Fake virus alerts are a common yet dangerous weapon often used by cybercriminals. These alerts masquerade themselves as legitimate security warnings, tricking users into actions that end up compromising their own digital […]
Most of us are geeks. We work many hours a day nonstop using computers and notebooks and seldomly take breaks in that time. Well, unless we stand up to get another coffee. So, most of us work in an unhealthy environment.
Is it a good idea to look at online marketplaces like ebay to find a (used) notebook ? Is it a good idea to buy a used one or should one go for a new one ? Buying used ones has some advantages over new models: The price will be considerably lower, even if the used one has been purchased just a few months ago. Prices for last generations notebooks drop fast, even more if they have been used already.
A good extensive list of freeware alternatives can be found at the neowin forum. The applications are sorted in categories like Cd/DVD Burning, Encryption and Data Security and Instant Messengers. All in all more than two hundred applications in 43 categories. If you are looking for a special freeware tool make sure you take a look at the neowin forum. Worth a visit.
Some weeks ago Sony made the attempt to protect the music from some of the cd´s they distribute by adding a rootkit software which would be installed if the user wanted to play the cd on his personal computer. The technique had its flaws and was only working on windows but it still ment that a rootkit was installed on the pc and other scripts could use this rootkit for malicious purposes. After a large outcry from the web community Sony decided to pull the cd´s from the shelves and offer a tool to uninstall the rootkit. (which you would only get through a long process)
Forcevision is an image viewer and image manipulation tool that is available free for non commercial purposes. It supports 46 different image formats and is able to convert single images or multiple ones in batch mode.
When I look at my taskmanager I sometimes see filenames that I don´t know. What is that file gives you the answer to the question. It´s solely based on user submissions, just like wikipedia for instance. Just enter a filename and the following information will be displayed: Name, purpose, description and if its safe or a malicious one. Great if you are not sure why a file is running on your system.
I found an interesting section at interfacelift.com which lets you icon packages for windows and macintosh. You find more than 90 pages each with 10 icon packages for macintosh and 24 pages with 10 icon packages each for microsoft windows. Downloads are free of course and icons look great. The site opens a popup with advertisment as well, if that annoys you use a popup blocker.
A friend of mine asked me to take a look at his computer because it reacted slowly and took ages to boot. He was running windows xp home and shared the computer with his wife and his two lovely girls who unfortunatly decided to install lots of "female" orientated applications like riding games, animated screensavers and the like. After getting rid of 185 spyware entries I told him that he could speed up his pc which had only 256 Mb if he would disable some features of windows xp.
Breaking news from the electronic frontier foundation website which warns users to use a feature called Search Across Computers of the google desktop software. This feature apparently stores copies of documents, such as word, pdf or text, on googles own servers.
Muzip is a freware packer that supports formats like zip, gzip and tar. It´s only 460K in size and offers an explorer like interface. It also offers the possibility to backup files on your harddrive and even schedule them using the windows scheduler.
If you are using linux you might know the symbolic link functionality which allows you to create a (symbolic) link between two directories. A little freeware tool called junction from sysinternals adds this functionality to windows.
I´am cautious when I read another article that claims to speed up your windows operating system by simply tweaking some settings in the registry. I learned the hard way that your os sometimes becomes unstable and you will have to restore it or do a fresh install. The article "Make your windows fast as never before" is one of those articles that makes this claim.
The free ftp software Smart Ftp 2.0 has been released and is available for download at the developers website. Changes include a new graphical user interface with tabs, a new local and remote browser and support for 64 bit windows operating systems. If you are looking for a free ftp program give it a try, it might be exactly what you are looking for.
When I tried to switch for the first time from windows to linux I felt left alone. The web was not what it now uses to be, tutorials and help documents were scarce and one had to have a friend who could help or try the trial and error way to get linux installed and configured. Linux is becoming more user friendly and lots of tutorials and help sites pop up that help beginners and guide them through the basic installation and configuration process.
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´am like most of you using windows xp as my primary operating system. I always pondered if I should make a complete change to linux, make a dual boot system or stay with windows. Every decision would have advantages but also disadvantages.
I was not sure how to name the article appropriately. You can convert any image on your computer into a text image at text-image.com. The result looks great, just take a look at the sample image that I reduced in size. The normal size looks much clearer and brighter.
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.
Kenny created a new little tool that might be helpful for some of you. Its called Privacy Browse, a freeware tool that uses those free proxy sites to surf the web. Download privacy browse from ghacks.net, unrar it to a location of youre choice and run it by double-clicking on Privacy.exe.
If you want to make the switch from windows to linux you should know some common differences between the two operating systems. A techrepublic article describes ten differences that every new linux user should know before making the switch.
I know that some of you are using a firewall and therefor the home pc firewall guide site might be worth a visit. The website has more sections than I can list here so i stick with some interesting ones and leave the rest to you. To start with a good one, Installig Security Products, a guide on how to install security type software on a new windows operating system.
First of all, Merry Christmas everyone ;)
Config Inspector is a nice little freeware application for windows operating systems that could be described as an advanced task manager. Besides offering more information about loaded applications and processes it also displays vital information about memory and cpu usage, network utilization and general windows information.
This guide will provide you with the means to detect and remove spyware that is installed on your system. Before we start we should define the term spyware. There are different categories of spyware, like adware and malware, that make it difficulty for the user to distinguish between them and select the right tool for their removal.
It seems that articles that cover running linux in windows are becoming more and more popular. I wrote one a few days ago (with vmwareplayer) and would like to introduce another method of achieving this.
Like the last time linux will be embedded inside windows which has some advantages but also some disadvantages. Many people don´t like the idea of installing a second operating system, messing with their partitions and bootconfig and probably having to setup their first os again because of errors they made. A linux run in windows does not have this difficulties, its simply load and run like all other windows programs.
I sometimes have the difficulty that the space of my desktop is not sufficient to show every information I need. This happens for instance when I use SSH to work on my rootserver and use a browser to find information.
Great the next match of my favorite sports team will not be shown on free tv. Actually it will not be shown at all in my country, except for satellite of course. If you encounter situations like this one and always thought there would be no other solution than to watch boring live tickers on internet sites, then you?ve come to the right place.
I will describe three freeware programs that let you connect to channels that stream tv and especially live sports events. This includes all major european football (soccer) leagues, champions league, uefa cup, espn, wrestling, national team matches, boxing matches and much more.
A friend of mine moved to a new house and had to change his internet provider as well. The room with the computer and the one with the phone line were not close to each other and he decided to buy a wireless lan router and use it to connect to the internet.
We had to do a scan of the surroundings of course and found lots of unsecured wireless lan networks. I don´t know why people keep these unsecured, maybe its laziness, maybe they simply don´t know the risks involved. Its like leaving your doors open when you leave your house. Lots of things can happen..
Its late at night and I can´t sleep, I thought i try this complete list of all windows xp command line tools and parameters to finally fall asleep but even that is not working tonight.
If you are new to firefox and have been using internet explorer or opera before you might find some of the concepts of firefox confusing at first glance. The Firefox Tweak Guide explains most firefox options in detail and is a great asset for every new (and probably even some older) firefox users.
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.
Only a few days ago I wrote a first small article about true crypt and recommended it. Back then I bought a usb 2.0 hard drive with 300 GB capacity and encrypted its entire partition with true crypt. This was done to test the programs functionality but also to see if it would slow down my main computer (athlon 64 3000+, 1 gb ram).
To my great suprise it did not slow down the pc and I decided to expand the encryption to cover all my hard drives. Let me tell you why and how i did this and why you should also be considering this.
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.
Taskbar++ is a software that allows you to sort (move) the buttons of the Windows taskbar by Drag & Drop. It´s for the people who care about the buttons' position such as "Mailer is the leftmost!!", "Internet Explorer is next to Explorer", and so on.
I do a lot of signups for example on webmaster forums and sites that require you to be registered to view the content. Its a tedious task to enter the information that are required by hand. You often have to add more information but the username and password, name and location for instance.
Auto It is able to help you fill those fields automatically, but not only that. It uses a combination of simulated keystrokes, mouse movement and window/control manipulation in order to automate tasks. AutoIt v3 is a freeware BASIC-like scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI and general scripting.
Everton Blair over at connectedinternet.co.uk wrote a nice beginners guide on how to increase the speed of your windows xp operating system.
Everyone who has to work with different computers has enountered a problem like this. The bookmarks are different because you have no possiblity to synchronise them. It could be that you have a desktop pc and a laptop and want to use the same bookmarks wether you are using the notebook or the desktop computer.
Programs can be loaded at startup of your windows machine, this is called autostart. There are unfortunately numerous places in windows that allow programs to be added to the autostart. The tool Autoruns 8.4 from sysinternals.com lists all known autostart places and programs that use this location to autostart.
CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it's fast (normally taking less that a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware.
I still remember my first arcade video game, it was xevious, a vertical scrolling shoot em up game with great graphics and playability. I spend most of my money on that game and had some trouble with my parents because of this.
In case you have not heard about it yet, Nmap is quite simply the best network security scanner around. To top it off, it’s free and even open source. While Nmap is designed primarily for use with *NIX systems, there is an excellent Windows version as well, sadly without the graphical interface NmapFE that is available for *NIX users. WiNmap now provides Nmap with a new face for Windows users.
