Birthday

Just wanted to let you all know today's my birthday...if you want to send me some money as a birthday present, email me and I'll try to arrange it with my dad's PayPal account! ;-)

Convert Windows XP Home to Professional

I recently modified my XP setup to trick my laptop into thinking it was running XP Professional, when in actuality it was running XP Home. This enables several features which were still on my system, but just not enabled. For example, I can now connect to a domain (well, not really, since I don't have a domain controller) and use lusrmgr.msc to configure users and groups. I now also have my Security tab visible in Properties dialogs.

And now for the information you've been dying to hear since you started reading this article: how to do it. First, you must go into c:\windows\i386. On some systems this may simply be c:\i386. Now see if there is a folder called winntupg in there. If there is, you're good to go. Otherwise, get it off another Windows XP CD. It doesn't matter whether it's an OEM copy that came with another computer; it also doesn't matter which edition that disc is. Just get that folder into your i386 directory. Now open up Registry Editor, select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and then click File > Load Hive. Select the file called setupreg.hiv in i386. Type in a temporary name, and then open that new key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. Go to ControlSet001, Services, and then setupdd. Now double-click (Default), and change the 01 and 02 in there to 00's. Click OK, select that key that was created when you loaded the hive, and then go to File > Unload Hive. Click Yes, and then close Registry Editor. Now, look in i386 (on your hard drive) for a program called winnt32.exe. Run this program. When asked, choose to upgrade. Enter your product key (yes, it will be accepted) and install. Now all that's left to do is wait, and then go through that Microsoft Out of Box Experience thing (with the blue question mark icon which moves around the screen giving assistance.) Even if you have an OEM copy of Windows, it will ask you to activate, but don't worry: it will do so just fine. Some features will still be missing, but that's simply because the files for them don't even come with XP Home. If you really want them, copy them off of another computer which runs an honest-to-goodness XP Professional.

Strange bitmaps inside many Windows programs

If you have ever fooled around with Resource Hacker, a free tool to view and edit resources in Windows executables, you may have noticed that many programs contain resources which appear to have been for features which were originally going to be in a program, but then removed. For example, if you look in MSPaint, you can find some removed dialogs, and if you look in that pinball game included with Windows XP, you can find some kind of editor dialog which cannot be opened. But there are a few bitmaps you can find inside of many different executables that I just don't know what they could have been. Look at this one for an example:



I see check boxes, radio buttons, and are those yin-yangs? Whatever this could have been used for, I can't think of. If you want to see for yourself, I took this image from Dependency Walker (DEPENDS.EXE), a tool which comes with Microsoft Visual Studio (and can also be downloaded separately from dependencywalker.com) though I have seen this particular image in several other programs as well.

Download: Alert (command-line message box tool)

I have another program for you: Alert. This program can create message boxes by command line. It is actually an upgrade of another program I had written for my own purposes, which only let you specify text. This one also lets you specify an icon and title text.

Download it at http://www.mediafire.com/?s10ryedzdmf!

Obviously this is intended for batch files and stuff like that. Or I guess you could use it in a scheduled task for a simple reminder system. You could even put a shortcut to it in someone's startup as a prank, to make them think they have a virus or something.