Increasing Netbook Screen Size

andrewmemoryblog@gmail.com (Andrew's Memory Blog) — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 22:32:06 -0700

I’ve got an old Acer Aspire One 521 netbook that I’ve had for ages. One of the downsides of netbooks is that their screen resolution is 1024x600 - which is too low for a lot of programs. In particular, all the interesting buttons of the MFJ-226 control program “T-Series Vector Impedance Analyzer” are below the bottom of the screen.

I found a workaround that appears to work on Windows 7 and higher. I found it here: http://www.tlbhd.com/how-to-get-better-resolution-on-your-standard-10-inch-netbook-2772/

The solution: use regedit to search for all instances of “Display1_DownScalingSupported” and change the value 0 to 1. (According to various things I’ve read, you’ll need to do that for all instances, not just one.) Then reboot. When I did this, I ended up in 1024x768 (which looks strange).

Strange isn’t bad, though. Now I can change resolutions to 1024x768 or 1152x864 if an inconsiderate programmer decides he wants to use more than my screen.

Unlocking a Windows 8.1 machine with MSN password

andrewmemoryblog@gmail.com (Andrew's Memory Blog) — Sun, 20 Sep 2015 15:39:31 -0700

Recently, I inherited a laptop that came with Windows 8.1 installed. The previous owner had forgotten the login password, and no longer had the phones/accounts that were associated with the machine either. (If you have the choice, I’d recommend you avoid Alzheimer’s disease. It sucks.) I wanted to get the user information off before wiping it and reinstalling. Unfortunately, this machine had a Windows Live / MSN password, rather than a local password.

I started with these instructions. They take advantage of an exploit to enable a command shell from the login screen. In short:

Go into Advanced Startup Options and Troubleshoot -> Advanced Options -> Command Prompt
copy c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe c:\
copy c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe
Reboot
Click the “Ease of Access” icon at the bottom left of the login screen. Now this will open a command shell.
If the user had a local account, you’d be home free now. (net user “username” new-password and then copy the original utilman.exe back). But I wasn’t - instead I saw “System error 8646 : The system is not authoritative for the specified account”. That was because the machine had a MSN login / Microsoft Live password. So instead…
net user brandnewuser secretpassword
Reboot again (probably not necessary, but I did this)
Get back into the “Ease of Access” shell
net localgroup Administrators brandnewuser /add
Reboot
Log in as brandnewuser rather than the original user.
Wait a really really long time (10 minutes or so) for Windows to rebuild the desktop for the new user.
At this point, you can navigate to C:\Users and copy the files from the original user to somewhere else. You will probably have to run the Explorer as Adminstrator in order to do this. I recall being prompted with “You don’t have access to this directory, do you want to get it permanently” once or twice. I said “Yes”.
And that’s it - the pictures can now be copied to CD for preservation (except the ones that were stored in Windows Live, of course). After that you can create restore media and wipe/reinstall.

Windows-8 on Andrew's Memory Blog

Increasing Netbook Screen Size

Unlocking a Windows 8.1 machine with MSN password