Archive for April, 2010

Shrink and Resize simple volumes

As most standard Windows installations format the entire disk with one partition or volume (excluding the hidden 100MB system partition), creating additional partitions without installing a new hard disk requires you to resize or better to shrink your existing volume. In certain computer setups, one would be better off with two or more partitions rather than having one large volume (sometimes referred to as the boot drive or the c: local disk). A typical case might be when creating a partition that hosts backups. Usually, backups are large files that take plenty of hard disk space and may halt your system because after so many jobs no free space may be left available for the system to operate. Also, it is by far more simpler to resize an existing volume rather than backing up all data, deleting and re-creating two or more partitions when your system is already installed.

To shrink a volume using Disk Management, perform the following procedure:

1. Open the Disk Management console by typing disk management in the Search text box from the start menu, and click the Create and format hard disk partitions link
2. From the Disk Management console, right-click the volume you want to shrink and click Shrink volume – the system checks and discovers the maximum available shrink size.
3. From the Shrink dialog box specify the amount which you want to shrink the volume or leave the displayed value to shrink to the maximum amount
4. The shrink process proceeds without further prompting and at the end you should be able to see a new unallocated space. Then, prepare this newly created space as a new volume.
5. To revert back before you prepare the new volume you can right-click the shrinked volume and click Extend Volume and follow the Welcome to the Extend Volume Wizard
   Read more…

Approving drivers that do not have a trusted certificate

If a device driver package is not signed with a trusted certificate then the user installing the driver needs administrative privileges to be able to complete the installation. You can allow ordinary users (non-administrator user accounts) to install specific drivers that do not have a trusted digital signature by adding them into the driver store. The driver store is a protected area that contains device drivers’ packages that have been approved for installation on the computer. Sometimes, this process is known as staging a driver package.

Read more…

An overloaded USB hub!

External USB hubs that have their own power supplies do not consume power from the computer and most often are called self-powered devices. On the other hand, the computer’s internal USB hub is bus-powered, that is, it consumes the computer’s bus power. One needs to be aware of devices that require a lot of power such as, cameras and should take the necessary precautions to protect both the device and the computer’s motherboard.

From the Device Manager’s USB controllers node you can check the power allocations for a USB hub and find if too many devices are using that hub.
Read more…

Modifying the device drivers installation permissions

By default, updated device drivers from the Windows Update repository are downloaded and installed automatically on a computer. However, if drivers are not found in the driver store then, only an administrator (user with administrative permissions) can install them. You can change this behaviour by configuring a computer Group Policy so that ordinary users can install specific drivers.

Read more…