Clean boot is a boot configuration, when minimal set of services and autorun programs starts with Windows. It’s a good tool for troubleshooting software issues. 

 To load Windows with clean boot configuration, follow those steps:

1)   1) Press “Start” button.

2) Type “msconfig”.

3) Press Enter or left click on “msconfig” link, that has appeared in search results.

4) On “General” tab, uncheck “Load startup items”.

5) On “Services” tab, check “Hide all Microsoft services”.

6) Press “Disable all” button and then “OK”.

7) It will prompt you to restart system - choose “Restart”.

1)      8) Now, system will load with “clean boot” configuration.

We can see the following picture during OS boot after a bad shutdown, power interruption, etc.

That picture means that special program was launched. It’s called chkdsk and it can display the file system integrity status of hard disks, fix logical file system errors or check the disk surface for physical errors and bad sectors.

But it happens that errors are present on the disks, but chkdsk doesn’t launch automatically. In such case you can run it manually using one of the next methods.

First method - using Graphical Interface.

1. Open Start menu and click on the Computer option.

2. Right-click on the disk that you want to check and choose Properties.

3. Navigate to Tools tab and press Check now button.

4. Press Start button in the next window.

NOTE 1: If you want to scan your disk for bad sectors then check second option Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors.

NOTE 2: If you are attempting to check disk that in use (for example, your system disk) you receive next warning message:

Press Scheduled disk check and close all windows. Your disk will be checked at next computer boot.

Second method – using Command Prompt.

1. Open Start menu, choose All Programs, Accessories and click Run (or just press Windows + R keys on your keyboard simultaneously).

2. Type cmd in the opened string.

3. In the Command Prompt type:

chkdsk volume: /f

– volume: – disk letter (in my case it is c drive);

– /f – parameter that fixes errors on the disk.

NOTE: The disk must be locked. If chkdsk cannot lock the drive, a message appears that asks you if you want to check the drive the next time you restart the computer:

Press Y key on your keyboard. chkdsk command will check your disk for errors and fix them at next computer boot.

You will see window below:

chkdsk command has got other parameters, you can see them by typing

chkdsk /? in the Command Prompt. 

You can use simple administrator user accounts to perform almost part of the actions in Windows 7. But sometimes you might need to use built-in administrator account.

You can easily use that account by following the instructions:

1. Open Command Prompt: click Start button and type cmd in the Start Search string. Find Command Prompt in the search result list and right-click on this item, then choose Run as administrator.

2. Press Yes button if you are prompted for User Account Control permission.

3. At the Command Prompt type:

    net user administrator /active:yes

press Enter button on your keyboard.

4. If you want set the password for this account at the Command Prompt type

    net user administrator <Password>

and then press Enter button on your keyboard.

Note: Replace the your_password with desired password that you want to set to built-in administrator account.

5. Close Command Prompt.

6. Log off the current user account and check the results.

If you want disable built-in administrator account you can perform that by following the instructions:

1. Open Command Prompt: click Start button and type cmd in the Start Search string. Find Command Prompt in the search result list and right-click on this item, then choose Run as administrator.

2. In the Command Prompt type:

    net user administrator /active:no

press Enter button on your keyboard.

3. Close Command Prompt.

4. Log off the current user account and check the results.

Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that contains configuration settings and options on Windows operating systems. When you install/uninstall some software, drivers you make some changes in the registry. Also some viruses or other malware can make changes in the registry. Sometimes it can cause many problems beginning from slow performance to broken file associations. These problems can be fixed but in this case you need to edit registry entries. Every time you attempt to make changes in the registry you should firstly back up the registry. That’s why you need to know how back up the registry and how to restore it back. There are the step-by-step instructions below.

To open Registry Editor:

1. Click the Start  button, click Run.

type regedit in the Open string and click Ok.

2. If you don’t have Run command in the Start menu you can open registry editor in next way: click Start  button and type regedit in the search string.

Click on regedit.exe.

3. After performing the actions above the Registry Editor window will be opened.

To back up registry:

1. Press File menu and choose Export....

2. In the Save in: drop down list choose the folder where you want to save your backup file. Type the name of the backup file into File name: text box and press Save.

3. Exit Registry Editor.

To restore registry:

1. Press File menu and choose Import....

2. Navigate to folder that contains your backup file. Click on backup file and press Open.

You will see the process of registry import:

Also you can easily restore registry by right-clicking on backup file and choosing Merge.

or by double-clicking on it.

In the window that will appear press Yes.

NOTE: During restore process only registry entries that are contained in backup file will be replaced. The new entries that don’t exist in backup file won’t be deleted.

3. Exit Registry Editor.

4. Restart your computer to changes take effect. Click on Start button , click Shut down, choose Restart.

Windows 7 allows you to manage whole system volume level and each application separately.

To change the volume level for any desired application, follow this simple steps:

1. Right-click on Speakers icon in notification area.

2. Choose "Open volume mixer".

3. At appeared window you may change volume level for different applications.

Mac OS X includes Samba support by default, and this is really handy if you’d like to remotely restart and monitor services running on a Windows machine.

To list services running on the Windows machine, use this command:

A practical example would be:

After identifying the service you want to restart, you issue the following command to stop the service:

Then you can restart (or start) the service by using the following command:

You can access the Character Viewer in most Mac apps by just hitting Command+Option+T

From this special character viewer, you can easily insert any special character and browse through all of the special characters available to Mac OS X. You can also use it to insert special characters in foreign languages, assuming you have the foreign language packs installed.

Starting in Mac OS X Leopard, you may have noticed that when you download a file from the web and go to open it, you will get a prompt saying something along these lines.

This is Mac OS X just being safe, but if you always know for sure what you’re downloading it could even be overly safe. You can disable this quarantine message by launching the Mac Terminal and typing the following command:

You will then need to reboot (although killing the Finder should work as well) for the changes to take effect. To reverse this and get the file quarantine message back, type:

Again you will need to reboot (or kill the Finder) to have the changes back.

You can remove the “Blah is an application downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to open it?” on a per application basis by using the following command:

If you want to remove the that warning message from all in your ~/Downloads directory, you can type the following command:

Remember this method only effects items you choose to specify.

You can use the tab key to autocomplete any path in the Finder Go To Folder window (Command+Shift+G).

To try it out, open the Go To Folder window and start typing the path to a folder, like ~/Library/Pre then hit the tab key to complete the rest of “Pre” with “Preferences” – this is extremely useful when you are accessing lengthy paths in your filesystem.

Auto-completion should be familiar to anyone with a unix background, since it is regularly used within the command line interface.