I personally really like this feature and have been using it years ago since I learned it because I don’t like seeing the letters cluttering up in my windows explorer.

Let’s say I want to map a new partition to a folder called temp under my c: drive. Here is how:

1. First of all, make a folder temp, and make sure the folder empty before doing the map.

2. Launch disk management, simply click Start menu and type in “disk management” in the search box, and hit Enter.

If you have an unformatted hard drive connected to the computer, the disk management will automatically detect it and prompt you asking for the initialize. You will have to initialize it before doing anything else.

3. Right-click on the disk and pick New Simple Volume…, which starts a wizard that will guide you through the process. Click Next to start.

4. Type in the size you wish to have for the new partition in MB. 400,000 in this case, and Click Next.

5. Here is where we can map the new partition to the existing folder. Instead of leaving it as the default which is Assign the following drive letter, let’s select the second one and browse the Temp folder we have created in the step 1, and click Next.

6. Leave the option as formatting as NTFS, type in the label for the new volume. And click Next.

7. Review all the settings, and click Finish.

Wait for a few seconds for the operation to finish. Once it’s done, I now have a new volume labeled as Test, and sized at 390.63GB

Because we mapped the new volume to a folder, let’s see what it looks like in Windows Explorer.

The property page also shows that the folder is actually a mounted volume.

If you want to know the details about this volume, click Properties button in the Properties window above.

That’s it. Now you have a folder that’s mapped with a new formatted partition. Enjoy.

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The new Libraries feature essentially is an “empty” directory that aggregate all the folders/directory into the same place. Because of this you can’t cut/past an item to the libraries directory itself. Personally I found frustrating when this happened. Fortunately there is ways you can disable the “Libraries” feature in Windows 7.

Guys over how-to-geek made a simple registry hack to enable or disable this particular feature in Windows 7.

Download the hack

(Note: before run the registry hack you are highly recommended to have a backup of your current Registry file)

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Now, it was announced that the beta for the next version of Microsoft Security Essentials have been released to the public. And you can get it from here on the Microsoft Connect page. You will need a MSN live account in order to download the beta software.

The installation process is smart enough knowing if you have a previous version running. And it will run the upgrade process instead of a brand new installation if it does. The process takes about a few minutes to finish and once it’s finished you may need to reboot your computer before you can use the tool.

The user interface in the new beta still remain the same with only two differences in the Settings tab.

One is in Real-time protection section, where it adds three options for monitoring file and program activity and network protection option.

And the other is in Microsoft SpyNet section, where it gives you the option whether or not you want to join the Microsoft SpyNet.

What’s more changes or new features though are actually in the backend.

• Windows Firewall integration, which now ask if you would like to turn the Windows firewall on or off.
  
• Enhanced protection for web-based threats – which is more integrated with IE to provide more protection against online threats. It adds another reason telling people why you should pick IE as the primary internet browser. However, I am hoping that later on it can adds the support to other browsers as well.
• New protection engine – which offers a more advanced detection and cleanup capability with better performance in the back.
• Network inspection system – a new feature that is only available to Windows 7 system adds another layer of protection against network-based exploits.

The beta program offers both 32-bit and 64-bit version of MSE for testing but so far seems to be limited only in US, Israel (English only), China (Simplified Chinese only), and Brazil (Brazilian Portuguese only).

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NirSoft’s DNSDataView is a free portable DNS look up tool that allows you to easily retrieve all kinds of DNS records for any given domains, including MX, NS, A, SOA, TXT, and AAAA records. However, as Michael pointed out, CNAME, PTR, and SVR records don’t seem to be supported in this tool.

The tool is deadly easy to use. Simply download the tool from the website, and extract the executable file to your local computer. Since it’s a portable tool you don’t need to install it first in order to run it. Once it’s launched,

First, type in all domains you want to query for the DNS records in the the Select Domains window.

And hit OK button, the tool will start querying the DNS data automatically and displays the results in the window once it’s finished.

You can then output the data to a plain text file. If you have a long list of domain searched, you can search the specific item you are looking for.

What other than a GUI interface actually makes this tool better than the classic NSLOOKUP is that it not only allows you to query a list of domains from one run but also gives you the option to use the different DNS server instead of the default ones assigned to your network card in case you have the suspicious that the bundled DNS server may not perform the query equally same as the other external ones. Just tick the option “use the following DNS Server” in the Select Domains window and specify the IP address of DNS server before hitting OK button to perform the query.

If you are the one like me who often need to use the classic NSLOOKUP to look up the DNS records, you should try out this tool. It’s more convenient.

The tool works perfectly on Windows 7, both 32-bit and 64-bit.

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Basically, once the feature is turned on, Window will detect a physical file system error and automatically fix it on the fly without you even noticing it happened. Because of this, you actually have a lot less chances having to run CHKDSK to check the disk manually because most likely the errors you suspected may have been fixed by this self-healing process already.

NTFS Self-healing is turned on by default in Windows 7 but if you are not sure you can use the following command to make sure. Note that the command has to be run as Administrator.

fsutil repair query c:

However, there is a possible downside that you may have already been thinking and wondering. Yes, the data may potentially be removed silently without user’s knowledge during the self-healing process. To address this issue, Microsoft added BugCheckOnCorrupt option that does something you may think it’s crazy.

It throws a BSOD (blue screen of death) and shuts everything down instead of attempting to fix the error, if the system discovers any NTFS corruptions.

Yes, not every BSOD is bad. Some of them happened in purpose, just like this as designed. It does sound crazy because why you would want the system crash, but from the data safety perspective, this attempt is actually better because it increases the chances of having the data recovered from the corruption.

Besides, this is not turned on by default and it’s suggested that you only need to turn it on only if you have the doubts on your hard drive.

To turn it on, simply type the following command as Administrator.

fsutil behavior set BugcheckOnCorrupt 1

Reboot your computer and run the following command as Administrator again to set which drive you want to check.

fsutil repair set <drive name> 0×10

To turn it off after it’s turned on:

fsutil behavior set BugcheckOnCorrupt 0

That’s it, hope it helps.

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Because of these, a good operation system, such as Windows 7, always provides some good tools in place to help users to keep their data safe. And the old school dos command chkdsk still remain existed among them.

First of all, you will have to run through the Command Prompt window as administrator.

Secondly, you can use it to check all sorts type of disks, including fixed hard drives, solid-state drive, removable disks, etc, basically anything that can be attached and assigned a drive letter. But you can’t check with this tool is the network mapped drive.

Thirdly, it helps to fix the problems that may indicate an easily-fixed inconsistency or data corruption.

For example, you can perform a quick checkup on a drive that you suspect something might be wrong by

CHKDSK <volume>

Then, if you suspect there might be more, run:

CHKDSK <volume> /f

to perform a disk checkup and try to fix any errors found on the disk. Or,

CHKDSK <volume> /r

to perform a disk checkup and locate any bad sectors during the checkup, and recover the readable data if possible.

If you want to see what else chkdsk offers, type the following command for the full list.

CHKDSK /?

What is more in action is that chkdsk will usually run automatically when something happen badly but only when the system next time boots. It will not run automatically when the system is still running.

So when should I be using this tool?

it would be a good idea to run this tool on a drive that falls into one of the following scenarios:

• If a hard drive start making crunching sounds, which usually indicates there are damages happening on the drive right now and you should start backing up your files immediately.
• If you start seeing BSOD on your computer which never happened before.
• If you start seeing the performance on your computer dropped dramatically, especially when reading or opening the file.
• If you start seeing the hard drive light on the front panel of your computer keeps on for a long period of time.
• If there is anything that you suspect that the hard drive is dying.

If you suspect that the system volume may have the bad sector on the disk, you will have to run the tool on Recover Console in order to fix the errors. Otherwise, running a chkdsk on a system volume will only be in read-only mode.

What’s new in Windows 7 for this tool is that the result of every chkdsk run will be logged in the application event log for future reference. Here is one from a checkup that found the errors.

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• NTFS Self-Healing is An Overlooked but Useful Feature in Windows 7 (1)

The biggest problem most people having when using command line is they don’t know what to do. If you are comfortable with using command line, then it’s not a problem. If not, EasyBCD is the way to go.

Months ago I’ve written an article on how to clean out unnecessary “Earlier Version Of Windows” from the bootloader. Well, now you can do the same but much simpler.

After you download and install EasyBCD, the first time you run this program it will list out the number of boot entries you have on your system.

Use “Change Settings” you can easily manage and set your default booting option, and from there you can add/delete additional bootloader entry.

Don’t worry if you really messed up they even have a “Diagnostics Center” that can recover any missing boot files, and can reset bcdedit storage.

Give EasyBCD a try you might find it’s useful. Sure it did for me.

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As usual the beginning of a new month is a chance to change your desktop’s wallpaper again. Here is another brand new month’s wallpaper collection from the Smashing Magazine.

Enjoy the summer everyone !

Download Smashing Magazine July 2010 Windows 7 Theme (calendar)

Download Smashing Magazine July 2010 Windows 7 Theme (no calendar)

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Ninite supports a large list of software, you get tons choices from web browsers, IM client, media playback, images editor, word processor, anti-various, system run time, file sharing, utilities, compression tools, developer tools and more.

This tool also will install apps based on your OS version and bit. It will automatically pickup the best available version for your existing OS, so you don’t have to worry about install 64 bit software separately.

Try out Ninite now

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We’ve discussed about the WEI in detail awhile back. It was only a guide for you when you purchasing a PC, however, that said you might want to be careful when you purchasing a PC only based on the score from WEI, because some retailers will purposely hack those values to appear higher than normal.

You can also play this trick to other peoples as well.

Here Is How You Can Change the WEI Score

Go to C:\Windows\Performance\WinSAT\DataStore find the file started with Formal.Assessment . WinSAT

Open the file for edit (if you only have the “Initial” then open that for edit, if you have a “Recent” open the most recent one)

Search for the String “SystemScore” from there you can change the value in between the tag. You can also change all the following values for Memory, CPU, GPU and disk scores etc.

Once you’ve done that save the file and go back to the System page in the control panel. Woooha !

Magically your PC are now top the line

Enjoy

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