How to Prevent Shutdown of a Windows XP Computer

If you’re looking for a way to prevent people from shutting down or logging off your Windows XP machine, you’ve come to the right place. Whatever your reason may be, it’s pretty easy to remove all options for shutting down or logging off a Windows XP computer.

In Windows XP, there are several ways to shutdown a computer: click on Start and Turn Off Computer, press CTRL + ALT + DEL and choose Shut Down, open the command prompt and type in the shutdown command, or install a third party application that shuts down the computer for you.

In this article, I’ll cover each method and see how we can block the shutdown.

Remove Shutdown Options

First, you can remove the Turn Off Computer button from the Start Menu and from the CTRL + ALT + DEL screen by using the Group Policy Editor. Note that this is editor is not available in Windows XP Home or Starter editions.

Click on Start and then Run and type in gpedit.msc and press Enter.

In the left pane, expand User Configuration and then expand Administrative Templates. Finally, click on Start Menu and Taskbar.

Now on the right pane, double-click on Remove and prevent access to the Shut Down command and set it to Enabled. You’ll notice in the description that this will remove the shutdown option from the Start Menu and Task Manager.

However, a user could still simply log off of Windows XP and then click the Turn off computer button from there, which remains even after enabling the setting above.

To prevent this, you need to find the Remove Logoff on start menu setting in the same section and change it to Enabled also. Now the user won’t be able to log off and won’t be able to reach that screen. However, if the computer restarts for any particular reason, the login screen will appear and the computer can be shut down. To prevent this scenario, you can also configure Group Policy to only allow shutdown of the computer when someone is logged on.

Computer Configuration – Windows Settings – Security Settings – Local Policies – Security Options and scroll down to Shutdown: Allow the system to be shutdown without having to log on and set it to Disabled.

Finally, you need to prevent people from going to the command prompt and simply typing in shutdown! To do this, go to the following policy:

User Configuration – Administrative Templates – System and double-click on the Prevent access to the command prompt policy and set it to Enabled.

Note that everything in the User Configuration section will apply to all users, even the Administrator account, so be careful and make sure you leave an option for restoring access if needed. What I normally do is leave the option for the Run command in the Start Menu so that I can get access to Group Policy later on. If you remove that option also, then you’ve basically locked yourself out.

There is a way to apply local group policies to all users except the Administrator account, but it requires quite a few steps. Microsoft has written up a knowledge base article on exactly how to do it.

Lastly, to prevent users from installing third-party programs to shutdown the computer, you can create a standard (non-administrative) user account in Windows XP. The standard account does not have permission to install software most of the time. If you really want to prevent any kind of software installation, go to the following policy:

Computer Configuration – Administrative Templates – Windows Components – Windows Installer and click on Disable Windows Installer.

Set it to Enabled and choose Always from the drop down box. Note that standard user accounts also cannot access the Group Policy editor, so that’s another good reason to use a non-administrative account.

Having the user logged in as a standard user will also ensure that someone cannot use the remote shutdown command in Windows to shutdown the computer. That is about all the different ways a Windows XP computer can be shut down, so hopefully this covers everything. If you have any questions, post a comment. Enjoy!

Tweak Windows XP Settings with TweakUI

Since I just wrote a post on how to tweak Windows Vista, I thought I would throw in some power toys for the Windows XP users. Windows XP is not going to disappear any time soon, so if you still have not gotten around to customizing it the way you want, take a minute and read through this article.

One of the best programs for tweaking Windows XP is the TweakUI PowerToy utility from Microsoft. Using this nifty little program, you can fine-tune many Windows settings quickly and easily. You can many settings, from how to group items in the taskbar to disabling or getting rid of those annoying shortcut icon arrows on the desktop.

Here’s a quick overview of some of the other settings you can configure:

Tweak number of applications for the Alt + Tab dialog

This if very useful if you’re like me and always have about 20 windows open in your taskbar. Even with the taskbar grouping, it can become a pain to find the program you’re looking for. Using this, you can increase the number of programs that show up when your press Alt + Tab.

Change number of lines your mouse wheels scrolls

Reduce the quality of thumbnails in Explorer to increase performance

Disable/Customize shortcut icon arrows

Customize locations for the Places Bar

The Places Bar is what shows up on the left side of the Open and Save file dialogs from Word, Excel, etc. The usual options are Desktop, My Documents, My Computer and My Network Places, but you can add your own custom locations using this option.

Hide a Control Panel Applet/Extension

You can hide Control Panel items so that they do not show up when you go to the Control Panel dialog. However, this does not uninstall it or prevent someone from opening it via the command prompt. Only useful if you want to hide it from users who don’t know what they are doing.

Automatically log into Windows as any user

Mange Access Control and security for Administrative functions

You can also control access to many of the Administrative tasks using TweakUI. For example, you can control who can manage file and printer sharing, manage disks, manage shares, etc.

Repair Windows files

Finally, you can use TweakUI to repair Windows in case something has become corrupted. You can rebuild icons, repair the font, My Music, My Pictures, My videos folders, and more.

Overall, a very handy utility that Microsoft provides for free. Should be something built into the Control Panel, but for now you’ll have to download it!

Guide to Windows XP Task Manager Part III

In this third post, we’re continuing the Windows Task Manager series. We already looked at the Applications tab and the Processes tab, now we’ll go through the last two tabs: Performance and Networking.

The Performance tab is a little confusing with all kinds of monitors like Physical Memory, Commit Charge, and Kernel Memory. What does all that mean? Well, let’s do the easy part first: CPU Usage. This is simply a graphical view of your current CPU usage, nothing special. You’ll see it spike here and there, especially if you open a program or something similar.

The next two graphs are referred to as “PF Usage” and “Page File Usage History“, but this is misleading because it doesn’t actually refer to the amount of your page file being used, but is the commit charge. So what is the commit charge? Well the Total Commit Charge is actually the memory allocated to programs and the operating system. It first uses physical memory and then uses virtual memory.

You’ll notice under physical memory, I have a total of 1GB and 484 MB are still available. Subtract 10408040 KB from 484632 KB and you get 563 MB. That’s the exact value show in PF Usage graph. However, under Commit Charge, you’ll notice the Total is 577 MB, which is a bit higher. That means a little bit of data is being sent out to the actual page file on disk.

The Limit number underneath Commit Charge is the total of all your virtual memory and physical memory combined. Kernel Memory is simply memory that is assigned to the operating system kernel and device drivers and that no one else can use. The sum of Paged and Nonpaged equals the total. Paged means that some of the kernel memory is using virtual memory (the page file) and the rest is using physical memory (the RAM).

There’s one more thing about this tab and that’s if you go to View and you’ll see an option called Show Kernel Times.

What this does is show you the percentage of the processor being used by the Windows Kernel or operating system. It’ll display red on top of some of the green part. So if half the bar is green and half is red, that means 50% of the current CPU Usage is the Kernel!

Now moving on to the Networking tab. This tab is very useful if, say, your connection to the Internet is slow or you are copying files between computers and it’s taking forever. You can go to the Networking tab and if you see that your Local Area Connection is at 90% utilization, then you might have some kind of virus or spyware that’s eating up all your bandwidth. Normally, it should look bland like this:

The Networking tab is fairly easy to understand: You have a graph for each type of network adapter on your computer (Ethernet aka Local Area Connection, wireless adapter, bluetooth, etc). At the bottom you get some basic information such as the adapter name, the network utilization, maximum link speed and current state.

As you can see only my wireless connection is working (operational) and my utilization is close to 0. This should for the most part be very low unless you are transferring or downloading large video or audio files. One last thing about this tab is if you go to View and choose Select Columns…, you can pick a whole bunch of other network stats too!

So that’s about it for the Windows Task Manager series. Hopefully, it was useful and if you have any questions about the task manager, please leave us a comment. Enjoy!

Guide to Windows XP Task Manager Part II

In Part I of the Windows XP Task Manager series, we talked about ending programs in Task Manager and in this second part we are going to cover the Processes tab in more detail because it’s full of useful information.

Now we ended off by saying that if your program does not die by clicking the End Task button on the Applications tab, then you can right click on the program and choose “Go to process“. This will bring you to the Processes tab, which shows you the executable that is running in Windows for that particular program.

The process that is running that program is automatically highlighted when you choose the go to process option. The Process tab gives you more detailed information on every process running on the system, whether it be a user process or a system process. The Image Name is the name of the process, User Name is whether it is a user process or a Windows XP process, CPU is the percentage of the processor time that a particular application is taking up, and Mem Usage is how much RAM memory is being used. You can click on any header to sort the list by that column like I have in the screenshot below using Mem Usage.

What I found out using the task manager was that Google Chrome eats up huge amounts of memory. Above, there is only one IE process and it’s using about 114 MB of RAM with one window open. Now check the how many processes are there for Google Chrome and how much memory is being taken up:

The other column you’ll be sorting a lot is CPU. Go ahead and click on the header and you should see the System Idle process at the very top. Normally, that process should be the one with the highest CPU value. If it takes several minutes to do something that normally takes a few seconds, it could be caused by a process with a very high CPU usage. Also, you’ll notice that the processes keep shifting up and down and that’s because one becomes active and then might stop and another process moves to the foreground, etc. At the bottom of the Task Manager window you’ll see the CPU Usage status. This number should be pretty low for a desktop computer.

Now to really kill a program, you can right click on the process itself and choose either End Process or End Process Tree. Try end process first and if that does not work try end process tree. The process tree option basically means that if this process was started up by some other process or if it spawned child processes, all processes in the entire tree starting from the parent will be killed. So if you opened IE and that caused the Flash process to start, then if you choose End Process Tree on the IE process, it will also end the Flash process

You’ll also notice that by default there are only four columns listed in the Task Manager for processes. You can actually choose a bunch more columns by clicking on View from the top menu and choosing “Select columns…“.

As you can see, there are a lot of properties for a process that you can view. Some of the more useful ones are PID, Page Faults, Thread Count, and Non-Paged Pool. If you’re interested, you can read more about these by doing a search on Google.

The last thing you can do for a process is to set how much of the CPU you want it to use and which CPU you want a process to run on. Of course, the second statement is only valid if you have a computer with more than one processor, but since dual and quad core computer are fairly common now, it’s something you might want to do.

If you right click on the process name, you see two options at the bottom, Set Priority and Set Affinity. Priority is exactly that: what kind of privilege do you want to give or take from a process. If you’re running something like an anti-virus scan, but hate the fact that it completely disables your ability to do anything else on the computer until the scan finishes, then you can reduce the priority given to the anti-virus software so that it doesn’t use all the CPU.

The values range from Low to Realtime, the latter which you should never use unless you really have nothing else running on your computer and you simply want one process to consume all the of CPU resources. You can also set the process to run on a particular CPU if you have more than one. Click on Set Affinity and you’ll get a dialog with 32 check boxes with everything disabled except for the number of cores on your computer. If you have one quad core CPU, that means you’ll have CPU 0 to CPU 4 available to check. If you have two dual core processors, you’ll also end up with four cores. Below I have two single core processors and therefore only two options.

By default, Windows will use the first processor on your computer for completing a task unless the program is designed to take advantage of multiple processors and cores. So if you want to run a non-optimized program on it’s own dedicated processor without interfering with the main processor used by Windows, just unchecked the box for the first processor for that particular application! Pretty cool!

Check out part III of the Windows Task Manager series where we talk about the Performance tab and Networking tabs.

Guide to Windows XP Task Manager Part I

Ever had a program freeze on you that refuses to close or disappear? One annoying problem is when a poorly written application crashes and refuses to be shut down. Or maybe you’ve noticed that your computer is suddenly running very slow, but there’s no clear indication as to why? In that case, you might have a process running on your system that is hogging all of the CPU time or taking up loads of memory.

Well, the Windows Task Manager can help you out in some of these situations to help determine the cause and completely kill the problem application. First off, the purpose of the task manger is to provide computer performance information along with details about currently running programs and processes. It also provides the ability to monitor your network traffic if you are connected to a network.

So let’s get started with learning about this very useful tool in Windows XP. You can get to the Task Manager in a few ways:

1. Press Ctrl + Shift + ESC one after the other while holding the keys down. Just like you would do Ctrl + Alt + Delete, which I think most people have done by now.

2. The other way is to press the second key combination mentioned above, Ctrl + Alt + Delete, and then on the menu pressing the “Task Manger” button. This button is usually the middle button on the second row.

Now you should see the Task Manager dialog on your computer screen. This window by default stays on top of everything else, so you it’s kinda hard to miss!

You’ll see that there are five tabs across the top: Applications, Processes, Performance, Networking and Users. Let’s go through each one in detail.

Applications Tab

This will be your favorite tab when it comes to killing a program that has crashed or is frozen. The Applications tab will list any of the programs that you currently running on the system. The programs shown here are usually the programs that you see on your task bar at the bottom of the screen.

So what you can do here is to click on a particular application and choose either End Task, Switch To, or New Task. Switch To does nothing more than just bring that application to the front of all other windows. New Task is for starting up another program, but is not useful for most users. Of course if you want to kill the program, choose End Task and you’ll usually get a popup dialog saying something like “The program is not responding, do you want to end now?“. In this case, click End Now.

This will more than likely solve 90% of your problems. In the rare event that using end task does not work, you can right click on the program and choose “Go to process“.

This is where the Processes tab comes into play. As you can see, we are now looking at all the processes running on the computer and there are a lot more here than what you see listed on the Applications tab.

By default, it will highlight the process whenever you use the Go to process option. You can now try to kill the program by clicking on End Process. Check out Part II of this series on Windows XP Task Manager to learn about the processes tab. Enjoy!

How to Change the Keyboard Language in Windows

Are you looking for a way to change the keyboard language in Windows? There are occasions where you might need to do this such as when you buy a used computer and the keyboard is set to another language or if you need to type something in a foreign language instead of English.

You can easily change the keyboard language from French to English, US to UK, etc. by modifying a few settings in the Windows Control Panel. You can do this by changing the language and keyboard settings.

It’s worth noting that when you switch languages in Windows, the settings are configured per application. You have to change the input language depending on which program you are using. This is very easily done using the language bar that shows up automatically when you add another language in Windows. I’ll also explain using the language bar at the bottom of this article.

Change Keyboard Language in Windows 8/Windows 10

For Windows 8 and Windows 10, open the Control Panel and click on Language.

Click on the Add a language button that is located above the list of installed languages.

Windows 8 and 10 have a much better interface for browsing the languages as compared to Windows 7 and earlier. Here you get a nice preview of a few characters for each language.

Pick the language and then click on the Add button at the bottom. You should now see it as an installed language. You might also get some messages from Windows as it installs any necessary files for the language.

You can click on Options to download the language pack for the newly installed language, which will allow you to change the Windows display language. You can also add additional input methods for the language.

Change Keyboard Language in Windows 7

For Windows Vista and Windows 7, open the Control Panel and click on Region and Language.

Now click on the Keyboards and Languages tab and then click on Change keyboards.

You’ll see the current default input language and installed services. To add a language, go ahead and click on the Add button.

Now scroll down to the language you want to add and expand the keyboard section. Depending on the physical keyboard you are using, choose the correct keyboard option. You might have to play around with the different options because sometimes one keyboard doesn’t work properly.

You can also click on the Preview button to see how the characters for your language are mapped to the keyboard you are using.

In my example, I chose Hindi Traditional for the keyboard language. Scroll down to the Using the Language Bar section to see how to type into different applications using the new language.

Change Keyboard Language in XP

For Windows XP, you want to go to the Control Panel and click on Regional and Language Options.

Next click on the Languages tab and then click on the Details button.

This will load up the Text Services and Input Languages dialog box. Here you will see the list of installed services and keyboards on your computer. You can click Add to install a new keyboard layout and input language.

Choose the input language and choose the type of keyboard that you have attached to your computer. If you want to type Spanish on an English keyboard, choose Spanish as the Input language and United States-Dvorak.

Using the Language Bar

When you install a new language in Windows, it automatically enables the language bar. This is really useful for quickly switching between languages in Windows. You’re probably not going to be typing in one language for every application, so the language bar makes it easy to switch.

                                                                                                                                                                  You’ll see the language bar in your task bar with letters to denote the language you are currently using. If you click on it, a list will appear and you can simply click on another language to select it.

That’s about it! So if you want to type in another language, such as a foreign language, or if you want to switch the keyboard language back to English, the above steps should solve your problem! Enjoy!

How to Rip DVDs to Your Hard Drive in Windows and OS X

If you have a lot of older DVDs sitting around in your house, you might be wondering if there was a way to rip them to your computer for free? Even though I stream most of my movies online today via iTunes, Netflix, HBO Go, etc, I still have about 200 DVDs that I had bought over the last two decades, which I still like to watch sometimes.

Instead of just getting rid of them or having to use a DVD player to watch them, which I don’t even own anymore, I decided I would rip them all to my NAS (network attached storage device) so that I can watch them anywhere or any device.

Now it’s worth noting that technically it’s illegal to rip DVDs because of copyright protection, but the MPAA probably won’t be suing you unless you sell or distribute the ripped DVDs. As long as you keep them to yourself, you shouldn’t have to worry about any legal issues.

Another issue to take note of is that some DVD drives have encryption protection on the drive itself and therefore can’t be circumvented by any kind of software. In those types of cases, you’ll need to get an older DVD drive that doesn’t have that type of built-in copyright protection.

In order to rip a DVD to your computer, you basically need two things: a program called HandBrake and an open source library for unscrambling DVDs called libdvdcss. You’ll find tons of other articles in Google about ripping DVDs using other programs and methods, but this method is free, uses safe, clean and malware free software and works on both Windows and Mac.

Step 1 – Install HandBrake

The first thing we need to do is download and install HandBrake on Windows or Mac. If you go to the main page, it automatically determines which version of the program you should download onto your computer.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

For Windows, it downloads a common x86 and x64 installer for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and will install the appropriate version for your computer. For Macs, there is only a 64-bit version. Go ahead and install it in the default location for Windows or Mac.

It should be a fairly quick install and you don’t have to choose any options, etc. At the end, go ahead and click Finish and HandBrake will now be installed. Now go ahead and run HandBrake, click on Help and then click on About. You only need to do this step if you are on Windows. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                        

At the top, you will see the version of HandBrake and whether it is the 64-bit version or the 32-bit version. Make a note of which version you have because you’ll need to know for the second step.

Step 2 – Download libdvdcss

The open source decoding library is actually managed by the VideoLAN company, which creates the VLC media player software. Note that we do NOT need to install VLC media player. A lot of online tutorials state that you need to install HandBrake and VLC together, but you actually don’t have to do that.

Depending on the version of HandBrake you have installed on Windows, here are the links to the appropriate versions.

Windows 64-bit libdvdcss

Windows 32-bit libdvdcss

Mac OS X libdvdcss

Just click on the link for the DLL file and it will download it to your computer. For Mac, click on the libdvdcss.pkg file and download that.

You’ll notice that this version of libdvdcss is actually pretty old (around 2012), but it’s the latest version for Windows and Mac. They have a lot of newer versions for Linux, which you can see here. I’m sure they will come out with a newer version eventually, so if you download the 1.2.12 version and this post is a couple of years old, make sure to browse through the newer versions and see if they have folders for Mac, Win32 and Win64 like they do for the 1.2.12 version.

Go ahead and download the correct file (either the .pkg for Mac or the .dll file for 32-bit or 64-bit Windows) and then move on to step 3 for your operating system.

Step 3 – Install libdvdcss & Configure HandBrake – OS X

For Mac users, you will want to start by running the libdvdcss.pkg file on your Mac. When you double-click on the file, you might get a message saying the program was downloaded from the Internet and therefore blocked.

In this case, you have to go to the Downloads folder and manually right-click on the package file and choose Open.

You’ll be asked for your Administrator password, but you should be able to install the package at this point. If not, go to System Preferences and then Security and Privacy. At the bottom, you’ll see that the app was blocked, but you can click Open Anyway to run it.

Once the package has been installed, you’ll see a message stating that the install was successful. Click the Close button and let’s now open HandBrake.

We have to configure one setting in HandBrake and then you’ll be good to go. Open HandBrake and then click on HandBrake at the top and Preferences.

Now click on the Advanced tab and then uncheck the Use libdvdnav (instead of libdvdread) box.

That’s all you need to do for the OS X. Skip down to the Step 4 – Rip DVD in HandBrake section below to learn how to rip the DVD now that you have everything setup.

Step 3 – Install libdvdcss & Configure HandBrake – Windows

For Windows users, you have to copy the libdvdcss.dll file to the HandBrake directory on your computer. First, open one explorer window that points to your Downloads folder or whichever folder has the DLL file. Next, open another explorer window that points to C:\Program Files\HandBrake or C:\Program Files(x86)\HandBrake, depending on which version of HandBrake was installed.

The (x86) path is for the 32-bit version of HandBrake and the other is for 64-bit. HandBrake will only be installed in one of those paths, not both. Now just drag and drop the DLL file into that folder. Note that you don’t have to rename the file by removing the -2 at the end of the file name. That was required in older versions of HandBrake, but not anymore.

You might get a message stating you need Administrator Privileges in order to copy the file to that directory, so just click Continue and it should work. Once you have that file copied or moved to the HandBrake folder, go ahead and open HandBrake in Windows.

At the top, click on Tools and then Options. Click on Advanced and then check the Disable LibDVDNav (libdvdread will be used instead) box.

That’s all you have to do in Windows. Go ahead and restart HandBrake and then move on to step 4 to actually start ripping DVDs.

Step 4 – Rip DVD in HandBrake

Now that we have the unscrambling program installed in HandBrake, we can actually start a DVD rip. Go ahead and pop in the DVD in your drive and open up HandBrake. Go ahead and click on Activity Log to open the log window.

Now click on Source and then click on the DVD option that should be at the bottom. The program should automatically start scanning the DVD and then load up all the title and chapter information. If, for some reason, you get an error and nothing loads, you might have to close HandBrake and open it again, but this time right-click on the desktop shortcut and choose Run as Administrator.

As long as you get the title and chapter info loaded, that means the encryption was able to be circumvented and you should be good to go. You will also see this information in the Activity Window as the following highlighted lines:

Depending on the DVD encryption, it can take anywhere from a few seconds to minutes in order for the program to decode the encryption keys, so be patient. If you see the following in the activity log and the chapter and title info don’t load, then you have to delete the libdvdcss-2.dll file and try to copy it again. Make sure to close HandBrake first and right-click on the shortcut and choose Run as Administrator when opening it back up after copying the file.

Hopefully, this tutorial is detailed enough for anyone to follow. It does take a few steps, but nothing is very complicated. You luck with vary depending on the DVD drive you have and the type of DVD encryption you have to bypass. If you have any questions, feel free to comment. Enjoy!