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Ever though of creating a Safely Remove Hardware icon on your desktop? You may ask why because the icon will usually appear at the taskbar, but for some odd reason, mine will not always appear, so sometime i have no other choice but to pull the USB stick right away. I don’t know what caused this happen, it’s Windows anyway and apparently i’m not the only one who facing this problem.

However, i found this simple workaround, which is create a shortcut on your desktop to open the Safely Remove Hardware menu, this is how you do it:-

• On your desktop, right click then choose New > Shortcuts after that copy and paste the following:

%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

• Press next, you will be ask to give a name for your shortcut, any name will do, or just name it Safely Remove Hardware, then press finish.

That’s it! You are done, the shortcut should appear on your desktop. But for now you probably in love with your new shortcut, so you feel like want to make it fancier a bit, and here is how you can add an icon for it:-

• Right click on your shortcut then choose Properties.
• Go to the Shortcut tabs and click on the button Change Icon….
• A menu should appear with a bunch of icon for you to choose, you can pick any icon from here OR you may paste the following and press enter for the Windows Safely Remove Hardware icon.

%windir%\system32\HotPlug.dll

Hope this helps.

Ever though of installing multiple standalone version of Internet Explorer in your machine and running them side by side? Maybe you ask why, but sometime for web designer, it’s necessary for them to install multiple different web browser just to see how their website turn out to be before publishing it to the public, and because of the CSS bugs in Internet Explorer, some web designer will actually install multiple version of Internet Explorer in case something odd happen to their website.

Few weeks ago i accidentally upgraded my Internet Explorer to version 7, before this i tried not to upgrade it because majority of my visitors are using Internet Explorer 6, so now i think i need to keep a version Internet Explorer 6.

So i went Google around and i found this website, there you can find all the archives of web browser including all range of Internet Explorer, and further search leads me to here, an installer that contain all the Internet Explorer 3 until Internet Explorer 6.

Got a new rig with kickass graphic card? Got extra RAM to spend? How about trying Microsoft’s soon to be release Windows Vista RC1?? What if i’m telling you that you can get the product key for free?? Got to be kidding right? No!! I’m serious about this!! So read on!!

Microsoft’s Windows Vista, is the new operating system from Microsoft, an operating system with a completely new visual style named Windows Aero that will blow your mind away, and the price too, i doubt, scheduled to be release on January 2007.

However, Windows Vista RC1 is available for free, mean that you can have a sneak preview of this operating system for free!! OMFG!! But you have to download the ISO, and the size is a wooping 2.5 GB of DVD ISO, so if you don’t mind to download the ISO with our crappy Streamyx, continue to read for the product key.

To get the product key is easy, all you have to do is go to Microsoft Live.com and login with your Passport account, answer a few very simple question and Microsoft will give you the product key, they will even send an email to you! After that go download the ISO for 32-bit edition or the 64-bit edition.

But please remember that this is just an RC1 release, RC mean Release Candidate, a Beta version of software with just a few final tweak and is ready to release, so this mean that there are no support from Microsoft (no not me either) if anything happen to your PC, so use it at your own risk!

For those who upgraded their Yahoo! Messenger to the latest one, here are some tricks to remove the advertisement, but bear in mind that this tricks involve altering your system registry value, so if you are not sure what you are doing or don’t even know what is system registry, then please stop now, i won’t be responsible if anything happen to your computer.

Here we go…

Yahoo! Messenger

1. Exit your Yahoo! Messenger.
2. Open Regedit and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Yahoo\pager\YUrl
3. Create new String with the following name on it.
• Messenger Ad
• Webcam Upload Ad
• Webcam Viewer Ad
• Webcam Viewer Ad Big
• Webcam Viewer Ad Medium
• Change Room Banner
• Conf Adurl
• Chat Adurl
• Y Content
4. Modify all the string to the value *(an asterisk).
5. Close your Regedit and go to your Yahoo! Messenger directory, by default should be
   C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\.
6. Navigate to the Cache folder and find the file named urls.xml.
7. Open urls.xml and delete all the content, left only “”.
8. Save urls.xml and close it, after that change the attribute to Read-Only.
9. And now you are done, go open your Yahoo and check to see it works or not!

Disclaimer: Once again i would like to reminds you that i will take no responsibility for anything happen to your PC after the tricks, so do this on your own risks.

Have you ever think of removing those annoying advertisement from your Instant Messenger? I know that it doesn’t effect your chatting experience, but you just don’t feel like want to spare some bandwidth for those stupid advertisement don cha? I know how you feel…

Anyway thanks to me, here i found some tricks to remove advertisement from ICQ Lite and Yahoo! Messenger, Enjoy^^

ICQ Lite

1. Exit your ICQ Lite.
2. Go to the folder where you install your ICQ Lite, most probably
   C:\Program Files\ICQLite
3. Browse to the folder LiteDataFiles, most probably in
   C:\Program Files\ICQLite\LiteDataFiles
   
4. Look for the three XML files named banners.xml, datafiles.xml and psearch.xml, write down the name in a piece of paper, or just remember them.
5. Rename all the three XML files to something else, for example like banners.xml to banners1.xml, anything will do.
6. Then create three folders, and name them to the same name as the three XML files earlier, which are banners.xml, datafiles.xml and psearch.xml.
7. You are done now, open your ICQ Lite and the advertisements should disappear.

Here are the trick to remove advertisement from Yahoo! Messenger, but warning!! this trick will involve the alter of windows registry, if you never play around with windows registry before, or don’t even know what is it, then i would suggest you to stop at here, for i won’t be taking any responsibility if anything happen to your PC, nor helping you to recover it.

Yahoo! Messenger

1. Exit your Yahoo! Messenger.
2. Open Regedit and navigate to
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Yahoo\pager\YUrl
3. Create a new string value and name it to Messenger Ad with the value *(an asterisk).
4. You are done, now go open your yahoo and check it works or not!

Basically you are done with the Yahoo! Messenger trick, however if you wanted to, you may change the registry value from the quote below to *, which will remove advertisement for other part of the Yahoo! Messenger, like the advertisement while waiting webcam to load, and if you can’t find the registry value, don’t worry, just create one, they all are string value.

Yahoo! Messenger

• Webcam Upload Ad
• Webcam Viewer Ad
• Webcam Viewer Ad Big
• Webcam Viewer Ad Medium
• Change Room Banner
• Conf Adurl
• Chat Adurl

Please notes that this registry tricks only work until Yahoo! Messenger 8 Beta, it doesn’t work for Yahoo! Messenger 8 Final release. Too bad huh?

Disclaimer: I will take no responsibility for anything happen to your PC after the tweaks, so do this on your own risks.