How to Install Windows XP using USB Flash Disk

What you need:
- USB Flash Disk drive with at least 1 GB of capacity. High speed is not necessary but preferred.
- usb_prep8 (download it here) and bootsect (download it here)
- a personal computer or laptop with Windows Xp or Vista installed (so, you have a computers to set up your bootable USB Flash Disk)
- A genuine copy of Windows XP or Vista.

Procedure (for copying XP to USB and configuring USB for installing XP)

1. Extract usb_prep8 and bootsect.
2. In usb_prep8 folder. Double click usb_prep8.cmd. A command prompt will open.
3. Press any key to continue. A PeToUSB window will open;
4. Don’t change anything in the PeToUSB window, just click “Start”. Formatting of your USB will then start. It will only take a few seconds.
5. DO NOT close the two windows (PetoUSB and usb_prep8). Now open a new command prompt by typing “cmd” in the Start->Run box. In this NEW command prompt, go to the directory where bootsect.exe is saved. Now type “bootsect.exe /nt52 X:“. Change “X” with the letter drive directory of your USB drive.
NOTE: When running the bootsect.exe command you cannot have any windows open displaying the content of your USB stick. If all went well you should see “Bootcode was successfully updated on all targeted volumes.” Now close this command prompt (Still, Do not close usb_prep8).
6. Now close PeToUSB window.
7. Now you need to enter the correct information for numbers 1-3.
Press 1 and then enter. A folder browse window will open for you to browse to the location of you XP setup files (aka your cdrom drive with xp cd in it)
Press 2 and enter a letter NOT currently assigned to a drive on your PC, say Z
Press 3 and enter the drive letter of your USB stick
Press 4 to start the process.
8. The script will ask you if its ok to format drive Z:. This is just a temp drive the program creates to cache the windows installation files. Press Y then enter.
9. Once it’s done formatting, press enter to continue again, you will now see the program copying Windows XP files from your CD to the temp drive it created. This will take around 3-5 minutes. Once this is done press enter to continue again.
10. Next you will see a box pop up asking you to copy the files from temp drive to USB drive. Of course, click “Yes”. This will take around 15 minutes, depending on the speed of your USB. In my case, it took around 30 Minutes.
11. Once the program has completed copy files a popup window asking if you would like to USB drive to be preferred boot drive U: select YES on this window
12. You’re done with this part. Now select yes to unmount the virtual drive.

Procedure 2 (Installing XP into your PC without CD-ROM using USB thumb drive)
1. Insert your USB then start your PC, then go to BIOS set-up. Set USB as your primary boot device. If it did not boot on the USB after doing this, there is an option in the BIOS where you can change the primary and secondary memory, set USB as the primary. When doing this, I also changed the OS installation from “finished” to “start” just to make sure that the installation will work.
2. On the startup menu you have two options, select option number for text mode setup.
3. From this point on, it is just like any other windows XP installation. When prompt, delete all the partition. Recreate the primary partition on your PC and format it using NTFS.
4. Once the text mode portion of setup is complete, the computer will reboot. This time, boot into the GUI mode.
5. Once the GUI portion of setup is complete you will again have to boot into GUI mode to complete the XP installation until you end up at your XP desktop. It is very important that you DO NOT REMOVE THE USB STICK before this point. Once you can see your start menu it is safe to remove the usb stick and reboot your pc to make sure everything worked.

How to Remove Google Text Ads

It seems that almost every web page you view these days has Google AdSense texts ads spread across the top or down the side.
These ads have never bothered me. They are easy enough to ignore and besides, website owners are entitled to earn a living just like the rest of us.
However, lately some sites have started embedding the Google ads in the center of the page or worse still, right in the middle of a block of text. So I decided enough was enough and started looking for ways to block the ads.
It turns out that it's dead easy to stop them. In fact there are many ways you can do it. For example Firefox users can use the AdBlock or CustomizeGoogle extensions to kill the ads while Internet Explorer users can use one of the many ad-blocker add-ins such as AddSubtract, WebWasher or the excellent freeware program IE7Pro.
Perhaps the simplest and most universally applicable method is to use the Windows Hosts file to block the address of the Google ad-server.
There is another advantage in using this technique; it will help you develop an understanding of the Hosts file and its many uses.

The Windows Hosts file

This a file on your computer that can be used to locally translate the names of web sites into IPs. IPs are sets of four numbers separated by dots like 65.109.128.16. They are the real addresses of the internet not web site names (URLS). Names are only a convenience and have to be translated into IPs. For example, the name (URL) of my website is techsupportalert.com but its IP, its "real" address on the internet, is actually 72.52.134.218.
Normally this kind of translation takes place at your ISP. They have a special server dedicated to the task called a DNS server. Whenever you type a URL like www.yahoo.co.uk into your browser address window, the DNS server translates the name into the corresponding IP 203.84.219.114. It's automatic and requires no involvement from you.
However, you can also do it locally on your own PC and that's where the Windows Hosts file comes into play.
The Hosts file is just a plain text file containing a simple list of web site names (URLs) and their corresponding IPs. Here's an example of what a Hosts file might look like:
203.84.219.114 www.yahoo.co.uk
216.239.115.141 www.cnet.com
You can think of this like an address book. In an address book you look up a name and find the address. With the Hosts file you look up a web site name (URL) and find the address (IP). In the example above, any reference to the name www.yahoo.co.ukwill directed to the address 203.84.219.114.
Now, the Hosts file on most computers has nothing in it. That's fine because the DNS translation is usually handled by your ISP.
If your Hosts file does have entries then these are used for the DNS translation for those sites instead of your ISPs DNS server. This is actually fractionally quicker as it saves a step. In fact. some web accelerators store thousands of popular sites in your Hosts file to take advantage of this slight increase in speed.
But there's another common usage for the Hosts file: to block addresses. This is done by using a dummy address, typically 127.0.0.1, that goes nowhere. For example, consider this entry:
127.0.0.1 www.yahoo.co.uk
With this entry in the hosts file, any reference to www.yahoo.co.uk will be redirected to the address 127.0.0.1. Now that address is not a valid web address for any real web site. In fact, by convention it refers to your own computer.
If you have this entry in your Hosts file and you type www.yahoo.co.uk into your browser, you'll get an error message: "Host cannot be found."
This is the very technique that we can use to block Google text ads.

Stopping Google Ads with the Hosts File
All the Google text ads seem to come from the addresses pagead.googlesyndication.com or pagead2.googlesyndication.com. If we place these names in the Windows Hosts file and point them to a dummy address then the Google ads will not appear.
First though, we need to locate the hosts file. Here is the usual location for the major Windows versions:
Windows 9x, ME C:\WINDOWS
Windows NT (and some 2K) C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc
Windows 2K, XP, 2003, Vista C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
The Hosts file is simply called "HOSTS" and has no file extension.
It's a simple text file and must only be changed with a plain text editor like Notepad and never a word processing program such as MS Word.
First, we need to open the Hosts file in Notepad. If you don't know how to do that then locate the Hosts file in Windows Explorer and right-click on it. Select "Open" and then check "Select the program from a list." You'll then be presented with list of programs; select Notepad. You should now see a simple text file.
Go to the first blank line at the bottom of the file and type in ( or copy and paste) these two lines:
127.0.0.1 pagead.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
Make sure you leave no blank lines before this entry.
Just save the file and you are finished. Saving this change may spark an alert from your anti-spyware software but it's OK, just approve the change.
If you've followed the instructions carefully you should never see Google AdSense text ads again. If at a future stage you want to see the ads again, just use Notepad to delete the line you just added.
The same technique can be used to block other advertising servers, malicious spyware or sites containing inappropriate material. In fact a number of folks offer free downloads of Hosts files containing thousand of entries of such unwanted sites.