Tech Junky

There is plenty of software available online as well in the market to help do the trick, but you don’t really need it.

Note: This trick work with Windows 2000, XP and Vista. You’ll also need administrator access to be able to carry out this procedure.

Here’s how you do it:

1. When you log into your system, click on the Start menu and subsequently on the My Computer icon. Right-click on My Computer and select ‘Manage‘ from the pop-up on menu.
2. You’ll notice the Windows Computer Management window pop-up on your screen. The Computer Management tool has a lot of options to offer in terms of System Tools, Storage, other Services and Applications. You can schedule tasks, view events, manage shared folders, run diagnostic tools and more. But in this case, go to the Disk Management icon in the bottom of the left hand side menu.
3. Clicking on this icon will reveal all the drives on your system. They will also reveal the percentage of free space available. To proceed, click on the drive that you want to make invisible and hide from other user accounts.
4. Choose ‘Change Drive Letter and Paths‘ in the pop-up menu. Here you will have to assign the drive which you have to hide from other accounts. Click on ‘Remove‘. While doing this, make sure no that no program is being run from that drive, and click Yes. You will notice now that the drive letter disappears.
5. For a way to access the data on the hidden drive, you will have to assign it a mounting location, an access point. To do this right click on the unassigned partition and choose ‘Change Drive Letter and Paths’ again. Further click on ‘Add and Mount‘ in the following empty NTFS folder. Browse for a suitable folder or create one on some other drive.

Now when all this is done, open My Computer again and you will see that there is a drive missing. The new folder can be made private, by going to the properties of the folder and selecting the necessary sharing and security tab selection.

If you want to share this folder (and along with it the drive) with multiple users, just map the drive into the My Documents folder of each user and they can access it just fine. However, the drive letter will still remain hidden on the My Computer page.

This is a great way to map and shift all the drives to a particular drive, make them private, and have confidence that none of your private data is being compromised. This procedure hardly takes more than a minute to configure and can come in very handy, in the absence of third party tools, to secure data.

To speed up your hard disk, you need to configure a special buffer in the computer’s memory in order to enable it to better deal with interrupts made by the disk.
This tip is only recommended if you have 256MB RAM or higher.

Follow these steps:
1. Click on Start Menu | Run and type ‘SYSEDIT.EXE‘.
2. Expand the system.ini file window and locate a line called ‘[386enh]‘.
3. Press Enter to make a blank line after this one.
4. Type ‘Irq14=4096‘ (without quotes) in the blank line.
Note: This line is CASE sensitive !!
5. Click on the File menu and save it.
6. Close SYSEDIT and reboot your computer.
7. That’s it. Done.

You’ll notice speed improvement after you restart your machine. The most speed improvement is visible with IDE drives, however there are reports that this tweak also works well with SCSI disks. In any case, it won’t harm your system, so why not try it yourself and do let me know what you experience.

Studio is Dell’s latest offering. This new range of notebooks stands in between the Inspiron series (low end) and the XPS series (high end), thus becoming a mid-ranged product. It’s design cues like the tapered lines, hinge design, slot-loading optical drive and a rainbow seven colour palette have been somewhere inpired by it’s latter. Bringing more to it’s cool body, Dell has even added an Apple-flavored dock to the Windows Vista residing in the notebook. The pricing for the 15-inch model starts at $799. You can get LED backlighting, a Blu-ray drive or even upgrade to the 17-incher but that will obviously bump up the price.

Windows XP has a feature that a lot of older users of Windows won’t be familiar with - Hibernation. For those who have no information regarding hibernation, it’s a special form of shutdown in which the current state of Windows is saved to your hard drive, and your machine is completely turned off. When you again turn on your computer, it resumes from hibernation and reads the saved state data and restores the system to that same state. The applications and windows that were opened at the time of Hibernation will once again be on your screen.

The hibernate feature is not enabled by default. You can enable it by going to Control Panel > Power Options. In the Power Options Properties dialogue box, select the hibernate tab and then check the ‘Enable hibernation‘ box.

It’s a good feature that works well in theory, but in reality, most people don’t really use it as they prefer to shut down their computers completely.

Another thing is that even if you don’t use the hibernate feature, you still get that huge file. This is because
Window XP still takes all the contents of the RAM and dumps it onto the hard drive in a file named hiberfil.sys.

This implies that your hiberfil.sys depends on the amount of RAM you have. Windows won’t allow you to delete the file while your PC is running.

To delete it, just follow these steps:
* Right click on the desktop and select ‘Properties’.
* Select the ‘Screensaver’ tab and click on the ‘Power’ button.
* In the “Power Options Properties” dialogue box, select the ‘Hibernate’ tab. Here, uncheck the “Enable Hibernation” box and click OK to exit.

The next time you restart the PC, the file will be deleted.

Apple is once again in the spotlight, and it’s all because of the recently revealed iPhone 3G. The latest version has the 3G capability and some more features that the original iPhone lacked.

1. Price Factor: The first-generation iPhone was for sure innovative. It also was an expensive gadget. The initial 8GB and 16GB models sold off for $599 and $699 respectively. The prices dropped as time passed but still many didn’t buy it. Now with the latest iPhone on it’s way, you spend significantly less money to get the device. The 8GB version will now sell for $199 and the 16GB will sell for $299. The price drop will put Apple’s smartphone into the reach of many more consumers.

2. 3G Capability: If you use your mobile phone for Web activities, then 3G is certainly an aid for you. The first-generation iPhone didn’t support the 3G connectivity but with the latest version coming, 3G is at your footsteps. According to Apple, 3G will enable you to load Web pages up to 2.8 times faster. That’s surely a big help for mobile web users.

3. Better International Support: From a user-removable SIM card to a multilingual keyboard that can be changed, new features in this model make it much more viable for international use. Wether you want to swap out your SIM card, or need to access the Web while you are abroad, this model proves to be better than the original.

The iPhone 3G eliminates some of the features and capabilities that were missing from Apple’s initial cell phone. But everyone will not want or need to buy an iPhone 3G as Apple will be realeasing an iPhone 2.0 software upgrade, which will be free to all first-generation iPhone users.