Troubleshooting a Trojan/Virus attack on your Laptop

Yesterday night my neighbor brough his Virus infected Laptop to me & told me that he has got critical data which he needs from the Laptop & that I should help him at any cost. I thus followed the standard procedure of starting the Laptop & checking for possible signs of Virus/Trojan infections. When I found some, I instantly started looking out for solutions on the Net. Though most of the solutions seemed technically correct & acceptable to me none worked out completely as some traces of the Virus always remained somewhere & things had to be repeated again & again. Since the Laptop was not covered under warranty, I had the freedom to tweak around with it.

In handling a situation as described above the best option is to get the infected Laptop Hard disk getting cleaned externally. To do so you require the following items:

1. An external USB Hard disk casing with an associated USB cable.
2. A PC/Laptop with Net connectivity & good updated Antivirus application.
3. Some good tools to remove Spyware, Trojans & Viruses.
4. Good Hardware knowledge.

Procedure to do the troubleshooting:

1. Turn off power from the infected Laptop & look out for the Hard disk compartment.
2. Detach the Hard disk from the Laptop & connect it to the external USB casing.
3. Connect the USB casing to the PC containing updated Antivirus application. In most cases the Antivirus application would immediately detect the virus & clean it. Else run some required Security tools freely available on the Net to clean all malicious data from the USB Hard disk.
4. Once you are sure that the Hard disk has been completely cleaned, attach it once again to your Laptop.

I used this technique to clean the Noooh virus from the Laptop & things worked out perfectly. If you are the one facing a Virus infection currently, why don't you try out.

Sync your Bookmarks with Foxmarks

This post is primarily directed towards non-Firefox users & also those who haven't tried out this interesting Mozilla add-on. How often we access Net from 2 or more PC's/Laptops in our day-to-day life. The problem in using multiple machines to access the Net happens with Bookmarks. The Bookmark in one machine is local to that machine itself. Though with Google Toolbar you could make your Bookmarks portable, you still need to download & install Google Toolbar in every machine. You might not even have Administrative privileges in all machines. How about a simple Pluggin or to be specific an add-on which would make your life simpler. Just register yourself at Foxmarks & install its Firefox add-on. Its simple to configure the add-on, which requires only your Foxmarks Username & Password to keep your Bookmarks synced. So everytime you start or shutdown Firefox from any new location which has Foxmarks installed, it auto-syncs all your Bookmarks, & the Bookmarks don't appear under any special menu but under the standard Bookmarks option in the Firefox Menu Bar.

During your free time just make it a point to visit the Mozilla Add-ons site & you might end up discovering few interesting add-ons which you were always looking out for.

Change is Good

After spending almost 1 year with the Greenish template, I thought of going for a change in the Blogs' look & feel. My Blog Stats showed that most of my Visitors used screen resolutions of 1024x768, which is popular these days. So I decided to have a look & feel which I feel seems more acceptable to my readers, since it provides greater width to the posts.

Hope you people like the new revamped look & feel. Would love to hear all your comments regarding the new look.

Track your MAC

If you are into the field of Computer Networking, IP & MAC are your favourite friends. During Broadcast storms, it so happens that you need to urgently locate a device by knowing its Brand from the MAC address that you have just captured on your monitoring tools logs.

I am posting a link of for Vendor/Ethernet MAC Address Lookup and Search . This link might be of some help to you in future. Enjoy !!!