Welcome to Konjopatrick's Guide about Windows files, Tips and Tricks.

Note: also read my other 2 guides:

http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=61522966&f=34 <-- Guide about Cookies & Browsers
http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=61604332&f=34 <-- Guide about Google & Privacy's

Index
- Hidden files
- Bytes
- WinRaR/WinZip
- Compressed files
- FAQ

Hidden Files

What are Hidden files?

A file with a special hidden attribute turned on, so that the file is not normally visible to users. For example, hidden files are not listed when you execute the DOS DIR command. However, most file management utilities allow you to view hidden files.
DOS hides some files, such as MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS, so that you will not accidentally corrupt them. You can also turn on the hidden attribute for any normal file, thereby making it invisible to casual snoopers. On a Macintosh, you can hide files with the ResEdit utility.

How do i see Hidden files?

1. Close all programs so that you are at your desktop.
2. Click on the Start button. This is the small round button with the Windows flag in the lower left corner.
3. Click on the Control Panel menu option.
4. When the control panel opens click on the Appearance and Personalization link.
5. Under the Folder Options category, click on Show Hidden Files or Folders.
6. Under the Hidden files and folders section select the radio button labeled Show hidden files, folders, or drives.
7. Remove the checkmark from the checkbox labeled Hide extensions for known file types.
8. Remove the checkmark from the checkbox labeled Hide protected operating system files (Recommended).
9. Press the Apply button and then the OK button..
10. Now Windows 7 is configured to show all hidden files.

How do i Hide files?

1.Find the file that you want to hide by clicking "Start" (bottom left corner). Click Computer and browse through your computer until you find the file you want to hide.
2. Right-click it and select Properties.
3. Check the Hidden box and click "Apply." Your file is now hidden. If you still see it, you must enable file hiding.
4. Click "Start" and select Computer.
5. Click Organize, followed by Folder and Search Options.
6. Select the tab that says View, and select the "Don't show hidden files, folders or drives" option.

Bytes

The byte is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the basic addressable element in many computer architectures.
The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. The de facto standard of eight bits is a convenient power of two permitting the values 0 through 255 for one byte. With ISO/IEC 80000-13, this common meaning was codified in a formal standard. Many types of applications use variables representable in eight or fewer bits, and processor designers optimize for this common usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures have aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit size.
The term octet was defined to explicitly denote a sequence of 8 bits because of the ambiguity associated at the time with the term byte.

The byte is also defined as a data type in certain programming languages. The C and C++ programming languages, for example, define byte as an "addressable unit of data storage large enough to hold any member of the basic character set of the execution environment" (clause 3.6 of the C standard). The C standard requires that the char integral data type is capable of holding at least 255 different values, and is represented by at least 8 bits (clause 5.2.4.2.1). Various implementations of C and C++ reserve 8, 9, 16, 32, or 36 bits for the storage of a byte. The actual number of bits in a particular implementation is documented as CHAR_BIT as implemented in the limits.h file. Java's primitive byte data type is always defined as consisting of 8 bits and being a signed data type, holding values from −128 to 127.
In data transmission systems a byte is defined as a contiguous sequence of binary bits in a serial data stream, such as in modem or satellite communications, which is the smallest meaningful unit of data. These bytes might include start bits, stop bits, or parity bits, and thus could vary from 7 to 12 bits to contain a single 7-bit ASCII code.

Prefixes for multiples of
bits (b) or bytes (B)

Decimal
Value Metric
1000 k kilo
10002 M mega
10003 G giga
10004 T tera
10005 P peta
10006 E exa
10007 Z zetta
10008 Y yotta

Binary:

Value JEDEC IEC
1024 - K - kilo - Ki - kibi
10242 - M - mega - Mi - mebi
10243 - G - giga - Gi - gibi
10244 Ti tebi
10245 Pi pebi
10246 Ei exbi
10247 Zi zebi
10248 Yi yobi

Unit multiplies.

Considerable confusion exists about the meanings of the SI (or metric) prefixes used with the unit byte, especially concerning prefixes such as kilo (k or K) and mega (M) as shown in the chart Prefixes for bit and byte. Computer memory is designed with binary logic, multiples are expressed in powers of 2. The software and computer industries often use binary approximations of the SI-prefixed quantities, while producers of computer storage devices prefer the SI values. This is the reason for specifying computer hard drive capacities of, say, 100 GB, when it contains 93 GiB of storage space.
While the numerical difference between the decimal and binary interpretations is small for the prefixes kilo and mega, it grows to over 20% for prefix yotta, illustrated in the linear-log graph (at right) of difference versus storage size.

WinRaR

WinRAR is a shareware file archiver and data compression utility developed by Eugene Roshal, and first released in autumn of 1993. It is one of the few applications that is able to create RAR archives natively, because the encoding method is held to be proprietary. The current developer is Eugene Roshal, while his brother Alexander Roshal is engaged in running the business behind the software

WinRAR supports the following features:

Complete support for RAR (WinRAR native conversion format) and ZIP archives, and unpacking of ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, EXE, 7z, and Z archives.
Multithreaded compression
The ability to create self-extracting and multi-volume (split) archives.
Data redundancy is provided via recovery records and recovery volumes, allowing reconstruction of damaged archives.
Support for advanced NTFS file system options and Unicode in file names.
Optional archive encryption using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with a 128-bit key.

WinZip

WinZip is a proprietary file archiver and compressor for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, developed by WinZip Computing (formerly Nico Mak Computing). By default WinZip creates archives in the ZIP file format but also has various levels of support for other archive formats.

Features

Creation of, addition to, and extraction from ZIP archives.
Configurable Microsoft Windows Shell integration
128- and 256-bit key AES encryption.[3] This has replaced the less secure PKZIP 2.0 encryption method used in earlier versions. The implementation, using Brian Gladman's code, was FIPS-197 certified, on March 27, 2003.
Version 9 also implemented a 64-bit version of the PKZIP file format, eliminating both the maximum limit of 65,535 members for single archive and the 4-gibibyte size limit on either the archive and each member file.
Support of additional file formats: bzip2 (9.0), PPMd (10.0), WavPack (11.0), LHA/LZH (11.2), LZMA (12.0), 7z (12.0)
Decompression of .bz2 and .rar files.
Support for ARC and ARJ archives if suitable external programs are installed.
Direct write of ZIP archives to CD/DVD
Decoding of .b64, .hqx, .uue formats.
Automation of backup jobs
Integrated FTP upload
Email ZIP archives
Unicode support to ensure international characters are displayed for filenames in a Zip file. (WinZip prior to 11.2 does not support Unicode characters in filenames. Attempting to add these files to an archive results in the error message "Warning: Could not open for reading: ...")

Compressed files

ZIP (File Format)

WinZip Courier: Automatically zips all files attached to an outgoing e-mail. Supported e-mail clients include Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Gmail and Hotmail.
WinZip Self-Extractor: It adds self-extracting modules to ZIP archives. A version called WinZip Self-Extractor Personal Edition is included with WinZip.
WinZip Command Line Add-on: It adds command line processing to WinZip.

Zip is a file format used for data compression and archiving. A zip file contains one or more files that have been compressed, to reduce file size, or stored as is. The zip file format permits a number of compression algorithms.
The format was originally created in 1989 by Phil Katz, and was first implemented in PKWARE's PKZIP utility, as a replacement for the previous ARC compression format by Thom Henderson.
The zip format is now supported by many software utilities other than PKZIP. Microsoft has included built-in zip support (under the name "compressed folders") in versions of Microsoft Windows since 1998. Apple has included built-in zip support in Mac OS X 10.3 (via BOMArchiveHelper, now Archive Utility) and later, along with other compression formats.
Zip files generally use the file extensions ".zip" or ".ZIP" and the MIME media type application/zip. Zip is used as a base file format by many programs, usually under a different name.
Zip files are often represented by a document or other object prominently featuring a zipper.

Local file header

Offset Bytes Description
 0 4 Local file header signature = 0x04034b50 (read as a little-endian number)
 4 2 Version needed to extract (minimum)
 6 2 General purpose bit flag
 8 2 Compression method
10 2 File last modification time
12 2 File last modification date
14 4 CRC-32
18 4 Compressed size
22 4 Uncompressed size
26 2 File name length (n)
28 2 Extra field length (m)
30 n File name
30+n m Extra field

Central directory file header

Offset Bytes Description
 0 4 Central directory file header signature = 0x02014b50
 4 2 Version made by
 6 2 Version needed to extract (minimum)
 8 2 General purpose bit flag
10 2 Compression method
12 2 File last modification time
14 2 File last modification date
16 4 CRC-32
20 4 Compressed size
24 4 Uncompressed size
28 2 File name length (n)
30 2 Extra field length (m)
32 2 File comment length (k)
34 2 Disk number where file starts
36 2 Internal file attributes
38 4 External file attributes
42 4 Relative offset of local file header. This is the number of bytes between the start of the first disk on which the file occurs, and the start of the local file header. This allows software reading the central directory to locate the position of the file inside the ZIP file.
46 n File name
46+n m Extra field
46+n+m k File comment

This post was edited by Konjopatrick on Mar 28 2012 01:05am

Compression methods

The .ZIP File Format Specification documents the following compression methods: stored (no compression), Shrunk, Reduced (methods 1-4), Imploded, Tokenizing, Deflated, Deflate64, bzip2, LZMA (EFS), WavPack, PPMd. The most commonly used compression method is DEFLATE, which is described in IETF RFC 1951.
Compression methods mentioned, but not documented in detail in the specification include: PKWARE Data Compression Library (DCL) Imploding (old IBM TERSE), IBM TERSE (new), IBM LZ77 z Architecture (PFS).

I Hope this was helpful for you guys! Remember to check out my other 2 guide's ( At the top of the guide )



This post was edited by Konjopatrick on Mar 28 2012 01:07am