove/Uninstall programs utility or by a third party. One that I've found usual recently is CCleaner. I've read about it in the past and finally decided to try it out. I found it to be extremely useful and user friendly. After launching the software you can clean out missing Registry files (be careful with this one though), clean out old internet files and also uninstall software right from CCleaner. The last is the best in my opinion as some programs not showing up in the Windows uninstaller appear in CCleaner. Not sure why but that makes it ten times better. Another piece of software I used to quiet the loud machine is Speedfan. It runs in the background and tries to keep your fans running at optimal speed. It does so by monitoring the temperature of your CPU and adjusting the fans based upon the current temperature. Last but not least is a big one. Run a malware scanner like Malwarebytes or HitManPro. Once again, be careful with what you remove but doing so will clean out the last bit of junk that could be slowing your computer down and making it noisy.

So what other options are out there to speed/clean up your PC? Please don't say calling those numbers that you hear on commercials... it makes no sense to have someone "clean up your PC" for some crazy amount of money when you can do it all for free! It just takes a little bit a work and a lot of patience.