How to Download Facebook Photos & Videos

If you have tons of photos and videos uploaded to Facebook, you may want to download a copy of all that for multiple reasons: if you want to backup your data, if you want to close your Facebook account, etc.

Whatever your reason, there is an official way you can download all your Facebook data without having to use third-party apps, plugins, or extensions. All of those sites require giving someone else access to your Facebook account, which is risky in my opinion.

In this post, I’ll show you how you can download all your Facebook data, which contains all your photos and videos and a bunch of other stuff. The nice thing is that it’s all very well organized and easy to navigate. It’s actually kind of cool looking at all the stuff Facebook has stored about you.

Download Facebook Photos/Videos

To download your Facebook data, login into Facebook and then click on the little blue arrow at the top right of the screen. Towards the bottom of the menu, click on Settings.

Under General Account Settings, you’ll see a link at the bottom called Download a copy of your Facebook data.

Click on that link and you’ll get a short description of what kind of data your archive will contain. To start the archive, go ahead and click the green Start My Archive button.

This will bring up another popup window where you have to confirm that you want to download your archive.

Once you confirm by clicking on the second Start My Archive button, you’ll see a message stating that you will get an email once your archive is complete. After a little while, you should receive an email with a link to your archive.

Click on the link and you’ll see a button called Download My Archive. You’ll need to re-enter your Facebook password again before you can download the archive.

Depending on how much you upload to Facebook, your archive could be several hundred megabytes in size. The archive will be in ZIP format, so you’ll need to unzip it first to see the contents.

The archive is broken up into three sections: html, photos and videos. The html folder contains all your posts, locations, tags, etc. in HTML format that you can view in your web browser.

The Photos folder contains all your uploaded photos and synced photos from your mobile phone. The only thing is that each album is represented by the numeric code used by Facebook rather than your album name.

This is a little annoying if you have hundreds of albums in Facebook because you’ll have to open each folder, see what pictures are inside and then rename the folder. If you just want a copy of everything, then it’s really not a big deal.

The video folder has all your uploaded videos in MP4 format. From what I can tell, the Facebook download doesn’t give you the original resolution of the files that you originally uploaded, which is a bit annoying. It could also be because my pictures and videos were uploaded before Facebook had the upload in high resolution option.

However, even with the high resolution option, Facebook will resize or compress your images and videos if they are greater than 2048 pixels or 100 KB in size or greater than 1280px wide for videos. For videos and pictures, make sure you set the Upload in HDsetting in your Facebook app by going to More, then Settings, then Account Settings and then Videos and Photos.

If you click on the index.htm file that is located in the same folder as photos, videos and html, then you can browse all of this info in your web browser in a nice format. You can see your info, everything written on your wall, your friends, messages, pokes, events and more.

You’ll also see extra information about photos like where it was taken, the camera make, the camera model, ISO speed, etc.

Overall, this is the safest and best way to download all your Facebook photos and videos without giving some other random company access to your account. If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment. Enjoy!

How to Share an Internet Connection with Other                           Computers

Looking for a quick way to share yourInternet connection with others around you? These days, this is only useful in a handful of situations. I’ve personally only used a shared Internet connection when in a car with a friend who had a laptop tethered to his smartphone.

My iPad was Wi-Fi only, so I was able to connect to his laptop Wi-Fi and get Internetaccess. The only other time I have used it is when I was staying in a hotel room and they only had a wired Ethernet connection for Internet. I setup my computer and created a personal Wi-Fi network so that everyone else could connect their smartphones, tablets, etc.

In this article, I’ll show you how to share your Internet connection from your Windows computer. Not that this only works well in certain scenarios.

1. Your computer needs to have more than one network adapter, preferably an Ethernet port and a Wi-Fi card. A 3G/4G device that you tether to your computer can be used in place of an Ethernet port, but you still need the Wi-Fi card.
2. It’s always best to share your connection by creating a virtual wireless network. Doing it any other way is super convoluted and almost never works. Don’t worry, I’ve tried and I’m a geek.
3. It’s best to be connected to the Internet via the Ethernet port or tethered device and to leave the Wi-Fi network not connected to any network.

If you match up with those three items above, then you will most likely be successful in setting up a shared Internet connection. Now let’s get started.

Create Virtual Wireless Network

The first thing you want to do is make sure your Wi-Fi network is not connected to any network. Why? We want the Wi-Fi network to use the Internet from the Ethernet port or tethered device, therefore the Wi-Fi network should remain disconnected to start.

You can check this by clicking on Start and then typing in ncpa.cpl and pressing Enter. You should see a red X next to the icon.

Now we have to open an Administrative Command Prompt window. Click on Start, type incommand, and then right-click on the top result and choose Run as Administrator.

Next, we have to create our virtual wireless network and start it. To do this, you need to type in the following commands:

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid="pickaname" key="pickapassword"

netsh wlan start hostednetwork

As you can see, you can choose a SSID for your new network and set the password also. Whatever SSID you set will be the name of the wireless network that shows up on other devices. Once the network has been started, go to Control Panel and open the Network and Sharing Center.

You will see the current network you are connected to, which in my case is Ethernet 2. Below that, you should see your new network, which will say No network access and Identifying. If you open ncpa.cpl again or click on Change adapter settings in Network and Sharing Center, you’ll see that Local Area Connection 3 is actually Microsoft Hosted Network Virtual Adapter.

Now in order to get the new network to have Internet access, we need to configure the other network connection. In my example, that would be Ethernet 2. Go ahead and click on the blue link for Ethernet 2. You can also go to ncpa.cpl again, right-click on Ethernet 2 and choose Properties.

This will bring up the status window for the connection. Now click on the Properties button.

Click on the Sharing tab and then check the Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection box. Under Home networking connection, you need to select the adapter name for the new virtual wireless network, which is Local Area Connection 3 in my case. If you don’t know the name of the adapter, go to ncpa.cpland find the one that says Microsoft Hosted Network Virtual Adapter.

Now when you go to the Network and Sharing Center, you will see that the new connection also has Internet access.

That’s it! Now you should have a functioning wireless network that will allows others to connect and use the Ethernet or tethered connection for Internet access. Go to any of your other devices and look for your new wireless network. Connect using the password you set and you should be good to go.

Note that if you want to see how many people are connected to your new wireless network, you have to open a command prompt and type in the following command:

netsh wlan show hostednetwork

Finally, if you are done with sharing your network connection, you can get rid of the virtual wireless network by typing in the following two commands:

netsh wlan stop hostednetwork

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=disallow

Make sure you type in both of these commands so that if you ever need to create the virtual wireless network again, you will be able to do so. That’s about it. Hopefully, this article will help you share your Internet connection easily with others. If you run into any issues, feel free to post a comment. Enjoy!

Lost or Forgot Administrator Password in                                 Windows?

It’s happened to all of us at some point or another: you go to log onto your computer and you type in the password and you get a Password Incorrect message. You try again and it doesn’t work. Then you type it in really slowly to make sure you didn’t mess up any character and it still doesn’t work!

You’ve forgotten your password! It’s never fun forgetting a password, especially if you have a lot of important data on your computer. Luckily, there are tools and methods that allow you to get access to your data without ever needing to know what the original password was.

In this article, I’m going to talk about the different ways I have learned to regain access to alocal account in Windows. Note that there is really no easy solution to this problem; you will have to open command prompts, type strange things and pray a lot.

If you are using a Microsoft account, it’s actually a lot easier to reset your password! Just visit the Windows Live password reset page and follow the instructions.

Windows 7 & Windows 8.1 Reset Password

There are actually two ways you can go about resetting a password for a user account in Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. Both methods work on both operating systems, which is really convenient. The first method uses the Windows 7 or 8.1 installation DVD and the second method involves using a third-party tool. If you don’t have your install CD/DVD, then use the second method.

Method 1 – Windows DVD

Go ahead and grab your installation disc for Windows 7 or 8.1 and pop it into your CD/DVD drive. Restart your computer and boot up from the disc. Note that you might have to change the boot order in your BIOS before the system will boot from the disc.

For Windows 7, the first screen will make you pick your language, keyboard, etc. Just leave those as default and click Next. For Windows 8, it will be similar. On the next screen, you’ll see a Repair your computer link at the bottom. Click on that link.

On the next screen for Windows 7, System Recovery options should find your Windows 7 install. Click on the Use recovery tools radio button and then click Next.

Finally, click on Command Prompt to open the command prompt. For Windows 8, after you click on Repair your computer, you’ll need to click on Troubleshoot.

Next, click on Advanced Options at the bottom.

Finally, click on Command Prompt at the far right.

Now you should be at the command prompt whether you were using Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. Now we have to type in two simple commands.

copy c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe c:\

copy c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe

Don’t worry about what the commands do, just hope they work. If you get an error messagelike cannot find the path, etc., then use a different drive letter than C. For example, type in the same commands, but replace C:\ anywhere with D:\. I had this problem on Windows 8.1 and using D:\ fixed it. Close the command prompt windows and choose Continue if using Windows 8.1.

Now you can go ahead and reboot your computer and don’t boot to the DVD. Actually, after you run the commands, you can take out the disc and then reboot. When you get to the Windows login screen, go ahead and press the SHIFT key 5 times.

A command prompt box should pop up on top of the login screen in Windows 7 and 8.1. Here you have to type in one final command to reset the password for the user account:

net user "User Name" newpassword

Note that you don’t need to use the quotes if the username is just one word like John. Since my username is two words, I had to use the quotes. The password can be anything you like. Once you have done this, close the command prompt window and type in your new password to log into your account! It works!

Method 2 – Third-Party Tool

If you don’t have a Windows installation DVD, you can download a free tool called Offline Windows Password & Registry Editor. Scroll down to the section that says Download and choose either the ISO image or the USB install. If you can boot your computer from a USB stick, that would be easier since you have to burn the ISO image to a CD/DVD if you download that.

Again, you’ll have to change the boot order on your computer in order to boot from CD/DVDor USB drive. When you boot up to this tool, you’ll see the following screen. This method is definitely a little more technical-looking, but it’s really not hard. Mostly, you just have to press Enter.

On this screen, just press Enter. You’ll see a bunch of stuff scroll across the screen and then it’ll end with a prompt for Step 1, which is to choose the installation. It should find this for you automatically and will have Select:[1] at the bottom. Just press Enter here also.

For Step 2, it will ask you to choose which part of the registry you want to load. In our case, it’s the Password reset [sam] option, which is 1 and already selected. So again, just press Enter.

For Step 3, you have to choose which hive to work on. Again, the option we need, Edit user data and passwords, is 1, so just press Enter again. Like I said, it looks scary, but mostly it’s pressing Enter.

Finally, at step 4, we actually have to type in something. Here, we need to select the username that we want to clear the password for. Instead of typing the username itself, type in the RID value that is listed to the left of the desired username.

In my case, the RID associated with my user name (Aseem Kishore) was 03e8. So I typed03e8 and pressed Enter.

Now, you’ll be asked what you want to do with that user. The first option is Clear (blank)user password, so type in 1 and then press Enter. This time around make sure you actually type in the number 1 instead of just pressing Enter. It should be very fast and you’ll see some stuff written that won’t make any sense. Don’t worry about all of that, just look forPassword Cleared written somewhere. If you don’t see if, don’t worry, just keep going.

We have one last thing to do before we are done. At the prompt, go ahead and type in q to quit and then type in q again to quit one more time. After the second time you type in q, you’ll see that it says Step 4 – Writing back changes. Here you have to type y to write the changes.

You should make sure that it says EDIT COMPLETE. This means that everything was written correctly. When it asks you if you want to do another run, type in n for no. Now you can restart your computer by pressing CTRL + ALT + DELETE. You may need to remove the CD/DVD or USB stick in order to boot to Windows normally.

That’s about it. If everything worked OK, you should be able to login into Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 without a password!

Windows 10 Reset Password

The procedure for Windows 10 is very similar to that of Windows 8, but requires slightly different commands. To get started, follow the instructions I have above for Method 1 under Windows 7 and 8.1 until you get to the command prompt. Follow the directions for Windows 8.1 as those are the same for Windows 10.

Once you get to the command prompt, type in the following commands:

move d:\windows\system32\utilman.exe d:\windows\system32\utilman.exe.bak

copy d:\windows\system32\cmd.exe d:\windows\system32\utilman.exe

Close the command prompt and then click on the Continue button to load Windows normally. Go ahead and take out the CD/DVD or USB drive before you reboot. At the login screen, you have to click on the ease of access icon at the bottom. This will pop up a command prompt window.

Now at the command prompt window, we use the same command like we used for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.

net user username newpassword

Again, you’ll need to use quotes around the username if it is more than one word. For example, if the user name is Aseem Kishore, you would type in:

net user "Aseem Kishore" newpassword

Now close the command prompt window and simply type in your new password and you will be logged into Windows 10! It’s amazing that this trick works, but I tested it out and it worked like a charm.

Hopefully, this will get you back into your Windows 7, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 computer. Note that if you don’t have an installation DVD, you can download them from Microsoft. Check out my previous post on downloading Windows 7, 8 and 10 legally. If you have any questions, post a comment. Enjoy!