First, we’ll need to get to the Advanced User Accounts Control Panel to get to this setting.

Type in netplwiz into the start menu search box, hit enter.

Note: If that doesn’t work, you can type in control userpasswords2 instead.

 Uncheck the box that says “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer”, and then hit Apply. You’ll see a username and password box. Enter in the appropriate information here and hit OK.

My 1st thought was that the HTPC was over heating and shutting it self down to protect the hardware. Then I thought it might be from a bad memory chip. Taking a shot in the dark (no – not the Starbucks drink, although I love those!!!), I purchased a new Antec EarthWatts Green EA-380D Green 380W Continuous power ATX12V v2.3 / EPS12V 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC Power Supply and installed it. I figured while I had it opened up, I would also replace the hard drive to a new Western Digital Caviar Green WD5000AADS 500GB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Hard Drive  (would you believe, my 1st SATA drive – lol). This HTPC is always on – as it is our house DVR and TV tuner so I figured I would tackle upgrading what I could to save on power consumption.

It has been 1 day now and it is running perfectly with no random power downs so I guess the power supply was the culprit. I did check the date stamp on the power supply and it showed 2004 so considering that was 6 years ago that I installed the old power supply - I guess that was $80 well spent?!

https://www.paypal.com/us/wf/f=ap_namechg

11 steps to Search Engine Optimization. Follow these steps and watch your website traffic increase drastically.

Tip: Use the WordPress All In One SEO Pack to quickly add SEO to each of your posts and pages.

Less Frequent Steps that do not Repeat Very Often

1. Keyword Research
Keyword research is the most important first step that should not be taken too lightly. While you can easily test and change hundreds of keywords in paid search campaigns, so is this not possible for organic search optimization. You usually concentrate on one to five key phrases for the whole site (theme) and one to three phrases for a single page. For large sites with thousands of pages is it hard to optimize every single page to the full extend due to the limits in time and other resources.

2. Competitive Intelligence
Know you competition! What are they doing? Where do they rank, for which terms? Who is linking to them and why? The things you have to do depend on what your competitors are doing. The less competitive your vertical is online the easier is it for you to outperform your competition. This is important to determining cost and resources for your SEO efforts.

3. Web Design and Development
Fixing something that is broke is always harder than building it right from the beginning. If you are in the process of creating a new website, make sure to consider search engine friendly design and architecture before and during the actual development of the website. This will save you a lot of time and money and in most cases put you already ahead of a considerable number of your competitors. Search engine friendly design is not rocket science and search engine friendly design does not have to be ugly. Search engine friendly design is for the most part user friendly design as well, but there are some exceptions where compromises have to be made.

4. Get Your First Inbound Links
Don’t submit your new site to search engines and by no means pay anybody to do it for you. There are plenty of very cheap services and software products out there that offer for less than $100 to submission to thousands of search engines and in some cases even guarantee ranking #1 at them. Especially the second part is causing many businesses to fall for such offers. Don’t do it. If you see an offer like that, hold your wallet tight closed and run. Your site should be found by search engines naturally and they will find your site if a page that is already in their index links to you. Why? Because this is what search engines do, following links to discover content. There are plenty of methods to get your first inbound links. There are some web directories that are recognized by search engines and a listing there will do your site good. Except for the Dmoz directory are all those recognized directories commercial in nature and charge a fee for reviewing your site and the consideration for the inclusion in their directory. For that reason is it important to wait with the submission to any of those directories until your website is live and ready for visitors. Also check with vendors or good customers (B2B) who have a website for the opportunity to have them place a link to your website.

5. Sitemaps
The larger search engines allow webmasters to submit a sitemap to them via a webmaster console. The search engines also provide reports and other useful information, such as technical problems with your websites you might not be aware of via their console. Even if you decide against the submission of a site map to the search engines, is it advisable to create an account and register your website with them, just for the reports and statistics they provide free of charge and which are invaluable for your internet marketing efforts.

Ongoing Efforts on a Frequent Basis

6. Web Analytics
You can’t determine success or failure of any of your internet marketing activities if you do not track and measure their effectiveness. Engaging in any type of marketing campaign online, be it SEO, paid search, display advertising, email marketing, social media or affiliate marketing is like fishing in the dark without any type of web analytics solution in place. It is up to you to decide if you want a hosted web analytics solution or run software on your own servers. The options range from free services to very expensive and heavily customizable package. You have to determine what solution will work for you, but you have to start with one so don’t put it off. Web analytics helps you to determine where to improve your site and your marketing campaigns to channel your resources and money to the things that work and pull it away from the things that don’t work. Web analytics is not a cost center if it is done properly. It will pay for itself many times over and can make the difference between making and breaking it on the internet.

7. Content Building
A website is never done. It has to change and grow over time. This is a natural process to adjust to changes in the market, with maturing in this type of medium and your normal business growth. Providing good quality content that is related to what you do, but not necessarily aimed to sell something directly is the best opportunity to increase traffic and exposure of your business. Most people do not link to pages that only serve the purpose to make a sale. This leads to the next step in the process of successful search engine optimization of your website.

8. Link Building
The internet wouldn’t be a “net” without links. It would only be a collection of independent pages that are not connected to each other. Disconnected pages cannot be found and that defeats the purpose of them, wouldn’t it? Inbound links and internal site linking is important for organic traffic, meaning people seeing and clicking on those links to get to your website, but they are also important for SEO. Inbound links play an important role in virtually every search engine when it comes to ranking pages in their search results. Links are added and sometimes removed constantly. This is a never ending process and while it happens naturally, so is it advisable to be a bit more pro-active from your part to get more and good inbound links. There are plenty of sites out there that should link to you, but don’t know you and your content. Help them to find your content and encourage linking to it.

9. Engagement, Trust and Community Building
Social media and Web 2.0 might be buzz words, but the underlying core elements they are made of are much more elementary and fundamental. Don’t live in a bubble and talk to people without allowing people to respond and to interact with you. People will talk about you, with or without you being around. Take the opportunity to become part of the discussion to build trust and deeper relationships with your customers or potential customers. Listen to what they say and learn about their wants and their needs. Hear what they say about you and your products, especially the criticism and improve on them. You probably spend today money on focus groups and surveys. You can get the same and more free of charge on the internet, if you allow it to happen while you are around. It also provides the opportunity to expand your link building and exposure of your brand on the internet for a fraction of the cost of traditional intrusive advertising campaigns that are less effective.

10. Ranking and Traffic Analysis
Check where you are today to be able to compare it with data in the future. Look for trends and evaluate the success of your goals, which you should have specified before you engaged in any type of marketing campaign. You did set goals that are measurable I hope. Improving ranking is important for SEO, but more important than the ranking is the traffic that comes with it. Does the change in ranking yields in the traffic you expected? Does this traffic actually convert? This leads to the last step.

11. Conversion Analysis
 No matter what you do, everything will come down to one critical factor at the very end. What is your bottom line? Did you make profit or did you lose money. While losing money in the short term for strategic reasons is okay, so Is losing money in the long run deemed to failure and the end of your business altogether. Whatever you do, it has to contribute directly or indirectly to a positive Return of Investment. Web Analytics is part of the process of making this determination among other tools and methods. Expand the things that work and help your bottom line and rid yourself of the things that don’t. Improve of details to increase conversion. This requires testing. Don’t reject anything upfront without testing it first. Things that work for others might not work for you, but the same is true the other way around.

This service includes the transfer and installation of:

• All themes transferred and same theme reactivated on new host
• All plugins transferred and active plugins reactivated on new host
• All images and post content transferred and reactivated on new host
• All database data backedup and transferred and reactivated on new host
• All hosted files transferred and reactivated on new host
• Ensure all security settings are correct on the new host

If you are interested in this service special, I look forward to working with you soon.

To disable WordPress thumbnails and image linking to the image source (link url):
Go to Settings->Media and uncheck all the boxes and clear all the values. Don’t forget to click Save change button.

You can turn off authentication on the SMTP Instance, thus disabling the AUTH verbs for any external smtp access (for those not using 3rd party filtering), therefore disabling anyone attempting to send authenticated email. Everyone I know uses OWA/RWW, no need to leave authentication turned on for things that noone uses.

One of the ways to show IP access is view the WWW(\windows\system32\logs\w3svc) logs, but if you use windows mobile push email, then your www logs get filled with the phone access.

Well, after searching high and low and everywhere in between, I found out how to successfully stream ripped DVD VOB files from my MCE 2005 PC to my extender. Read on to find out how!

I came accross this article below from http://windowsmediacenter.blogspot.com and it is very detailed in how to accomplish this task. It is more geared for Vista but you can impliment for MCE 2005 without having to worry about the user issue described below.  I will add….  In MyMovies Collection Management, check, Configure/Media Center Interface/Extender Transcode/Let “Watch” button and MyMovies will use Transcode 360 as “engine” to play your files.

 I just saw a great guide on setting up Transcode 360 with My Movies for MCE. Enables movie play back on the Media Center Extenders of DVD VOB’s, DivX and XVid etc.

It includes some of the pitfalls that took me a long time to work out, such as the Transcode 360 registry change that is required.

See the guide here on Adding Guest account to network movie folders and sharing themIf you will be accessing movies from an extender(Xbox 360), we need to alter permissions setting on the shared movie folders computer. The bottom line is ‘Guest’ account needs to be enabled on the other machine, and ‘Guest’ needs to have Read (Read and List) to the movie folders. On Vista Ulimate and Vista Enterprise Enabling go to Start>right click on Computer>choose Manage>expand Local Users and Groups>Highlight Users>in the right pane right click on Guest>choose Properties>on the General tab make sure that ‘Account is disabled’ is unchecked. Click Ok.
In Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium editions go to Control Panel > User Accounts > Manage Accounts, and Turn on Guest Account.

To give Guests access to the movie folders go to Computer and browse to the root folder containing all of the movie folders. Right click the folder and choose Properties. Click the Security tab. Click the Continue button (if UAC is enabled). Click the Edit button. Click the Add button. In the ‘Enter the object names to select’ box type Guest. Click Ok. Click Ok again. Click Ok.

Share the movies folders, if not already, and everyone should have read.

Add the guest account the the movie folders. Give Guest account Read access.

I intend to come back and give instruction on the above two sentences.

If the above is not configured, when you go to Watch Stream on your extender, you will get a ‘Path not found ‘ error message.

To sum, enable Guest account, give guest account read to movie folders (do this by giving read to the parent folder (or drive) and the permissions will propagate down. Finally, share the folders so the UNC path matches the path you specified for the movies in My Movies.

Testing

Bring up your Xbox 360, connect to the Media Center, go to My Movies, pick a movie and choose ‘Watch Stream’. If you click Watch you will get an error. So use Watch Stream. You should see ‘Loading’ for a short period, and then you should get the spinning circle in the middle of the screen. The spinning circle may stop spinning for a short period before the movie starts. If the spinning circle stops and you wait, and wait…and no movie, then something is wrong. The xbox may be frozen at this point. I’ll get into some troubleshooting below.

Troubleshooting

The two versions of My Movies I have used TT with are 2.42 and 2.44.

It may be beneficial to disconnect from the Media Center on the Xbox 360 if the permissions changes were made while connect from the Xbox. I always do this when I make a change so I can’t really so if it is not necessary. From the extender, close media center. Then reopen media center on the extender.

Valuable information will come from the TT log file. These are located at C:\Users\Public\Transcode360\LogsIf you tried to watch a movie on your extender using Watch Stream in My Movies and it did not work, look at the log file with the most recent ‘Date modified’ value. This should be the log created when you tried to stream the movie.

The error message you get when you try to stream the movie is important. Depending on what happens, you may not get a message.

The event viewer on the Vista MCE machine will also give valuable information. Go to Start>right click on Computer>choose Manage>expand Event Viewer>expand Applications and Services Logs>Click on Transcode 360 Service>in the right pane events will be listed. Looks for events that are ‘Error’ and ‘Warning’.

Examples

The path [some path] was not found when trying to watch a network movie-> give ‘guest’ account access to the network folder

After doing the above try to watch the network movie and get ‘Transcode failed transcode was unable to transcode the file [some path].
-> this could be that the service is running with an account that does not have permission to the remote computer-> this could be the mencoder.exe file is not updated

If in the log file you see:

*ERR* Transcoding error:*ERR* This codecs.conf is too old and incompatible with this MPlayer release! at line 6
-> you can delete the codecs.conf file located in the C:\Program Files\Transcode360\Wrappers\MEncoderTranscoder\mplayer folder

If in the Event Viewer you have a message that includes ‘Cannot open file/device.
‘->it might be a permissions, network access, firewall type issue.

Make sure your movies are stored in a separate folder for each movie. Inside the movie folder there should be a Video_TS folder and within it the movie files (.ifo, .vob). Transcode 360 looks for the Video_TS folder and the movie files within. If the folder and file structure described above is not used, the movies will not work.