Posts Tagged ‘disable’
Block a program’s internet access with Windows 8 firewall
If you have some peculiar program installed that you need to have but want all its internet communication blocked you can do that easily with Windows’ built in firewall. On Windows 8 just hit the Windows key to get to the main menu and
- type Firewall.
- Click on Settings on the right pane and
- go to Windows Firewall.
- Click on Advanced settings on the left side of the window.
- On the left pane of the new window, right-click on Outbound Rules and
- select New rule…
Now follow the setup wizards few steps to set the rule up. That’s it! If you happen to need to deactivate the rule for a short time, you can just right-click it and do so:
Turn Off Screen-Keyboard on Windows 7
The screen-keyboard is a useful Windows feature on some occasions, e.g if you want to find out if it’s the new keyboard’s drivers that suddenly make your machine crash, or when you just need to unplug your keyboard for other reasons.
However it can happen that, if you turn on the screen-keyboard a few times on the login screen, it will stick to the desktop and open up every time you log in (be it a bug or adapted behavior). This is annoying if you just unplugged your keyboard to test stuff.
But fortunately we can turn that behavior off easily in the Control Panel:
Open it up and go to the Ease of Access section. Under Explore all settings, click on Use the computer without a mouse or keyboard:
Now uncheck the Use On-Screen Keyboard check-box under Type using a pointing device:
Click OK to save the settings and you’re done!
Add More Tabs to Firefox Before Scrolling Occurs
The past versions of Firefox brought a feature to it that a great deal of users didn’t like because it changed the way tabs are handled in a window. Instead of just showing all tabs at once, Firefox now adds horizontal scrolling to the tab bar in order to prevent the tabs from becoming too small to read its name. That way you can always see what’s on your tabs but don’t have a complete overview of the whole bar anymore.
In order to help out on that an add-on was created that increases the number of tabs that are visible before the overflow scrolling occurs.
It’s called Prevent Tab Overflow and you can find it in the Firefox Add-On database: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noverflow/
Add it and it will get to work instantly. Have a look at the Add-on preferences (Tools>Add-ons>Extensions>Prevent Tab Overflow>Preferences) to see what you can actually do:
While the add-on cannot prevent tab overflow as whole, it can resize the minimum tab width down to 40 pixel (the default in Firefox is 100 pixel). A lot more tabs fit in that way and the scrolling kicks in on a point where it actually makes sense not to shrink the tabs any further.
Deactivate Lock screen on startup in Windows 8
One of the most unnecessary things that Windows 8 brings to desktop computers might be the lock screen you need to wipe away every time you start your machine – luckily it’s also one of the things you can disable.
To do so, open the Local Group Policy Editor (as shown here).
Browse the left pane for Computer Configuration > Administrative Tools > Control Panel > Personalization and double-click Do not display the lock screen on the right pane. Enable the setting and confirm by clicking Ok!
Remove global menu in Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment (Linux)
The default settings in the Unity desktop environment move a window’s control panel away from the actual window up to the top panel of the screen – this is called ‘global menu’.
Since that is a major change of paradigm and might hinder your workflow if you decided to switch, here is how to reverse the settings:
Open a terminal and enter following command:
sudo apt-get autoremove appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-qt
Afterwards you need to log out or reboot your machine. To enable it again if you should change your mind, just reinstall the packages:
sudo apt-get install appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-qt
Disable Autoplay on Windows 7
If you are one of those who like to deal with inserted DVDs, USB keys and other removable media yourself, the Autoplay feature of Windows will most likely do nothing but being clicked away by you.
If you want to save yourself a pop-up and a click you can disable Autoplay. To do so, open the menu and type in gpedit.msc. The group policies window will open and you’ll see a navigation pane on its left. Browse it for
Local Computer Policy > User/Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > AutoPlay Policies
Pick User or Computer Configuration depending on the range you want your settings to have. On the right pane, there should now be some settings, on of them being Turn off AutoPlay. DOuble-click it for the configuration window to open.
On the left, click the Enabled radio button. On the options pane you can choose between turning AutoPlay off for all media or just for CDs or removable media drives (since those are the most common I’d recommend to choose that). When you’re done, click Apply and exit the group policies. Next time you insert something you won’t be bothered with pop-ups.
Change Ubuntu logo on lightdm login manager
If you install lightdm on distributions other than Ubuntu you may want to have the Ubuntu logo in the lower left corner removed or altered. This can be done easily by editing the original picture file which is located in /usr/share/unity-greeter/ (remember to open the folder as administrator, or do it right from a terminal as root).
The file you want to edit is logo.png. You can either rename it, so it doesn’t show up on login anymore (for example, rename it to logo.png.bak – if you want it back, just remove the new extension again), or edit it with a graphical editor right away so that it reads something more appropriate to your distribution or login screen.
Disable guest login-entry on lightdm (Ubuntu’s login manager)
Ubuntu’s login manager, lightdm, offers a guest login option by default.
Most of you won’t use it anyway, so why keep it at all? You can disable that entry in the lightdm configuration file, which is /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf. Open it from a terminal using
sudo gedit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
At the bottom of the file, insert following line:
allow-guest=false
Afterwards, restart your machine and the guest login option will be gone. To bring it back, just erase the line again or set it to true.
Disable AVG Advisor memory usage pop-up
Users of AVG 2012 antivirus software will already have noticed the AVG Advisor pop-ups informing you about high memory usage of browsers (I usually get them from 300 MB RAM upwards) which come up relatively often and are quite annoying since your browser uses more memory the more tabs you open.
But as in most cases you can simply disable this feature along with the memory monitoring. To do this, open the AVG control panel from the tray icon. On the top bar, click on Tools and select Advanced settings…. In there, select Appearance from the left panel. Under System tray notifications, uncheck the Display AVG Advisor notification to turn those off and click Apply. You will now no longer be warned about your browser’s memory usage.
Disable Plugin-Container in Firefox
Plugin-container is a Firefox process designed to ‘out-source’ the plugins used by the browser. Firefox’ model is based on the use of plugins to add functionality, however this goes along with a chance of instability due to a malfunctioning plugin – this would cause the whole browser to collapse since the plugins were all included in one central Firefox process. With the implementation of the plugin-container, the plugins are seperated from the browser process, making it more stable. Now if a plugin crashes, Firefox remains unharmed.
It is known however that this feature causes serious performance issues with many users, that’s why it might be a good idea to test what happens if you deactivate plugin-container (the plugins are not disabled that way, they are just stitched to the main process again).
To do so, open Firefox and direct the URL line to about:config. This is the internal configuration of Firefox, be sure to take the warning that will be shown seriously.
In the search bar on top, enter dom.ipc. A few boolean entries will be shown whose name begins with dom.ipc.plugins (on Firefox 9 there are two, while there are five on some older versions).
Set all of them to false to disable plugin-container:
If this results in performance improvement for you, leave the settings as they are, if there is none however, it is recommendable to switch them back to improve Firefox’ stability.