There are many articles floating around on the internet covering this subject and I would like to stay at the basics this time. A way to secure Windows XP with little effort. You can't make a system 100% secure, there will always be ways to beat every protection. I collected a list of things that should be done to secure the system, it is not a huge list but it covers all the necessary steps I think.
We were taking a look at possible hardware incompatibilities of Windows Vista yesterday and will do the same today for software. Do you think that all the software that is currently installed on your Windows XP system will run on Vista ? Think again. Did you for instance know that the latest Nero Burning Rom or the firewall Outpost are not working in Vista currently ?
Vista here, Vista there - I know that I'm writing many articles about the upcoming operating system but there is already that much to write. You may have heard that Vista has some "enhancements" that could make the switch from another operating system to Vista a living hell. Did you know for instance that many old devices and even brand new software will not work in Vista ?
Ever encountered a problem on your computer that made it impossible to access a partition or complete hard drive ? Or something that erased your Master Boot Record which meant that you were not able to boot your operating system as usual ? Something like this could happen if you try to install a new operating system to dual boot both systems for example. If you do not know what caused this and do not know tools that can fix this your only option is to install the operating system again.
Using Windows XP without those nifty little freeware programs is not a good idea. When you run it out of the box it is slow, offers many features no one needs, lacks many that everyone needs and raises privacy concerns that can only be fixed using third party tools. This is basically a listing of programs that I install everytime I setup Windows XP on a computer, the must have freeware utilities in my opinion.
Many hardware companies sell their systems with a windows xp recovery cd which makes it most of the time impossible to install that operating system on a different system. This forces the user to either buy a new XP system or at least a standalone XP Cd, that is, unless you do what I'm going to explain here. The following steps create a bootable standalone installation system for your operating system that is not connected to the computer you purchased it with.
Ghacks got slashdotted yesterday and I had to enable caching to make the site run fluent as usual. I'am sorry if you experienced troubles connecting to my website, those should be solved by now. When I was installing Windows XP on my new computer that had only SATA drives I had to use a floppy disk to load the SATA drivers because Windows did not have them onboard at that time. I had to buy a floppy drive, floppy disks and create a bootdisk and load the drivers from that disk during setup.
Apple Quicktime and Realmedias Realplayer are typical heavyweight programs that install themselves in ways that could influence the speed of your system. Both add parts of their suit to be run at system startup and load slowly nevertheless. It is also great if you distrust big companies and are looking for freeware alternatives to those big media suits.
I think you can´t have enough file recovery utilities once you lost data on your computer either by accidentaly deleting the files or by crashes or hardware failures. It is better to have one additional try at recovering the data than to give up if the first program that you´ve been using failed to recover the files. It is even better to already have those programs installed or ready at hand to use them immediately after you have lost the files. Chances that you are able to recover the files are highest right after the incident because no new data was written in the sectors the deleted files occupied.
It is very handy to have a linux live CD at hand when your system crashes and your operating system of choice does not boot anymore. This could mean that either the software or the hardware fails to load the operating system. You should try to diagnose the problem with a live CD before thinking of reinstalling the operating system or exchanging parts of the hardware.
Well well well. The industry tried their best to make the new competing high definition formats blue-ray and hd-dvd as secure as possible so that no one would be able to view them with insecure hardware or would be able to copy the movies. The files themselves are protected by AACS which stands for Advanced Access Content System. HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) makes sure that high definition playback is only available if the output device (television, monitor) is HDCP capable, if not the movie will be downsampled to 960x540p.
If you think that your IDE hard drives are slow you might want to check their transfer mode by going into Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager. Click on IDE ATA / ATAPI Controllers and right click the primary ide channel (and secondary ide channel if you have hard drives there too) and select properties from the menu. Select advanced setttings from the tab and check the setting under current transfer mode. If you see Pio or a low Ultra DMA mode you might want to try the following fix to increase the speed of your drive(s).
It is sometimes a good choice to disable USB drives and still use other USB hardware. This is especially true for computers and notebooks that are publically accessible from time to time. So, to disable USB Drives you simply fire up regedit and browse to the following key:
The article essential utilities at laptoplogic.com lists several freeware utilities that should be useful to everyone who owns a notebook (with an intel cpu that is, a guide for amd will follow). All tools mentioned can be desribed as system tools that either show system information, test hardware or tweak it. For example tools to test the notebooks memory (Memtest86) are included as well as dead pixel tester for the lcd screen.
Coolmon is a great little freeware application that monitors and displays various windows settings. Among the information that can be displayed are Processor usage (up to four CPU's) , Number of Processes , Number of Threads, Process using the most CPU time , Processor type , Used/Free/Total page file , Used/Free/Total RAM , Free/Total/Grand Total Disk space (up to sixteen disks, also mapped network drives) , Computer Uptime , Date & Time , Computer name , User name , All IP addresses , Network read and write speed (up to four NICs) , Total Bytes sent and received and Battery status.
I bought a Geforce 6600 graphic adapter last year from Asus and had the initial problem that the fan was to noisy. Even when I was surfing the internet or writing a text in Open Office. I was sure that this could not be correct and decided to search for a way to reduce the fan speed and thus the noise level when it was not needed.
CDs don´t last forever. They get scratches for instance and sometimes these make the CD or some sectors become unreadable. Now, what can you do if you desperately need the data on the CD ? The article Recovering Scratched CDs from hardwaresecrets.com tries to answer this question.
It´s always a good idea to backup your hard drive(s) every now and then to prevent data loss. The guys, eh Gina, over at lifehacker wrote a nice article. It only describes the procedure for windows computers, all you need is an external hard drive, a ftp server and the freeware tool Syncback.
I have a very noisy fan at the back of my pc tower. It spins to fast and therefor makes to much noises. There are various ways to reduce a fans speed and one of them is using the free software speedfan.
Now this article over at tomshardware.com comes in handy. I told you yesterday how to encrypt your hard drives with the great true crypt freeware and recommended that everything would be encrypted and the system would be booted from usb.
The people over at comcast have written a free troubleshooting guide for windows xp systems. There is of course no 100% fool proof way to fix a windows xp system, the problems that can occur are manifold and no article can ever deal with every possible error.
You´d probably heard this before. Everyone should secure his personal computer. You read stories like this in every other computer mag, your geeky friends probably tell you the same and even name some programs that you should use because they are the best and most secure. I know that you would like to have a secure computer, well a secured computer, there is nothing like 100% security if you are on a network or the internet. Keep that in mind.
Most banks in Europe offer a new service on their internet pages. When a user has to enter his login data he has the option to enter the password using a keypad that is displayed on the screen using a java applet. The user then clicks on the numbers and they appear in the password field. This is done to prevent the keylogging of the password.
The Anti-Keylogger does the same thing, only difference is, that its a tool that is started like every other windows program. After the tool is started you simply use the displayed keys to enter your passwords or other data on websites or even local programs.
Richi posted a nice introduction on how spammers actually send the millions of spam mails every day. He begins by describing two ways of sending spam mails: traditional and viral.
