Saturday, January 22, 2011

How to Activate Windows XP without Product Key


Here is a simple trick to activate windows without any product key  .

When you have installed windows xp and try to activate you get messages like “your product key is not genuine or the number of activation has been exceeded” and then it tells you to call MIcrosoft to get the key, Instead of Going to this trouble, or instead of spending Hundred of dollars, to get a new genuine product, let us solve this problem by following way:

STEPS:-

  1. Click on Start
  2. Find and Click “Run”
  3. Type regedit
  4. Click the plus next to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE”
  5. Click the plus next to “SOFTWARE”
  6. Click the plus next to “Microsoft”
  7. Click the plus next to “Windows NT”
  8. Click the plus next to “CurrentVersion”
  9. Click “WPAEvents”
  10. On the right panel, find “OOBETimer” then double click it.
  11. Now, Delete all the Values by highlighting it, then delete it
  12. Then type in this value without the quotation mark “FF D5 71 D6 8B 6A 8D 6F D5 33 93 FD”
  13. Then after that click OK,
  14. Then on the left panel right click WPAEvents, then click on permissions
  15. Then click System or SYSTEM, then Deny Full Control, then Click OK.
  16. Then Exit Registry Editor by Click the X or the red X on the Upper Right of the Title Bar or press ALT and F4 at the same time.
  17. To Very that it works, go to start, then “activate windows”, or go to start, then all programs, then “activate windows”
  18. If it says that Windows has been activated.
I got this info from this website, thanks a ton to him


XP Mode for Windows 7 Ultimate

XP mode is nothing but, a virtual machine inside windows 7 running windows xp. The best part I can think about this is everything is provided by Microsoft, the virtual machine and the guest operating system, and hence we assume the operating system to be tuned for virtual machine and hence the performance is much better. Last year  I had run windows xp on Ubuntu, and this time on Windows 7. The main motive for me to try this is I wanted to run Need for speed Special Edition, it was one of my favorite game of the past.


You need to have a genuine windows 7 for you to be able to install xp mode, but then you can download the torrent version of the same files as it by pass the genuine validation check. I downloaded one from a torrent, which has Windows Xp mode installer, and Vitual PC and Virtual PC update. I installed Windows Xp mode, which basically is a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) file, which can be booted from Virtual PC. I could not install Virtual PC as it was meant for a 64 bit machine and mine was 32 bit machine, so I downloaded Virtual PC 2007, and it works just fine with the VHD Image installed by the Xp mode.

I think the Virtual PC provides additional functionality which allows you to run Xp installed applications directly from windows 7, which you cannot do here directly, but you can always go inside xp and run the applications. Things seem to be working very fine for me. I also installed the guest additions which allows you to share folders between the operating systems and also allows pointer integration.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Sony VAIO Camera Driver for Ubuntu

After installing Ubuntu and configuring it to look like windows, one thing that was really lacking was the web cam driver, I could not do video call from Gmail. This time with little easy, I found a link which help to install the driver easily.

First check which is your camera, by typing in the command lsusb, which shows something below.
Bus 006 Device 002: ID 045e:00a4 Microsoft Corp. 
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 044e:3012 Alps Electric Co., Ltd 
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 044e:3013 Alps Electric Co., Ltd 
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 044e:3010 Alps Electric Co., Ltd Bluetooth Adapter
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 044e:3011 Alps Electric Co., Ltd 
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 05ca:1839 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC6 [R5U870]
The camera is from Ricoh Co. Ltd, VGP-VCC6[R5U870] 


The packages provided (both source and binary) include only the loader software and do not contain the microcode, whose copyright and license status is unclear. Instead, a simple shell script is provided that can download and install the microcode directly from the upstream repository.

Installation
========
1. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:r5u87x-loader/ppa
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get install r5u87x
4. sudo /usr/share/r5u87x/r5u87x-download-firmware.sh

(Step 1 only works on Ubuntu 9.10 and newer. On 8.04 you will need to add this PPA to your APT sources manually.)

Supported hardware
================
05ca:1803 Flybook V5
05ca:1810 HP Pavilion Webcam
05ca:1835 Sony Camera VGP-VCC5 (used on Sony Vaio SZ laptops)
05ca:1836 Sony Camera VGP-VCC4 (used on Sony Vaio FE laptops)
05ca:1837 Sony Camera VGP-VCC4 (used on Sony Vaio FZ laptops)
05ca:1839 Sony Camera VGP-VCC6 (used on Sony Vaio CR laptops)
05ca:183a Sony Camera VGP-VCC7 (used on Sony Vaio SZ and TZ11 laptops)
05ca:183b Sony Camera VGP-VCC8 (used on Sony Vaio FZ laptops)
05ca:183e Sony Camera VGP-VCC9 (used on Sony Vaio FZ laptops)

Hope this helps !

Monday, December 13, 2010

Make Ubuntu look like Windows 7 (Windows 7 theme for Ubuntu)

Most of my time on my laptop is going to be on Ubuntu-10.10 from now on. But I am a hard core fan of Microsoft and its Windows OS. The best ever OS you can ever have on your personal laptop at this point of time in my opinion for 100s of reasons, but whatever is the case when you want to get into learning mode, things are in favor of Linux, as its open source and you can download, modify, configure and compile your own kernel. and write your own drivers etc. 

So while I am inside Linux, I don't want to miss the familiar look of Windows 7, So I spent some time to set my Ubuntu look like Windows 7, and there is lot more you can do, but I want to keep it to the minimum and internally it should have the Linux touch to it. So here is the list of things I did, and if I add any more I will update in the Updates section.
  1. Install emerald theme manager, and download Windows 7 theme for it.
    goto synaptic theme manager, and search for emerald and install it and all dependencies. Download the theme for windows 7 from here. Open emerald theme manager and import the downloaded theme. Alt+f2 -> type in command emerald --replace
  2. Move the task bar down, and delete the other bar, which is having minimum buttons, (don't worry, you are not going to loose it forever, its configurable)
  3. Add emerald to start up when Ubuntu starts, same command as above.
  4. Goto Themes, customize, change Icons to Windows 7 set of icons, which are already present by now in the Appearance settings.
  5. Set a bright windows 7 wall paper.
  6. Press Alt + F2 -> type in gconf-editor, goto apps->nautilus->Desktop, and look for the trash_icon_visible and check the box beside, you can also add other icons to desktop like computer etc, I don't like My computer icon on my desktop !
  7. Download the task bar background image from here, and change the task bar settings to put this image as the background image.
  8. Download the Show Desktop background image, and add code for it. The code looks something like this,  You may have to install wmctl package for this.
  9. #!/bin/sh
    if wmctrl -m | grep "mode: ON"; then
    exec wmctrl -k off
    else
    exec wmctrl -k on
    fi
  10. You can change the three menu task bar with single icon start button type task bar, but removing that panel (right click - remove) then add to panel Main Menu. 
  11. You download the Windows 7 icons set from this link, and apply it by drag and dropping on the change themes dialog box.

You are done !, now your desktop should look something like this, its more of windows 7,  with a touch of Linux for the menus. I have referred to these two sites for this make over, and some more from Google! Other things explained on these blogs, I found unnecessary for me at least.


Comments are welcome !

Disable Syntax Error Check in Eclipse

Eclipse underlines when your code does not match the syntax rules, which is done in the CDT parser, for lot of reasons you end up highlighting most of your code as syntax error and its a pain to see the code in between these high lights, I wanted to disable it for god's sake! and could not find an easy menu option to do tat. After Google-ing a bit, I found it can be by un-checking these options shown in the below pictures.


Goto Windows->Preferences->General->Editors->Text Editors->Annotations->C/C++ Occurrences, and uncheck all the boxes on the right side and apply ! Hope this helps !