Last week, i was called to fix a machine which had XP installed in it. As usual, i tried to look into the symptoms. The behavior i observed was, whenever i tried to execute a shortcut( or Double click a short cut) to open an application, nothing happens. None of the applications opened.
Surely i figured out, that the system was affected with some kinda virus. And when i didn't want to continue looking at the symptoms of that virus and when i came to know that data backup was not needed, i just went ahead with a clean reinstall of the Windows.
But the cool part which i figured out later is, how to identify if our executable( ie .exe ) files are affected with a virus.Because some of the apps act weirdly sometimes.It could be a failure in the app code, that might cause the app to stop working or it could be the virus.And usually most of the viruses target the .exe files on your system.
Here is an easy way to find out, if your system is really affected with that kinda virus or not.
1. Open Start -> Run
2. Type in cmd and press 'Enter' ( go to the command prompt )
3. goto your windows folder.
Mostly this action need you to key in the following commands
- cd \ 'press enter'
- cd windows or cd winnt 'press enter'
- cd system32 'press enter'
- setup 'press enter'
If you get a popup window saying " Please go to Control Panel to install and configure system components" then your .exe files are not affected and you can be sure that your system is safely away from those harmful viruses.
If you get something else... or nothing pops up... then you better get your AntiVirus updated.
This method can also be used to check your computer, even without an antivirus available.
SystemCheckup without an Antivirus
Turn Off Desktop Cleanup Warning in XP
Windows xp always shows this ballon popup, which suggest you for a desktop cleanup. When you run this cleanup wizard, it removes your unused desktop shortcuts or files and places them into a unused folder.
But most of the times, this balloon is irritating and i want my desktop to be like the way it is..
I have a quick fix for this...
1.Right Click on the empty space on your desktop,
2.Goto> Properties
3. select the desktop tab
4. Click on the Customize Desktop button
5. Under General tab you will be able to see desktop cleanup
6. Uncheck the Run Desktop Cleanup Wizard every 60 days checkbox...
7. Click ok>Apply>ok and you are done..
8. Your windows will not complain to you anymore about your desktop
Creating Portable Apps
Download both the softwares from the above links and install them.
Now let me illustrate the steps to create the portable app for the Application CCleaner.
The ccsetup224.exe file can be downloaded from the above link.
Windows 8 makes it to the Microsoft Roadmap
The Operating system gaint Microsoft has declared that it will release its next generation the successor of windows 7 by 2012. This Operating system named Windows 8 is rumored to be a 128 bit operating system. The company is co- working with Intel, AMD, HP and IBM for this 128bit machines which will be in markets by 2012.
Nothing much have been said about the features that its gonna have, but 3 years from now is a long way. And Microsoft having a hard time maintaining its timescale. Since Windows vista was delayed by 2 years, microsoft said that it wont have 5year gaps between its new launches. Then came windows 7 which is gaining market these days and in 3 more years lets hope windows 8 will have more to offer....
Few Tips to keep safe from Computer viruses
Readers of this blog ...Today i wanna give you few tips to Safe keeping your desktops and laptops from all the viruses that are wildly waiting to attack your computer with their vulnerablities.
Good to know that these days the viruses don't get shipped with the Cd's or dvd's. And thus it leaves us only to the counter-attack the viruses that are in your pen drives, memory sticks or the memory cards.
I would like to present you the few basics at first and then proceed with the method to prevent viruses from attacking your PC.
- Firstly as everyone suggests...install a good antivirus on your pc or laptop. Norton, McAfee, Avg, Eset Nod32 any one of them will be fine.
- Keep updating your antivirus software regularly.
- Before opening your pendrive do a scan of the pen drive with the antivirus scanner.
- Delete all the files that would be shown as affected.
But as the days go by, and the technology grows... reducing the physical size but increasing the capacity of the pen drives. These days its common to have 2gb, 4gb, 8gb and 16gb pendrives.
Few years back we used to get hard disk of these sizes.
Scanning few mega bytes would not take much of the time, but these days when you have a 8 gb pen drive filled with your office files and you take to a cybercafe near your place for a print out and the guy there starts a scan on the whole pen drive... Believe me its gonna eat up lots of your minutes.
I experienced this when my friend brought the designs of our t-shirt in his 8gb pen drive to the shop where we had gone to give the order, and the guy there started scanning it.
We just required a single file from the pen drive. And in this age where impatience is the new life, its not agreeable to waste time scanning the whole pen drive.
So whats the alternative to scaning the whole pendrive.
Yeah I do have an alternative, But prior to it, let me take you on a walk through, of how the viruses from the pen drive affect the PC's on how so they spread.
When you insert your pendrive into the usb , the windows searches for the drivers and are automatically installed and it displays that the device is installed and ready to use
In the next step it searches for the 'autorun.exe' or "autorun.inf" file which lies inside every pendrive. This is a hidden file which will be in the pendrive by default from the device manufacturer .This file contains the various calls to other files. The windows by its default behaviour runs this autorun file.
So now if there are any virus scripts or any programs like trojan horse, malwares etc... they wil be inside your pendrive. The virus writter just need to edit this autorun file and put a line of code into it so that whenever autorun is called ,it automatically calls the virus script which runs in the background and thus it starts affecting all your files.
And this will happen everytime you plug this pendrive into your usb drive in any of the systems.
- So my first tip is to disable the autorun in your windows.
This is done by editing the groups policies. Go to start > run > type 'gpedit.msc' and press ok
A group policy editor window will popup. As shown below.
Now in this window there are two configurations the computer configuration and the user configurations.When you click on these the right side partition will show various options which can be enabled and disabled.
Now we need to browse through the path computer configuration> Administrative templates > System . Now scroll down in the right partitions and you will find an option saying turn off autoplay. As shown below.
Double click on the Turn off Autoplay, you will get a popup window as shown below. here the default option would be selected saying its not configured. Change it to enabled and also select All drives in the drop down menu.
Now press Apply and Ok.
Now you need to change the settings in the user configuration. Its very similar to the above process . Go to the path user configuration > Administrative templates > System > Turn off Autoplay . enable it for all the drives.
as shown below.
Press ok and you are done with it. Close the window.This also has a side effect. For example if you insert your favourite movie DVD. It now doesnot autorun with your DVD software. you need to browse the cd and manually select the files that you want to play.
2. The first one was good to prevent the virus from spreading.But the virus file is still in your pendrive. Usually the name of the virus file will be very similar to your folder names inside the pendrive. You open your pendrive and there is a virus file inside the pendrive ... something like 'New folder'. And you accidently doubleclick on this folder thinking it was your folder but it was actually 'New folder.exe' which runs the virus file.This again affects your computer.
So in this step we will change the folder options such that it shows all the hidden folders.
You go to start > control panel > folder options
In the Folder option window, scroll down and select 'Show hidden files and folders'
3. the third and the last step is to untick the check box saying 'hide the extensions of known files type'. It is just next option below the show hidden files option .This will display the extension of every file in the system. You will feel the difference when you open your mp3 folder where the name of the song is suffixed with .mp3
Now its easy to distinguish between the original 'New Folder' and the 'New Folder.exe'.
Thus after the step 2 and 3 the folder options should look similar to the image below.
Apply it and click on Ok and your are ready.
Thus now you need not be scared that you double clicked the drive as soon as you insert it into the usb drive and the virus will start to spread.
After opening the pendrive you just need to browse only the folders that you know are free of virus and now you dont accidently click into any of the unknown file. You can just delete the New folder.exe file now and similarly other hidden files.
Now you can put your pendrive anywhere , in a cybercafe and you don't need to worry that your pendrive is affected and you need to scan he whole memory now. Just right click and open the pendrive and only copy the files and folders that you created and the rest can be deleted.
Thus you dont need to waste time scanning , you need not waste time thinking that you opened the pendrive without scanning.
This method is safe only if there are few files.
And when every folder is affected in the pendrive, then you obviously need to have a good antivirus scanner to clean all your files or delete the virus.
Search anything with Everything
I've tried a lot of desktop search applications like Google Desktop, Copernic and many others but nothing beats Everything! Well, I meant the software. Most of them slow down the system which is very irritating for me. And after a long search on the internet, I finally came across this software.
Windows 7- Build 7022 Leaked?
According to a Russian torrent site it was leaked by "friendly" Microsoft Ukraine individuals.(Lol lol, no wonder why piracy rules the world :P ) It's not likely that the build contains any of the UAC changes Microsoft has recently promised. The build is Build 7022.winmain.090115-1850 which indicates it was built nearly a month ago. Some Microsoft employees have twittered recently that they were "installing build 7034" so the company is clearly pushing ahead with the builds ready for the upcoming Release Candidate.
Intrepid Ibex vs Windows 7
First the download itself: it took a long time since Microsoft didn’t expect so many people to download the beta..Is that naive or just plain stupid?
But after a full night downloading(yeah!,moreso, because of my internet plan :P) the ISO is in.
I had Vista before and I assume that Windows 7 should run on a machine with at least Vista’s settings: I have created a partition with 16Gb disk, 2Gb memory and 128Mb video memory, 3D enabled. Microsoft promised that Windows 7 would be more resource friendly.
It takes ages before Windows 7 has figured out what hardware the machine contains, but the installation itself runs smoothly. It requires 2 restarts, but thats normal with Windows(:P). After about 50 minutes I’m on a working desktop. But, darn!, Aero doesn’t work, that was to be expected. The install takes about 7Gb (!). So I ended up manually updating the drivers for the system and the video. Another restart required.
Ubuntu clearly wins here. The Ubuntu installation is easier, more logical and much faster.
Going over to the General performance issues. I feel thats its still slow. When I click anything it opens slow, very slow. The Card Deck application took about 50 seconds to open.
I have the feeling that Windows 7, as Vista, depends to much on Aero for the frontend that not being able to run Aero breaks the whole system. Also Windows 7 still starts a lot of services after it has already shown the desktop which causes it to be less responsive in the first minutes. After this is done the system response improves a lot. It’s not as fast as Windows XP , but it’s much better then Vista.
Memory usage after startup is 300Mb, that’s impressive!
Ubuntu is faster. That’s no surprise.
After playing with the monitor settings I managed to kill the resolution of the monitor, it now displays 800×600. So if you want to play with Windows 7: don’t fool around with the screen resolution!
I’m a Gnome addict, I never liked the Windows and KDE interface approach. The new taskbar which an act like a dock is pretty nice. It takes a lot of screen space though, which is a general problem with the Windows 7 visual design. The icon tray is still there, include the bizarre ‘hide icon when not active’ function.
Explorer (the file manager, not the browser) is very much the same as in Vista. The only difference I could find was that the ‘open folder’ triangles fade out when the pane is inactive. What’s strange is that the Folder Settings dialog is still the same as in windows XP, that dialog is 10 years old…
If I look at the default installation only, so no personalisation then Windows 7 is doing quite good. The Ubuntu default config with the awful orange/brown colors and the Gnome default layout is horrible. Windows 7 looks more clean and the start menu is fast and easy to use.
While configuring Windows 7 more to my liking I was reminded of why I prefer Ubuntu: Windows can’t be configured. You can can choose a predefined setup that matches your needs best, but you can’t tweak it completely. Windows is and stays what it is.
When you play around with Ubuntu it enables you to make it exactly as you want it. This takes time and effort, so not everybody will do that. If you stay with the default config I’d say Windows 7 is actually better then Ubuntu, but if you’re ready to think and do some tweaking Ubuntu is so much better than Windows 7.
On the ease of use I would say Ubuntu and Windows 7 are equal. Ubuntu is more configurable, but most people won’t use that, Windows is familiar and that’s working ok. On the visual level I like Ubuntu better (especially with the Shiki Colors scheme!), but that’s mainly taste. Windows 7 looks good, so I’d call this a draw.
There is a huge difference in the approach that Windows 7 and Ubuntu take the pre installed features here. Windows 7 is an operating system, with everything that an OS needs: kernel, GUI, utilities, even some end user applications like Notepad and Paint.It’s not a fully operation system after installation; you need to install your productivity tools yourself: mail, word processor, spreadsheet, etc. This makes sense: not everybody wants to use what your supplier offers you.
Ubuntu installs a lot more end user applications, it actually comes fully loaded. After installation you can start working. This is easier, but it also forces you to use the preinstalled tools or to deinstall them and install your own preferences.
When it comes to the preinstalled features Ubuntu is a clear winner. Windows delivers near to nothing when it comes to end user applications.
What Windows does deliver a complete stack of OS features. In that section it is a good competitor of Ubuntu. Please mind that I’m looking at this from the standpoint of the end user, and not a system administrator. Windows 7 even includes a decent command line tool, which supports some more Unix oriented commands like ‘ls’ and ‘cat’. A peculiar decision of Microsoft.
Windows 7 has a complete and understandable set of tools to manage the system. Ubuntu tends to get a bit hard to understand for newbies at some points, although this is improving fast.
Windows 7 has sufficient features to call it a good OS, but Ubuntu delivers a much more complete set of features. Ubuntu is the winner here.
Conclusion
Windows 7 is far better then Vista. It’s faster, looks a little better and takes yet another small step towards the future. But. I’ve downloaded 2.44Gb to be able to install a system that contains only an OS. Nothing more, just a kernel, a GUI and some utilities. It takes 7Gb on your harddisk after installation and it can’t run 3D graphics in a slower machine.
I have mixed feelings here. On the one side Windows 7 is really going somewhere, it’s good. But on the other side Ubuntu is so much better when you tweak it a bit. When Canonical would invest some more time in delivering a more tasty off the shelf install then it would easily defeat windows. But they don’t.
There is no winner in this competition. Windows 7 will be the next most used OS, there is no question about that. Ubuntu is trying to compete, but it will never be able to. In the end Ubuntu is a better OS, which a better GUI, but it should show that much better then it does now.
Windows 7 Beta on USB?!
In addition to burning the ISO image of Windows 7 Beta on a DVD and installing the operating system from the media. Build 7000 can also be deployed via a USB stick. The Windows 7 Beta bootable USB created, the rest of the installation process is similar to the experience offered via DVD. However, the difference is that Windows 7 Beta can now easily be installed even on machines without a DVD drive. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows 7 Beta are available for download via this link provided below and you will have to burn the bits on a DVD in order to get started.
Of course, the critical step in installing Win 7 Beta from a thumb drive is actually building the bootable USB stick. A key detail is to use Windows Vista or even Windows 7 Beta in the process, and not earlier releases of Windows. Users will need to open up Command Prompt, just enter cmd into the search box under the Start Menu, then right click the highlighted result and choose “Run as administrator.”
In order to build the bootable USB, users will need to turn to the Diskpart tool. Simply run the “Diskpart” command, followed by “List Disk.” Next, the USB stick has to be selected. To do so, run “Select Disk X” (while making sure to replace X with the number associated with the USB drive). Wipe all data from the stick with the “clean” command, and then set up a partition via: create partition primary, making it “active” and format the USB with “format fs=fat32 quick” finishing up by assigning it a drive letter with the “assign” command. After all these steps are complete, you will have to copy Windows 7 Beta Build 7000 from the DVD you burned with the downloaded bits to the USB. The bootable USB will be ready to install Windows 7 Beta.
Windows 7 Beta is available for download here.
Download Vista SP1 and XP SP3!
With the January 2009 release of security updates, Microsoft patched a total of three vulnerabilities in its Windows client and server operating systems. Last week, the Redmond company made available for download a single security bulletin designed to patch the vulnerabilities, and subsequently issued the January 2009 ISO. According to the software giant, the DVD5 ISO image file with the security patches for Windows are available for Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP (including SP3), Windows Vista RTM/SP1, and Windows Server 2008.
In addition to MS09-001 (for the vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol), the January 2009 Security Release ISO Image also includes MS08-078 and MS08-076 released the past year, patching vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Windows Media Components. Microsoft explained that Windows 7 Beta Build 7000 was also impacted by the same vulnerabilities affecting Windows Vista SP1 and patched by MS09-001, but since the issues were rated only Moderate and the company's policy was to resolve only Critical flaws in its Beta software, Win 7 would get patched with the Release Candidate Build, and not via a standalone update.
January 2009 Security Release ISO Image is available for download here.
