Technorama Blog

Kindle Fire!

2012-01-24T23:11:00.002+05:30

Coming from a long sojourn off the blog, I would like to share a whole lot of things I have been busy with. Many things got me busy for past few months preventing me from blogging regularly. I shall try my best to be as regular as possible from now on.

As you may have already guessed, this post is about Kindle Fire. If you don't know what a Kindle Fire is, here is a short description to help you get acquainted with the term. Kindle Fire or more specifically, Amazon's Kindle Fire is a tablet computer introduced by online retail giant Amazon. Kindle Fire looks exactly as you can see in the picture above and is very similar to Apple's iPad but comes with some limitations (but with a much lesser price tag of $199).

The best thing about this tablet is that is offers great hardware for a very minimal price. It is more of a multimedia tool to be used for using Amazon's products (ebooks, games, videos, songs etc sold by Amazon). It is not a full fledged tablet computer like the iPad but for a price as low as $199, what more can you expect! This 7" tablet runs on Android operating system and does all your average computing needs such as listening to songs, playing videos, games and surfing on the internet using wifi. I got one as a new year gift from my uncle. For more details on the product check out Amazon's page for Kindle Fire here.

I shall, in the days to come, post 'how to' things on Android and Kindle Fire, the ones that I have been learning and using while customizing my Kindle Fire. I shall also post a short review on the Kindle Fire soon. I shall see you guys tomorrow.

How to Get Gmail Alerts via SMS on Mobile Phone for Free

2011-07-02T06:51:00.000+05:30

Ever wondered how to get Gmail mail alerts on your mobile phone through sms for free? I too was looking for such a free service, also called as sms alerts, but I could not find a proper solution to do so. There are a few of them online but they usually are in a very disorganized manner.

Here am putting up one of the simplest ways to get all your Gmail mails on your sms alerts on your mobile phone through sms for free!

Please note that this technique mentioned below caters only to the following group of people.

One should have an account at Way2Sms. (You can always get one if you do not have)
One should be an Indian resident as making an account on Way2Sms requires an Indian mobile phone number.

Continue reading through the step by step tutorial on how to get Gmail alerts via sms on your mobile phone. You can click on the images to see them at their original size.

Step 1: Login at Way2Sms

Step 2: Click on the Gmail icon on the left side bar as shown in the image.

Step 3: Then click on the Mail Alerts option on top as shown below.

Step 4: Activate your email alert as shown. Complete the activation process by selecting the day and time you would like to receive these alerts.

Step 5: After the activation, now link your Gmail account with Way2Sms by clicking on the link as shown.

Step 6: Follow the on-screen instructions as in the first image below or follow the marked steps as shown in the subsequent images. Note down your way2sms mail id from the first image as marked.

Step 7: Now add the way2sms mail id in the dialogue box that opens up as shown. You can get the way2sms mail id as shown in the first image of Step 6. Add and confirm.

Step 8: You will get a confirmation code on the mobile number that you have used to register your account at way2sms. Enter that code into the appropriate place as shown below. Or you may also get the code as shown in the area marked in the first image in Step 6.

Step 9: Follow the steps as shown below and save the settings.

Your account is now setup and you will get the emails from your Gmail account delivered in your mobile inbox through way2sms.

Positive features:

You get alerts to the mails you receive in your email account.
You can add Yahoo email account too in a similar way to get the alerts.
You can set filter for email ids for which you would not like to receive alerts.
You can set a particular day and time too for receiving these alerts.
Best of all, its free!

Negative features:

The service is activated for a period of 14 days after which you have to come back to this site to re-activate it again. There's no permanent activation solution to this.
You do not get the entire mail in your sms alert. The text date your receive in your alert is limited to 160 characters only. But most of the time it is enough to let you know who the sender is and the subject of the mail id. Once you know about it, you can go online and check it in details. After all, its only a sms alert feature and it is doing its job well!
The website is loaded with advertisements and can be irritating and/or confusing for new users to navigate through the site.
In case of mobile network congestion, your alerts may get delayed.

Overall, its a worthy feature and thanks to way2sms we are able to use it for free. Mobee.in has a similar feature which has turned into a paid service now. You can try their 7 days trial plan.

I have been using way2sms for getting Gmail alerts on my mobile phone through sms for quite sometime and am satisfied with the service. There are minor problems here and there but one cannot really complain for something that is being provided for free!

Try this out and feel free to ask questions if in any doubt.

How to play Angry Birds online

2011-05-17T19:35:00.000+05:30

Angry Birds is an extremely addictive but simple game that has been downloaded in millions ever since its first release for iOS platform in December 2009. Since then, Angry Birds has been released as a free version for Android (but ad supported) and paid versions for Symbian, Windows PC, MACs among others.

For many of those who wish to play Angry Birds online for their very own reasons, here is the link to an online version of the game. Click on the link below to start playing the game online!

Play Angry Birds Online

Be patient as it might take a few minutes to load Angry Birds depending on your internet connection speed. If you are running a slower connection on your computer, prefer selecting the SD(Standard Definition) version than the HD(High Definition) one.

Have fun playing!

How to Register 32 bit dll on 64 bit Windows

2011-05-12T17:31:00.000+05:30

Trying to register a 32 bit dll on a 64 bit system running Windows fails and gives the error-

Filename.dll is not an executable file and no registration helper is registered for this file type.

The reason :
This happens because even though you intend to access the 32bit version of regsvr by typing regsvr32, it actually opens the default 64 bit regsvr that lies in the system directory(of 64 bit Windows).
That is, when you run regsvr32 to register a dll, you are actually running the 64 bit version by default.

The solution:

To resolve this issue, run Regsvr32.exe from the %SystemRoot%\Syswow64 folder. For that
1st save the dll file in c:\windows\syswow64
Now, open the command prompt by
Click on Start-->Click on Run-->type cmd
else press Win button (the one in between Ctrl and Alt on the bottom left hand corner of of keyboard, near the space bar) and R. ie press Win and R .

and then type the following commands to register the DLL:
cd \windows\syswow64

regsvr32 filename.dll

(replace filename with the actual name of dll file)

P.S.: The Syswow64 folder contains the 32-bit versions of Windows program files and DLLs.

Getting "SDL.dll not found" error

2011-05-12T17:19:00.000+05:30

If you are getting SDL.dll not found error such as the one shown on the left(click on it to enlarge it), then follow the below mentioned steps to resolve the issue.

First of all download the SDL.dll file from HERE.

Now copy the SDL.dll file to the location
c:\windows\system32 (for Windows XP/Vista/7)
c:\winnt\system32 (for Windows NT/2000)
and then restart the computer.

If still, this does not work then try the following:
open RUN:
Click Start-->Click RUN(for 7 type run in the search bar below)-->type regsvr32 SDL.dll as shown below

If you still have problems registering the dll file, it is probably due to the 64 bit Windows you are using. To resolve that issue check the link mentioned below-
How to Register 32 bit dll on 64 bit Windows

Webcam detected but not working/ getting a black screen on MSI Notebook

2011-02-11T00:37:00.004+05:30

Do you have a problem with the webcam in your MSI notebook ? Is it giving blank screens or an error message such as 'cant connect your webcam. The webcam may already be in use' or maybe- 'webcam not found.' There exists a variation of problems that a non functioning webcam can cause. So if there is such a problem in your MSI laptop then kindly read the below mentioned points.

Note: this problem has been known to occur on notebooks by some other brands too but the resolutions in most cases are brand/model specific (depending on the hardware they use) so the ones mentioned here may not work for notebooks of brands other than MSI.

Problem 1: webcam (Bison webcam module) does not work.

You need to TURN ON the webcam which probably is turned off.

Resolution:

Depending on your notebook, there is either a keypress combination (eg Fn Key + F6 on Wind U100) or there is a dedicated button which will do this.

Just try using Fn + F6 combination to turn on your webcam. Once pressed, you should see a webcam on symbol on the right hand corner of your desktop screen.

If the key combo doesn't work on your model of notebook then refer to the user manual provided with your notebook for how to turn on the webcam. If you have lost or discarded your manual, you can download it from the MSI website.

Problem 2: webcam detected by Windows but doesn't work. Gives an error 'webcam already in use by another application', 'webcam not detected' when you try to open the webcam through the default webcam application or through software such as Skype or Yahoo messenger or it just gives you a black screen.

Cause: software issue with the command 'clear'

Resolution:

The problem is with the firmware of the webcam and can be resolved by updating/flashing it with the latest firmware for the same.

The 1st link from MSI UK Support shall solve the problem in most cases.
Click Here (to read the pdf file)

Click Here(to download the actual firmware file)

for additional reference you may check the following link too (use it only if the firmware in the above link doesn't solve your problem).
Click here

Facebook Hacker Cup 2011

2011-01-05T23:56:00.000+05:30

So what is this all about ?

The Facebook Hacker Cup is an annual worldwide programming competition where hackers compete against each other for fame, fortune, glory and a shot at the title of world champion.

Hacking is a central part of Facebook's culture. Whether we're building the next big product at one of our Hackathons or creating a smarter search algorithm, we're always hacking to find a better way of doing things.

We're starting the Hacker Cup to bring engineers from around the world together to compete in a multi-round programming competition. Contestants will have to successfully solve algorithmic-based problem statements to advance and are ranked by accuracy and speed.

What: An annual algorithmic programming contest open to hackers from around the world.
Where: Three online rounds with the finals at Facebook's headquarters in California.
When: Registration opens December 20th with the three online rounds occurring throughout January 2011. World finals to follow.
Finals: We'll pay to fly and accommodate the top 25 hackers from the 3rd online round out to our campus.
Prizes: Of course! $5,000 USD and title as world champion to the top hacker, $2,000 for 2nd place, $1,000 for 3rd, and $100 for 4th through 25th. Awesome t-shirts for the top 300 hackers coming out of the second online round.
Fine print: See below.

Thousands will enter, but only one will emerge as world champion.

The Fine Print

The competition commences with a 72-hour Qualification Round on January 7, 2011 at 0:00 UTC (4:00 PM PST) to January 10, 2011 at 0:00 UTC (4:00 PM PST). All registered competitors will be presented with three problems. Only competitors who correctly solve at least 1 problem will advance to Online Round 1.

Online Round 1 consists of 3 sub-rounds, each lasting 3 hours in length that are offered at different times from January 15, 2011 at 15:00 UTC (7:00 AM PST) to January 16, 2011 at 0:00 UTC (January 15, 2011 - 4:00 PM PST). Competitors who advance to this round can participate in any of the three sub-rounds until they qualify for Online Round 2. The top-scoring 1,000 competitors from each of the three sub-rounds will advance to Online Round 2.

Online Round 2 begins January 22, 2011 at 15:00 UTC (7:00 AM PST) and will end on January 22, 2011 at 18:00 UTC (10:00 AM PT). The 3,000 competitors will have three hours to solve the presented problem sets. The top-scoring 300 participants from Online Round 2 will receive an official Hacker Cup t-shirt. The top-scoring 25 competitors from Online Round 2 will be notified via email that they have advanced to the final round at Facebook.

Facebook will fly the top-scoring 25 competitors to Palo Alto, California, for the final round of competition on March 11, 2011, where they'll receive some great cash prizes and other awesome goodies. Out of these 25 finalists, one champion will emerge and be immortalized on the Hacker Cup trophy.

Keep an eye on the Hacker Cup page at www.facebook.com/hackercup for more announcements as the January 7th qualification round approaches.

May the best hacker win!

Download Chrome OS

2010-12-09T20:30:00.002+05:30

Google had announced sometime back about building an operating system that would be light, powerful and more importantly a strong competitor to Microsoft's Windows operating system. Looks like those day are not far away.

Google has made announcements about selling Chrome Cr-48 notebook, its Chrome OS based notebook. Chrome OS is in its release candidate stage (just prior to retailing) and can be downloaded freely off the net. Remember that Chrome OS is ought to be free and not sold. This is Google's main challenge to Microsoft where they are offering a quality operating system for free while the later flogs the public for their piece of software.

Google Chrome OS Release Candidate Live CD can be downloaded officially at

http://getchrome.eu/download

How to install: Download the iso file and burn it into CD-R. Boot the computer from it and when Chrome OS is loaded, click Live Installer on the desktop. Follow the instructions.

User password: user

Root password: root

Command and Conquer Red Alert Free Download

2010-11-25T23:16:00.006+05:30

Command and Conquer Red Alert has been made available for free download too along with Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun and Command and Conquer Gold (full game) .

Also of these downloads have been added in the Command and Conquer Classics collections and have been made available for FREE and LEGAL download to promote their latest offering from the hit series.

One can download Command and Conquer Red Alert and play from the Soviet side or the Allied side as both the downloads have been made available on the official site.

Download Command and Conquer Red Alert (Allied version) from Link
Download Command and Conquer Red Alert (Soviet version) from Link

Command and Conquer Gold Full Game Free Download

2010-11-22T23:12:00.006+05:30

Command and Conquer Gold full game can now be downloaded for free, thanks to Electronic Arts who have added the game for free download officially on their Command and Conquer Classic collection.

This game had two options, the GDI and the NOD downloads. You can download whichever side you feel like playing.

Command and Conquer Tiberian Dawn can be downloaded for free at
GDI here and NOD here

Visit Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun Free Download to download the game for free and legally too.

You can additionally visit Command and Conquer Red Alert to download that version of the game for free!

Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun Free Download

2010-11-19T18:00:00.006+05:30

Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun is a real time strategy game developed by Westwood Studies and released in 1999. This game was a big hit with the strategy based game players and had a huge fan following.

Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun is now available for FREE and LEGALLY on the official website. Electronic Arts, the publisher of the game had decided to make this game available for free download to the masses as a means of promotion for their latest in series.

Thus it is a good news for all Tiberian Sun lovers as they can now get this game for free! Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun is being issued along with its expansion named FireStorm.

You can also download download Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun and Command and Conquer Gold (full game) for free and legally too.

Download Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun + FireStorm from their Command and Conquer Classics collection at LINK

Play Mafia Wars Atlantic City from PC

2010-11-18T20:28:00.003+05:30

Mafia Wars Atlantic City which was launched for mobile play can now be played through your pc too. Atlantic City is costlier in terms of stamina and energy needed to play there but the advantages are many. You will get free boosts everyday(I got +200 energy on my 1st visit) plus the rewards are very cool ones.

Do give Atlantic City a visit. Now it can be played from your computer (pc) too. Use the following link to visit Mafia Wars Atlantic City page from your computer :

http://m.mafiawars.com/mobileweb

UPDATE:

Many people are complaining about Boardwalk (ie level 2) is not getting unlocked even though Uptown (level 1) has been mastered.

The thing is that Atlantic City implementation though computer is very buggy. Many people are unable to unlock successor levels, or they are not getting the completion rewards. For me it works just fine. Click on the image below and check out. I was on Boardwalk, I completed the bronze master and unlocked the next level. So it is working fine for me.

On doing a bit of research online and consulting my Mafia friends, I understand that its looks like a glitch from Zynga which is creating all such problems. The web interface for the above mentioned link was different and was later changed to what it is now. This new interface causes the unlocking problem for some. Not all players are facing this problem it seems.

We cannot do much about it. But try the following in case they work for you. No guarantees here friends.

1. Many players have reported that the link is working perfectly on Google Chrome browser. So if you are on Firefox, Opera or any other browser, just give Chrome a try.

2. I found this online, contributed by a Mafia Wars player. Just try it and see if it works.

Found a workaround for the locked into uptown problem... Right click on the first job and copy link, paste it in your url address box and change the job number to 2001 and story to 10 like "http://m.mafiawars.com/mobileweb?xw_controller=StoryMobile&xw_action=dojob&iframe=1&job=2001&storyId=10" - your info that follows, the tracking id and such shouldn't be changed. The problem is they're sending you to storyId=9 and job=2019 to 2024 - which should be later in the mobile chapter... My guess is someone screwed up when they fooled around with the next chapters.
When you do this, you'll have to complete a different set of jobs for uptown and you'll have to do it every time you log into mobile until you can get to boardwalk then go back to uptown.

3. Go to this site : www.iphonetester.com

Type : m.mafiawars.com in the address bar of the iPhone you see on screen.

These methods are not guaranteed to work for everyone. One could try and see his luck.

I would be grateful if people using the above techniques report here whether it worked with them.

Also, kindly report if http://m.mafiawars.com/mobileweb is working normally for you guys.

Windows Phone 7 Development for Absolute Beginners

2010-11-13T17:18:00.000+05:30

With the Windows Phone 7 already released and gaining a steady sales figure, there has been a scurry among developers and amateurs to develop applications for the Windows Phone 7. Microsoft has a big power when it comes to marketing and trade pundits believe that it will end up selling a larger volume of its phones than it is selling at the moment (which is not too flattering).

If you are interested in developing applications but do not know much about Silverlight or C#, then Microsoft presents a series of videos to help you through their Channel9 network on MSDN. These videos are for absolute beginners but could be used by professionals to brush up their knowledge.

The description on the website reads :

This video series will help aspiring Windows Phone 7 developers get started. We'll start off with the basics and work our way up so in a few hours, you will know enough to build simple WP7 applications, such as a GPS aware note taking application. We'll walk you through getting the tools, knowing what an if statement is, to using the GPS built into the phone and much more!

Check out the videos, starting with the introduction video by clicking on the link below.
Windows Phone 7 Development for Absolute Beginners: Series Introduction

Life of a Software Engineer

2010-11-12T22:09:00.002+05:30

Pays damn good. Life Sucks!….Software Engineer

Here is an story I had read quite long ago at AboutMyJob.com that interested me. The website is about a place where professionals can put up their job experiences, whether good or bad(though it is often the later!), for everyone to read. Most people you find here are complaining and this is no surprise. The article quoted below was written long back in the year 2001 and probably doesn't hold true in today's IT world. But it still makes for a good reading. Read it below...

I’m a software engineer writing this so that someone can learn from my experience.

I graduated in 2000 and got two technical degrees from one of the most “esteemed” universities in India.(I would not be able to answer even the most basic questions if asked a question on the subject of either of my degrees. This might sound stupid but you wont believe the number of people who are like me!!!) I got my first job in the US of A. And my first car is something I only previously saw in american movies.

I work in a major communication systems deveopment company and spend my life sitting in front of a computer screen ( mostly thinking “What the hell am I doing here???”. ).

I have been working only for a year now and already I feel I’ve burnt out. The work that I do is really interesting as far as software engineering goes.The field is in embedded system developement. Real systems work. You also get to work on real life problems which affect millions of users worldwide and problems which most computer developers would kill to be working on.

You work with new technology and even have a sense of accomplishment that your work is really being used by people. The work culture ensures that you get the sole credit for any work that you do.

The Good points of my job:

1. Good pay.

2. Intellectually stimulating.

3. Not something anyone can do!

The bad:

1. NO women!

2. No or minimum contact with people.

2. LONG hours in the office.

3. Lots of stress.

4. No social life.

5. Radiation burns from the monitors.

Guys at college: (esp in India)… MONEY IS NOT EVERYTHING! THINK about what you REALLY want to do in life!Its not a joke. And usually in India you dont have a choice. Its YOUR life… dont let anyone else (even parents) make this decision for you.

I am seriously thinking of changing my career. Unfortunately I dont know what I would love to do. And the things that I do love …people would not pay me to do .

I’m searching alternatives right now. Lets see what happens.

I had previously thought that I’d make a million and retire by 25… (yes I said 25). That was possible in my field maybe a year ago but not now and probably not for the next two/three years. And I cant waste those precious years.

In five I years I want see my self on a place with tropical beaches. The same for when I’m thirty… doing something I really love.

Umm enough … I think I’ve bored you enough.

Click here for the original article.

Computer Virus Leads to $20 Million Scam Targeting Pianist Composer

2010-11-10T22:18:00.001+05:30

A noted pianist and a composer in The United States has been duped over the years to a tune of $ 20 million by a computer technician citing virus problem! The musician had approached a New York based computer technician named Vickram Bedi and his girlfriend Helga Invarsdottir to get his laptop problem solved which he guess might have been caused due to virus. The technician duo manipulated the gullible musician citing some devious group being behind them and The U.S. Government.

The ridiculous thing is that the musician bought their stupid idea and allowed them to leech him for exorbitant amounts, which are now being touted to be anywhere between $ 6-20 million.

The culprits have been caught while they were preparing to leave on a trip to Iceland. If convicted (which they most probably will be), they will each get a jail term of 25 years!

Google Chrome Offline Installer

2010-11-08T21:25:00.000+05:30

Google Chrome download can become a mess for people with very slow internet connections. This is because the chrome setup that you install from the official website is actually the online installer. The size of the file is very small too (~555 KB). Once you finish installing and run the setup, the application connects to the internet and downloads additional files which will then install the main application. For slow internet connections this may not be desirable. That is, downloading the full software(~23.3MB) using a download accelerator may seem a better option.

For such people, below is the link to the Google site for Google Chrome's offline installer. It is also called as the standalone package/installer.

Download it from here - Google Chrome Offline (standalone) installer

Breaking News - Michael Jackson's New Song

2010-11-08T21:05:00.001+05:30

Michael Jackson's new album entitled 'Michael'

Sony has released a never before heard song from none other than the late Michael Jackson. This song is entitled as 'Breaking News' and is included in the official album due release next month. Sony has released this full song as a teaser to the album.

The album itself is shrouded in controversy as some members of Michael Jackson's family and close friends are claiming that the sound is not that of Michael Jackson's. But Sony claims that a lot many experts and artists have confirmed that the song is indeed authentic and that the vocals are indeed Michael Jackson's.

If you are a Michael Jackson fan you will surely like the song. The song is essentially a good one with beats and chorus that will get you hooked. The song somewhat reminds of his 'Tabloid Junkie' from his History album as it has a similar overtone. The song has Jackson trademarks throughout the song but in these days of the digital world, it is possible to easily digitally modify any music.

What ever is the case, Breaking News will surely turn out to become a hit with the fans. Listen to the song and decide for yourself. The song will be on air on the official website for only a week. So hear it till you have a chance. I have already heard it over a dozen times!

Listen to the song at http://michaeljackson.com

Note : the image and the art work is the copyright of its owner. It has been taken from the internet and is not mine.

Web Browser Bookmark

2010-11-07T04:55:00.008+05:30

If you are just interesting in knowing about only web browser bookmarks then skip to the later parts

In literal sense, bookmarks are page keepers that distinguish the page from others. In most cases, when reading a book, we put page markers/bookmarks as shown in the picture on the left so as to be able to easily come back to that page for future reference or to resume after a break.

The slideshow shown to the left shows some examples of what physical bookmarks are.
These can be any objects you have at hand, such as a pagemarker, your spectacles, a pen/pencil etc. Many of us must have used them already (sometimes without even knowing what they are!).

Web browser bookmarks or favourites are very similar in function to those mentioned above. The only difference being that these are software bookmarks and not physical like the ones we have spoken about earlier.

The reason for writing this blog post on web browser bookmarks is because I suddenly noticed a lot of my friends do not know what a 'bookmark' is and have never used this excellent helpful functionality. And there must be more and more people like them on the internet who are unaware of this convenient facility and thus I have decided to devote a series of posts on this small but useful topic - 'web browser bookmarks'.

Definition
According to Wikipedia, "in the context of the World Wide Web, a bookmark is a locally stored Uniform Resource Identifier (URI or an URL). All modern web browsers include bookmark features. Bookmarks are called favorites or Internet shortcuts in Internet Explorer, and by virtue of that browser's large market share, these terms have been synonymous with bookmark since the first browser war. Bookmarks are normally accessed through a menu in the user's web browser, and folders are commonly used for organization. In addition to bookmarking methods within most browsers, many external applications offer bookmark management".

Suppose one is browsing a random website and likes a particular article/information on the current page. He decides that he may require this page in future, so what method does he use to store it for future reference? There are 3 simple methods to do that:

maintain a diary listing important webpages by manually writing them down as and when needed. You can refer to this diary in future if required. I used to do this when I was a newbie to the world of internet and computers and I guess there are many who still do this. The main drawback of this system is that over a period of time the diary will fill up and it will become a mess of scribbled web links that will become more and more difficult to refer to as time passes and more links get added.
another option would be to save the entire webpage in a folder on your hard disk using the 'File>Save as/Save Page as' option from your web browser. This method saves the page for offline viewing and that could be of some use but again a clutter of hundreds of pages may become irritating after a period of time to search from.
the best and most effective way, as you might have already guessed, is to use a bookmark. It will be stored in the browser itself and will be indexed for future reference.

To create a bookmark in your web broswer, follow the following steps:

For Firefox
Just click on the Bookmarks option in the Menu Bar on the top of the browser and select Bookmark this Page. Alternatively one can also press Ctrl+D to save the current page as a bookmark.
One can edit the name of the bookmark, select the folder where one wants to save the bookmark and give it tags for indexing.

For Internet Explorer
Click on the Favourites option in the Menu Bar on the top of the browser and select Add to Favourites. One can then edit the name to be saved with and also specify the folder in which the favourites/bookmark is to be stored.

For Opera
For the latest editions with the big red O(the menu button for Opera), click on the top left hand corner on the Opera Menu, Click on Bookmarks and click on Bookmark Page. The bookmarks add menu is a bit more elaborate with extras like html address, descriptions and a couple of other options.
For the older ones, its same as in Firefox.

Note that other than accessing the menu, one can also book mark by

pressing Ctrl + D
clicking on the 'star' on the right hand corner of the address bar (place where one types the web address such as www.google.com; the star may be located somewhere else too as in case of Internet Explorer.)

Why bookmark?
We learnt 'how' to bookmark and now let us see the benefits. As mentioned earlier in the post, bookmarks are an alternative to saving pages on hard drive or listing our favourite website addresses in a diary. It is more convenient to just bookmark the site and let the browser do the homework. A bookmarked site can be easily found out when-

one types the partial name of the site in the address bar and the browser gives you the choice for the complete addresses from the saved bookmarks(kind of autocomplete feature in google search).
one can directly seek the bookmark from the bookmarks menu or the bookmarks toolbar. Just keep the most visited websites in the toolbar for 'click and use' access.

Usage of bookmarks can be more efficient if managed properly. That will be the scope for a later blog post. I think it is enough for now. A couple of posts more to come on web browser bookmarks. Will get those out in a day or two.

Note: Some of the pictures used here are taken from over the internet and were found using Google image search. Their copyrights belong to their respective owners.

Asia Pacific and MEA Cup 2011- IT Security for the Next Generation

2010-09-10T12:37:00.003+05:30

Conference Objective

This conference brings together students, experts, scientists and researchers in a collaborative environment to present and discuss issues relating to cybercrime. It provides a platform for the next generation to be able to share their respective knowledge and experiences and to develop new ideas to improve the level of security in information technology.
The best submissions will be given awards and valuable prizes from Kaspersky Lab and the authors will be invited to attend the MEA and Asia Pacific Conference for Young Professionals to be hosted at the University of Technology MARA in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) on February 25 - 28, 2011. The authors will be given a certificate of participation.

Conference Topics

Technical Topics:

Trends in Anti-Spam Development – Techniques, Methods in the “Spam Arms Race” and new Innovations
Dangers of an increasingly Networked World
“In the Cloud”-Security
Future Technologies for Detecting and Combating Malware (e.g. artificial intelligence, fuzzy systems, p2p-networks)

Social, economic and legal Topics:

Emerging Threats (e.g. social network security, embedded systems security, mobile security, online banking security)
Challenges and Opportunities for IT-Security Companies within the next 10 Years
Impact of technologies on Data Protection, Copy and Intellectual Property Rights and Jurisdiction
Education in IT Security - Trends and Questions

Conference Participants

Those who would like to participate should register here by October 30th, 2010 & send the research by November 30th, 2010 to studconf@kaspersky-asia.com
Bachelor and Master Students from all Asia Pacific, African and Middle East Universities, Institutes of Higher Education and Graduate Schools are welcome to apply. The program committee will evaluate and select the best submissions.

Countries

Students from the following countries can participate in this conference:
Asia Pacific: China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Australia and New Zealand
Africa, Middle East: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordanian, Mongolia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Mongolia, Pakistan

Visit site
For more information click here (pdf)

Meet The New Fox

2010-07-15T20:51:00.000+05:30

Mozilla is getting ready for the new version of the hugely popular web browser that will be called Firefox 4 and has released the first beta version for the new edition of the browser. There are a few aesthetic changes in the new version of the browser such as the tabs that have been pushed up where the Menu bar originally was, much like in Opera and Chrome browsers. The Menu bar instead been transformed into a drop-down menu on the upper left corner of the user interface (UI) labeled as ‘Firefox’. This feature was first seen with Chrome having a single button for their drop-down menu and later Opera used this feature and put up their Opera button on upper left hand corner, an idea which the newest edition of Firefox has borrowed. These changes will surely help by neatly arranging the menu items in one place for quicker access, thereby reducing the clutter in UI and make the new version more visually enhancing.

Other than these cosmetic changes, the new edition also sports a ‘Switch to Tab’ which according to them will help navigate more easily by switching to open tabs from the tab toolbar. Other than these cosmetic changes, the beta version gives a glimpse of what the final version will be like. It includes features such as a new Add-Ons Manager, support HTML5, CSS3, a new lightweight Jetpack framework and lots of other developer friendly features that will help make and use the browser for a more dynamic web environment.

One of the most important announcements has been the crash protection. Until now, if a module or a plugin such as Flash(yes, it frequently crashes!) crashes, the entire Firefox has to be shut down and restarted. This can be pretty annoying when, say, doing some important work or watching videos or maybe if someone is working with too many open tabs. Now, with this crash protection feature, only the crashed tab will have to be reloaded leaving other tabs (and the entire browser) virtually unaffected. This was first featured in Chrome browser and Firefox seems to have taken a cue from them.

Firefox 4 has other notable improvements such as new privacy controls, an inbuilt sync facility and it promises to be faster than ever. It will be available for Mac and Linux users too.

Try out the new beta version and be one of the first to test the newest edition of the popular web browser (click here to download) . Check out more about the new browser on their official page here.

This post was originally guest authored by me for CrazyEngineers for their blog - Voice. You can visit the blog for the original article here

Pirate Party to run The Pirate Bay from Swedish Parliament

2010-07-12T09:32:00.001+05:30

After their former hosting provider received an injunction telling it to stop providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, the worlds most resilient BitTorrent site switched to a new ISP. That host, the Swedish Pirate Party, made a stand on principle. Now they aim to take things further by running the site from inside the Swedish Parliament.

When the Swedish Pirate Party announced, back in mid-May, that they were the new ISP of The Pirate Bay, it surprised a lot of people. With their latest announcement, that they will run The Pirate Bay from inside the Swedish Parliament, they hope they will surprise people again.

The Pirate Parties around the world are best known for copyright activism and are often seen as a ‘one-issue party’. While they also focus on privacy, government transparency, free speech, and patent reform, it is copyright that people’s minds spring to. So, with an election coming up, the Swedish Pirate Party has decided to play to their strength.

The party has announced today that they intend to use part of the Swedish Constitution to further these goals, specifically Parliamentary Immunity from prosecution or lawsuit for things done as part of their political mandate. They intend to push the non-commercial sharing part of their manifesto, by running The Pirate Bay from ‘inside’ the Parliament, by Members of Parliament.

Of course, the plan can only take place if the Party wins some seats in the September 19^th Elections, where there is a 4% barrier to overcome. However, last June they did manage 7% in the European Parliament elections, so it’s not an impossible goal by any means. We will have to wait and see what September brings.

Source

Hard Drive Prices Dropping Again

2010-07-07T19:19:00.007+05:30

Hard drive prices, about a year ago, had stabilized down after a period of sharp fall, due to shortage of hard drives. The depreciation in the price was very less or even negligible in some cases. A couple of months ago, I had gone to the wholesale market to get a few things and I noticed that the prices of hard drives had actually shot up by about 15-20 $. I certainly had expected the prices to come down but was surprised with the sudden rise in the prices.

On enquiry, I found out that there was shortage of hard drives (especially Seagate ones) in the market due to under supply. A little googling shed more light on the matter. The reason was that for the past 2-3 quarters, the demand for desktop computers have been on the rise but the hard drive producing companies still had not increased their production capacities and continued to maintain levels they had adopted during the recession period(source). Their argument was that technology had moved away into its next phase (read SSDs) and there was no point in investing in older technology. This actually forced the prices upwards and helped the manufacturers make better profits than they had in years.

But my recent visit to the market brought to my notice that the prices have started showing a downward trend yet again. Recently, the manufacturers had yielded to the industry demands and had increased the production of the conventional hard drives fueled by a healthy demand of desktop computers and the slow market acceptance of the SSDs (mostly due to their high costs). Thus the market had an increased supply of components but the recent European crisis seems to have decreased the forecast margins for pc demand and therefore there seems to an over supply of hard disks at the moment, thereby causing a downward trend in their prices.

Hard drives with bigger capacities have shown steeper fall in their prices and the fall is expect to continue till at least the end of the year, after which a revision of demand estimates against production estimates will determine the future of the pricing wars.

Source

This post was originally guest authored by me for CrazyEngineers for their blog - Voice. You can visit the blog for the original article here

Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech(2005)

2010-06-30T23:53:00.000+05:30

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower," Steve Jobs.
And how well these words describe the man himself. For a man who takes home an annual salary of $1, it is surprising that Jobs regularly is in the list of the world's rich and powerful.
In his resume, Jobs says his objective is to look for a fixer-upper with a solid foundation. "Am willing to tear down walls, build bridges, and light fires. I have great experience, lots of energy, a bit of that "vision thing" and I'm not afraid to start from the beginning."

Born in Green Bay, Wisconsin to Joanne Simpson and an Egyptian Arab father, Jobs is the chief executive officer of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios. Jobs was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California.
Jobs lives with his wife, Laurene Powell and their three children in Silicon Valley. He also has a daughter, Lisa Jobs from a previous relationship.
We present here Steve Jobs' Commencement address at Stanford University where he speaks about the highs and lows of life, how to counter challenges and how to fight the odds to come out victorious. Jobs delivered this speech on June 12, 2005.

Check the video footage of the speech at Standford.

For those who are unable to view the video for some reason, here is a transcript of the same.

I am honoured to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.
I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born.
My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.
She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.
Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.
So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course."
My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers.
She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later, I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.
After six months, I couldn't see the value in it.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.
And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.
It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.
I loved it.
And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in thecountry.
Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.
Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.
I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.
It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.
And we designed it all into the Mac.
It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college.
But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky -- I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.
We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh -- a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired.
How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well.
But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out.
When we did, our board of directors sided with him.
So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down -- that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.
I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologise for screwing up so badly.
I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me -- I still loved what I did.
The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.
It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.
Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.
And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.
Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.
You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.
And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.
As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.
So keep looking until you find it.

My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right."
It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"
And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas.
I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.
My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die.

It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months.
It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day.
Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor.
I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.
I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades.
Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.
And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking.
Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation.
It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.
This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras.
It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue.
It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age.
On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.
Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off.
Stay Hungry.
Stay Foolish.
And I have always wished that for myself.
And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you.

Source

Using HijackThis to remove malware

2010-06-30T22:46:00.003+05:30

HijackThis, a hijacker detector and remover was originally created by Merijn Bellekom and then later sold off to Trend Micro. HijackThis is a very popular browser hijacker detector used by majority of security analysers to identify the possible malware infections on a computer.

The problem with today’s malware is that they are very difficult to detect due to the advanced protective mechanisms used by them. Because of this, even a thorough scan by the latest updated anti virus or an anti spyware/malware may miss out on the latest variants of a particular malware. In such cases, to make sure even the last traces of the malware is weeded out, security analysts suggest using HijackThis logfile through which they can analyse the registry and other program settings on a computer and based on the log, they can pinpoint towards the malware entry (and thereby their removal too) with greater accuracy.

It is rather a simple process.
•   Just download the HijackThis software from http://free.antivirus.com/hijackthis and run the executable.
•   Then select the appropriate option to scan and generate the log file (the 1st option).
•   Once the log file is generated, get it analysed at www.hijackhthis.de or if you are still unwilling to take any risk, post the log to any security forum of your choice. Googling out for ‘hijackthis security forums’ will get you lots of relevant links.
•   Check out the bad settings and click on ‘Fix checked’. Additionally, if it is some program that had set the malicious entry, delete the file manually. If you are unable to delete it, Use the ‘Delete a file on reboot’ option at the ‘Misc tools section’. The file will get deleted after the computer is restarted.
•   The above technique is one of the most popular methods in malware removal and is supposed to almost guarantee a malware free computer.

Check out the short video tutorial below to see how it is done in few easy steps:

For those who are unable to check out the video tutorial for some reason, here’s a pictorial walkthrough below. Click on the images to see them at their full resolution.

Step 1:
Download the HijackThis executable from the link mentioned above and run it. Then click on
‘Do a system scan and save a logfile’ as shown in the picture.

Step 2:

Step 3:
It will auto generate a log file after the scanning is completed. Copy all the contents of the notepad.

Step 4:

Step 5:

Step 6:

Step 7:

Step 8:
In case of any instability issues after you have deleted some entries using the above method, you can easily restore them back with the restore function.

Step 9:
Other tools such as the ‘process manager’ (similar to the Task Manager in Windows ), file deletion on reboot and startup list log file generator are some of the extra features that HijackThis offers for tackling malware that are relatively difficult to remove.
Remember that the startuplist log file is similar to the HijackThis log file but it scans only for the startup entries. This kind of a log file may be asked by experts to be posted in forums in case of tough malware.

This post was originally guest authored by me for CrazyEngineers for the blog - Voice. You can visit the blog for the original article here

Download GTA game for free

2010-06-23T15:45:00.000+05:30

Grand Theft Auto (commonly abbreviated as GTA) fans have something to cheer about. Rockstar Games, the developer of the famous game series has decided to offer the classic GTA , GTA 2 and Wild Metal games for free download on their website. "These games, each available free of charge and optimized for play on modern PCs, offer a nostalgic trip back in time to the early days of the Rockstar legacy."

One can download the games from this link - Rockstar Classics

Note that, after clicking on the icon of the game one wants, he is required to fill up a small form and then the download link will be sent to their email address.

P.S. : for people who loved GTA Vice City and its sequels, I suggest you give these classic games a try. They are the real basis for these popular games that we have today. I had played GTA 2 when I was a kid and I had loved it even then!

Things you didn’t know VLC media player can do

2010-06-08T10:16:00.001+05:30

For most people, VLC is the favorite media player because it plays everything they throw at it without hiccups. No hunting for codec. But VLC can do a lot of other things as well. Find out how many of these listed below you knew, and how many you did not.

1. Rip DVDs: VLC includes a basic DVD ripper. You probably would never use it when there are better DVD rippers available, but it helps to know that you can in fact, get a decent quality DVD rip with VLC. To rip a movie follow these steps:

Go to the Media menu and choose Convert/Save. Click on the Disc tab.
Here you can adjust the Starting Position and rip only specific titles or chapters.
Enter file name making sure to end with .MPG, and start ripping.
Click Save.

2. Record videos: With the new VLC, you can record videos during playback. The record button is hidden by default. To see it, click on View>Advanced Control. The record button will now appear. Clicking on the button while playing a movie or video will start recording. Clicking again will stop recording.

3. Play RAR files: Do you know VLC can play videos zipped inside RAR files? They play like normal video files and you can even use the seek bar. If the RAR file is split into several files, no problem. Just load the first part (.part001.rar ) and it will automatically take the rest of the parts and play the whole file.
4. Play in ASCII mode: VLC media player has an amusing ability, to playback movies in ASCII art. To enable ASCII mode, open VLC media player and click on Tools>Preferences. Open the section “Video” section and under “Output” select “Color ASCII art video output” from the drop down menu. Save it. Now play any video file to enjoy the ASCII art.

5. Listen to online radio: VLC includes hundreds of Shoutcast radio stations. You just need to enable it through Media>Services Discovery>Shoutcast radio listings. Now, open the Playlist and browse through the stations.

6. Convert Audio and Video formats: In VLC you can convert video and audio files from one format to another. Several different formats are supported like MP4, WMV, AVI, OGG, MP3 etc. To access the converter:

Go to Media>Convert/Save.
Load the file you want to convert using the Add button and click Convert.
Now choose the output format and output file location.

7. Download YouTube and other online videos: First grab the URL of the YouTube video page. Now click on Media>Open Network stream. Paste the URL and click Play.
Once VLC starts streaming the video, click Tools>Codec Information and at the bottom of the window you will see a Location box. Copy the URL and paste it on your browser’s address bar. The browser will now download the file which you can save it to your hard disk. Alternatively, you can record the video. (See #2).

Source : InstantFundas

Hollywood says NO to Steve Jobs

2010-05-29T23:32:00.001+05:30

The Apple vs Adobe fight drags on with several large media companies going Adobe’s way by not relenting to Apple’s directives on changing their Flash based media content to the ones supported by Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

According to a report by New York Times, “several large media companies, including Time Warner and NBC Universal, told Apple they won’t retool their extensive video libraries to accommodate the iPad, arguing that such a reformatting would be expensive and not worth it because Flash dominates the Web.

The resistance to the change buoys on the hope that the recently announced tablet pcs by Dell and HP (and a few more) will include support for Flash, thus requiring no extra work for these media companies towards re-encoding as they can run their media on the currently popular Flash technology.

Apple’s cause will be further weakened as Google TV plans to distribute media content using Flash technology.

After a string of bad experience with Adobe’s product in their devices, Apple decided to cut off its customers from Flash entirely for both interactive and video content and it pushed for the development of HTML5 and H.264 formats instead. According to Apple, Flash is an old technology and causes faster depletion of battery life along with a slew of other issues that reportedly spoils the iPhone/iPad experience.

Though Apple has been slow in getting most media companies into their fold in the past too, time has shown that they had to return back on their side after a certain period of time. Things were sour with the media companies when Apple decided to sell songs on their iTunes at a flat rate across the board but they had to relent in the end when their own rival marketing model fell flat.

This time too Apple is facing the difficulty of getting the media companies to agree upon its set of directives but it doesn’t seem long before they actually end up agreeing. Already, high profile companies like Virgin America, Scribd, Disney, Fox News, CNN among others have started delivering media content according to the formats supported by Apple’s products. These companies are of the view that Apple’s customers represent a large portion of the affluent demographic of users and hence they are lining up to cash in alongside Apple’s continued success with its products.

It would be interesting to see what Adobe executive have to say regarding the matter as this is the first time in several weeks that something good has come their way and not Steve Jobs!
________________________________________________________________
The article above was written by me for CrazyEngineers. You can read the original article at their site here

IObit Advanced SystemCare PRO Free Giveaway

2010-05-16T00:04:00.001+05:30

IObit is giving away their popular system maintenance software Advanced System Care PRO free as a part of limited time giveaway to commemorate their 5th anniversary of Advanced System Care.

Advanced System Care is a popular system maintenance software that has received rave reviews from technicians and users alike. It has won several Editor's Choice awards and continues to be a favourite among the computer techies.

Advanced System Care provides all in one computer maintenance with anti-spyware features, performance optimization, system and registry tune ups, and system cleaning features. All of these can be accessed at once by clicking on the 'Care' button and can also be setup for automatic use. It works on Windows 7/ Vista/ XP/ 2000 (32/64 bit) and supports multi languages.

Get your free license copy of the Advanced System Care PRO here

Note: this giveaway is for a limited period only.

The Chinese find use for cigarette butts

2010-05-14T16:15:00.002+05:30

HONG KONG, May 13 (Reuters) - Chemical extracts from cigarette butts -- so toxic they kill fish -- can be used to protect steel pipes from rusting, a study in China has found.

In a paper published in the American Chemical Society's bi-weekly journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, the scientists in China said they identified nine chemicals after immersing cigarette butts in water.

They applied the extracts to N80, a type of steel used in oil pipes, and found that they protected the steel from rusting.

"The metal surface can be protected and the iron atom's further dissolution can be prevented," they wrote.

The chemicals, including nicotine, appear to be responsible for this anti-corrosion effect, they added.

The research was led by Jun Zhao at Xi'an Jiaotong University's School of Energy and Power Engineering and funded by China's state oil firm China National Petroleum Corporation.

Corrosion of steel pipes used by the oil industry costs oil producers millions of dollars annually to repair or replace.

According to the paper, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts find their way into the environment each year. Apart from being an eyesore, they contain toxins that can kill fish.

"Recycling could solve those problems, but finding practical uses for cigarette butts has been difficult," the researchers wrote.

China, which has 300 million smokers, is the world's largest smoking nation and it consumes a third of the world's cigarettes. Nearly 60 percent of men in China smoke, puffing an average of 15 cigarettes per day. (Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn; Editing by Miral Fahmy)

Source

Infinite USB Ports ?

2010-04-10T02:32:00.000+05:30

Yes, that's right. A Chinese designer and inventor has made something that most of us would think, "why didn't someone think of this before!" Gonglue Jiang, the man behind this innovation has made this attractive little contraption that may be of great use to computer users.

These days, we see a lot of USB devices and for a person like me who uses too many devices at once (2 external drives, a pen drive, a USB mouse, laptop cooler and a USB mobile phone charger), such a thing could be a boon. At the moment, I use a 4 port USB hub on one of my USB ports on my laptop (out of the total three) and that's how I manage my USB devices. But most of the times this becomes messy and irritates me a lot. A good alternative could be such a device as shown in the picture which would allow me to add any number of USB devices I would want to use.
Typically, the no of devices that can be attached in this daisy chain kind of arrangement is limited to 127(+ the main port). But there's hardly any need for anyone to add more than 127 USB devices on a computer.

Every coin has two sides they say and such is in this case too. The innovative contraption comes with its own disadvantages too. Attaching too many devices on a single port will need a lot of power and it may lead to a deficient power supply to some of the devices at the end of the chain. To counter this problem, Jiang has come out with a solution, that is a USB ended AC power adaptor that will compliment in providing the required power (click on the image to see the original size).

But again, an additional power adaptor will hinder mobility. Also, plugging too many devices over a single port may turn out confusing for the user but Jiang seems to be optimistic about this innovation and believes that "the colourful design helps users organise their devices more easily, and makes a series of USB plugs more vivid".

On a more practical note, no person is mad enough to need 127 USB devices in one go, so the argument about too many devices making it look messy and drawing too much power is out of question. Yes, devices such as external hard disks can requires more power but a laptop or any such portable computer has more at least 2 or more ports so they can be assigned to a dedicated port and the other, less power consuming devices can be added to this contraption. And as I said, very few people would require even more than 5 USB devices to be used simultaneously!

One thing that people should note is that USB controller on the motherboard shares the bus among all the USB ports. So in case there are many devices attached on the ports + this contraption, then it will decrease the efficiency of all of these. For stuff like USB keyboard/mouse, mobile charger etc, this arrangement would be fine. But in case, in addition to all these, there are 2-3 external hard disks attached, then they will see a drop in their performance transfer speeds because of the above mentioned reason.

Overall, I believe this device is very useful and can serve as a suitable substitute for USB hubs. It would be especially nice when we do not require the many additional ports that the hubs have, instead we would just plug in the number we want.

Hero or just a fizzle, its yet to show. But that the device is truly eye catching and innovative has been proved from the world wide acclaim it has received. It also won the 'iF concept award 2010' for this innovative concept and is gaining in popularity slowly but steadily. It's now upto you to decide whether it is good for you or not. As for me, am waiting for its release into the market!

Check Gonglue Jiang's site.

Facebook's virus spreading Email

2010-03-26T15:12:00.000+05:30

I had earlier written an article on malicious emails being sent to Facebook users telling them that their password have been changed and that the new details are enclosed in the attachment. Any one then downloading the attachment will get infected with the malware present in it. You can read more about it here.

Today, I too received the email on my Yahoo account so I thought I should share the screenshots with you. See the images below. I have explained things in them where possible. Click on them to see the original size.

Beware of such fake mails. Do not download these attachments.

Things to look for when buying a new Laptop

2010-03-26T14:12:00.002+05:30

The need for computers have been changing ever since its inception as personal computer. Be it programming, gaming, surfing the net, watching movies or just listening to music, the personal computer has evolved and so have the demands.

In the current scenario, the demand for mobile computing has seen a huge surge in demand as against the decreasing market share of desktop computer.

A person must fully understand his needs before he can decide whether to buy a laptop, a netbook or may be a tablet pc. These days, with so many brands and their subsequent models, it has become difficult for the average user to decide on which type/configuration of laptop to buy.
Just give a visit to the Dell website and you will be bombarded with details like Sata, 7200x, HD5770, Level 2 or 3 Cache and other similar computer related jargon. This gets confusing for many average users wanting to buy a new laptop computer.

This quick reference guide will help one look through and understand the basics before they can make sense to all the information that is fed to them. The following are the few things can one must attend to before deciding on their choice.

Processor: There are several processors in the offering from the stables of AMD and Intel. Do not get fooled by the numbers or the names of these processors. Before deciding which one to buy, ask yourself what is your actual need. If it's just for casual entertainment and a little work here and there then consider buying yourself a Dual Core processor. If it's for gaming or other heavy work, consider going for quad core processors such as Intel i7 or AMD Phenom 2 X4 series processors. If your need is just for some office work and internet surfing with some occasional music and movies, then consider going for Atom family processors.

Remember getting the most powerful processor in the market is not always the good thing to do. If you are buying a laptop and are a frequent traveler, then getting a quad core based laptop wont suit you well as it will drain your battery very fast. Instead the Atom based processors will serve you better by offering much better battery backup. If you are interested only in internet surfing and applications then you may consider netbooks. They will do almost everything a laptop does but is little less powerful than the traditional laptops.

Screen size: choosing the correct screen size is important and should be done on the basis of one's needs. If you are buying a laptop as a replacement for desktops then consider having screen sizes larger than 15". They are good for gaming or watching movies. If portability is an issue then consider having a 14" screen that will not make the laptop too big nor too heavy to carry.

If you are a frequent traveler then consider the netbooks with typically 10-12" screens. They are smaller, lighter versions of laptops. And for ultra portability consider tablet pcs. Tablet pcs (such as iPad) are very small and thin and can fit easily into any small traveling bag. It is ideal for travelers and businessman alike.

Battery backup: battery backup won't be much of an issue if you plan to keep your laptop at home. But if you are a traveler and frequently on the go, then consider having a laptop with a good battery backup. These days, there are laptops giving users upto 6-8 hours of computing power. So grab one that fits your needs.

RAM: an important thing to be checked is the RAM. The RAM is the memory that your computer needs to run the operating system and the application running on it. Netbooks are typically coming with 512 MB to 1GB of RAM as it is sufficient for general office and internet related work.

Laptops come with usually 2GB of RAM which is more than sufficient for most casual work and gaming. If heavy gaming or similar heavy work is your concern, then consider 2GB of DDR3 or more.

Storage space: this is something one must evaluate on the basis of their intended use and generally, more the hard disk space, the better it is. If gaming, movies and/or music is your concern then consider getting the largest available hard disk that fits your budget (from a minimum of 300GB to a maximum of 2.5TB). For normal office and internet related work. 300GB would be more than enough.

For those who are going to use for business, may look at SSD's which is a new technology in data storage being used in computers. They are very costly at the moment but without any movable parts, they offer the best service in terms of performance and reliability. But large space SSD's are still sparse owing to their extremely high prices and thus lower demands. Market conditions are improving and SSDs will become a lot cheaper in a year or so.

External storage solutions are also an option in case one runs out of internal hard disk space. These can be added later as required.

CD/DVD drive: Laptops these days are generally built in with CD/DVD drives that can read and burn these discs. Costlier models may include Blu-Ray drives too. Additions could be slot-in types, dual layer burning capability, LightScribe features etc.

Remember that netbooks are made to be more portable than their laptop counterparts and therefore lack these CD/DVD drives.

Operating System: most laptop models come with preloaded OEM based Operating System(OS). Windows is the market leader in this case with many Linux distros seeing an increase in popularity year over year. You can choose to buy a model with a preloaded OS or you may add one later. Check the details before buying.

Software packages: most laptops come with trial versions of popular softwares. Most of these such as antivirus programs, MS Office suite etc come with a 60 day trial which needs to be bought after that trial period. Be sure to ask your retailer about these products and buy out full/registered versions of these when possible.

Else use the open source alternatives that are usually as good as these paid ones and are free.

Other specifications: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, card readers etc are mostly available in all models these days as they have become a necessity rather than a specialty.

Warranty/Service Centres: this is a major issue but it gets the least attention. Laptops are delicate computers and usually more difficult to maintain than traditional desktop computers. Thus it is imperative that the buyer clarifies the terms and conditions of warranty and the location of service centres.

One can never predict when an electronic device may go wrong. Thus make sure that there is a service centre nearby your place. Some companies provide on-site warranty which means that they will come to your place and do the repairs that are required. Remember that while on-site solutions may sound better it is not always good. Because one may have to wait for several days before the technician comes and solves the problem.

Some extra homework: for people who are looking for 'value for money', look out in computer/tech related blogs/forums. Beware of paid reviews though. These people get paid to write good about the products. Look for sties such as MouthShut which offers free user reviews which according to me are very important before buying any item.

New password stealing virus targets Facebook

2010-03-18T14:51:00.002+05:30

(Reuters) - Hackers have flooded the Internet with virus-tainted spam that targets Facebook's estimated 400 million users in an effort to steal banking passwords and gather other sensitive information.

Hackers are sending emails on behalf of Facebook stating that their passwords have been reset due to some security measure and that they need to click on the attachment to get their new login credentials. But as soon as the user downloads the attachment, the malicious contents automatically download and get installed and they are known to cause a number of problems including stealing of passwords from the infected computer.

Facebook has become a frequent target these days owing to its large no of users and ever increasing popularity. This spam attach was launched a few days back and many millions are reported to have received this spam mail.

Incase one receives one such mail, do not open it. Remember that NO company will send you your account details through mail attachments. Just be careful and report to email provider, tech forums or to your anti virus product's company if you find anything fishy.

Source: Reuters

Microsoft IE9 Platform preview available for download

2010-03-18T14:22:00.001+05:30

Microsoft today launched the Platform preview of their latest browser Internet Explorer 9. Platform preview basically means that it is a browser without the user interface which you would normally associate a browser with. It is basically a developer version released for them to take a look at the latest features of this new IE9.

IE9 has a lot of big changes coming out with their new browser. New improvements include

New Microsoft JavaScript engine codenamed "Chakra" has been specifically designed to make better use of dual-core systems by using the second core to compile the JavaScript code down to native code.
New graphics subsystem and the browser also makes use of the PC's GPU in order to boost performance, much to the excitement of the guys at NVIDIA.
More support for the emerging HTML5, CSS3 and SVG2 technologies.

HTML5 applications are a lot richer and demanding, in terms of graphics and speed than Ajax applications. So it’s logical they’ll work better on multi-core machines where the browser can take advantage of multicore performance, Microsoft officials argue. That’s why Microsoft’s new JavaScript engine is built to take advantage of two cores, with the second core compiling JavaScript down to native machine code to help speed up the browser. (Once the native code is available, there’s no need to use interpreted code on Core 1, meaning an app spends less time in JavaScript.)

Microsoft is planning to deliver a lot more preview builds of IE 9 before it hits beta. In fact, the team is committing to delivering an update every eight weeks, and to interact with developers via the Microsoft Connect feedback loop. Microsoft officials wouldn’t say when to expect the first IE 9 beta or to provide any kind of ship date target for the final release.

The product is available for download at www.IETestDrive.com. Do check it out!

Foobar2000 - best alternative to Winamp

2010-03-10T14:02:00.002+05:30

For those who are still sticking around Winamp (or any other media player for that matter) to play their audio files should seriously have a look at Foobar2000. "Foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats."

Foobar2000 is free, small(~3 MB), light on resources and simple to use. The interface is very user friendly and may not look attractive to many but a few changes using optional components can make it rock!

The best thing about Foobar2000 is that its SDK is under BSD license therefore allowing developers to develop their own components(plugins) for this application.

Main features
Supported audio formats: MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND... and more with additional components.
Gapless playback.
Full unicode support.
Easily customizable user interface layout.
Advanced tagging capabilities.
Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats using the Converter component.
Full ReplayGain support.
Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.

There are other good audio players in the market but Foobar2000 has carved a niche for itself with the users owing to its simplicity and good functionality. There are many useful functionalities such as audio converter, inbuilt file copy/delete/rename/move etc (now you don't have to open the folder for every song you want). If you haven't tried this yet, it is time for you to do so.

Download it from here
Read more about it on Wikipedia

How to enable the secret Windows 7 GodMode

2010-03-08T12:29:00.003+05:30

Since the past few months of Windows 7's release, there has been a sudden interest in something that people are calling the Windows 7 GodMode. Don't know how it got the name GodMode; probably the kind of GodMode cheats that allow gamers to play the game without any vulnerability. But there is no such thing here. All Windows 7 GodMode does is, give you a folder where users can access all of the operating system's control panels from within a single folder. All kinds of modifications you may ever need to do, you will find their links here. It is a 2 step process needed to create such a GodMode folder in Windows 7 and it works on both 32 and 64 bit versions.
Here is what you need to do

Create a folder on the desktop (or anywhere appropriate for you).
Right click and rename the folder to

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Remember that you can change the name to anything else if you don't want it as GodMode. Just replace the word "GodMode" with your text, leaving everything else as it is.

The folder icon will now change. Just double click it to open the folder. It is not something very special, just that all the important task links have been put up together for easy access.

Note: This GodMode feature is not exclusive to Windows 7. So if you are a Windows Vista user then you too can try this same thing on your system. Yes, it's nothing new with Windows 7, just that most people came to know about this recently. But ,do note that it had been reported to crash the system in case of using GodMode in Windows Vista 64 bit version. Works fine on 32 bit version.

You may also check out the YouTube links for videos showing how to enable the secret Windows 7 GodMode.
Link1
Link2

Auslogics Disk Defrag

2010-03-03T23:18:00.001+05:30

Disk defragmentation has become an important procedure in computer maintenance. It not only optimizes how data is stored on the hard disk, but it increases overall performance of the computer by making it faster.

Auslogics Disk Defrag is one of the tools that has recently been acclaimed by many expert sites and individuals. It does its work very efficiently and its completely free for home users! And surely, it's a much faster and better alternative for the default Windows Disk Defragmenter.

Its main features are:

Disk Defrag - Intelligent Defragmenter
Auslogics Disk Defrag is a compact and fast defragmenter that supports both FAT 16/32, and NTFS file systems. It is supplied with advanced optimization techniques, which will remedy your system sluggishness and crashes caused by files fragmentation.

Optimizes file systemThis tool will speed up your computer and make it run more smoothly by moving system files to the faster part of the disk and clearing the MFT Reserved Zone from regular data files.

Consolidates free spaceDisk Defrag doesn't only defragment files - it prevents further files fragmentation by merging free space on the disk into a large contiguous block.

Can defrag automaticallyYou can set the program to run automatically when your system goes idle. It will analyze the disks and defragment them in the background if required. With this feature your files fragmentation will be eliminated as soon as it occurs.

Provides flexible schedulerDefragmentation yields better results when implemented on a regular basis. Using flexible scheduler you can set the most suitable time span for defragmenting your hard drives.

Can defrag a single file or folderHave no time for defragmenting an entire hard drive? With Disk Defrag you can defragment a single file, several files or a folder.

Supports multi-terabyte volumesDisk Defrag is supplied with a powerful engine, which can easily defragment large disk volumes of several terabytes, as well as several drives simultaneously.

Compact & FastSmart defragmentation algorithms allow Disk Defrag to run much faster than similar defragmenters and consume less system resources.

You can download Disk Defrag from here. Its very light(2.2 MB) and free for home use too.

Opera 10.50 final release available for download

2010-03-03T18:36:00.001+05:30

Opera has finally come up with their stable Opera 10.5 browser after weeks of beta testing. It promises a lot of improvements over its predecessor and is supposed to be blazingly fast. Infact, many experts are already claiming the latest Opera to be faster than both Firefox and Chrome. Seems like there's stiff competition brewing up there.

Key features:

Fastest ever: their new JavaScript engine is about 7x faster.
Private browsing: choose between private tabs and windows that leave no trace.
Top security: stay protected from dangerous and insecure sites.
Desktop widgets: use hundreds of Opera widgets as standalone applications.
Optimized for windows: take advantage of Windows' new features and look and feel.
Next generation engine: with Opera Presto 2.5, Carakan and Vega, get the fastest and most advanced browsing technologies.
Opera Turbo: boost your speeds with our powerful servers to compress webpages, so you get them faster.
Visual tabs: drag the handle underneath the tabs to reveal thumbnails of your open webpages.
and many more...

You can download Opera 10.5 browser from here

Facebook Mafia Wars hack

2010-03-02T05:32:00.001+05:30

Facebook has gained a lot of popularity in the last couple of years and that is mostly due to its famous apps and games that keep users glued to this site. One of the most famous games on Facebook currently is Mafia Wars made by Zynga Inc. This game is a browser based multiplayer game that has won many awards since its inception. There are many people who want to keep up with the leveling stuff and all but can't be sitting in front of their computer the whole day, or maybe someone has just got bored enough to keep playing that game monotonously. As you know, most games have cheats that help people to bypass difficult portions of the game with ease. But unfortunately, this game doesn't have any cheat codes to apply. Instead there are some hacks for this game that can make your gameplay in Mafia Wars a breeze.

There is a hack for playing Mafia Wars called as the Mafia Wars Autoplayer. It has settings that will allow the game to progress even when you are not playing it manually. Just load it onto the browser and keep it minimised or do your work. The game shall proceed without your intervention. It is basically a JavaScript code that gives you this added functionality. Check the screenshot below

To use this you need to have Firefox installed with Greasemonkey addon on it and then installing the script. If you do not have Firefox then you can use it on Chrome too. There are more than half a million users using this script.

How to use this (Firefox):
Install Greasemonkey - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downlo...
Install the script - http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/64720.use...
On your Facebook homepage: Hold Ctrl, then click on your "Mafia Wars" bookmark. This will prevent the application from shrinking into a bar.
Alternatively, load mafia wars using this link http://apps.facebook.com/inthemafia/index.php

Google Chrome support!
Install from this link: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/lhj...

New features:
Introducing job bursts, help drain your energy faster!
Introducing stamina bursts, help drain your stamina faster!
Bangkok support for choosing sides (General Tab)
Bangkok jobs added
Bangkok support for auto-banking / selling business output
Added publishing of Iced opponent bonus, Level up bonus
Automatically use mini Pack every 8 hours (+25% max energy)
Auto-publish secret stash found while fighting (mafia tab option)
Ice Check
Random stamina usage (Stamina Tab --> Spend Stamina Randomly)
Add/remove friend to and from war list (from friend's profile)

This script is being hosted by www.userscripts.org and is a safe site for downloading and using scripts for Greasemonkey. These scripts can add functionalities to websites that otherwise is not possible for us to get. Check out the variety of scripts available on their website. You will also find scripts for other Facebook games on that site.
Check userscript page for Mafia Wars Autoplayer

Note: installing JavaScript codes can be a potential security risk when installed from unreliable sources. Userscript is endorsed by many websites and has a large pool of scripts for everyday work. Still, use your discretion if you find anything wrong.

Changing the default save format in Microsoft Office 2007 appplications

2010-02-26T01:49:00.000+05:30

Microsoft(MS) Office is one widely used office applications around the computing world. With MS Office 2007, the file formats of its applications changed. That is, for eg, powerpoint files were earlier saved as .ppt format while it became .pptx now. Similar with other office applications whose file formats changed with the new version.

It's a common notion that latest is always better but in this case it was not so. People who had saved their office files in latest 2007 format found their files incompatible in computers running 2003 office applications. Thus, it put many a people under inconvenience. So it is better to use the 2003 office file formats till everyone is familiar with 2007. While saving, we may select 'save as' and then select 'type' as 2003 file format(ppt, doc etc) and click on OK. That will work but many of us are careless to remember doing that all the time, or worse still, many new users don't even know about selecting the type and all that stuff. So it's better to keep 2003 file format as default rather than the 2007 one.

I will show an example using MS Word 2007. I will change the format from docx to doc. The images below show step by step procedure.
Click on them to see full sized images.

I have given the example using MS Word application. The procedure is same for other MS Office applications too.

Also check, how to change colour scheme in Microsoft Office 2007 applications

Changing colour scheme of Microsoft Office 2007 applications

2010-02-25T23:57:00.002+05:30

2007Many people have been asking me frequently how to change the colour scheme of MicroSoft(MS) Office applications. By default it is silver in colour like the one shown below.

I have posted stuff using MS Office applications on various forums and many people have asked how did I make mine Black instead of the default silver(I think so). Actually it is very easy and no big trick is involved. Just that most people overlook the settings required to make the changes.

MS gives us the option to change between silver, blue and black schemes. Here is the procedure to make the changes. Just follow the steps shown in the images below. You may click on them to see a larger image.

So, change the colour as you like!

Also check how to change the default save format in Microsoft Office 2007 applications

Firefox memory leak problem solved

2010-02-24T20:27:00.000+05:30

I had talked about computer starting to lag after sometime when using Firefox over a long time. The reason is that Firefox has a problem of memory leaks. Read here for more. And I have also posted a couple of solutions for those facing this problem. Other than the link given above, you can check easy solutions here and here. This was a problem for those on Firefox versions 3.5 and earlier. Yes, you heard it right! That was a problem and it has been cleared off in their current Firefox 3.6.

The memory leak problem was so irritating that I had seriously considered shifting to Opera or Chrome but had to remain on Firefox because of some addons that I was using wasn't available for the others. But there still was a nagging thought in my head about this complaint about Firefox. It can really become irritating when your simple click action takes 10 seconds to execute instead of one.

Later I upgraded to Firefox 3.6 and to my surprise the problem is all gone. No more lagging of computer even if I have opened more than 20-25 tabs and left Firefox open for hours. It's a great relief to me and hundreds of other Firefox users who have been facing this problem. Now we have one more reason not to leave Firefox!

For those who haven't updated to the latest version can do so from here

Flash, a CPU hog?

2010-02-23T10:37:00.002+05:30

Apple messiah Steve Jobs has recently been on a criticism spree for the graphics company Adobe Inc. While Steve had said that he won't be using Flash for his iPad just like the iPhones calling Adobe as "lazy" and offering "lousy" software, he recently reaffirmed that consumers won't be seeing any flash content on iPad even though competitors may be doing so. According to Steve Jobs, Adobe's Flash is a big time CPU hog and running a flash based content on iPad could reduce the battery life from estimated 10 hours to a meagre 1.5 hours.
Of course the fault isn't with the iPad's processor but with Adobe's Flash, as said by him.

Steve Jobs even went to the extent of comparing Adobe's Flash technology to the now obsolete floppy drives and the likes. According to him Flash is a dying technology and that HTML5 is the answer as its replacement. Many analysts however seem to think that Flash is not dying yet and that Steve may be over reacting on it.

Whatever be the case, many enthusiasts have actually tried out a series of experiments based on this report to see if there really is a problem with Flash. It has been found out that when playing media content on Divx or Xvid, the battery last almost 2 to 3 times longer on a portable computer and that the CPU usage is around 10-30% compared to 40-70% for flash based contents.

I couldn't try it out myself because I have internet connection problem here in my hostel. Am using a measly 256Kbps rated connection which actually gives me below 100Kbps most of the times. You could try experimenting yourself though. For flash based media you could use YouTube or MetaCafe against watching Divx stuff on internet or on your computer itself. Use a good media player though. You could avoid the default Windows Media Player for this.

Check out more here

Auto Power On and Shut Down

2010-02-21T19:43:00.002+05:30

There can be variety of reasons why we may need to shutdown and start the computer at certain times without the need to do it manually.

Maybe someone just likes to wake up listening to songs in the morning, or maybe someone wants to record some program from the TV during his office hours. From shutting down the computer after a long download to waking up the computer from standby or hibernation and playing Mafia Wars on Facebook, the reasons can be unique and there's no end to them.

Especially in India, more and more people are getting connected to broadband internet. BSNL being one of the largest ISPs in the country. Most people resort to the night time unlimited plans to enjoy free downloads at high speeds but that comes at a cost too. The timings for such a connection starts late at 2:00 AM at night and ends at 8:00 AM in the morning. If the user starts his connection earlier than 2:00 AM or stops it even a few minutes after 8:00 AM, he will get charged for the entire usage throughout the night and many people end up with soaring internet bills at the end of month.

All such problems do have solutions. There are softwares meant to start the computer at a particular time, some others to start downloading and stuff and some more to shut down the computer at required time. My college friends use 3 such different softwares to do all that. That is, one to start the computer, one to start the applications for downloading and some to shut down the computer at the required time. But what if we get a software that can do all of these work single-handedly?

Yes, there is a beautiful software doing all of these required work. I use it for night time downloading and it works flawlessly for me. Just an initial setting and then its done. No need to do any changes again after that unless you need to do so.

The software in question is named as Auto PowerOn & ShutDown. The features include

Features:

Auto Poweron & Shutdown is able to allow users to do this all of the following:
Control your computer resume from power-off state (hibernation).
Wake up your computer from sleep mode (standby).
Playback a keyboard and mouse macro, a useful feature for such as TV record.
Run programs, close programs, open files and open URL at any specified time.
Play mp3, wma , wav and flash at any specified time.
Logs on system automatically (Win2000/XP/Vista/7).
Shutdown or reboot , log off, lock session, close monitor, make computer enter sleep mode (standby/hibernation) at any time.
Synchronize your PC's time with an atomic clock server.
More Features:
Easy to use, install and configure the software in 2-10 minutes.
Support Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista/7.

Download Auto PowerOn & ShutDown here (1.35MB)
Note: many people have requested me for the cracked version of this wonderful software. Giving out cracked versions of software is illegal and I can not allow it on this site. However, if one wishes to try out this software one can get the demo version available on their site or else try out the torrents at your own risk.

Google for hackers

2010-02-20T22:31:00.001+05:30

Did you know there was a Google search engine version for hackers too? No? Here it is then.
Open your web browser and type the following in the address bar (or copy paste the following)

www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/

and you get google for hackers :-)

Note: it's just the look that is changed and nothing on a serious note. Have phun!

AntiFeatures are taking your digital freedom away

2010-02-19T00:44:00.000+05:30

Did you just say that you got a huge bill for overshooting your download limit on your 'unlimited' to use internet connection? You too are a victim of antifeatures then. Antifeatures, as in 'anti - features' are a very irritating and unfortunate prospect that many people are facing, some even without knowing about them. Antifeatures are some special limitations set by the vendor/company on your use of digital equipment. For eg, many people in India, who have unlimited internet connection get an extra charges section on their bill for overshooting their download limits. Now what the heck does "overshoot the download limits" mean in an unlimited connection?
Some of you may not know but some ISPs in India set a monthly limit of around 60 to 80GB limit on download on their unlimited connection. After crossing that limit, either they are supposed to pay extra charges on per MB basis or your internet connection may get reduced to more than half the original speed.

Bandwidth throttling on peer to peer or torrent networks are a more global phenomenon. There are hundreds of ISPs who throttle their network to make it slow to download from torrents and other peer to peer networks. These companies do this to prevent people from using the internet excessively and to be able to make more profits out of their connections. This more or less amounts to cheating but the companies can always defend saying that it was put up on their terms and conditions (in some dirty corner where one would hardly notice).

The ones stated above are just 2 small (yes, actually!) examples that are prevalent in the market. Check out this link containing a list compiled by Benjamin Mako Hill from the entries sent by readers from around the world. You will be really shocked to read about all these things. All I can say is that it is really unfortunate. This should be an eye opener to those who blindly support some of the well known companies. No need to name anyone here, just check the link given below.
Antifeatures - WikiDotMako

Get ready for a Crazy revolution

2010-02-15T23:53:00.016+05:30

Revolutions have taken place throughout history. Some were in the field of science, some in the industrial arena, while some were just political in nature. But the result was always the same; a wild turn around of things signaling growth and prosperity for all mankind. But what is all these revolution stuff doing in this tech blog? Incase you have got that question in your mind then let me clear it out. The one am talking about, is not one of those backed by political or financial heavy weights, but one which was brought about by a single man, just like James Watt and Newton did in their respective fields, ages before him. The guy am talking about may or may not become a hero like they did, but has the potential of becoming one of them. Wondering what all this babble is all about? Here's the story.

Kaustubh Katdare, a young electrical engineer working in the IT industry, gets bored with his daily chores at office and wants to do something big. A big fan of Extreme Engineering and Megastructures (shown on Discovery Channel) that he was, he wanted to work on something "mega". But realising that it was easier said that done, he started looking for an online forum where he could at least get in touch with some of those, already working on such mega projects. So began the search, but was soon frustrated when he found none of quality. That gave birth to an idea, to bring all the engineers in the world together, in a common forum, where they could interact and share their ideas.

He was crazy wasn't he? To think he could get all the engineering minds together in one place? Yes, he was crazy. And it was his craziness that gave rise to CrazyEngineers. On 26th November, 2005 the CrazyEngineers forum was formed and subsequently the website too. The forum is the place that he had envisioned. CrazyEngineers or CE as it's fondly called, runs with the tag line, "Uniting engineers across the world" and so far it has managed to rope in around 69,000 like-minded engineers from more than 187 countries around the world and the number is growing by the day. Now, that definitely is a feat to be complimented about! Getting huge no of visitors to the forum shows its ever increasing popularity. And why not? CE hosts a large no of sections catering to all types of engineering palettes.

Some notable points about CE are:

Common forum for engineers around the world. Gets you in touch with around 69,000+ engineers and the yet to be, with their 100,000+ posts in various sections of the forum.
Forum has many sections catering to all types of needs that a CE member may have.
CE Headquarter lists all CE related announcements and information while Start Point is the place for new members to get themselves acquainted with each other.
Technical Discussions cover various topics related to respective engineering fields. This section also contains the most sought after Projects section where discussion on various project and seminar topics are shared with. You can find brilliant ideas for seminars and projects from students and engineers that is shared with all members for free. This makes it a very valuable resource and a must have for any engineering or a engineering student.
CE Labs is another innovative section where engineers from all over the work come together and collaborate on projects.
General Discussions sets you off with Debates, Quizzes, Puzzles and also on topics related to entrepreneurship and other events taking place in the engineering world. Help Center is for Career and Job guidance, while CE Lounge fills in for members wanting to chill out.

Other than these sections CE also gives its members other innovative avenues for technical discussions and knowledge guidance. Some of these include

Small Talk is a separate section on CE where many greats come and go entertaining people with their insightful interviews on various marketing and technical topics. Famous personalities such as Seth Godin, Mathew Hill and Achyut Godbole have graced this section.
VoiCE acts as the official blog for CE giving updates about various activities and events across CE worth mentioning.
Know your CEan allows members to get acquainted to particular members who are highlighted due to their dedicated work on CE.
Contests, events and more, keeps happening all throughout the year rewarding the people who have contributed well.

What sounded like 'just any other site/forum' a few lines ago seems to have turned into a 'Wow!' isn't it? It surely does. Where else do you expect to get so many things at one go? The concept of CE appealed to me a lot and made me join it. Before starting this blog, I used to frequent Yahoo Answers and forums of other tech biggies and tried to solve people's queries in the simplest way possible. Sometimes it just gets over my patience but I still manage clearing everyone's problem. I do that for self satisfaction that I get from helping others and this blog was meant for those people to get everything in one place. But if I am to suggest a better place than this, then it would be www.crazyengineers.com and their forum. You will find many other friendly people willing to help you all the time and of course you will find me there too ;)

CE made Kaustubh leave his job and dedicate his time fully to this novel idea called CrazyEngineers. Even if you are not a person from engineering field, this website is for you if you have the love for tech stuff. Bill Gates, Jobs, Wozzy, Dell etc made it big because they saw a dream and pursued it till they were satisfied. I see such a person in Kaustubh who seems determined to take CE to new heights. CrazyEngineers has been growing at a fast pace and has been providing a good ground to share resources and also interact with engineers and students from around the world. CE has been covered extensively by the media over the years. You can find them in magazine articles, YouTube videos and the like. Additionally, you can read about Kaustubh's interviews here and here.

Some words from Kaustubh Katdare, creator of CrazyEngineers

The God, they say, is the greatest engineer.
God created Earth to accommodate life. Then he created us, the engineers, to make Earth a better place to live. We, the engineers, are responsible for the world that we live in today. We have turned dreams into reality. No doubt, we will continue to do so for the infinite time ahead.
CrazyEngineers (CE) provides a common platform to engineers around the world. Through CE’s online forums they can exchange ideas, views, share knowledge, innovate and help each other. Feel free to take a look at the discussions on CrazyEngineers forums. We bet you will enjoy our discussions.

Top 500 worst Passwords of all time

2010-02-13T04:19:00.004+05:30

These are the top 500 worst passwords you could possibly use. The following list is from Mark Burnett's 2005 book Perfect Passwords: Selection, Protection, Authentication, where he has compiled the most commonly used passwords by people all over the internet. Though the compiled list is now old, considering that it's the year 2010 now, a full five years on, this list still has got a lot of importance. Though the trend might have shifted a little, with internet users becoming more aware of all these security issues, but even today most people still use some of these passwords.

Crackers use these commonly used lists of passwords to break into accounts of their targets using a technique called Brute forcing. This technique essentially involves trying out different password combinations for an account as if you were 'guessing' and trying to break in. That's where the term 'brute force' comes in. The only difference being that nothing is being done manually, instead, brute forcing tools are used to do this work. List of these guessable passwords, called as the 'hacker dictionary file', is used in brute forcing tools thus essentially automating the guessing process. This technique of brute forcing using a dictionary file is also known as Dictionary Attack. A hacker dictionary file can also be a collection of words from the standard dictionary. Well known examples of dictionary attack software tools include:

As said above, such techniques make use of these dictionary files that contains list of all the common words that people use as passwords and hence staying away from these or their derivatives is very important. Below is a small excerpt and the list of 500 worst possible passwords that one could possibly have, compiled by Mark Burnett.

From the moment people started using passwords, it didn't take long to realize how many people picked the very same passwords over and over. Even the way people misspell words is consistent. In fact, people are so predictable that most hackers make use of lists of common passwords just like these. To give you some insight into how predictable humans are, the following is a list of the 500 most common passwords. If you see your password on this list, please change it immediately. Keep in mind that every password listed here has been used by at least hundreds if not thousands of other people.
There are some interesting passwords on this list that show how people try to be clever, but even human cleverness is predictable. For example, look at these passwords that I found interesting:
ncc1701 The ship number for the Starship Enterprise
thx1138 The name of George Lucas's first movie, a 1971 remake of an earlier student project
qazwsx Follows a simple pattern when typed on a typical keyboard
666666 Six sixes
7777777 Seven sevens
ou812 The title of a 1988 Van Halen album
8675309 The number mentioned in the 1982 Tommy Tutone song. The song supposedly caused an epidemic of people dialing 867- 5309 and asking for "Jenny"
"...Approximately one out of every nine people uses at least one password on the list shown in Table 9.1! And one out of every 50 people uses one of the top 20 worst passwords.."
Lists the top 500 worst passwords of all time, not considering character case. Don’t blame me for the offensive words; you were the ones who picked these, not me.
NO Top 1-100 Top 101–200 Top 201–300 Top 301–400 Top 401–500
1 123456 porsche firebird prince rosebud
2 password guitar butter beach jaguar
3 12345678 chelsea united amateur great
4 1234 black turtle 7777777 cool
5 pussy diamond steelers muffin cooper
6 12345 nascar tiffany redsox 1313
7 dragon jackson zxcvbn star scorpio
8 qwerty cameron tomcat testing mountain
9 696969 654321 golf shannon madison
10 mustang computer bond007 murphy 987654
11 letmein amanda bear frank brazil
12 baseball wizard tiger hannah lauren
13 master xxxxxxxx doctor dave japan
14 michael money gateway eagle1 naked
15 football phoenix gators 11111 squirt
16 shadow mickey angel mother stars
17 monkey bailey junior nathan apple
18 abc123 knight thx1138 raiders alexis
19 pass iceman porno steve aaaa
20 fuckme tigers badboy forever bonnie
21 6969 purple debbie angela peaches
22 jordan andrea spider viper jasmine
23 harley horny melissa ou812 kevin
24 ranger dakota booger jake matt
25 iwantu aaaaaa 1212 lovers qwertyui
26 jennifer player flyers suckit danielle
27 hunter sunshine fish gregory beaver
28 fuck morgan porn buddy 4321
29 2000 starwars matrix whatever 4128
30 test boomer teens young runner
31 batman cowboys scooby nicholas swimming
32 trustno1 edward jason lucky dolphin
33 thomas charles walter helpme gordon
34 tigger girls cumshot jackie casper
35 robert booboo boston monica stupid
36 access coffee braves midnight shit
37 love xxxxxx yankee college saturn
38 buster bulldog lover baby gemini
39 1234567 ncc1701 barney cunt apples
40 soccer rabbit victor brian august
41 hockey peanut tucker mark 3333
42 killer john princess startrek canada
43 george johnny mercedes sierra blazer
44 sexy gandalf 5150 leather cumming
45 andrew spanky doggie 232323 hunting
46 charlie winter zzzzzz 4444 kitty
47 superman brandy gunner beavis rainbow
48 asshole compaq horney bigcock 112233
49 fuckyou carlos bubba happy arthur
50 dallas tennis 2112 sophie cream
51 jessica james fred ladies calvin
52 panties mike johnson naughty shaved
53 pepper brandon xxxxx giants surfer
54 1111 fender tits booty samson
55 austin anthony member blonde kelly
56 william blowme boobs fucked paul
57 daniel ferrari donald golden mine
58 golfer cookie bigdaddy 0 king
59 summer chicken bronco fire racing
60 heather maverick penis sandra 5555
61 hammer chicago voyager pookie eagle
62 yankees joseph rangers packers hentai
63 joshua diablo birdie einstein newyork
64 maggie sexsex trouble dolphins little
65 biteme hardcore white 0 redwings
66 enter 666666 topgun chevy smith
67 ashley willie bigtits winston sticky
68 thunder welcome bitches warrior cocacola
69 cowboy chris green sammy animal
70 silver panther super slut broncos
71 richard yamaha qazwsx 8675309 private
72 fucker justin magic zxcvbnm skippy
73 orange banana lakers nipples marvin
74 merlin driver rachel power blondes
75 michelle marine slayer victoria enjoy
76 corvette angels scott asdfgh girl
77 bigdog fishing 2222 vagina apollo
78 cheese david asdf toyota parker
79 matthew maddog video travis qwert
80 121212 hooters london hotdog time
81 patrick wilson 7777 paris sydney
82 martin butthead marlboro rock women
83 freedom dennis srinivas xxxx voodoo
84 ginger fucking internet extreme magnum
85 blowjob captain action redskins juice
86 nicole bigdick carter erotic abgrtyu
87 sparky chester jasper dirty 777777
88 yellow smokey monster ford dreams
89 camaro xavier teresa freddy maxwell
90 secret steven jeremy arsenal music
91 dick viking 11111111 access14 rush2112
92 falcon snoopy bill wolf russia
93 taylor blue crystal nipple scorpion
94 111111 eagles peter iloveyou rebecca
95 131313 winner pussies alex tester
96 123123 samantha cock florida mistress
97 bitch house beer eric phantom
98 hello miller rocket legend billy
99 scooter flower theman movie 6666
100 please jack oliver success albert

The two entries for zeroes is a spreadsheet formatting error. That is a spreadsheet like MS Excel won't recognize between 0000 and 0000000 when entered inside the cell under default formatting. It will automatically consider them as 0 (that's natural mathematics!).

Brute forcing tools and techniques are also used for checking the strength of user password as a security measure. While we may never know whether these password lists are being used by crackers and hackers or if they are being used by security professionals, it's always recommended that we use a password that is difficult to guess by using different combination of uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers and also making sure that these are changed periodically without repeating them. Because hackers won't be using these 500 word list, they have thousands of them. Better be safe than sorry :)

You may download a free brute force tools called John the Ripper from here.
Dictionary files can be found below
Oxford University Wordlist (ftp)
The Argon wordlist

Making Windows Genuine using registry crack

2010-02-12T08:58:00.004+05:30

In most of the client computers I attend to, I have seen that many are still using Windows XP and are either using pirated copies or have been duped by then software vendor by paying for pirated ones. The problem arises when Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage tool (WGA) declares that you are using counterfeit version of Windows and that you need to buy a genuine one. And then on you will be getting that ugly WGA pop up irritating the hell out of you, before blacking out everything for you(as in Windows Vista) and making it unusable.

This predicament is a result of clever Microsoft marketing strategy. Microsoft tells everyone to keep their Windows updated by using Windows Update feature and if you have noticed, WGA tools is one of their first downloads under important security fixes. Microsoft had been dragged to court regarding misleading people but recently they ended up winning the case. Anyways, if you are on Windows XP, and if you aren't on the internet, then you wont face any problem. Incase you do, you will have to face this problem. Such computers won't be able to patch up their Windows copy either directly or from the Microsoft website.

There is a very simple way to overcome this. Remember, this and all other such potential hacking and cracking stuff that you will find on this blog are meant for educational purpose only and not meant for misuse. It's just about educating people about technology and their limitations(or otherwise).

To make Windows XP Genuine download this registry file from here
Right click on this file and click on Merge (or double click on the file) and click OK.
Your Windows is now genuine and you can verify it running the WGA tool. (Sometimes it may show some other status but it will allow you to do your work flawlessly).
Now you can safely use Windows Update without any worries.

You can download Windows Genuine Advantage Tool from here

If you use a pirated copy of Windows, kindly consider buying a genuine one as using a pirated copy is illegal. If the price is too high for you, look for discounts on Windows packs at your local supermarkets or check online. Using a genuine copy has its own advantages.

1 Gigabit per second internet connection ? Yes, Google has got it!

2010-02-11T23:50:00.001+05:30

Looks like Google is out there to capture everything that is internet! First they got the world under its control through its flagship www.google.com and subsequently coming up with a slew of other services that has capitulated the company into one of the biggest players in the world computer market. Google's plan, now, is to setup a no of ultra high speed, fibre based, internet connection that will reach 1 Gigabit per second or even more on an experimental basis at the moment.
The experiment, if successful, will capitulate Google as the King of the internet as there is no one even close to giving that kind of speeds to the general public at the moment.

Google says,

"Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:
Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it's creating new bandwidth-intensive "killer apps" and services, or other uses we can't yet imagine.
New deployment techniques: We'll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we'll share key lessons learned with the world.
Openness and choice: We'll operate an "open access" network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we'll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way."

That being said, only a lucky few (Google says around 50,000 people) will be able to enjoy this high speed internet for a very competitive price at the moment. Once the experiment is done with, Google will make it open to all ISPs to deliver this high speed service through their network. It seems Google is trying out this experiment as improvement in internet speeds and reliability will only help Google propel further considering that even now, Google's main source of revenue is its search engine only.

Check out the video posted by Google explaining their experimental venture below.

For those living in The U.S., fill the form here if you want them to offer service in your region. Remember this is on experimental basis for now and thus only limited connections will be given out. The region showing the most active interest in this will get a chance to try their service. So register here

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 RC

2010-02-11T15:31:00.001+05:30

I do some casual programming in c++ and vb.net and I use Visual Studio 2008 for it. Recently I wanted a copy of that software to install it on my home computer and found that the dvd had caught a lot of scratches and it won't install the software completely. I had heard weeks ago, that Microsoft (MS) had launched a new version of their Visual Studio software and that they were giving it out for free at the moment, but didn't pay much attention to it until now.
So just for the sake of information to those who didn't know it, you can now get MS Visual Studio 2010 Professional Edition RC for free testing.

RC means release candidate, that is, it's a version that is 'almost' complete but the company is giving it out for free for evaluation purpose to iron out the last possible issues they may have. So for those of who didn't know or did not try out, do get a copy for yourself and try it out. It makes making an application or designing a product very easy as most of the tools are given to you readymade by them. It greatly improves efficiency while working with this software.

These are some of the new things doled out in the new version.

New prototyping, modeling, and visual design tools enable you to create innovative applications for Windows and the Web
Create a shared vision as a foundation for creativity with SketchFlow ,in Microsoft Expression® Studio , and Team Foundation Server
Take advantage of new opportunities & capabilities offered by multi-core programming and cloud development tools

I haven't used it yet. Just downloaded it a while ago. From user reviews that I read, it seems this one's got a lot of new tool to program applications for Windows 7. I will put up a review once I use it enough. Till then feel 'free' to try your hands at it. Those who still program in visual basic can upgrade to visual basic .net. It's more efficient than classic vb.
You can get your copy of Visual Studio 2010 RC here

If you want to use a stable version, then Visual Studio 2008 Express edition is given off as free and is sufficient for most coding work. If you need more power tools then professional edition is the one for you, but it will cost you too.
You can get your copy of Visual Studio 2008 here

Need a fried hard drive?

2010-02-09T10:20:00.001+05:30

Did you ever fry a hard drive? I did one a few weeks ago and learnt an important lesson. It was a small issue and hardly worth noting but it did cost me a hard disk(in replacement). Here's what happened.

I do part time computer technician's job and here's something I had to deal with, a few weeks ago. I got a call for a computer repair and I went to their home to check it out. It was a case of non booting computer. It was a 6 month old Pentium 4 based computer (didn't understand why someone would buy that in the age of dual and quad cores). The problem was, it would not give any signs of life. As you must have already guessed, it was a case of power supply unit (PSU) gone bad. It's a common thing with most people who do not use UPS and use the (cheap and sub-standard) psu that comes along with a cheap cabinet. Getting a good and reliable psu is very important but we will speak about it in another post.

I checked the psu with my digital multi-meter(DMM) and confirmed that it was dead. I explained it to my customer and he asked me to replace the dead psu. I replaced it immediately and then the computer was working fine. I always carry an extra psu other than the one I use for testing purposes because problems like these are very common in this place. There were few other problems with their Windows and after a few minutes work, it was all fine and healthy. It was time for me to leave and I demanded my fee which was the psu's price + Rs 20(a little less than half a dollar). I charge less because I do this work for pleasure. The man was highly impressed with the neat work and was actually shocked when he learned about my small fee (others in the area charge around Rs 500). He paid me out and I was ready to leave when he called me back and asked me why the side fan of the cabinet was not working. I had forgotten to power the case's fans. I opened up the case, but there wasn't any free molex (power) connector available. So I removed the one connected to the (ide)hard disk(as it was the nearest) and connected it to the fans, and from there took the other one(fans usually have male and female molex in Y formation) and connected it back to the hard disk and shut the case back.

I powered on the computer and this time it gave an error while booting and won't go ahead. It said 'system disk error, press any key to restart.' I restarted the computer but it was the problems again. I checked the BIOS settings for boot priority and they were all right. Suddenly I noticed the BIOS main screen and saw that it didn't detect the hard disk. I thought I might not have connected it to the hard disk properly after I removed the connection so I opened the case again and tightened the molex on the hard disk. Powered on the computer again but it still wasn't detecting the hard disk yet and I got worried. The man was standing beside me and seeing while I was working and he seemed to notice the worry on my face. I suddenly realised what mistake I might have (I did actually!) made.

I opened up the case again and poked my nose near the hard disk bays and sure it smelled of burnt electronics. I had fried the hard disk! I managed to make a fool out of myself in front of my customer. I acknowledged my mistake, went back to my room and got back with a replacement. I removed the molex from the bad hard disk and replaced this good one in its place. Just to check what had made the hard disk circuit to burn, I checked the power connector attached to the hard disk and there was the culprit. On closer observation, I noticed that the 4 pins of this male molex connector(coming from the Y of side fan) was crooked and therefore even though I thought I had fit the connector snugly, it didn't actually go in properly and might just be touching the other side pin which had caused a short circuiting. I finished with the replacement, loaded up Windows and left the place. I was lucky that the person did not have any important files on his computer. He used it to watch movies and listen to songs.

I went back home and analysed the situation more clearly. There could have been two reasons for the hard disk circuit to get fried. One was, as I mentioned, that it might have touched the other pin from inside when I tried to force the connector in and that may have resulted in outright short circuiting. As for the other reason, I researched a bit on it and found out the obvious but often ignored fact. As we know, all wires and connecting parts have some amount of electrical resistance to them. If the connection is loosely fit, then it creates a gap between the two connections and this results in greatly increased resistance. As the resistance increases, so does the heat and this may have spoilt the hard disk. That is why, it's important to make sure that all the connectors from the psu are set firmly and not left loose. This is the same (arguable) reason why modular power supply units are not preferred over wired ones.
So I learned from my mistake and always make it a thing to check if all the power connectors are properly fit. I hope this was some good information to you all. Will post more if I find something worth sharing.

If you face computer heating issues or face sudden shutdowns, then check this post here

Schoolboy gets a stripper as his birthday present!

2010-02-09T08:28:00.001+05:30

Here's a picture I found by mistake in Google's image search. It's truly hilarious. The picture? No the text inside the picutre. Check out the picture below for details.

Guess how embarrassed this unsuspecting guy might be in front of his classmates!

How To Print Pages In Order with Ink Jet Printers

2010-02-07T09:10:00.001+05:30

I found a nice informative (and helpful) article while reading over the net and it was on How to avoid the ink jet page shuffle to put your printouts in order.
The article's been published on ITWorld by James Gaskin a couple of months back. Read the article below.

Pages printed on laser printers come out face down, so when you pick up the pile, the pages are in the correct order. Ink jet printers, however, print pages face up (the paper goes under the ink cartridges) so page number one is on the bottom, page two is next, and so on, meaning page 12 is on top of the stack. That means you do the “ink jet page shuffle” to get things back in numerical order. But here are some tricks to make your ink jet printer spit out the pages in the order you want, saving you time and aggravation.
First, check your ink jet printer's menu. A few printers, but not many, have the smarts to print the first page last, keeping the order you want. Look at the manual (remember, the one you threw out of the way when you opened your printer box?) for tips. There may be a setting for this in the control software loaded on your computer as well. Check both.
If that fails, and it likely will, your word processor can reverse the order in which pages are sent to the printer. This method works best when you have only one printer you use, because if you reverse print order then send the file to a laser printer, you're back to the shuffle.
In Word 2003, check out Tools > Options > Print, and check the Reverse Print Order box. In Word 2007, find and click the Microsoft Office button, then find Word Options. Click Advanced options on the left side of the dialog box, then scroll down to print options. Check the Print Pages in Reverse Oder box.
OpenOffice, the free productivity suite, also offers this trick. Go to the menu and click Tools > OpenOffice.org Writer > Print, find the Pages section, and check the Reversed box. Even easier, hit Control-P > Options > Pages section, and check Reversed. The Control-P option will reverse the print order for all subsequent print jobs, so you can avoid the longer menu drill down if you wish.
If you do shift between printers, try this trick. When you open the print dialog (Control-P), choose to print not all pages automatically, but a range of pages. Put that range in backwards. If you have a 12 page document, tell your software to print pages 12-1. That works in many printers.
And that's how you stop the ink jet page shuffle.

Source

Website Edit Hack ?

2010-02-06T12:08:00.001+05:30

Just try the following step.

Go to any website, say www.google.com
Paste the code given below into the address bar, i.e. where you just typed www.google.com, and press enter.
Now have fun editing the elements of the site!

The Code:

javascript: document.body.contentEditable= "true"; document.designMode= "on"; void 0

Note: this will work only for javascript enabled websites. This is not a serious hack. What you are doing is that you are editing web elements on the client so it wont be affecting the actual web server. So it's safe to try! I tried with Google and Rediff, it worked. You can find this all over the internet. Got this one from Digg.

Optimizing Windows Registry

2010-02-06T11:28:00.003+05:30

In my previous post, we saw how to backup and restore Windows registry easily by using ERUNT tool. In addition to backing up and restoration, the registry requires optimization too. Registry optimization keeps the registry hives healthy and increases overall performance. Just like we need to defragment our hard drive, registry too needs to be done the same. And NTREGOPT does that for you. NTREGOPT stands for NT Registry Optimizer and it works for Windows 7 and Vista too.
Just a few clicks and it's done. It is really very simple. Here's few images below.

As you can see from above, its just a few clicks' job. My registry was already optimized and so you don't see much of a difference in the last image. This small software does its work very efficiently, starting to optimize all the registry hives(files) from the scratch. Remember to optimize especially during installation and un-installation of a program.

Download this small tool from the official site (~772 KB)
Visit the official site here
If you haven't read about the ERUNT tool then read it here

Backup Windows Registry

2010-02-06T11:05:00.003+05:30

Anyone who has been working for sometime with computers having Windows as its operating system, will be knowing how important a Windows registry is.
For those who do not know what it is, Wikipedia defines it as " a hierarchical database that stores configuration settings and options on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It contains settings for low-level operating system components as well as the applications running on the platform: the kernel, device drivers, services, SAM, user interface and third party applications all make use of the Registry. The registry also provides a means to access counters for profiling system performance."

Coming back onto the importance of registry, a small case of wrongful fiddling can cause it to become corrupt. That can often cause a program to crash when it's working or worse, not make it work at all. In some instances it can cause Windows to function improperly too. Thus it becomes imperative that the registry be maintained. A maintenance isn't too hectic. Just backup regularly and in case of corruption, can be restored back from the corruption.

For this very purpose, we have a nifty tool called ERUNT (Emergency Recovery Utility for NT). This is a light and easy to use tool for backing up and restoring the registry in Windows NT/2000/2003. The latest version works with Windows 7 and it can be used on Vista too keeping User Account Control turned off.

Backing up is very simple. The screenshots below are self explanatory.

Restoring back is pretty simple too. Check out the images.

Click OK and you are done!

Remember to back up regularly!

Download ERUNT from the official website

Best Antivirus Software

2010-02-05T07:35:00.000+05:30

Yes, the topic is about the best antivirus software available in market. Why? Definitely if one would know that there are thousands of new viruses and malwares being made everyday, he would be worried about the health of his computer and will try to get the best protection suite for it. But this is also true, that there is no such thing as 100% protection for a computer. Unless, of course, your computer is never connected to the internet or exposed to any kind of external media.
But that would destroy the purpose of using a computer right? So let us see how to decide on which antivirus software is to be used to remain best protected among the rest.

Before all that, we need to what should define these 'best antivirus software'(this is necessary to understand HOW of 'how to decide which antivirus is better' and is advisable to be read, but if you are not interested, then skip this and go towards the end of the post where I have told ABOUT the best antivirus product).

According to AV-Comparatives, "an antivirus product should preferably have very high detection rates (of malware and also potentially unwanted applications), high pro-active on demand protection, very few false positives, scan fast and reliably with a low system impact, provide good malware removal capabilities, protect the system against malware/websites with malicious software without relying too much on user decisions/interactions, cause no crashes or hangs and have no annoying bugs". If that went heavy on you, then let me explain what it meant.

Basically a good antivirus solution should have these features or capabilities:

Should have very high detection rates: i.e. the antivirus should be able to detect as many malwares and other harmful (or potentially harmful) stuffs that may be a cause of concern to an average user.
High pro-active detection capability: this can mean that the antivirus should be able to identify a harmful object even in its unreactive state. i.e. the antivirus product should be able to detect a malware automatically, if present in any storage media, without needing the user to manually scan it. Also known as resident shield in some antivirus.
Very few false positives: its a bitter truth(or was) for most malwares that initially, the malware comes out and then the antivirus companies resolve it and make an update to their products. Thus by the time an update is received, a few computers may have already been infected by a new malware. So, to minimise this risk, antivirus companies have resorted to heuristics method which means that they check the pattern of coding on the target software(or the object) and if they find a similar pattern with already known malwares, then they will mark this object as a malware too. While this comes handy when dealing with new and unknown malwares, it may also brand a good object as a bad one (even a computer makes mistake). These mistakes are called false positives and are highly undesirable. A novice user may actually delete a good file mistaking it for a bad one(due to heuristic detection). It's very common when it comes to cracks and key generators.
Scanning: definitely a fast scan(but thorough and reliable) and lower system requirements are desirable for antivirus products. Remember? Symantec Norton Antivirus has been badly branded as a system resource hog for years now even though it has actually learned from its mistakes and improved!
Malware removal: an antivirus having just high malware detection rates is not enough. It should have good removal rate too. Often, you may find that an object has been detected as a malware and even after deleting it, it comes back and shows the warning again. No matter how many times you delete, it will come back. This may be termed as a bad removal rate. It can be most noticed amongst malwares spread by USB flash drives.
Web protection: it should be able to detect harmful scripts and other malicious codes in a website and block them too. This feature is found on most major antivirus products and can be a boon against web malpractices such as phishing.
No crashes and bugs: though not generally seen, but antiviruses may tend to hang up while scanning. They should not crash when operating them. Though it's got to do nothing with security but it may irritate the user and thus is not desirable.

These were the things a good antivirus software must qualify at. Other than these, there are few things for the user to keep in mind when selecting a software.

Cost factor: this is an important factor for most. Look for value for money products. Some products will just demand a higher price just because they are famous (innovation advantage? effective marketing?). Look for which delivers the most. 'More the cost, better the product' thing doesn't always work. These days many free antivirus products are actually better in many ways than their paid relatives. So look for value for money. Better still look for the free ones, mostly they are pretty good. Why spend money when you are getting good quality for free ?
Pro-Activity: in most countries that do not have a good internet connection availability ratio(population wise) as in India, users just install antivirus products and tend to think that since they have installed an antivirus product on their computer, it will work well indefinitely without any updating (many even do not know that it's required to update!). Remember one thing, thousands of new malwares are coming out every single day and to remain protected you need to be updated as regularly as you possibly can. These days antivirus companies release updates (which contains virus signatures needed for their identification) every day or even by the hour in some cases. It is important to update and for those who can't do so everyday, try to update it at least every week. In such cases, where updating regularly is not a feasible option, heuristics play an important role. Since they trace a malicious object by identifying the code patterns against previous known malwares, they have high chances of catching new and unknown malwares even without updates. So make sure that your choice of antivirus has a good heuristic capability (with few false positives) and set it on 'high' inside settings menu.
Look for newer technologies such as 'sandboxie'(or sandbox; suspected infection is allowed to execute in a virtual, controlled environment and marked as bad if caught doing any harm. This avoids harm to the actual computer), 'in the cloud' (infection is scanned against a set of pre-existing samples in the cloud. Requires internet but is faster than sandboxie method) and 'behavioral blockers' (mostly for malicious websites).
Safe removal: sometimes a malware may be very difficult to remove. This mainly happens because that infection may be active in the computer memory an in such cases removing them in Safe Mode may be beneficial. Some products, such as Avast Antivirus, offer something called 'boot-time scan' which attempts to scan and remove the infection before the computer boots into Windows completely. As such, the malware does not get a chance to attach it to the active memory and thus gets removed (in most cases). Techniques such as these, though often overlooked, can be immensely useful at times.
When a file is infected by a particularly bad malware, it may need to be deleted. But what if that file is an important one and you do not have a back up ? Some products create a database or fingerprints of files in advance and are able to restore them back to earlier non-infected condition. Check for products that have such feature as they can be really helpful in need.
Give preference to a complete suite (such as Internet Security suite) instead of just an antivirus. These suites generally include the antivirus + firewall + web security + Anti-Spyware etc. Thus giving you better overall protection for a little extra price.
Some other small and negligible factors such as pop ups when watching a movie or playing a game may irritate you (as in Avira). Just make sure about such things beforehand.

Thus, until now we have seen what factors determine a good antivirus and what are the factors that should be kept in mind while selecting the product. Now, let us see HOW to actually determine which product is the best available one in the market.

To actually do so, we require benchmarking (testing all selected products in a controlled manner one by one and then collecting and analysing data from them) of all relevant antivirus products. Benchmarking or bench-testing antivirus products is a very delicate matter as extreme caution and careful analysis needs to be done, to be able to observe minute details. You will find many blogs and websites posting their own benchmarked results but very often these are not so accurate. But AV-Comparatives is an Austrian Non-Profit-Organization, which is providing independent Anti-Virus software tests free to the public.
They do these bench-testing under controlled conditions and this organisation is endorsed by all the major antivirus companies. Their results are often regarded as the official tests and used for analytical purposes.

They have divided their tests in many parts:

Main tests: again divided into 2 types

Retrospective/Proactive Test: in this test, they update the antivirus to a particular date (say 1st Jan, 2010) and then test them on a later date using malwares that were released after 1st of January and thus unknown to the products(say, malwares collected from 2nd Jan till 5th Jan and then tested on 6th Jan). Thus this shows how effective a computer's heuristics are in detecting unknown malwares. Good for people who do not update their antivirus regularly.
On-demand Comparative: here, a large collection of malware collected during past many months are used for scanning on fully updated antivirus products. Their objective in this test is to determine how effective the antivirus product is, in detecting infections based on their updates. Thus it shows how good the product is in bringing out effective and timely updates that can detect and remove known malwares.

Performance tests: these are done to check if the antivirus products are hampering a computer's performance. Different activities like installing/uninstalling, downloading, copying from one hard disk to another etc are done on various common softwares and files. These will tell you if your antivirus is a resource hog or not.
Corporate Reviews: this section is mainly for corporates who use these security products and this type of test is focused not on detection rates but on handling and user friendliness and its scope of functionality. These tests reviews are not for average home users and therefore not counted when accounting for the Best Antivirus Product of the Year.
Dynamic tests: the main objective is to test the high claims of antivirus products (more so by their Internet Security products) about their special features on a real world basis. Features such a sandboxie, in the cloud , behavioral blocking among others are tested to check for their effectiveness for an average home user.
Removal tests: the objective here is to check how effective an antivirus product is in removing the malware from an already infected system. No consideration is done for detection rates here.
Potentially Unwanted Applications: these are the ones that are not exactly malwares and therefore not too harmful but can be misused if intended so. The best example would be cracks, and key generators.

The above mentioned tests are carried out in regular intervals (mostly twice a year) and based on data collected over the particular year, they decide on the best current antivirus product. That title sure comes after a lot of grilling. One thing to be noted is that though the others may not have been adjudged the best, it doesn't mean they are not good. Just the fact that these qualified as finalists for these tests (among the submitted ones based on a qualifying criteria) is in itself shows that they are pretty good. But when it comes to selecting the Best, extremely minute details matter and that is where they may have lost it. Also note that, though one is supposed to check all these tests and decide on the Best (AV Comparatives is already doing that for you!), it may be sufficient for average users to check the Main tests and decide on their choice.

And finally here are the results for the Best Antivirus Product of 2009,

Gold Certification - Symantec (Best Product of 2009)
Silver Certification - Kaspersky
Bronze Certification - Eset

Well, it's a surprise but Symantec's Norton products have improved a great deal. These results are from data collected over past one year and signify the best performance results from these products and thus you can trust them to be better than you thought it was! Kaspersky remains consistent while Avira, which was last year's Best Product has gone down a little.

The following products are tested in the current main comparatives:

avast! Free 5.0
AVG Anti-Virus 9.0
AVIRA AntiVir Premium 9
BitDefender Antivirus 2010
eScan Anti-Virus 10
ESET NOD32 Anti-Virus 4.0
F-Secure Anti-Virus 2010
G DATA AntiVirus 2010

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010
Kingsoft Antivirus 2009+
McAfee VirusScan Plus 2010
Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0
Norman Antivirus & Anti-Spyware 7.30
Sophos Anti-Virus 9.0
Symantec Norton Anti-Virus 2010
TrustPort Antivirus 2010

Keep visiting the Official AV-Comparitives website regularly to keep updated about the latest trends and results in the antivirus market.
Check out more at www.av-comparatives.org
You can download the results in pdf format from the website. Just select the category of test you want the data on.

If you like the article, kindly share this article with as many people as you can.
Feel free to distribute this article or link to it as long as you have mentioned the source clearly.
Give a visit to this blog as often as you can. Let me know what you want me to write, I will post it as soon as it is possible for me.
Thank you for reading.

How to install Windows from USB Drive

2010-02-04T02:48:00.005+05:30

Does this picture say something? Are you one of those trying to install Windows from your flash drives but don't know exactly how to do? Or are you one of them who know a certain method but want to know which is one of the most efficient ways to do so?
If, at all, you belong to any of the above (others are equally welcome!), then this post is what you should definitely read up. More and more people these days are trying to leave the traditional way of booting into Windows setup using bootable CDs. It's more of a necessity because people with netbooks do not have an optical drive or may be a person's optical drive has gone kaput.

Honestly speaking, though the awareness of making flash drives bootable seems to be quite on the lower side, it's actually an easy task to do so. What made me think about putting up this post was that I find people asking how to make flash drives bootable all the time on other popular blogs or computer forums. And instead of answering them individually all the time I find it better to post here once and let them refer it as many times as they want. Actually, I wanted to present with an easy, short and a reliable method to make flash drives bootable and I found that, though there are many ways to do so, most of them are not so reliable. They have some issues or the others depending on the version of Windows being used, version of Windows to be installed, as well as file system of the OS drive amongst other factors. It took me time to publish this article because I had to individually check all of them by varying the important factors. Some I knew before and some I learnt them new. I won't be mentioning all the methods I have researched right now, instead I will put them up in separate posts later on, detailing them and pointing out their pros and cons.

The method I found the best was using Novicorp's WinToFlash. It's a light (6.5MB), free and easy to use software that can be used with all versions of Windows to install almost all versions of Windows.

Here are the 3 steps to making your flash drive bootable.

1) Download the software from here. Extract the zip file and run WinToFlash.exe

2) Start the Windows setup transfer wizard. You will get this screen below. Put your Windows Cd/Dvd into the optical drive and attach you flash drive to the USB port. Now put the source of Cd and the flash drive as it's in your computer and click next. It will start copying data and notify once its done.

NOTE: for people who do not have access to optical drives (such as in netbook), they may mount the image of their Windows in virtual drives using software such as PowerISO, Alcohol, MagicISO etc. Use any software you like. Just mount the image and link to that image as mentioned above (for the CD).

3) Your flash drive is now perfectly bootable. Just make sure you have set up boot priority for the USB Drive in your BIOS menu. Restart your computer and you see this screen below(latest beta version). Select the 1st option to go into the setup.

You are done and can now boot up with this USB stick! Boot away!

You can visit the Official website here

If you are new to installing windows, you can check this wonderful simulator to see how to do installation of Windows on your computer. It has been simulated on Windows XP but is quite valid for 2000, Vista or even 7 as almost all have similar working. Click on the link Install Windows XP to see the post.

Install Windows XP

2010-02-03T15:49:00.002+05:30

Until I come up with my short guide on making pendrives bootable, here is a quick tip on how to install Windows. Though am using Windows XP as an example, it can be applied to almost any version of Windows from 2000 and later. This guide is basically meant for both new, inexperienced users as well as those who know how to do it.
Ill tell you who needs to follow this post.

Those who do not know or find it difficult to install a clean version of Windows or
Those who wish to train/show others how to install Windows but do not want to actually end up installing again and again (I know there's the virtual way but we will talk about it later)

Am not going to put up something to read here. Instead I will let you try it yourself. Do not worry as its a small simulation software that will just show you how to install Windows XP in a realistic way and not by actually installing it. Its a great tool for the two category of people I have mentioned above.
Download the software HERE (1.23 Mb)

It's a free software and if you like it kindly share it with others too and do visit the official site.
If you want to download free drivers for Windows in easy way then check this post free Windows driver download

How to block a website

2010-02-02T11:06:00.002+05:30

You may want to block a particular website on your computer. May be you do not want your brother or sister to visit a particular site, or you just do not want your room mate to keep orkuting all day and so you want the website blocked. No matter what the reason be, there are many ways to block a website. One can block a website from a browser, a software or within a computer itself.
What we are going to see today is, blocking a website manually from your own computer by making a small modification to a file named host in your windows folder.

To perform this hack, we need to go to
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
that is go to C drive first, then go to windows folder, then system32 folder then to drivers folder and finally a folder named etc.
Once inside, see for a file named hosts. Right click on that file and select Open or Open With , a small box will be shown, select notepad or wordpad and then click on OK.

Inside, you will find a line such as
127.0.0.1       localhost
now this IP address, i.e. 127.0.0.1 is called a local host that is it will redirect to your own computer everytime you try to access this IP address.
Try putting this code into you web server and you will see that it could not connect.

So if you want to block, say www.orkut.com, then do as follows
127.0.0.1       www.orkut.com(hit tab button after typing the local host address and before typing the web address to give it a required web address)
Now what will happen is that everytime you try to access orkut, it will go to 127.0.0.1 (which is your computer's local host address) and thus will not connect to it and instead give an error.
If you want to add multiple websites to this list then follow the same method for all.
eg.
127.0.0.1    www.orkut.com
127.0.0.1    www.rediff.com
127.0.0.1    www.google.com
127.0.0.1          www.ask.com
and so on

use this trick to fool your unsuspecting friends! Have fun but do not misuse.

Unlocker alternative for x64 Windows - LockHunter

2010-02-02T08:11:00.002+05:30

In our earlier posts we have seen about deleting undeletable files using Unlocker and also about deleting undeletable files manually using command prompt. Doing it manually is actually a hectic job and using Unlocker is fast and a sure shot way. But the problem is that Unlocker is only for the 32 bit platform and more and more users these days are moving to the 64 bit version of Windows. Thus, for them, there's another nifty tool named LockHunter that comes in both 32 and 64 bit versions.

According to the site description, "it is a free tool to delete files blocked by something you do not know. LockHunter is useful for fighting against malware, and other programs that are blocking files without a reason. Unlike other similar tools it deletes files into the recycle bin so you may restore them if deleted by mistake."

Key Features

Shows processes locking a file or folder
Allows to unlock, delete, copy or rename a locked file
Allows to kill locking process
Allows to remove locking processes from hard drive
Integrates in to Explorer menu
It deletes files into the recycle bin, so you may restore them if deleted by mistake
Supports both 32 and 64bit Windows

To delete a locked file, right click a file and select 'What is locking this file?'

LockHunter main window

What file does lock process in folder?

Unlock, Kill or force remove the process.

This is a good alternative to Unlocker and is highly recommended.

Download LockHunter from here.

For more details visit Official Site

For other file unlocking procedures

Check deleting undeletable files using Unlocker or

deleting undeletable files manually using command prompt.

Note: images are taken from the official site and used to describe the product only.

Deleting undeletable files manually using command prompt

2010-02-02T07:37:00.001+05:30

In our earlier post, we have seen about deleting undeletable files using unlocker. That's a nifty tool for sure and is a must have for all computer users. But one friend of mine asked me if we could delete files manually without using any software. So just to share with those who don't know, I am putting up few lines on how to do it manually.

Warning: novice users may find this a bit complicated and if so stick to deleting undeletable files using unlocker. It's a free and small (about 250 kb only) software and should not be a trouble even for very new users. Just follow the guide on that post on on the official website and it will be a clean job.

Continuing with our post, we go ahead and see how to delete undeletable files manually using command prompt.

METHOD 1

The first way is to delete a file using command prompt (the normal way)
*Suppose the file we want to delete is named 'undeletable file' and is located somewhere in our c drive, program files. Our first step is to navigate to that folder using command prompt.
*To access the command prompt (for those who don't know, else skip to next procedure), press Win key + R to get the run command, or click on Start, then run and type 'cmd' or 'command' without the quotes. Vista users may use the Search box after clicking on Start.(click on the images to see them in their original size)

*Once we get the command prompt, the next step is to go to the directory of the file we want to remove. In our case, we have a file in C:\Program Files\undeletable file.exe

*To navigate to that place we type the following without the quotes.

--type 'cd\' . This command takes us to the root (beginning) of the current drive (we are in C drive initially)

--type 'cd program files'. cd stands for change directory. We are using it because we need to go into a directory/ folder name 'program files'. After typing this, we will be inside program files and command prompt will show as follows. C:\Program Files>

*Now that we have come to our destination it is time to delete the file that we want to remove. To do this, you may additionally see if the file is present inside the current directory/folder. Do this by typing 'dir' and you can see your target file. This is not needed if you already know if the file is present inside that folder.

*Now, to delete the file type

del "undeletable file.exe" or

del undele~1.exe

The file name is put inside the double quotes because it has multiple words with space in between. If we neglect the quotes then it will detect only undeletable and will show error since there's no file with that name. Another method is to append ~1 after the 1st six letters of the file name. Note that in case of a file name such as 'bat manager.exe' the word bat has only 3 letters, so in such cases we write it as 'batman~1.exe' (without the quotes) and our work will be. What we are doing here is that we are neglecting the space character. See the image below to understand clearly. Click on it to see the original image.

*If all the procedures have been done properly then you will find that the undeletable file is now gone.

In most cases involving viruses, the files are locked into memory and are thus difficult to remove by the earlier method. Thus, if the above method has failed in removing your undeletable file then here is a method stronger than above.

METHOD 2

*Press alt+ctrl+del or ctrl+shift+esc together to access the task manager. Go to the Process tab, find EXPLORER.EXE, right click on it and select End Process.

*After that the entire screen will go blank. Keep the task manager open.

*Click on File(on the top) in the task manager and select New Task(Run).

*Type cmd or command and follow the procedure given above in METHOD 1.

*This time, the file must have been deleted.

*Open task manager again, go to File, select New Task and type 'explorer' or 'explorer.exe' and click OK to get back the GUI Shell (your normal windows screen).

*This method should remove most of the file but if it'a nasty case of virus infection then it may not. In that case follow this method in Safe Mode.

Deleting undeletable files using Unlocker

2010-02-02T05:21:00.005+05:30

Many a time we have come across a situation where we try to remove/delete, move a file or a folder and we get this message.

Sometimes it just says 'Cannot delete file: access denied,' or may be 'Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use'. Most of the times it is true that the file mite be being used and that's why this warning can be a boon to some people. But it also happens that even though it is 'really' not being used anywhere, these kinds of messages pop up and hamper our computer activity.
This can especially happen if a trojan or a virus is actively using a file and therefore is not allowing it to be deleted. If you are a computer technician or work with computers a lot then you sure must have got these warnings when trying to delete virus infected files.

There's a beautiful software to fight this problem and that is Unlocker. Follow these simple steps to solve this problem
1. Simply right click the folder or file and select Unlocker

2. If the folder or file is locked, a window listing of lockers will appear.

3. Simply click Unlock All and you are done!

Its a freeware and is very light. It's a must have for any computer user. Who knows when one will need it! Download the portable or installable version. Both 32 and 64 bit versions are available.

Download Unlocker from here

Note: this freeware will work on 32 bit version of windows only. A 64 bit version is under development by the software developer.

You may also want to try a very good and recommended alternative to Unlocker, i.e. LockHunter. Check out the Unlocker alternative for Windows or if you want to try doing it manually then try the link deleting undeletable files manually using command prompt.

How to use mouse gestures !

2010-02-02T04:09:00.000+05:30

No! Am not trying to lecture on mouse gestures techniques used in Opera or any future versions of Windows. What I want to share with you today is something I accidentally found a couple of years ago.
It's a group of people who are trying to play around with and research the scope of using only mouse gestures for all our computational work. Yes ! You heard it right. Whatever we need to do in a computer can be done 'without' the use of mouse clicks. According to their research, clicking on any item requires an action period of 700 milliseconds but a gesture would take only about 150. So, which is more efficient huh!
They have given a lot of onsite activities that you can enjoy and make sure you don't click by mistake!
Visit the site at www.dontclick.it.
Now, that's a nice domain name isn't it !

Steve Ballmer signing a MacBook !

2010-01-31T19:37:00.001+05:30

PIC : Steve Ballmer signs a student's Macbook during his visit to Trevecca Nazarene University. (Nashville, TN - 01/20/2010)

Well, I know it's an old news and that many of you must have already heard or read about it. I too heard about it earlier but a friend showed me the video and I did find this a worthy collection to my blog :)

Check it out the video and see how Ballmer reacts when a student asks him to sign his Mac.

Remove Antivirus 2009

2010-01-30T05:23:00.004+05:30

NO! This is not any new antivirus product in the market, in fact it's a problem caused by one 'supposed to be antivirus' of the same name. A lot of people, mostly novice users, are facing this problem of Antivirus2008, Antivirus 2009, Antivirus 2009 PRO or even Antivirus 2010. They are all from similar family and just have different names. What happens, is that all of a sudden the user sees a pop up saying that the computer contains a number of viruses and they are risking their computers. When they try to click on the Clean button, it tells the user to buy the software and clean their system.
See some examples below.

Now let me tell you that this is a scam and is called as 'rogueware' in technical terms. What it does is that it tries to forcefully get the user to buy their software. DO NOT click on their link and try to buy. If you do so you will end up with a lighter wallet as well as end up compromising your credit card details.

There's no need to worry as luckily this irritating ware is only too easy to remove. Seems like the software developers of this rogueware haven't done their homework well.
Anyways, we will see how to remove them easily. I have given YouTube links(they belong to their respective authors, I just found them good and am sharing them) which will demonstrate how to remove it easily. For people who are having problems watching the videos(due to slow connection?) I have put up few steps in writing too, you can follow that. Though I would suggest watching the videos as it is be much easier if you see the demo.

The video below shows you HOW Antivirus 2009 and its similar family members 'infect' your computer. This is not necessary but will help prevent future problems. No need to follow the link they have put in the end as the next 2 videos I have put are demonstrating the procedure for removal.

This video below is the simplest one and involves installing a small software(MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware) to do the work. Will help remove other small infections too. It has got subtitles to it.

This video below is a voice over one, where the author is explaining how to remove it with CCleaner. This software is beautiful and I too use it for everyday purpose. The main thing starts after 2 mins though.

For those though have difficulty watching the videos or do not prefer them, here is what you can do.

METHOD 1 (the best way )

Download MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware from here
Install this software and update it (just for more security) from Update tab.
Once it is updated, run a scan.
It will detect the Antivirus as a rogueware.
Click on remove selected and you are done. Restart your computer and scan once more just to be sure

Note: Many other anti spyware/malware softwares are capable of doing this but we chose this because its a light software, comes free and does the job we want to do. Other notable similar softwares include Spybot Search and Destroy, Spyware terminator, Spyware Doctor(paid) amongst many more.

METHOD 2 (alternate method)

Download CCleaner from here
Click Options on the side tab. Now Click on Include.
Click Add Folder and browse to the Antivirus 2009 folder. My Computer--C Drive--Program Files--Antivirus 2009. Click Ok
Click on Cleaner (top most option) on the side tab and click Run Cleaner to start cleaning.
It's now removed.

Note: CCleaner is light, free and popular cleaner softwares available on the internet. Other option could be Advanced System Care which is also good.

These methods will work on any of these roguewares which tell you that there are many viruses on your computer and that you need to buy the software to remove them. Do not fall into their trap and don't even think of going to the Geek Squad or the likes. They will skin you out of your wallet for this small thing.
Leave a comment if you need more help.

Suicide attempt by a student

2010-01-29T23:13:00.001+05:30

Here's a silly suicide attempt by a student. It's a student in Pillai College in Panvel,India.
I think its funny with those people trying to save her using that green cloth. Don't think that cloth will hold on to that student's weight. Anyways she gets saved in the end. Made a fool out of herself, that noob.
Youth these days get carried away by small and irrelevant things and end up doing such things. I don't understand what makes a person so desperate to end his precious life. Failure shouldn't mean and end to life, rather learn from it and carry on.

Check out this youtube link.

Optimizing Firefox

2010-01-29T09:16:00.005+05:30

We have seen how to optimize Firefox to reduce Firefox memory usage the manual way and to speed up Firefox automatically using FireTune. There is one more nice little application that will optimize both Firefox as well as Firebird and is therefore named as Mozilla Optimizer.

This software is good enough to be used on latest Firefox. Just select your browser and the action you want to do and its done. Easy and quick!

Its made and maintained by the guys at www.computerbase.de
You can download it from their site. Alternatively you can also download it from the link given below

Click here to download

Incase you want to try FireTune, a similar software you can visit here

Speed up Firefox

2010-01-29T08:54:00.005+05:30

We have already seen how to reduce Firefox memory usage in our previous post. That can indeed solve the memory hogging problem of Firefox, but it involves manually tweaking about:config settings and that can be quite a complicated job for a novice user. Also if you have noticed, that configuration page is similar to the windows registry and tweaking them wrong can certainly be bad for your browser. Therefore for faster and easy optimization of these settings to speed up Firefox, we have a small but efficient software named FireTune. The version we have here is FireTune v 1.2.0 and it works with all versions of Firefox.

This software was made for easy and quick optimization of Firefox settings to allow user experience fast browsing speeds. It is based on a collection of optimization settings collected and tested by Tweakfactor.Though home site TotalIdea Software has discontinued the product, it still seems to work

on the current versions of Firefox.

Its very simple to use indeed. Just select the settings from the options that suit your condition the best and the software will do the changes automatically thus rending your Firefox faster.

Softpedia tells us how to determine if this FireTune really works for you.
How to tell whether Firefox is faster after optimizing it:

Clear the cache of Firefox from the Firefox settings dialog - this is very important!
Before you optimize Firefox, navigate to http://www.numion.com/stopwatch/ and do a speed test on http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
The time needed to load the site completely will be displayed to you in the browser window. Write down the time.
Clear the cache of Firefox from the Firefox settings dialog again - this is very important!
Now, close Firefox, and optimize it with FireTune
Start Firefox again, and repeat the speed test on http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
Compare the displayed result with the result from the test before the optimization.

Also there's a warning that some anti viruses may detect this as a virus or trojan but its absolutely safe. Its detected as a part of heuristics and is a 'false positive' so there is nothing to worry about it.
Try this its extremely simple to use and it did give positive results for me.
Download Firetune
Link 2

Reduce firefox memory usage

2010-01-29T08:03:00.005+05:30

Firefox has been gaining popularity by the day and it holds a considerable market share when it comes to the battle of the browsers. They key to Firefox's popularity is its speed, security, ease of use, and of course the ever useful add-ons. While Firefox has made tremendous improvements in terms of features, security and speed, it has repeatedly failed in addressing a major issue, that of memory leak.

I have been a fan of Firefox for past many years. I had read it in some computer magazine that a new browser called Firefox was an upcoming hero and I wanted to try it. Once I tried, I never left. Firefox has got many features that suit my taste. But for past many months I have been noticing that after a long period of time, Firefox starts using up a lot of memory. If I am surfing on my desktop computer then I do not notice the difference much because it has got 2 GB of ram. But my laptop with 1 GB of ram starts lagging after around 2-3 hours of continuous surfing. I understand I end up opening too many tabs and that may have slowed it down but after closing the tabs at least it should be working fine with reduced memory consumption, but that wasn't happening.

The next thing I tried was that I opened up some 4-5 tabs and kept Firefox open all night long and went to bed. When I got up in the morning it was consuming around 750 MB out of 1GB ram and when I tried surfing, it was lagging. This condition, I came to know, was a consistent problem in Firefox and is known as 'memory leak'. Click the image to see a larger one.

According to Wikipedia, "a memory leak or leakage in computer science is a particular type of memory consumption by a computer program where the program is unable to release memory it has acquired. A memory leak has symptoms similar to a number of other problems (see below) and generally can only be diagnosed by a programmer with access to the program source code; however, many people refer to any unwanted increase in memory usage as a memory leak, even if this is not strictly accurate."

In layman's terms and in our context, Firefox is using up memory, i.e. ram, to do its work. After that particular work is finished, it should release that bit of ram. But here is out problem. Firefox is unable to release that bit of ram and there after a period of time this unreleased ram causes the Firefox to bloat and make the computer slow. With recent releases, Firefox has been trying to solve this problem and thought it has become less prominent than before, people who are browsing for long hours will still feel this issue.

So how can we stop Firefox from hogging the memory and making our computer slow ? Well, I read up a lot on this topic and discussed with some programmers and from what I have understood, it's a problem that we really can't 'stop'. It's upto Mozilla's programmers who will do it. All we can do is to tweak the settings and make this condition improve. I have eventually come across some Firefox tweaks that will eventually help reduce the memory consumption of Firefox a lot. I have used the method and my browsing experience has really improved a lot. Here's what you need to do.

1) Uninstall or atleast disable the add-ons that you are not currently using. Keep only those that are needed. These add-ons use a considerable amount of memory. Though this isn't a major issue.
2) The main thing is to follow the set of instructions given below. They are the ones that will show drastic improvements.

Firefox has a hidden configurations option 'about:config' that can be tweaked to obtain better results and we are going to use that to solve our memory problem.

Get the main configuration screen by putting 'about:config' in the browser’s address bar.

It will display a warning window. Just click on 'I'll be careful I promise' button and proceed.
On the filter bar on the top, type 'browser.cache.memory.capacity'. Below in the empty space, right click and select New, then put 'browser.cache.memory.capacity' in the preference name and set it to a low number. Most people prescribe the number 16384 for the value which is 15 MB in size. This tweak controls how many kilobytes of memory are used for the browser's cache.
Now again in the filter, put 'browser.cache.disk.capacity'. In the space below you will notice an entry. Right click on that and select Modify, then put a number 5000(if u have 128-512MB of ram) else use 15000. This tweak controls how many kilobytes of memory are used for the browser's cache.
Again in the filter, type 'config.trim_on_minimize'. In the empty space below, right click and select New then Boolean and put preference name as 'config.trim_on_minimize' and set it to True. This tweak actually makes Firefox swap the memory to disk when it is minimized. That is, it will free up memory from the ram and store it temporarily onto the hard disk when it is minimized. Thus you will notice a large fall in memory when you minimize the browser.
In the filter again, put 'network.prefetch-next', set this Boolean setting to False by modifying it. This setting will stop prefetching of data from sites. Prefetching is often unnecessary and stopping this frees up memory and improves speed.
In the filter space again, put 'browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers'. This setting implies the number of pages to be saved in memory for going back using the Back/Forward buttons. Generally we do not need much so setting it at 5 or 8 is enough for most people.

Restart Firefox and now your computer will be much faster than it was before.

Note: the information on this page has been gathered from all over the internet and then compiled.

Apple iPad launched !

2010-01-28T07:19:00.002+05:30

The wait is over! Apple's new tablet pc which has been speculated over and over for past few weeks or even months, has finally been launched by Apple's iGod himself. Terming it as "a truly magical and revolutionary product" Steve Jobs showed the gadget to an enthralled audience, what he called the iPad. This iPad is unarguably an ultraportable device that does the work of a netbook but giving the user a "revolutionary" experience. According to Steve, iPad is the company’s “most advanced technology in a magical & revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”

Here you can see what he said at the launch.

As you can see the device is extremely thin as looks like a wonder. According to Steve, this will change the way people surf the internet!

Steve believes iPad will enthrall users with its "large, high-resolution LED-backlit, IPS display. An incredibly responsive Multi-Touch screen. And an amazingly powerful, Apple-designed chip. All in a design that’s thin and light enough to take anywhere. iPad isn’t just the best device of its kind. It’s a whole new kind of device."

Lets have a brief look at its features:

Looks:

It unarguably has got killer looks with a sharp, high resolution IPS display with 9.7 inches (measured diagonally) long screen sporting a resolution of 1024x768 at 132 pixels per inch, which is something geeks will drool over. The orientation of the iPad can be both portrait and landscape. This is done automatically by inbuilt accelerometers that gauge the movements and adjust the screen automatically. It also has inbuilt light ambient sensors. Thus it will be a real visual treat whether one is surfing the internet, watching movies, playing games or simply reading ebooks.

Check out the pictures below (click on the images to see them in their original sizes)

The Menu looks similar to the iPhone

Enjoy crisp, full-screen image

The new multi-touch environment must be a breeze

Experience gaming like never before with this

great screen, powerful processor and

the accelerometer making it more exquisite

Watch high res maps

Get 10 hours of non-stop enterntainment

For those who complain ebooks don't have

the charm the real ones have

Lets have a look at its performance:

It is powered by Apple's 1Ghz A4 chip about which very little has been leaked and technical information has been carefully safeguarded from getting leaked to the media. It comes in capacity of 16 GB to 64 GB of flash storage space. Included Bluetooth + EDR, WiFi, a 30 pin connector, inbuilt speakers and a microphone. The battery gives 10 hours of continuous playtime with 1 month of standby.

The chip that runs the iPad

The connector and the speakers

Lets look at the software specs too:
The operating system looks like OS 3.2. Rest everything is similar to what you find in an iPhone but overall the features have been given a touch up. Especially the onscreen keypad is generating great curiosity amongst people. Let's see more of it in pictures.

There doesn't seem to be anything new in the looks of the iPad OS

That's the onscreen keyboard everyone's so excited about

Unleash a new emailing experience with new never before features

So lets put up the pros n cons on this new gadget that Apple has given us.

Pros:

A powerful 1Ghz processor
New age high res LED screen for crisp images
A new web surfing experience claimed by Steve Jobs
Smaller and very thin yet does most work a netbook would do. The new form factor that Apple has pursued for making iPad is something that should be commended
The Ebook experience will surely kill its competitor, Amazon's Kindle.
All iStore Apps shall work on this
Great Aesthetics, quality and of course, brand Apple

Cons:

iPad doesn't support multi-tasking. Surprised? Well, everyone is. Without the multi tasking support, the iPad loses out to the netbooks with which it is essentially fighting a war with. It has got such a powerful processor but very little work to do. Isn't that waste? It's expected that a future update of OS will allow multi tasking but people won't be willing to wait for it that long. The sooner Apple gets it, the better it would be.
No Flash support. It's sad that's all I can say. We will miss all the rich features that Flash has to offer.
Should have been given a front faced webcam. Without that it loses out to the "revolutionary web experience" that Apple claims. How will people Skype man! No video chats and no video conferencing.
The main thing that is of concern is that with its onscreen keypad, how will people type? They are providing with a keyboard dock but then what about when someone's traveling? With the keypad inside the screen and the device being so big how will a person type with both hands? Will he place it on his lap or table and strain his neck or keep it suspended in thin air? That's why a laptop has its screen at an angle to the keyboard and not flat out in the same plane. Don't know what Apple has thought about regarding this. We will certainly have to wait till the device is out in the market to check the customer reviews regarding this.
Should have added USB ports for people to attach pen drives and other devices directly
Could have added more space to it. In this digital age even 1 Tb seems small after a relatively small amount of time.
The pricing of $429-$829 may sound quite high for many

Conclusion:
Looks like iPad has more negatives than positives, right? It may be true or may not be. We will have to wait for more reviews and the actual product to come out in the market. What we have today, is from what we saw at launch, few hours ago. The pricing is on a higher side but that won't stop a Apple fanboy from laying hands on one of these.
If we stop comparing iPad to netbooks then we might be able to see the vision Steve Jobs is trying to show us. iPad is essentially about web experience coupled with the features that we enjoy in our iPhones. It's not out to kill the current generation of netbooks(though it may end up doing so, only time will tell) , that was all media generated hype. iPad will take us through a different set of rides and let us enjoy the "revolutionary and magical" web experience that Steve Jobs is claiming, because we all realise that the coming revolution in information technology is all about web.The internet boom hasn't ended, it has in fact just started with this magical tool called iPad .

Feast on these images too

Crystal clear images from this high res screen

A comparison between iPhone, Kindle and iPad

Reading newspapers will be more fun

The keyboard Dock and iPad Case

The price tag. Hefty ?

Will post more updates when available.

For a review of world's fastest RAM chip check out this link on rams made by Corsair

Note: the images and date used in the post are from www.apple.com/ipad , www.gizmodo.com and the google search engine. The images are copyright of their owners

Pop up blocking

2010-01-28T01:12:00.003+05:30

Everyone of us has faced those often nasty new browser windows opening up automatically when surfing online at some point or the other. During the early days of the internet, surfing through the web was a peaceful journey. When the internet revolution really began, the marketing guys went online too. And guess what! Pop up adds became their nuke weapon.

According to Wikipedia, "pop up ads or pop ups are a form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to attract web traffic or capture email addresses. It works when certain web sites open a new web browser window to display advertisements. The pop-up window containing an advertisement is usually generated by Javascript, but can be generated by other means as well".

Thus pop ups maybe a good advertising tools for marketing firms but they can be real irritating and sometimes harmful too. People who have been accustomed to the present form of internet recently, may think why I am creating such a big issue out of pop up adds. Well, I can understand that but the real thing is that you people haven't faced the big time irritation they used to cause when they were shining in full glory. These days pop up adds are not a cause of worry because most browsers these days are very efficient at blocking these pop up adds. But it wasn't so a few years ago. By ''few years ago'', I mean around the year 1999-2000.

At that time, we had no option other than installing 3rd party softwares most popular of which were pop up blocking toolbars sported by several companies. Later on the Yahoo and Google toolbars became widely used and they possessed good pop up blocking capabilities. Opera was the first major browser to include pop up blocking capabilities into their browser software and the others followed suit. These days all browsers have very strong pop up blocking capabilities and thus the pop up menace has slowed down considerably.

Incase you still faced problems by pop up adds, then you might consider upgrading to the latest version of your internet browser. I use Mozilla Firefox as my default browser though I use Opera too when needed and both are good in terms of blocking these pop up adds.
Otherwise you may search out for 'pop up blocker' in a search engine such as www.google.com or www.search.yahoo.com and you will get many free pop up blockers that you can install.

If you are not sure whether you need to upgrade or install a new toolbar/software then you may try this nice little test on the link given below. This site has automatic tests for checking the strength of your browser for blocking pop up adds. My Firefox scored full on their tests :)
Click here for the Pop Up test

Free Windows driver download

2010-01-27T02:17:00.005+05:30

Do you want to download drivers for your computer but don't know how to ? Or may be you are just unable to find them ! Today we will see how to download driver free of cost for your windows running computer without any hassles.

Many of us use Windows as their default operating system and for Windows XP and earlier versions, it is necessary to install the drivers of the hardwares being used, for them to work. Unless we do it, we will see these yellow question marks in device manager (Right click on My Computer>Click on Manage> Click on Device Manager on the left hand side menu. Alternatively, press Win key and R to get Run command.Type devmgmt.msc ) which means that the device drivers are missing.

Drivers, for each of these hardwares, are missing and they need to be installed for them to function properly.Also outdated or wrong versions of drivers can cause problem in the operation of the computer. (Note: In Windows Vista and presently Windows 7, the drivers are automatically loaded so there's no need to install them separately for most hardwares).
Now we have got 3 main options with us.

Install drivers from the motherboard and/or CD that we got with the respective hardware, or
Incase the motherboard/hardware driver CD is not available, then go to the manufacturer's site (if the hardware manufacturer is known to us ), or
Use the method I am going to show below.

If we do not have the first two options with us then we have to go for the third i.e. updating device drivers through special softwares. Many of the cases I have seen about missing drivers, the user doesn't usually have the driver cd with them (mostly in case of laptop owners who didn't get a separate cd from the manufacturer) or they have lost them. So ultimately they are left with no other option but to download them from the internet. People who are adept at using the internet find it easily locating the particular driver with the correct version but people who aren't so sure end up messing up their computers.

One of the simplest and least time consuming ways is to use the wonderful freeware Device Doctor.

Device Doctor is basically a freeware windows driver updater that is extremely easy to use and very efficient. According to the site www.devicedoctor.com "Device Doctor is a freeware Windows application that scans your computer hardware and checks to see if there are new driver updates available for your devices. It also locates drivers for "unidentified devices" in the Windows Device Manager."
It is very simple to use too.The basic interface looks like this -

Click on 'Begin Scan' and the software starts scanning your devices. Once that is done, it will start searching for updates for the devices from their online servers.

Once scanning for updates is over, it will display the drivers available for download as shown below

Now you will see all the downloads available listed as shown. You can click on Download Update and get the drivers updated one by one. Finish up with a restart and your computer is now updated with the latest device drivers.

Note that the most important aspect of this software is its huge and regularly updated library of drivers and its ease of use. Even a newbie can sit and update his pc using this software. Its a recommended software for all pc users to have.

This software is free and comes in two types, the normal installable version (4.6 mb) and the other portable version (5.1 mb) for use in multiple computers using a usb drive.

You can download them from the original site

Making URL short

2010-01-26T04:21:00.004+05:30

Step by step tutorial on making URL shorter.
For those who don't know, URL stands for Universal Resource Locator which is basically the address of the website you want to visit. Just like every house has an address to it, so does a website which has a unique address assigned o it. It is typed on the blank space on the top of the browser. See the example given below. Click on the images to make them larger.

I wanted to post URLs of my blogs on my mobile networking group but they were too long. Most sites like twitter or other free messaging services allow upto 140 characters to be typed. But my blog URLs stood out at an average of 70 characters which I could hardly afford. I tried a lot shortening my message but still could not make the entire message short enough to append the URL of the blog article. In the end I had to give up till I found a solution to it.

Honestly speaking, though I am in touch with the internet since around 1998 I am relatively new to blogging stuff. I did not ever try maintaining a blog or a website by my own, I was just happy to read out the universe of knowledge that the internet gave me. Thus I was thinking on how to cater to this problem of mine about making the URLs of the blogs shorted so that i could use them in messages through Twitter and elsewhere. Thinking on it, I dug my memory and realized that I have seen other blogs and websites use something called 'tiny url' which contained oddly twisted but relatively small links. Though I wasn't sure about what it exactly was , I had an idea of what it did. So I googled out tiny url and found its site - www.tiny.cc
Note that there are many such sites but I got this one 1st in my head so I ultimately ended up using it.

According to Wikipedia "URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web where a provider makes a webpage available under a very short URL in addition to the original address. For example, the page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TinyURL&diff=283621022&oldid=283308287 can be shortened to http://tinyurl.com/mmw6lb".
Instead of writing much about what it does, let me show you step by step on how to make original URLs shorter.

Let's take the example of one of my earlier posts on PC/Laptop overheating issues

The URL of this post was 70 characters long and I wanted to make them shorter. Thus I browsed over to www.tiny.cc , the home of TinyURL.

Now you can see "Enter a long URL that you want to make tiny" followed by a blank space. Type out the original URL that you want to make small. In my case it was http://babbleona.blogspot.com/2010/01/pclaptop-overheating-issues.html .

I put it in the appropriate place

The original URL has been copied into the box and now we click on 'Tiny It' . You can see the results below.

As you can see my original website link or the URL was 70 characters long and now it has been brought down to just 20 characters thus saving me 50 precious character space. It really is important if you are into mobile networking as the space is really limited, being 140 characters in most cases.

The real positive thing is that it makes my URL way shorter and I can now use it in a more efficient way for networking or other purposes. These links are permanent so there's no problem about the link getting expired et al.

One small problem that I noticed in this is that the shortened URL is case sensitive. Take this example again.
My original URL : http://babbleona.blogspot.com/2010/01/pclaptop-overheating-issues.html
Shortened URL : http://tiny.cc/DtL1g
Problem here is that its fine if these links are put up on webpages or hyperlinked on some webpage but if you are sending them as text message then there's a fair chance that the user might type all characters in small case and may end up getting an error. For a serious blogger or those wanting to make their presence even such small chances can be fairly harmful.

Thus to evade that problem we can use the customize option given to us. This option lets us put the keywords we want into new short URL. Thus to remove the problem of upper n lower case of characters we may put up some keyword in small case letters (note that if your given keyword is already used up then yours will be appended by some random number.).
In my case I put 'heatpc2'. I added the number beforehand cause 'heatpc' was already present and the site was allotting me some weird random numbers I did not like.

And I got this new link with my keywords all in small case.

Now, finally, I was happy and satisfied with the link that I could easily use for my networking purposes.

The keywords have a big role to play which many people do not use unfortunately. 1st of all any experience blogger would know the importance of the right set of keywords - they are very important in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Along with that I believe that the URL we get using keywords look sensible rather than the ones that are auto generated.

Thus we have seen how to make shortened URLs out of long ones.

Kindly note that there are many other such sites doing the same thing but TinyURL is one of the most popular ones out there. The most notable ones have been listed below

There are of course some more available but these are renowned ones. As these short URL serve good purpose as you have seen above, these can also be potentially harmful.

Spammers use these nonsensical URLs to camouflage their originals URLs and may redirect the internet user into harmful websites.

Giveaway of the Day - Platinum Guard 4.0.0

2010-01-25T23:57:00.000+05:30

www.giveawayoftheday.com is giving away this windows cleaning and tweaking type software named Platinum Guard 4.0.0. According to the site "Platinum Guard helps you to remove any unnecessary files from your computer, allowing Windows to perform faster, while freeing up some valuable hard disk space, which otherwise would have been lost.
Apart from that Platinum Guard is also an excellent utility to protect your privacy."

Though we do have popular cleaners such as Tuneup Utility, ASC and Ccleaner out there, this is being given off as free as part of special promotion. Try this out it might turn out to be better. Who knows !!

We have added the Giveawayoftheday ticker on the right side. It will keep updated about the daily offering by that site so we won't be publishing it everyday. If there's something really good or helpful , then we might chip in a post about it.

You can download today's give away at www.giveawayoftheday.com

Giveaway of the Day - History Killer Pro 5.0.1

2010-01-25T00:34:00.000+05:30

As I have already mentioned in earlier posts that www.giveawayoftheday.com puts of paid versions of software for free download as a part of promotional initiative. Today's give away is "History Killer Pro erases EVERYTHING you do on the computer that may put your privacy at risk – the websites you visit, what you search for, the passwords and credit card digits you enter into forms, the pictures and video you download, the documents you open, the programs you launch and much more. In just a few mouse clicks, you can wipe away every detail of your Internet activity and computer usage, so that there is NOTHING personal about you that can tell snoops or cyber criminals about your private computer habits."
Though these days we have pretty decent history cleaners inside our browsers itself, but for some paranoid geeks out there, here's one software that will definitely do your work of cleaning up your mess. Grab the software till time lasts as these are free for one day only.

Download the software

Giveaway of the Day - Crave World Clock

2010-01-23T17:55:00.000+05:30

www.giveawayoftheday.com gives out paid softwares for free as a promotional initiative giving users to try out softwares which otherwise they might not have tried at all.

Today's give away software is Crave World Clock, which "is a nice looking clock for people who wish to keep in touch with friends, colleagues and clients around the world. The current date and time will be displayed for all major cities and countries on a real world map which shows day/night effects and real-time imagery provided by NASA. You can quickly add multiple cities of your choice on the World Map using Add/Remove City tool."

Remember these are free full versions of the same paid type but the offer is for 1 day only. So grab it before it expires.

Visit site for download

Corsair® Dominator™ GT DDR3 Memory Hits 2533MHz, Sets World Record for DDR3 Memory Frequency

2010-01-23T00:04:00.001+05:30

Corsair's new ram named as Dominator GTX 2333MHz has been certified as the world's fastest XMP RAM by the Intel. Corsair beat its own previous record of scoring 2000MHz with its Dominator GT series of rams.

These rams are XMP certified by Intel meaning that they are overclocked enhancement of the standard DDR3 type of memory that are specifically beneficial of gaming rigs running on Intel technology.

According to Corsair, "the Corsair Dominator GTX1 modules are individually screened and tested on multiple high-performance Intel P55 chipset platforms to ensure that they operate at the incredible frequency of 2400MHz at timings of 9-11-9-27 at 1.65V," thus targeting it clearly towards overclockers and extreme gamers. But these rams won't be cheap either. They will cost around 200$for each 2gb kit you buy but they surely are the best offering in terms of memory kits.

These kits can be only only from official Corsair online shop. You can check them out here.
Corsair Online Store

Give away of the day

2010-01-22T22:54:00.002+05:30

www.giveawayoftheday.com has launched an unique initiative wherein they give away full versions of paid softwares for free but for a limitated duration. This site gives away paid softwares for free ?? Then how are they or the software developers profiting from this ??
Yes , the softwares given away are definitely free for that given day. The software developers are giving off their software so that people would try their 'FREE' software which otherwise they wouldn't have tried because of their price tag.
It gives the developers an excellent opportunity to distribute and advertise their software. Also for the consumers, it'a an excellent opportunity to get their hands on full paid versions of software without the need to pay for them. For some adventurous type who prefer cracked versions of softwares for trials, this is an excellent opportunity to use those softwares in a legal way.
Is there any catch in this promotion ?? Yes, there's one small catch about users not being able to use their technical support though ofcourse their technical forums will always be available.
In all, its a win-win situation for both the developers as well as the consumers.

For more, check out their website www.giveawayoftheday.com

Today's Give away of the day is

JPG To PDF Converter

JPG To PDF Converter is a windows utility that quickly convert multiple images into a single pdf document. With JPG To PDF Converter users can create pdf files from image formats like JPG, GIF, BMP, TIF, PNG and PSD.

Download Here

Remember that these free downloads are for one day one after which a new software is put up for promotion. So get the software soon. You can check the official site everyday for latest updates though we too will post regular updates on available softwares.

Free personal diary software for windows

2010-01-22T16:09:00.001+05:30

People use books to maintain their thoughts which they call as their personal diaries. While many others resort to blogging which has become a fad in this digital age. But they do possess some limitations and disadvantages too.
How good would it be if one could write anything they wanted yet keep them secret from others without the fear for getting them leaked. Well, we have this software called 1-abc.net Personal Diary which is essentially a password protected personal diary which can save different entries with different passwords.
This software costs 19.99 $ but the company is giving away free serial keys as a part of promotional offer. so grab it soon!!
Click here for the promotional offer

Download Personal Diary
Publisher’s description :
In times when many people like to publish their thoughts and ideas in so-called web blogs that can be read by everyone, no-one seems to care about the normal meaning of diaries and the words and stories that are written in it. The general sense of diaries is to keep all these things private. Maybe the author wants to make it available to an external reader from time to time, but most of the time the content is not meant to be seen by anyone.
1-abc.net Personal Diary was designed especially for this need! This fast and easy-to-use product allows you to write down your thoughts every day to a password-secured file that is saved with a special encryption engine so that definitely no-one but you can open and change it without the knowledge of your password and without your permission.
Besides many useful functions like a very easy navigation, export functions for a single day or the whole diary, date and day of the week auto detection or the absolutely unique 1-abc.net encryption engine it is a very nice feature that this program can be installed on USB sticks, floppy disks and nearly all other re-writable media too. This function allows you to edit and add new entries to your personal diary on every computer in the world – even without the program installed on it.
Write down what happens on a journey, write down how your business is developing each day or write down all your private thoughts and feelings about your family, your friends, your love or your life! 1-abc.net Personal Diary brings the real idea of a diary how it was meant for centuries and millenniums back to the IT age.
For Windows® XP/Vista, Download size: 573 KB
Download Personal Diary

Changing MAC address of a computer

2010-01-21T19:56:00.007+05:30

As the title says, we will see how change the MAC address or id of the computer. But before we do that lets have a overview of what MAC is basically and what it's used for.

MAC or Media Access Control address (MAC address) is a unique idenifier assigned to most network adaptors or network interface cards (NICs...more specially what's known as LAN card or ethernet card) by the manufacturer for identification purposes. Now the question is why do we need to change it ?

These days many ISPs(internet service providers) lock their internet connection to a particular MAC of their subscriber. It is perfectly fine for most people but for people (am one of them) who have more than one computer/laptop and want to use internet on all of them as and when required, it can be quite a hectic job calling the call centre and setting the MAC for the pc they want to use it on every time you want to access internet from a different computer. The ISPs may lock MAC with their connection to safeguard their connection against malpractices or even for push sales for selling wireless solutions to be used on multiple pcs sharing a same connection.

I have a pc and a laptop. I use the net mostly on pc but need it on my laptop for updating it too. Calling the call centre every time is not an impressive solution as some times their service can be down too. Instead a found a very easy to use and simple solution for overcoming this problem.

AnalogX solutions have deveoped a software called anonymac which can solve the above problem by changing the MAC id of the computer.
Consider my situation, where the MAC lock is done with the MAC id of my pc and I want to use internet on my laptop. Thus I need to change the MAC id of my laptop and make it similar to my pc's.
To do this, I first need to check the MAC of my pc. So i need to run this software on my pc first. On the opening window click on local network and then you can see the info out on the software window. Under MAC address section the one on the active is the current MAC id of the pc.

Another way to check the MAC id is to go to start>click on run>type cmd>and then type ipconfig /all

once you do this, you will get a lot of info on the command prompt.Out of that check the physical address under Ethernet Adaptor local area connection. That is the MAC id.

Now once we have got our target MAC id,

open the software in the other computer, Click on local network on the upper most window.
Go to Modify MAC address section and type out the MAC address we got before and click on Apply new MAC. Refresh the network adaptor by disabling and enabling again or simply restart your computer. Now you are done. Both the computers have the same MAC and the internet connection can be used freely on any of them as needed.

There are many such software out in the internet but Anonymac is one of the smallest (only 523kb ) and best one available. For more information on this software check their site by clicking on the banner below.

You can download Anonymac from the link below:
Developers Site

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1	123456	porsche	firebird	prince	rosebud
2	password	guitar	butter	beach	jaguar
3	12345678	chelsea	united	amateur	great
4	1234	black	turtle	7777777	cool
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6	12345	nascar	tiffany	redsox	1313
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41	hockey	peanut	tucker	mark	3333
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54	1111	fender	tits	booty	samson
55	austin	anthony	member	blonde	kelly
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57	daniel	ferrari	donald	golden	mine
58	golfer	cookie	bigdaddy	0	king
59	summer	chicken	bronco	fire	racing
60	heather	maverick	penis	sandra	5555
61	hammer	chicago	voyager	pookie	eagle
62	yankees	joseph	rangers	packers	hentai
63	joshua	diablo	birdie	einstein	newyork
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77	bigdog	fishing	2222	vagina	apollo
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80	121212	hooters	london	hotdog	time
81	patrick	wilson	7777	paris	sydney
82	martin	butthead	marlboro	rock	women
83	freedom	dennis	srinivas	xxxx	voodoo
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87	sparky	chester	jasper	dirty	777777
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89	camaro	xavier	teresa	freddy	maxwell
90	secret	steven	jeremy	arsenal	music
91	dick	viking	11111111	access14	rush2112
92	falcon	snoopy	bill	wolf	russia
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96	123123	samantha	cock	florida	mistress
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98	hello	miller	rocket	legend	billy
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100	please	jack	oliver	success	albert