Hasn’t this happened to all of us IT professionals at one point in our careers: A client is going to be traveling out of the country on a vacation and he is leaving his computer for you to fix; he is of course, expecting his computer to be ready when he comes back. He leaves for his trip, you turn the computer on and you realize you can’t get into Windows because he did not leave you his password. What do you do now? You bypass it! Fortunately there is a program called Kon-Boot which will let you bypass the Windows password and go right into the operating system. Kon-boot does not alter Windows in any way; it works by changing the Windows kernel virtually so when the computer is rebooted it is back to its original state.

As you may already know, Gmail offers a lot of storage space for your email account.  However, who is going to use 7.5GB of storage space to store emails?. Well… I know people that would. But for 99% of us, that space would go to waste. So why not use it as storage space? Its free anyways, and you are using it to store files just as you would if you had attachments on your emails. So, its kind of the same purpose, but with a more convenient way of accessing those files. A way which will literally turn your email account into a virtual drive. In this article we will use a free third-party application called Gmail Drive which has been developed for this purpose.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could store all of your favorite ISO image files, like the ultimate boot CD, Kon-Boot, DBan, Parted Magic, etc, into a single USB flash drive and be able to boot to every single one of them using a single menu? The end result is called a USB multipass and if you are tired of having to carry a CD spindle around every time you have to visit a client for a job, tired constantly losing CDs, tired of being in situations where you could have done something but couldn’t because you did not have your CDs with you. I have the solution for you with this tutorial. We are going to store all our favorite ISO images in a USB dongle storage device, and create a menu which will let us boot to each and every one of those ISO images using grub4dos.

Let me start by saying that cropping a picture is one of the most basic photo editing tasks and it can be done with practically any image editor, with some being harder than others. There are plenty of free image editors on the web now a days, however, The Gimp is as powerful as it gets; it is an excellent image editing software, comparable to Photoshop that can perform very complex photographic jobs. In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to crop a photo using The Gimp. This tutorial is not only designed to teach you how to crop, but it is also a good introduction to this powerful image editor.

As many of you may have noticed, deleting a disconnected mailbox in Exchange Server 2007 is not as evident as it could be. Microsoft definitely wants to prevent accidental deletion of data, so it decided not to offer the option though the Exchange Management Console anymore. Purging a deleted or disconnected mailbox in exchange 2007 must now be done inputing a series of command in the Exchange Management Shell. There are many guides on the web that teach you how to do this, but they all involve a series of commands; commands which, depending on your settings, you will have to greatly modify to get them to work. In the following tutorial I will describe how to do it literally just by copying and pasting commands. You will have to make minimal modifications if any at all.

Setting up a pptp VPN server in Windows server 2008 is a relatively simple and trivial task. Pptp VPNs are certainly very handy when you need to quickly allow users into your network and, although less secure, pptp vpn servers are a breeze to install and configure compared to ipsec vpn servers. The setup changed a little from 2003 to 2008. Now RRAS needs to be added using server manager as a “role” using the Server Manager. In this tutorial, I will walk you through the installation. Before we begin our project I will advise that if you wish to setup a quick pptp vpn server at home the best way to do this, in my oppinion, is using a home router rather than having a computer always on consuming power. If you want to learn how to do this, read my article: Setup a VPN with DD-WRT.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could convert all the songs on the CDs you own to mp3 format and be able to play them on your mp3 player?. Store them on your computer for safe keeping, place them in a usb flash drive and listen to them at work, Make an mp3 CD and store 100 songs and more in one single CD, etc. The procedure is fairly simple and can be accomplished using free software. The procedure is called ripping and for this tutorial we are going to be using software which has been around since the Internet became popular in the early 1990’s. Audiograbber, is an excellent CD ripper. It can rip and convert CD audio into a variety of formats all in one step.

If you did not already know it, you can run Android on your PC. Phone OS developer companies usually provide emulation programs that will let you run their operating systems on your PC. I was once involved in a project where the client wanted the company phones to interact with certain applications. The company had phones running Windows Mobile 6. Needless to say that, since I did not own one of their phones, my job would have been almost impossible if I wouldn’t have had the OS emulator running on my PC. This is just one of the advantages of being able to run a smartphone OS on your PC. Other advantages include, having the ability to take screenshots to make tutorials (such as this one), try different apps, demo the OS before purchasing the phone, etc. In this tutorial we will learn how to run Google Android on your computer using VirtualBox.

If you are getting the “This device cannot start. (Code 10)” error whenever you plug a USB flash drive on your VirtualBox Windows virtual machine, you most likely need to install the “VirtualBox Extension Pack“. VirtualBox USB support is essential and is is unfortunate that is not installed by default, however, this is the reality. The not so evident solution is installing the extension pack. This extension pack enables support for USB 2.0 devices, VirtualBox remote desktop (RDP) and PXE boot from network for Intel network cards. In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to install the VirtualBox Extension Pack.  I will be using VirtualBox 4.0, Ubuntu 10.10 as the host operating system and Windows 7 as the virtual machine. However, the Extension Pack installation file is the same for all operating systems.

If you have an Exchange server and wish to create a new domain user account, the best way to accomplish it would be using Microsoft Exchange Server. Many IT professionals tend to create a domain account first, then go to the exchange server to create a mailbox for the new user; this is totally unnecessary. The Exchange Management Console will allow you to create both, the domain and the email accounts in the same wizard and in a few easy steps; this way you can kill two birds with one stone. In this tutorial, I will teach you how to create a user account using Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and 2010. This tutorial was made using Exchange Server 2007, however these steps apply to the 2010 version as well.