The Digital Jedi's Words

Here is a proper Step by Step tutorial for anyone wanting to install this on their Droid, and hopefully this will help answer most peoples questions. I had done this to my DROID and love it even more now than I did yesterday.

SholesMod Updater will backup all of your existing data, but if you would rather be safe than sorry do a backup of your stuff before continuing.

If you have WiFi, go ahead and enable it now as it will make the download process go by much faster.

Here we go:

1. Go to Android Marketplace
2. Search for SholesMod Updater, donate your $5 and download the app (or download from Sholes)
3. Open SholesMod Updater
4. “Your phone is not rooted”. Select Root my Phone (update.zip will download to your SD card)
5. When you get the “Reboot into recovery mode message”, press the home button and power off the phone
5. Reboot into recovery mode by holding the X key on the keyboard while powering on.
6. When the MOTO logo changes to recovery (white triangle with yellow exclamation point and phone picture ) press and hold the volume up button and then press the camera button
7. Once in the menu select Apply sdcard:update.zip with D-pad and select with center button
8. Once it’s done applying update.zip select reboot with D-pad and select with center button

Congratulations! Your Droid is now rooted, but we’re not done just yet. If all went well, you should see a new icon in your app drawer called Superuser Permissions.
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Many people ask me why there is no built-in Administrator account available in Windows Vista and 7 like previous Windows versions? Why can’t we use the default Administrator account? The answer is “Yes! The default Administrator account is created in Vista and 7 but its disabled by default for security purposes.”

You might want to enable it for troubleshooting or to get rid of the annoying UAC prompts while tweaking your system. So here I’ll describe a few methods to enable / activate the hidden Administrator account in Windows Vista and 7:

1st Method:

1. Right-click on My Computer icon on Desktop and select “Manage“, it’ll open “Computer Management” window. ( You can also open it by giving “compmgmt.msc” command in RUN dialog box or Startmenu Search box).

2. Goto “Local Users and Groups -> Users“. In right-side pane double-click on “Administrator” account. It’ll open its Properties. Deselect “Account is disabled” option and Apply it.

2nd Method:

1. Type “secpol.msc” in RUN dialog box or Startmenu search box, it’ll open “Local Security Policy” window.

2. Goto “Local Policies -> Security Options“.

3. Double-click on first option “Accounts: Administrator account status” and select “Enabled” and apply it.

3rd Method:

1. Click on “Start button -> All Programs -> Accessories“. Right-click on “Command Prompt” and select “Run As Administrator“. If you are prompted to enter password, enter the password and continue. You can also open Command Prompt in Administrator mode by typing “cmd” in Startmenu Search box and press “Ctrl+Shift+Enter“.

2. Now provide following command:

net user administrator /active:yes

3. Thats it. The Administrator account will be enabled. If you want to disable it again, simply replace “yes” with “no” in above command.

NOTE: Never activate the hidden Administrator account until required. Its better to use other general accounts for better security. Also the Administrator account has no password, so if you enable it then don’t forget to set a strong password for it.

With more and more netbooks hitting the shelves at the local computer stores it surprised me to find that there are very few dead-simple guides to creating a bootable USB thumb/pen/flash drive for a Windows 7 installation.  I cobbled together the following from VistaPCGuy and another source I don’t remember right now.

This will walk through the steps to create a bootable USB flash drive for the purpose of installing a Windows 7 OS.  These instructions assume that you have a computer with Windows 7 installed on it.

Required:

• USB Flash Drive (4GB+)
• Microsoft OS Disk (Windows 7)
• A computer running  Windows 7

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