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 !!!

Cross-check your Batteries before its too late

Today almost all gadgets that we use have a Wireless component, like Remote, associated with it. Since these Remotes hardly consume any power, it so happens that we require a change of Batteries after pretty long intervals. We thus install these Batteries & just forget.

I thought of writing this post when I found my TV remote malfunctioning even though I had installed a new Duracell Battery few days back. On removing the Battery cover I found that the Battery was leaking. The Battery was manufactured this year itself & had a shelf life up to 2012.

Though most big Battery brands boast of leak-proof Batteries, such an incident can just make us rethink on the assurances. As is wisely said - "Prevention is Better than Cure", why not make it a regular practice, say once in a month or 2 months, to open the Battery covers of all Remotes. Remember, since most of the Batteries have acidic chemicals, a Battery leak could result in severe damage of the device. Also if the climate is on the warmer side, the Batteries tend to give up faster.

Come on !!! wake up & open those hidden Battery compartments :)

Preventing Spamming on your Blog

After all your efforts in maintaining your Blog the last thing you would want is Bots posting Spammed comments to your informative posts. This post is actually directed towards all new Bloggers Blogging using the Blogger platform. This post might also help other Bloggers who have not enabled a quite useful setting provided by Blogger.

To prevent spamming on your Blog, just logon to Blogger. Now visit the Settings tab. Now go to the section Comments. If you scroll below you would find a section on Word Verification as shown below



Just select the Radio Button YES. This will ensure that only genuine readers can post comments on your Blog & stop all Bots from spamming.

PUSH your E-Mails for FREE!!!

Most Smartphones users today opt for a paid PUSH Mail Service from their Cell Phone operator rather than searching for something which is readily, freely available & provides excellent Service. I am referring to the Free PUSH Mail Service offered by emoze. I opted for emoze rather than the one which was offered by Vodafone in India. It only requires your advanced GPRS connectivity to be activated by your Cell Phone operator. The installation & configuration of the application is also quite simple & is explained in their Portal itself. You only need to remember that with continuous GPRS connectivity your Battery drains out a little bit faster. But in India it is safe to be connected continuously rather than initiating a connection every 5 mins to PUSH my mails, as most Cell Phone operators do a session based billing rather than billing on the total transfer that has happened throughout the month. Session based billing increases your GPRS charges & also ends up in an Itemised Bill which would run in huge number of pages.

I thus have set emoze to remain continuously connected to Net. Why don't you try out & enjoy the freedom of e-mail anytime, anywhere through emoze.

Successful e-Filing of Tax Returns

This is the second consecutive year when I have successfully filed my Tax Returns electronically. There have been some minor improvements in e-filing the returns. The ITR-2 return preparation utility is now exclusively in excel format & the PDF utility has been phased out. Last year I had faced a major problem where the PDF utility would not pickup data regarding my Advance Taxes paid which was linked to a different page in the same PDF. Also the XML file generated would pop-up a lot of errors while uploading on the e-filing portal. It was later traced by me that the web application would not accept special characters in the Address field.




This year the XML upload has been really smooth & I successfully filed my returns in the first attempt itself & the Portal also sent me an acknowledgement mail containing the ITR-V form. If all the technical terms used in this post sound like Greek & Latin to you then please refer to the e-filing portal & you could also take a clue from my previous post on ABCs of Filing E-returns of Income Tax.

Do get back to me if you have any queries & I would be Happy2Help U :)

Interesting Components to lighten up your Blog

In this post I would mention some interesting components or you can say widgets or gadgets which would make your Blog very interesting. I would not get into much details of each individual components, you need to just search on the net to find the code for the same component to implement on your Blog.

Components -

1. Google Translate - Would result in higher readership of your Blog as more & more visitors can get a translated version of your Blog.
2. Google Talk Chatback - This component would display your Google Talk status on your Blog & would enable visitor to have a live chat session with you when you are online. This components does not reveal your true Google Talk ID.
3. Feedburner RSS Feeds - On implementing this component your Blog becomes RSS enabled & people can subscribe to your Blog through RSS.
4. Feedburner / Google Analytics Site Statistics - These are hidden code & would enable you to receive the Site Statistics for your Blog. There are lot of reports that you can receive as part of Site Statistics viz. No. of Visitors, How many Visitors reached your site directly or through Search Engines & using what Keywords, Browsers accessing your Blog, Regions form where the Blog is being accessed, Operating Sytems accessing your Blog, etc.
5. StatCounter Hits - Through this you can display how many visitors have accessed your Blog.
6. Google AdSense - Using Google AdSense you can monetize your Blog using AdSense for Content, AdSense for Search & AdSense for Mobile Content, by displaying relevant Ads on your Blog.

This are just a few among a whole list of interesting Blog components. If you find other interesting ones do post your comment on this post.

Fine Tuning your Google AdSense Palette with your Blogger Template

If you are new to Google AdSense & use Blogger as your Blogging client, this post would turn out to be a handy tip to fine tune your Google AdSense Palette with your Blog template.

Google AdSense provides you with an easy wizard to create your Ad unit of varied sizes using various readily available Colour Palettes. It sometimes so happens that none of the Colour Palettes exactly matches your selected Blogger Template. The palette items which actually need to be customized in the Ad unit are -

1. Border
   
2. Title
3. Background
4. Text
5. URL

Among all the above 5 mentioned palette items Background & Text colours are the ones which determine how well the colours in your Ad unit mixes with your Blogs template. To do a perfect mixing following is the procedure -

1. Logon to Blogger using your authentication credentials & go to the section of Layout.
2. Now click on Edit HTML & search or mainBgColor from the top.
3. The first search result will take you to the section where all variables like Background colour, Text colour, etc. for the selected Blog template are defined.
4. Against each variable definition you would find a HEX code like #446666 which actually defines the colour.
5. Logon to Google AdSense.
   
6. A little bit of HTML knowledge would help you in identifying these HEX values & the same values need to be copied & pasted in Google AdSense under the section AdSense Setup -> Manage Ads -> Edit Settings (under Actions for specific Ad units).

Try out yourself & beautify your Blogs.

Go Green !!!

After spending the last 6-7 years in various companies, right from big to small, I continue to find the same problem of paper & energy wastage everywhere. Hard copy printouts still remain an uncontrolled wastage medium in almost all corporates today & there are hardly few companies who have enforced strict guidelines to tackle this menace. This menace can only be tackled by public awareness & one of the best methods to spread public awareness among everyone of us is through e-mail, the fastest communication medium. So how about appending a small, meaningful message to your signatures in your e-mail. Here goes the message -

Please consider the environment before printing this email.

Kindly append the above message to all your e-mail signatures. Make a pledge today to save paper & energy & also ensure that we don't pollute our environment & keep it healthy, friendly & safe for our next generation.

Easy Tips to keep your data Healthy, Safe & Secure

If the data stored on your PC is so very precious then why not keep it healthy, safe & secure. In this post I would give you some easy tips to protect your data. Though this post is primarily directed towards Windows XP users, other Operating System (OS) users who are beginners can make a note of it & find corresponding mappings for their OS's too.

1. Always plugin your PC to a stable power source rather than raw power. It is always recommended to use an UPS to protect you PC from improper shutdowns.
2. It is said that Windows XP performs best with 4 partitions on your Hard Drive. This is actually based on mathematical calculations which I have learnt earlier when I was trained in a Voice Based Technical Support process, in a Call Centre long time back. Currently due to space limitations I would not be in a position to share the same calculations.
3. Keep your PC with a dual boot option so that you are able to boot to the secondary OS when your primary OS Windows XP fails to load due to some corruption issues.
4. It would be prudent not to install Windows XP on first partition, say the C drive & rather install the secondary OS on the C drive.
5. Also ensure that your critical data, say your Documents, Projects, Music, etc are not located on the same partition where your Windows XP is loaded. This is because sometimes we need to hard boot a PC when Windows XP gets hung up & file corruptions generally happen in the same partition on which the OS is installed. Thats why you would notice a Hard drive scan happening on the OS partition after an improper partition, further resulting in corrupt, truncated & finally junk files.
6. Have a good Anti-virus, Anti-Spyware & Personal Firewall application running in your PC & also update its Virus/Rules definitions on a regular basis to ensure that your critical data is Virus-free.
7. Don't run your PC greater than 10 mins or so after a Power failure. On an average an UPS gives a backup of 15-20 mins or so depending on how much it is loaded. An LCD monitor would result in greater backup time after Power failure.
8. Use a free tool like Microsoft's SyncToy to sync your critical data with a Portable USB disk large enough to backup the same data. I would always suggest to use an external Hard drive or a large Thumb drive rather than burning the data onto an Optical disk, which would anyways not provide you an option to have perfect sync.
9. Last but not the least do Defragment your PC's Hard drive as well as External Hard drive once in a month & also run a Scandisk to keep the Hard drives healthy & safe.

Always remember... Prevention is better than cure.

Mobile Marketing Gimmicks

Most of us get caught up in marketing gimmicks of Mobile companies, like "All STD and local calls at Re 1". Most of these schemes never come free & have an associated monthly rental. We have a general tendency of subscribing to these lucrative offers without first judging whether this scheme would truely end in greater savings.

Take the above scheme of Vodafone India where you get all STD & local calls at Re. 1 with a monthly rental of Rs.31. If you are computer literate, just open excel & create a new worksheet containing three columns - Monthly Usage (in mins), Charges (without offer) & Charges (with offer). Now start numbering from 1 upto say 120 in the Usage column. Since Vodafone offers STD at Rs.1.30 without any rentals, you can use the formula Usage x 1.30 for the second column on Charges (without offers). In the third column use the formula Usage + 31. Now apply the formula upto the 120th row. You will soon realise that you end up making profit (break-even) using this scheme only if you speak a minimum of 100 mins on STD calls. Do you truely spend greater than 100 mins on STD calls - may be yes, may be not.

What I am trying to say is that, before opting for any of these lucrative offers just tabulate things, as suggested in the previous para, based on your average monthly usage & then take a call on subscribing for these offers.