'CON' Folder

'CON' Folder

Myth - "Not being able to name a file or folder 'CON' is a bug or a secret"

Reality - "Several special file names are reserved by the system and cannot be used for files or folders: CON, AUX, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, PRN, NUL. This goes back to DOS 1.0 which didn't support subdirectories, lowercase, or filenames longer than 8.3. 'CON' is a reserved word from the old DOS days, simply meaning 'console'. If you wanted to create a new text file in DOS you could type 'copy con newfile.txt' meaning copy from the console to newfile.txt. This would let you type some lines and when you ended the file you would have a file called newfile.txt containing whatever you wrote in the console. Since they are still relied on with things like batch files (redirect to >NUL) they are still reserved today."

How to: change the start button text on Windows XP

How to: change the start button text on Windows XP

Tired of the boring old “start” button at the bottom left corner of your Windows XP’s monitor? Want something new to replace iit? Well here’s how to change it.

With a few modifications in the Windows Registry, you can replace the “start” text with anything you like. Great for achieving a new, custom look for your Windows XP. So let’s get started.

Warning: this tutorial is more for advanced users, and I'm not
responsible if your system gets messed up. Only attempt the following
at your own risk.

Step 1: Modify explorer.exe

If the warning didn’t scare you enough, then the title of this step probably did. Yes, we are going to change Explorer, the backbone of your Windows XP, but don’t worry. Everything should be safe as long as you follow the steps closely.

As explorer is a binary file, we need a special tool to modify it. One of the best ones for this purpose is Resource Hacker. There are of course others that will get the trick done, but we will be using RH this tutorial so I recommend installing it to avoid making mistakes. Install it and let’s continue.

As always before changing anything. you want to back up. So open My Computer and navigate to and look for explorer. Copy paste it to a safe location on your hard drive.

Now that you’ve backed it up, fire up Resource Hacker and find the same explorer.exe.

When you’ve found and opened explorer in RH, navigate to String Table -> 37 -> 1033. The “start” value is on line 4, after the 578. Change the text “start” to anything you want, making sure you keep the quotes. In this example. I changed the text to secrets-windows.blogspot.com.

Press the Compile Script button to make Resource Hacker put together the code. Now click File and Save the script as explorer.exe. into C: \WINDOWS\inf or another C: \WINDOWS subfolder.

Note: make sure you choose Save AS, NOT just save!!

And that’s all for the first step! Now let’s move onto the second one -modifying the registry.

Step 2: changing the registry.

By now, you have a modified explorer sitting in the /inf/ subfolder, so we need to tell Windows to use that one, instead of the original one still resting untouched.

To do this, we need to make just one simple registry modification. To open up the registry, press start (something else soon ) -> run and type regedit.

In the registry editor window that opens, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Windows NT\ CurrentVersion\ Winlogon and look for the registry entry “shell”. Click it.

Change the explorer.exe to inf/explorer.exe or whereever you saved the modified explorer.

And believe it or not, you’re done! All you have to do now is reboot or log out to see the changes. Enjoy your new custom Windows XP start button!

How to: visit password-protected websites without registering

How to: visit password-protected websites without registering



We all know how annoying it is when we search Google for something and the result we are looking for leads to a password protected forum or site. You have to register to view content, but who likes doing that?

Fortunately there is a solution to save your time and email account from spam - pretending to be Googlebot. For those of you that don’t know, Googlebot is Google’s “spider” that crawls sites and indexes them for Google’s search results. More about Googlebot. The owner of a password protected site also wants their site to be on Google, so they make a separate account on their site for Googlebot.

We can use this small security hole and visit a website pretending to be Googlebot. This way you are automatically logged into the site or forum and don’t need to enter any password or login info. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Here’s how:

Step 1. If you’re not using it already, get Firefox! It’s a lot better than Internet Explorer.

Step 2. Download and install the User Agent Switcher plugin for Firefox.

Step 3. Restart Firefox to complete the installation and go to Tools -> User Agent Switcher -> Options -> Options. In the window that opens, select the User Agents tab and press Add.

Step 4. Add a new user agent. Write Googlebot for the description and Googlebot/2.1+(+http://www.google.com/bot.html)” in the User Agent box as shown above. Press OK and you’re good to go!

Now you can visit most password protected sites and forums that appear on Google’s search results. Here are a few to try:

http://secrets-windows.blogspot.com/