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How to Set up A Local Account in Windows 10

By admin | June 24, 2016 | How-to Guides | No comments

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Using a Microsoft account to log in to Windows brings some benefits, such as synchronization of files and personalized settings. But it also means you agree to share a lot of personal information with Microsoft. If you are concerned about privacy issue, using a local account to run the system would be a better choice. Windows 10 doesn’t make it obvious to create a local user account, but you still can do it within a few steps. Actually, you can set up a local user account in Windows 10 either during a clean installation, or after installing Windows 10 using a Microsoft account.

Wanna know how to revert your Microsoft account back to a local user account? Here’s how to set up a local account. You have two options to choose from.

To get started, you need to be logged in to your Windows 10 as Administrator.
Head to Start > Settings > Accounts, click Your account on the left-hand pane, and select the option “Sign in with a local account instead” to bring up a new window.
In “Switch to a local account” window, enter your current password, and click Next.
Enter a user name and password for your local account, and click Next.
Click “Sign out and finish” after saving your work in progress.

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After signing in with your local account, you may need to sign in to some apps with your Microsoft account to access associated information. Anytime you wanna roll back to your Microsoft account, just follow the same steps and click “Sign in with a Microsoft account instead”. A window will open and ask for your local account password. Then click Sing in, and you will be prompted to enter your local account password again. Once you click the Next button, your local account will be deleted.

Right click Start menu and choose Run to bring up the Run box.
Type “control userpasswords2” in the box and then click OK.
In the “User Account” window, click Add under the “Users for this computer”.
Click “Sign in without a Microsoft account” at the bottom of the new window.
Click Next, and then select the “Local account” button in the “Add a user screen”.

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Then you can enter a user name and password, and click Finish to create a new user account. Using this way to create a local user account is a Standard user by default, but you can change it to Administrator by doing these: go to Settings > Accounts > Family & other users, click the account you just create, and click “Change account type”. From here you can switch the type from Standard User to Administrator.

Have other issues about Windows 10? Leave your question here & we’ll help you out.

How to Fix Slow Boot-up Issue – Troubleshoot Guide

By admin | June 17, 2016 | How-to Guides | No comments

Many users who perform the free upgrade from Windows 7 or 8.1 to Windows 10 may suffer from massive lengthened boot times. The symptoms include a black screen after seeing Windows loading animation, and the ability to move your cursor around but an inability to do anything else. The process may last in excess of a minute.

In most cases, the sluggish boot-up time is not due to the voluminous size of the new OS but to some malware and non-optimized startup settings. What can you do to fix this issue? First, run an complete system malware scan to remove any possible malware infections. Windows 10 is still vulnerable to malicious virus and programs, and the old malware and virus could be the reason behind Windows 10 slow boot-up. After a thorough antivirus scan, you can modify your system settings to solve the problem. Here are some solutions to speed up boot times on your Windows 10.

Method 1:

Right click the taskbar and choose Task Manager from the list.
Click the Startup tab, click the Startup impact to list the items from High to None.
Select the items with High/Medium/Low rating and click Disable bottom.

You can disable any startup items you think unnecessary to load when Windows boots up, including your antivirus software. AMD and Nvidia driver services can also be disabled without affecting the graphics performance of your system.

Method 2:

Click Search icon, type “power options” and then hit Enter key.
In the Power Options window, click Choose what the power button does on the left.
In the System Settings window, click Change setting that are currently unavailable.
Click Turn on fast startup under Shutdown settings, and then click Save changes.

Method 3:

Right click Start, click Run, type in “services.msc” and hit Enter key.
When the Service window opens, click Starup Type to sort the list of services.
Observe the services which appear to take time to launch, double click the service with the Automatic startup type, and the Properties window shows up.
Change the Startup type from Automatic to Automatic (Delayed start) or Manual.
Click OK to save the change, close the window, and reboot your computer.

Method 4:

In some cases the black screen before boot is a graphic driver problem for the laptops that switch between Intel HD Graphics and a dedicated card from Nvidia or AMD. You can test to fix the problem by disable your AMD or Nvidia graphics driver.

Right click Start menu and choose Device Manager from the list.
Click Display adapter on the left, select your dedicated graphics card labelled Nvidia, AMD Radeon or ATi Radeon, right click on it and choose Disable from the list.
Turn off your PC and start it again to see if the problem is solved.

Method 5:

If you are having an AMD graphics card, you can disable a power saving feature so your system will no longer disable the second GPU when idle, and your Windows 10 may boot in under 30 seconds, compared to over 3 minutes for ULPS Enabled.

Type “regedit” into Cortana and hit Enter to bring up Registry Editor.
Press Ctrl + F to open the Find box, type EnableULPS and click Find Next.
Double click EnableULPS and change the value from 1 to 0.

In this tutorial we’ve shown you several simple way to speed up Windows 10 slow boot time. Does any of them help troubleshoot your boot-up issue? If none of the aforementioned methods work for your case, you might need to restore Windows 10 to its default setting, or do a clean install of Windows 10 to see if that works.

Wanna get more How-to guides on system maintanence and security? Stay with us for fresh content on this website.

How to Troubleshoot Access Denied Errors

By admin | June 12, 2016 | How-to Guides | No comments

Have you ever get an access denied message when open a file? Some of you may run into the problem of being unable to access files or folders, and the message shows up like “Access Denied”. Access Denied error may be triggered under these circumstances: the file may be in use, corrupted or encrypted; you don’t have the proper permissions; the user account may be corrupted; the folder ownership may have changed…… How to fix Access Denied error? Check out this troubleshooting guide.

If you receive the “access denied message” when you try to open a file, you may first check if the file is encrypted or not. Here’s how to do: right click on the file, choose Properties from the list, and then click Advanced button in the General tab. If the Encrypt contents to secure data check box is selected, then this file is encrypted, and you will need the certificate that was used to encrypt this file so as to decrypt it first. To import or export a certificate in Windows 10, type “certmgr.msc” in the Search box, and hit Enter to open Certificate Manager. Then select the certificate, click All Tasks from the Action menu, and then click the corresponding command to carry out action.

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If the file is not encrypted, corrupted, or in use, but you still cannot access, edit or delete it, then check the permissions of the files or the folder the file is saved in. Here is how to do: right click the files or folder, click Properties, click Security tab and then click your account under Group or user names to see the permission you have. The permissions for the selected user or group are shown in the lower portion of the properties dialog box. In many cases, Access Denied error is mainly caused due to permission issues. Here are the troubleshooting methods you can try to fix it.

To regain access you can modify the permissions for the file in the following way:

Right click the file or folder you want to get full control, and then click Properties.
Click Security tab and then click Edit button under the Group or user names.
Click your user account, tick the Allow checkbox next to Full control, and click OK.

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If you want to ensure all the files have the correct permission, you can re-confirm the permissions for your user’s personal folder by doing the following steps:

Right click the file or folder you want to take ownership, and then click Properties.
Click Security tab, and click Advanced under Permission for Authenticated Users.
In the Advanced Security Settings window, click Change next to the “Owner:” label.
In the Select User or Group window, input your user account in the area which says “Enter the object name to select” and click OK to close this window.
Check the “Replace all child object permission entries with inheritable permission entries from this object” option in the bottom left corner, and then press OK.

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Now the ownership of all subfolders and files inside your user folder has been changed, and subsequently you should be able to access those files and folders. That’s it. If you are prevented from doing any operation on files or folders, just perform the aforementioned methods to take ownership and get full access to them in Windows 10.

Is this tutorial helps solve your Access Denied issues? Feel free to share your thoughts with us here 🙂

How to Configure Windows Defender on Your Computer

By admin | June 3, 2016 | How-to Guides | No comments

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Windows Defender is a Windows built-in app that helps detect and remove malware, spyware or other potentially unwanted software. If you install other 3rd party antivirus or security software, Windows Defender will disable itself automatically, while when the 3rd party software stops functioning, it will activate itself as well. So if you want to make Windows Defender work, you will need to disable your 3rd party security software first. In this guide we will show you how to configure Windows Defender.

There are several ways to open Windows Defender in Windows 10:

Right click Start menu and choose Control Panel from the list. Type Windows Defender in the upper right corner and click Windows Defender from the result list.
Press Windows + I keys to open the Setting panel. Click Update & Security, click Windows Defender in the left panel, and scroll down to click Use Windows Defender.
Click the Search icon in the taskbar, type Windows Defender and click Windows Defender settings from the list. Then scroll down to select Use Windows Defender.

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In the Windows Defender UI, you can click Settings button in the upper right corner and then configure Windows Defender, i.e. turning on/off real-time protection, cloud-based protection, or sample submission, as well as adding an exclusion. If you don’t want Windows Defender to scan a specific file, folder or process, click the + icon under Add an exclusion, specify the item, and click Exclude this… button.

If you cannot turn on Windows Defender, check if other security software is running. If not, try to run a complete Windows Update including Windows Defender update.

To disable Windows Defender, Windows 10 users can perform one of these ways:

Turn off Real-time Protection and Cloud-based Protection in the Settings panel.
Type services.msc in the Search bar and hit Enter key to open Services Manager. Scroll down to locate Windows Defender Service, and change the startup type from Automatic to Disabled. Also disable Windows Defender Network Inspection Service.
Click the Search icon, type regedit and hit Enter to open Registry Editor. Navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows Defender and set the value of DWORD called DisableAntiSpyware to 1.
Type gpedit.msc in the Search bar and hit Enter to open Group Policy Editor. Navigate to Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Defender, right click on Turn off Windows Defender, choose Edit and then Enable option. Then reboot your computer.

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Also, you can schedule a periodic scan in Windows Defender by doing these:

Type taskschd.msc in the Search bar and hit Enter to open Task Scheduler.
Navigate to Task Scheduler -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Windows Defender in the left pane, and double click the Windows Defender Scheduled Scan in the middle pane.
Click the Triggers tab in the open window, and then click New… Button
Choose begin the task as On a schedule, and then set your time and frequency.
After that, click Enabled in the left bottom corner and click OK to save the change.

So that’s it. Now you have learned how to configure Windows Defender. If you have any other issues about Windows Defender, leave your question and we’re glad to help.

How to Install Language Packs & Change Display Language

By admin | May 27, 2016 | How-to Guides | No comments

No matter what language you are using on your Windows computer, you can easily install additional languages as you like to view menus, dialog boxes, and other user interface items.

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There are two ways to change original language to your preferred one. The first way is to deploy Multilingual User Interface to transform almost the entire user interface to the language of your choice, but that’s available to users of the Ultimate or the Enterprise edition of Windows. The other one is to install a language interface packs, which is more freely available to users of Windows Home and Home Premium versions as well. Language packs will transform the most commonly used areas of the user interface, rather than the entire one to another language. Today we’re gonna show you how to install and change language packs on Windows. To install additional languages on your Windows, you can either use the Language Control Panel to easily change your system language, or you can download language pack from external links and install it separately. To install additional language packs using Windows Update, here are the steps to follow:

Click Start menu, choose Settings, and then click Time & Language.
Click Region & language in the left panel, and click Add a language on the right.
Select the language you want in the opened panel and it will start downloading.
Click on the language that has been installed, and then click Set as default.
Log out and log in again to make the change take effect.

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Now, if Windows fails to download or install the language pack for unknown reason, you can download and install it manually. You should download the correct language pack matching your OS first, and then install it by performing the following steps:

Press Windows + R keys together to bring up the Run dialog.
Type “lpksetup” in the box and then press Enter.
Click Install display languages in the Install or uninstall display languages wizard.
Click Browser… Button, navigate to the location where the language pack file is saved, and select the .cab file there. Then click Next button and wait while it is being installed. The
whole process may take a considerable amount of time to be completed.

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Head to Control Panel > Clock, Language, and Region > Language.
Click Add a language and select the language you installed to add it to the list.
Click Option next to the language and then click Make this the primary language.
Log out and log in again to make the change take effect.

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After that, you can use Windows in your preferred language. The text of dialog boxes, buttons, and windows will be displayed in the language you set as default.

But what if you want to remove or uninstall language packs from Windows 10?

If you wish to remove language packs, you may open a command prompt window, type “lpksetup /u” and hit Enter. The Install or uninstall display languages window will open up. Then you can select the language you wanna uninstall, click Next and the Language Interface Pack will start uninstalling. As soon as the process is finished, you will be asked to restart your computer to complete the language pack uninstall.

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Is this article helpful for you? Welcome to share your thoughts here with us.

Google Crafts Art Camera to Capture Subtle Details of Artworks

By admin | May 18, 2016 | IT news | No comments

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Google launched Art Project in 2011 and cooperated with international museums to help the public access hign resolution images of great artworks. In the past five years, Google Cultural Institute scanned and perserved 200 works of art in high resolution gigapixel images. Now it has archived another 1000 using the ultra-high-resolution “Art Camera” during the past few months.

How did the sudden expansion happen?

Google Cultural Institute introuduced that they have developed the Art Camera system to perserve the subtle details of artworks down to every brushstroke. Art Camera is a robotic camera designed to create gigapixel images. The whole thing works like this. A operator sets up the camera in front of a wall where a paiting is hung, and points the camera at the four edges of painting. Once set up, the robotic system will automatically steer the camera to scan the paiting inch by inch and to take high-resolution close-ups. Art Camera is equipped with a sonar and a laser to make sure the focus is right on each brush stroke. As soon as all the details are captured, thousands of close-up shots will be sent to Google’s servers and then stitched into one single super high resolution gigapixel image at just a few hours later.

Thanks to the new custom-bulit camera, museums and institutions can capture and digitize art and documents much easier and faster. The capture time has been reduced largely. As Marzia Niccolai, the technical program manager at the Cultural Institute, said, it used to take almost a day to capture an image, but now it would take 30 minutes to capture a one meter by one meter painting. Meanwhile, previously institutes and organizations may need to pay money for bringing in third party image-scanning equipment. Now Google brought Art Camera and encouraged organizations to take advantage of it for free. The proces of perserving valuable artworks becomes much cheaper and streamlined. Google Cultural Institute express their willings to lend it out around the world to make museums’ artwork more accessible. With the help of Art Camera, museums can share their valuable but fragile collections with the global public, and art lovers can browser museum’ library of art online and fully appreciate a master piece by zooming in and viewing individual brush strokes.

Yet, Art Camera has itslimitataions. It can be used to capture and archive 2-D things, like flat paitings, but it is not capable to handle 3-D objects or things particularly large. For that, Google will still have to bring in other technology to achieve this task.

Google Cultrual Institute posted 1000 ultra-high resolution images artworks from masters like Pissarro, Signac, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Monet and other well-know artists. They are now available at the Institute’s website. It hopes to help preserve priceless works digitally and to share cultural heritage to anyone around the world.

AdBlock and AdBlock Plus Available for Windows Edge

By admin | May 11, 2016 | IT news | No comments

AdBlock for Edge

Not long ago Microsoft confirmed that it would add ad blocking support for its Edge browser, which is long-awaited by many Edge users. Now Microsoft Insider users can block web advertising with the extensions of both AdBlock and AdBlock Plus.

These two popular ad-blockers for Edge have been released officially in the Windows Store, and they are free of charge. As long as you are running the latest Windows 10 preview build, you can test out the extension-enable browser and install AdBlock or AdBlock Plus extensions to block internet ads in the Edege. The feature is sadi to arrive for everyone this summer with the Anniversary Update of Windows 10.

AdBlock and AdBlock Plus bring many of the same features as versions for other browsers, including controls over what type of ads to block, as well as whitelisting website where it’s ok to display ads. These two similarly named but actually unrelated add-ons received pretty good reviews on Windows Store right after the release.

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As the sucessor of Internet Explorer, Edge gets a big improvements over IE, but it is still not an easy task for Microsoft to convince users to switch from Google Chrome or Firefox to Edge. Edge is released originally without extension support, which is somehow unacceptable for many Microsoft users, especially for those who rely on using extensions for their browsing experience. That may help explain why Edge held a mere 3.9 percent of browser market share as of February. A browser with a library of optional add-ons is critical for many users to navigate the web as they like.

Adding the feature of extension may be a smal victoriy for the Edge browser. Are those third-party extensions for Edge attractive enough to win back the losing users? That remains to be seen. But the support of more and more major extensions for Edge will undoubtedly bring a great convenience to its users. What do you think?

Like this article? Feel free to conmunicate with us, or leave your comment here.

How to Optimize Your SSD in Windows 10?

By admin | May 4, 2016 | How-to Guides | No comments

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Windows 10 includes features to help users optimize different types of drives on their PCs, and it is necessary to defrag Hard Disk Drive at regular intervals to improve computer performance. Solid State Drive may not need defragmenting the same way as conventional hard disk do, but they do require occasional maintenance. Today we gonna talk about why and how to optimize your SSD using Windows built-in tool – Optimize Drives. Continue reading.

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Is it good or bad to trim SSD? why to optimize my SSD? SSD works differently from traditional mechanical hard drives and it supports limited writes. There is no need to defragment SSD too often. But it is possible that drives hit maximum file fragmentation which will result in errors when trying to write or extend the file, and when a drive is highly fragmented, that will slow down the read and write process on drive. That helps explain why you need to optimize SSD at times.

Trim is an operating system function that helps an SSD manage space containing data that has been deleted or invalidated by the operating system. Windows 7 is the first version that recognizes SSD drives, and a Trim command has been available since Windows 7. But at that time this feature was somehow invisible to the end-users. Windows 8 came along with its own set of optimization specifically for Solid State Drives. Now Windows 10 brings in more improvements for SSD optimization. There are a few handy ways to open Optimize Drives in Windows 10:

Way 1:

Click This PC shortcut on the desktop (or open it in File Explorer).
Right click the drive you wanna optimize, and then choose Properties option.
Click Optimize button in the Tools tab to open Optimize Drives app.

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Way 2:

Click This PC shortcut on the desktop (or open it in File Explorer).
Select the target drive, and click the Manage tab in Drive Tools menu.
Click Optimize button in the ribbon to bring up Optimize Drive window.

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Way 3:

Type defrag (or optimize) in the search box.
Click Deframent and Optimize Drive from the result list.

As the Optimize Drive windows opens, you can highlight the drive in the list of volumes and click Optimize button to perform the Trim command. Then you will see a brief status message and the trime operation should be compeleted in a few seconds. Optimize will allow a user to execute trim on a predetermined schedule and run it on a point-and-click basis. Once you delete a large file, you can immedaitely reclaim that deleted space by using this Optimize feature. It is useful on drives that are almost full. Besides, you can click Change settings button in Optimize Drives window to turn scheduled optimization on/off, or change the frequency of automatic optimization.

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If a drive does not appear in Optimize Drives, try to repair the drive with chkdsk first.

Chrome Gets Native Notifications On Mac OS X

By admin | April 8, 2016 | IT news | No comments

As one of the most popular browser, Google Chrome is testing a new option for the Mac version that allows Chrome to support native OS X notification push. Chrome has been using its own in-house notification system before creating the built-in version in OS X, and users have been long complaining about Chrome not utilizing OS X’s notification system. Now this option allows the use of native push notification for the first time. Once enabled, Chrome notifications will be delivered in the same way other alerts on OS X, and Mac users can see Chrome notifications arrive via the native OS X notification interface. Get to know more about this feature?

Though the feature is till in testing, Mac users on even the stable channel of Chrome can enable it with a flag. To turn this native option on, you need to enter this into your Chrome URL bar and then click Enable: chrome://flags/#enable-native-notifications. And the setting will take effect after the relaunch of Chrome. The feature allows Chrome notifications to run through OS X Notification Center, and users can view them in Notification Center alone with other notifications, all of which obey “Do Not Disturb” settings. It also has other implications – the Rich Notification API will no longer work since the OS X does not support such customization.

A developer on the Chromium site notes that the Chrome teams “are actively working on integrating with the OS X native notification center”, and that the feature is already available in the latest Chrome canary build. It should also be pointed out that the Notification Center feature is still in active development, and users who choose to turn this option on might run into some bugs or incompatibilities. Google developers also note that the version you’ll see in the current Chrome release is different to what’s being tested in its unstable nightly builds right now.

As for whether or not the native notification center support will become a full-fledged feature in Chrome, the team warns that “it is not 100% clear either way as we may run into certain roadblocks.”

Anyway, if you have tried this new feature, welcome to share your thoughts with us here.

Snapchat Chap 2.0: Video, Audio, GIFs, Stickers Combined Seamlessly

By admin | March 30, 2016 | IT news | No comments

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Snapchat is one of the most popular mobile apps around, letting users send photos and videos which will self destruct after a few seconds of a person viewing them. Now Snapchat introduces Chat 2.0 with reworked features and brings a more intuitive experience to the users of this service. Let’s take a quick look at the new Snapchat Chat 2.0 features and what’s new with Stories in this March Snapchat update.

With new Chat 2.0 you can make Skype-like video or audio calls by swiping right on a friend’s name and choosing the video camera button or the phone icon. Even if your Snapchat friends are not available, you can also press and hold the video camera button or the phone icon to make a short snippets of video or audio. Once you finish recording, letting go of the button will send this note to your friends instantly. If you wanna delete it during the recording, just drag it to the red “X” in the middle.

When making a video call or a audio call, you can head to your camera roll to pick up the pictures you would like to send to your friends at the same time. Moreover, you can now easily switch between various communication modes. If your circumstances change, to continue the conversation you can quickly change how your chat and speak, i.e. you can seamlessly change from an audio/video call to a note, or to a text chat.

Meanwhile, Chat 2.0 adds over 200 new stickers to help you express more feelings during video, audio or text chats. You can tap the smiley face button to choose the stickers. If you type in a word like “sad” or “miss you” in the chat line, related stickers will be surfaced immediately, allowing you to choose your favorite one.

In addition to the new video & audio features, Snapchat also introduces the so-called Auto-Advance Stories to help you easily watch all your friend’s stories without having to tap and start each other. When you finish viewing a Story, the next one will begin automatically. You can swipe to skip ahead, or pull down to exit the story.

The new Snapchat features do make communication more effective and user-friendly. Then how to update Snapchat on iOS and Android to get the latest new features? Just open Apple App Store (for iOS users) or Google Play (for Android users) on your device and check for updates. If you have installed the latest Snapchat but some new features did not show up, go to the Settings menu to make sure they are switched on.