Replace your missing Desktop IE icon in XP SP3

If you've installed service pack 3 in Windows XP and removed the Internet Explorer icon from your desktop you may have also realized that it's not so simple to replace the icon. Oh sure you can just create a shortcut to the program itself but then you won't have all the right click menu items associated with the original icon. In previous service packs, Microsoft allowed the recreation of the icon in a menu inside the control panel's display settings. Since their court battles about the integration of IE inside the operating system they seemed to have removed this feature all together.

Please only do this if you are moderately comfortable with the registry editor. Manipulating keys in the registry can really mess up your OS. That being said, enabling the icon can be done by opening your registry editor start/run/regedit and Navigating to the following registry key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explore\HideDesktopIcons\

You may see either NewStartPanel like I did or ClassicStartMenu, inside whichever one your using you would create a new key then inside that key you create a DWORD (32-bit) value named {871C5380-42A0-1069-A2EA-08002B30309D} and set it with value of 0 (dword:00000000).

After doing that, if you've done it correctly you can refresh the desktop by pressing F5 or right click on it and click refresh.

Voila, your icon should be restored!
Happy computing...

A nice partition Magic Alternative...

So you've got a drive that's dying and you want to copy it's contents over to a new drive. Normally people would use Norton Ghost to do the job and I must say Ghost does a fantastic job at it as I've used the product many times in an industrial setting. However today I just needed to recover some data from a dying drive before the drive failed and put it on a larger one. I didn't have a copy of Ghost anywhere in my disks, not sure where my disk went so onto the google search engine I went. Very quickly I found what I was looking for. A free and I must say very flexible product called Clonezilla. In my situation i was able to use it to clone my friends drive to a remote SSH location...

Huh? What do you mean by remote location?

Well it means that Clonezilla created an image file for me but not on the machine I'm working with... It grabs the data and stores it over the network on another machine. In my case it is the 500GB sata raid drive in my server. This means that I will retain the state that the machine is in so if the drive fails I can simply re image it from that ssh location. Theoretically this would even work from a far off remote location but on the local network it would be MUCH MUCH faster. I have a gigabit connection so things run smooth as can be and it doesn't affect my usual web traffic.

I recommend you use Clonezilla if you need a free alternative to commercial cloning software.

Cheers!~