We recently went through a few ways to break into a Windows PC without the password, and it turns out it’s just as easy to break into a Mac too. Here’s how to do it and keep yourself protected. More »
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How to Break Into a Mac (And Prevent It from Happening to You) [Passwords]
Posted on November 4, 2010
The Complete Guide to Windows System Restore (It’s Better than You Remember) [Windows]
Posted on February 8, 2010
Most of us remember Windows System Restore as a lame-duck feature from Windows XP; when it seemed we might benefit from using it, it never quite worked how we expected. That’s no longer the case.
Windows System Restore is an awesome system recovery tool, and it’s included with Windows for free. It’s the ideal solution for rolling back bad drivers, fixing when buggy software breaks your PC, or simply rolling you back to a previous point in time. If you’ve still got a bad taste in your mouth from the lackluster XP version of System Restore, it’s time to take a look at it again if you’ve upgraded to Windows 7 or Vista.
System Restore in Windows 7 Is Better than XP
If you’ve ever tried the XP variety of System Restore, the uselessness of it probably left a bad taste in your mouth. Setting a system restore point was often agonizingly slow, and when it came time to actually attempt a system restore, it rarely did what you wanted it to do. But if you’ve upgraded to Vista or Windows 7, you should really give System Restore another chance.
Back in the XP days, system restore simply used a file filter and copied files around, but since Vista, it uses the Shadow Copy features built into Windows—essentially, Windows can create a snapshot of your drive as of a certain point in time, which can then be used later to restore your PC should anything go wrong. The Shadow Copy feature is also used by backup software to take snapshots of files even while they are in use, and it powers the Previous Versions feature built into the Professional and Ultimate version of Windows. Using Shadow Copy instead of simple file copying makes System Restore much more effective and comprehensive—while the XP version could only really roll back from certain Windows changes and generally didn't work that well, System Restore in Vista or Windows 7 can actually roll back to a previous version of an installed application.
System Restore snapshots are automatically created on a periodic basis using a Task Scheduler job, triggered at system startup and at midnight each day. Before you start to think it's a contributing factor to your system boot speeds, the Conditions tab specifies that it won't actually start until the PC has been idle for more than 10 minutes—and if you don't like the schedule, you can tweak the Task Scheduler job to run more (or less) often. When you install (or uninstall) a piece of software, a new System Restore point is also triggered, or snapshots can be created manually if you’re about to make a change and want to be sure that you can roll back.
Create a Manual System Restore Snapshot
If you're going to be making changes to your system, like upgrading drivers or tweaking settings, you should create a snapshot before you do anything, so if it all goes horribly awry, you can roll it back to normal. If you're using Windows 7, just use the System Protection tab in the System Properties window—or you can search for "create restore point" to get there directly. Once you're there, click the Create button, type in a descriptive name for the restore point, and then let it run—it shouldn't take longer than a few seconds. If you're a fan of the step-by-step walk-through, we've written up a quick guide to manually creating a System Restore point over at How-To Geek.
If the manual method is too many steps for you, you can make a shortcut that creates a system restore snapshot in a single step without having to go through any other steps. Regardless of the method you choose, you should make a point of creating system restore snapshots before you start doing any major tweaking on your PC.
Restoring from a System Restore Snapshot
All these snapshots don’t do you much good if you don’t know how to restore your PC using them, and it’s just as easy as creating a snapshot. While you can restore from a snapshot by simply finding the System Restore screen in Control Panel, you’re not going to have a lot of luck actually using the snapshot unless you’ve restarted your PC into Safe Mode. Normally, you can just restart your PC and hit the F8 key really quickly right when Windows is starting up, which will show you the boot menu and allow you to choose to boot into Safe Mode, but if you have problems triggering this, I’ve previously written up a guide to force Windows to boot into Safe Mode using the msconfig utility.
Once you're in Safe Mode, head into System Properties –> System Restore or just search through the Control Panel to pull up the wizard, choose the restore point that you'd like to roll back to, and then choose Next to start the restore process. If you're not sure which one to choose, however, you can select a restore point and click the Scan for Affected Programs button, which will analyze the restore point to figure out what applications will be rolled back if you choose that restore point.
You should note that System Restore isn’t going to roll back your documents, it’s just going to operate on internal operating system files, program files, and system settings. If you had a document on your desktop, it shouldn’t be removed, but if you roll back to before you install an application, the shortcut to that application would probably go away.
If your PC won’t even boot, you should also note that you can access the System Restore features from the Windows installation disc, which can be very helpful when you’ve completely broken your PC.
There’s No Performance Drain From System Restore
One of the most common performance-tweaking myths that you'll find on all the amateur tweaking sites says that you should disable System Restore for maximum performance, but that's just ridiculous. We've already shown you that System Restore only kicks in once a day, and only runs when the system is idle—so the only drain on your resources is a little bit of extra drive space being used, not to mention that snapshots take virtually no time to create.
If you’re really worried about the use of your drive space, you can easily tweak System Restore to use less space in Windows 7—just head into System Properties –> System Protection –> Configure and drag the slider to choose exactly how much space you want to use. For Windows Vista, it's a lot more difficult—you'll need to use a command-line hack to force Windows Vista to use less space.
The much better solution, however, is to simply clear out all restore points but the most frequent one whenever you're in need of some extra drive space using the Disk Cleanup utility. Just run it as administrator by right-clicking on the utility in the start menu and choosing the Run as Administrator option, or you can open it normally and click the "Clean up system files" button—once you've done so, you can choose the More Options tab where you'll find a Clean up button to remove all the old restore points except for the most recent one. This keeps you safe just in case you need to restore, but doesn't keep the older, more unnecessary restore points around.
At this point hopefully you can see the benefit and learn to love how System Restore can fix your PC easily, but if you really insist, you can disable System Restore easily from the System Protection tab.
What about you? Have you used System Restore to fix your PC problems? Share your experiences in the comments.
The How-To Geek deleted his system32drivers folder for fun, and used System Restore to easily get the PC running again. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.
You’re Backing Up Your Data the Wrong Way [Backup]
Posted on November 16, 2009
Time and time again, people tell me that they’ve bought an external hard drive to back up their pictures, music, and documents. Great, right? Sadly, that’s not always the case.
There’s one simple rule about backups that everybody needs to fully understand: Your files should exist in at least Two places, or it's no longer a backup—and your data is at risk. Too often people delete the files from their primary PC, assuming they are backed up.
It’s time to educate people on proper backup strategy, so we’ll run through your options and talk about the pros and cons. These days, you’ve got plenty of choices on the Windows side of things, Mac users have Time Machine, and there’s online backup for anybody.
Backing Up to a Local Source
When it comes to local backup applications, it’s really a matter of preference, since most of them do the job adequately without a lot of fuss. The Backup and Restore application built into Windows 7 or Vista is a perfectly acceptable choice, and will handle most backups with ease. My personal choice is a paid version of SyncBack SE, but there’s plenty of other choices for Windows, and all of them do the job.
The most important thing to remember when backing up your data is that you can’t delete it from your main system once it’s been backed up to an external drive. By doing that, you’ve left yourself with only a single copy of your important files, on an external drive that has just as much chance of dying as your internal PC hard drive. Think it can’t happen to you? One of my external drives died last week.
Backing Up to an Online Source
There’s quite a few online backup services to choose from, and while the great thing about online backup is that you don’t have to deal with external drives, you’re leaving your data in somebody else’s hands, and restoring all of your files can take an extremely long time, since you’ll have to download all of the files again. If you don’t have a ton of personal files, online backup is a great choice, if you don’t mind putting your faith in somebody else to keep your data secure.
Backing Up a Total System Image
Without question, the easiest form of backup to restore from is a complete image of your system. We’ve already covered a list of the best free system restore tools, and Gina walked through how to hot image your PC hard drive with DriveImage XML, but if you really want an easy experience you might want to check out one of the paid tools like Acronis True Image.
These tools are the best way to recover from a total system failure, but they usually aren’t quite as easy to restore a single file from, which is a much more likely scenario. There’s been dozens of times that I’ve needed to restore an older version of a document, and was able to easily grab the previous version from Dropbox or my external drive.
What Should You Back Up?
When you’re backing up your files, there’s no reason to make a backup of every single thing on your hard drive-in fact, it would be a huge waste of space to back up your Windows folder if you have to reinstall the whole system in order to restore the backups again. Here’s a couple of pointers to help you choose what you really need to back up, and what you don’t:
- Your entire Users folder: either at C:UsersUsername for Windows 7 or Vista, or C:Documents and Settings for Windows XP. This folder should contain all of your documents, settings, etc.
- Your Data Folders: If you’ve created other data on your hard drives, you should include those as well.
What you don’t need to back up?
- Your Program Files Folder: There’s simply no reason to back up your installed applications when they all have to be re-installed if you had to restore your machine. It’s a waste of space to do so.
- Your Windows Folder: The only real good reason to back up your Windows folder is just in case you can’t find the same drivers again. On the other hand, there are any number of tools to back up your drivers, and you should do that once in a while instead of backing up the entire Windows folder.
Best Backup Strategy: Combo
Your best bet is to combine a number of different methods into your backup strategy.
- Create a System Image: Use one of the many system restore tools to create a complete image of your PC, which will protect you in case of a catastrophic system failure. You’ll want to back this up to your external drive.
- Use a Backup Tool: Just pick one, any one, and start using it. Back up your data to an external drive, another PC, or anywhere else. Just make sure you don’t delete the data from the primary PC.
- Use an Online Backup for Important Files: Even though you are backing up to an external drive, you might want to start using something like Dropbox or Mozy to back up your most important files.
Just remember, all of your files need to be in at least Two places at once. You don’t want to get Journalspaced.
Do you always keep your data in more than one place? Share your backup strategy in the comments.
The How-To Geek backs up data to his Samba server with rsync’d drives. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.
Top 10 Windows 7 Booster Apps [Lifehacker Top 10]
Posted on October 24, 2009
Windows 7 is a big improvement over Vista, and a pretty convenient OS in general—but it's by no means perfect. These 10 downloads improve Windows 7's looks, functions, and make it easier, safer, and more convenient to upgrade to.
10. Bring back the “classic” Start menu
Windows 7′s Start menu is a powerful thing, offering program and file launching as you type and allowing for smart pinning of whatever you frequently access. If you’re really attached to the Windows 2000/XP-style Start system, though, CSMenu restores a “classic” look to Windows 7 by installing a companion Start menu on your taskbar. Want to eliminate that new-fangled Start menu and use only your classic model? Grab StartKiller and wipe away all signs of progress—er, change. We meant change. (Original post)
9. Logon changer customizes password screens
You can customize a lot of your system’s look in Windows 7, but the login/password screen remains fairly opaque and unchangeable. Tweaks.com offers a Logon Changer for Windows 7 that simply takes a JPG file (256K or less, so be sure to re-size and compress) and applies it to your logon background. If you don’t mind doing a little registry hacking, there’s a manual work-around for logon changing, but the Logon Changer is worth the install/uninstall if you know what you want to keep as your logon screen. (Original post)
8. Create recovery discs for pre-installed Windows 7
If you moved up to Windows 7 by way of a new computer purchase, you may have found that getting a full Windows 7 disc, or even a system recovery disc, was an “option” that cost a good bit of extra cash. If you’d like to ensure you can save your system from common boot-up and system errors in the future, NeoSmart offers its own Windows 7 System Recovery Discs that can repair damaged files, restore System Restore points, and even pull in full backups for restoration. If you upgraded to 7 from a student discount package that only delivered a single .exe file, Download Squad explains how to make a DVD upgrade disc from student discount files. (Original post)
7. Pull up incoming Gmail from the taskbar
If Gmail is your primary inbox, Gmail Notifier Plus not only subtly informs of you of new mail by changing its taskbar icon, but provides a subject line preview of new messages when you hover over its icon. You also get shortcuts to compose a new message, pop open your inbox in your browser, or head to any of your messages individually. Neat stuff, especially if you'd rather have a more firm control over when your inbox can have your attention—just close down Gmail Notifier Plus when it's time to get cranking. (Original post)
6. Winfox makes Firefox work with Jump Lists
Support for Windows 7′s helpful jump lists won’t show up in Firefox until version 3.7. In the meantime, those who want to access their current tabs and most frequently visited sites can do so with Winfox, a helpful little add-on that you pin to your taskbar to access Firefox from. Copy Winfox to your Firefox program directory, install it, and pin the “Winfox” application to your taskbar. Now you can pin favorite pages to your jump list by dragging their tabs down, see the favicons of the sites you’ve got open, and get a read on how many tabs you’re running in the Firefox icon. (Original post)
5. Hulu Desktop Integration adds streaming TV to Windows Media Center
Windows 7′s Media Center was impressive enough for Adam to bust out his Buster Poindexter headline, and the only thing you might say it’s missing is better access to streaming television. Since Media Center just added CBS streaming, the one big hold-out is Hulu—which would deliver streaming shows from the likes of Fox, ABC, and NBC. Hulu Desktop Integration brings Hulu to Media Center with a clever little app. Launch the Hulu app from Media Center, and Media Center shuts down, opens the full-screen Hulu Desktop app, and then switches back to Media Center when you’re done in Hulu. That’s a nice thing, since because it uses the official channel to get at Hulu, the chances of it being locked out by Hulu are slim. (Original post)
4. Add stacks to your desktop
Windows 7's taskbar is getting a lot of notice, and some say it's more useful than Mac OS X's Dock—except it's missing the very neat "Stacks" feature. Missing, that is, until you grab StandaloneStack or 7stacks, which both do a great job of creating blow-up menus of folders and apps from single icons on your taskbar. Add a storage folder or custom collection of shortcuts to your taskbar, and you’ll never have to hunt down that “Computer” link in the Start menu again just to get to the right file. (Original posts: StandaloneStack, 7Stacks)
3. Tweak hard-to-find settings
It’s always a good idea to see what kind of settings you can change from your new OS’ Control Panel, but Microsoft only lets you play with so many check boxes and sliders. Apps like Ultimate Windows Tweaker, along with XdN Tweaker, have been digging deep into the guts of Windows since Vista first arrived (and sometimes before XP showed up), and they let you seriously fine-tune your system. Want only certain Aero 3D effects on your desktop? Need to change Windows 7′s window-snapping behavior? These apps have you covered. The hardest part is knowing when to say when on a settings-changing binge. (Original post)
2. Make Alt+Tab switching more intuitive
The familiar Alt+Tab keyboard shortcut gained a little visual overhaul in Windows 7, but it still offers just basic window switching. VistaSwitcher, a more powerful app and window switcher, improves on it in just the right ways. Besides an intriguingly different look, the app supports keyboard shortcuts that let you minimize or tile windows from your Alt+Tab screen, close down programs or file windows in bulk, and, with a Ctrl+Alt+Tab press, switch only between the open windows of the particular program you’re using, like a browser or image editor. Despite the name, VistaSwitcher works perfectly well on Windows 7. (Original post)
1. Install all your necessary apps at once
The first few times you re-installed an operating system, it probably felt like an adventure, something fun, a test of your tech prowess. At this point, though, you might just want to skip the part where you spend an hour grabbing Firefox, Picasa, an anti-virus app, WinAmp, uTorrent, and other must-have apps from the net. Ninite is your ticket out of redundant installations. Head to the web site, check off the apps you need from a huge range of good, free software, and download the resulting customized installer app. Double-click, hit start, and do something constructive while Ninite installs everything you asked for in the background, with very few, if any, questions or prompts. (Original post)
What app or utility has made Windows 7 feel a bit more like a desktop home on your system? Which apps from previous versions of Windows do you miss most? Share the wealth, and the links, in the comments.
Computer Repair Kit Packs Dozens of Tools in One Portable Package [Downloads]
Posted on February 16, 2009
Windows only: Portable system-fixing bundle Computer Repair Utility Kit puts 57 recovery tools into a single package. That gives you easy access to important system utilities without the fuss of building your own toolkit.
The launcher can be run directly from the folder or copied to a flash drive for access from any system, with a system tray menu for quick access to the included tools—which can be tweaked to add your own favorite portable applications. Most of the included utilities are familiar to Lifehacker readers, with well-known utilities like reader favorites CCleaner, PC Decrapifier, and Process Explorer along with dozens of other utilities that perform tasks ranging from killing spyware to system tweaking—and a copy of Portable Firefox is even included for good measure. If you haven't taken the time to build your own flash drive toolkit, this download might be worth a look to get you started.
Computer Repair Utility Kit is a free download for Windows, though readers should be forewarned that some of the actual download links on the home page purposely take you to ad-ridden, pop-up crazy download sites—getting to the actual download is more than a little annoying.