There are a lot of things you can do to protect yourself. You can educate yourself on new potential threats, read on how to keep your computer secure, and what security software doesn’t protect, and obtain the best tools for the job, whether they are anti-virus programs or extensions.

Here, I’ll be taking a look at ClamWin, an open-source anti-virus program that’s been around for a while. Should you get it? Read on to find out.

Getting ClamWin

ClamWin is an anti-virus program based on the only open-source anti-virus solution in the market, Clam AV, which is a toolkit initially designed for UNIX.

As you can probably tell by the name, ClamWin is available as a download for Windows machines only. You can download the installer here, which is almost 40MB, or you can also try the portable app for anti-virus protection on the go.

If you’re wondering about which version to go with, I’m using the portable version 0.97.3 for this review. This latest release has improved bytecode signature matching, in addition to the reigning features that characterize this anti-virus – virus scanner, scanning scheduler, automatic virus database updates, and integration with Windows Explorer and Microsoft Outlook.

If you’re using the installer, be aware that the Ask toolbar might be offered during the installation. Make sure you read what the checkboxes are offering before you click Next. I didn’t see any such thing during the portable application “installation”.

Launching ClamWin

When you first launch ClamWin, you’ll likely need to download the built-in database of viruses.

Doing so will just take a few seconds if you’re connected to the Internet.

Once ClamWin has finished updating its Database, you can see the main window where you’ll have the options to set your preferences, update your virus definition database once again, scan programs currently running in memory and finally, scan specific files or directories.

Running Memory Scan

Selecting this option allows you to scan the programs that are currently running in memory. If you’re as paranoid as this author, t’s probably a good idea to update your virus definition database before running your scans.

Unless you’re running Photoshop, Mozilla Firefox, and many other resource hogs, this scan should be completed in a couple of minutes. Mine took just over 3 minutes and scanned 28 processes in memory.

Running File Or Directory Scan

In the main window, there will be a directory browser where you can select a whole drive (e.g. your C drive), specific folder or even a file to scan.

Depending on what you chose, this scan can obviously last a while. When I was running a scan for my D drive, ClamWin was also working really hard, using almost 109 MB of RAM. Not that it’s a bad sign, but it’s probably a good idea not to multi-task on your PC while you let a scan run through an entire disk drive. After a scan is finished, you can see the report right after, save it or access it in the main window menu.

If a virus is detected during the scan, there are three options you can choose from in the Preferences: Quarantine it, report it, or remove it.

If you’re particular about your scans, you can also filter files to be included or excluded from the scan in the Preferences. You can also limit a file size to scan or not, and also whether to extract files from zipped files in the Preferences window.

If you installed ClamWin instead of using the portable version, you’ll be able to schedule scans right in the Preferences window, increasing security for your PC.

If you’re using the portable version and wish to schedule scans, you could always use Windows Task Schedulerand clamscan.exe which should be under ClamWinPortable/App/clamwin/bin.

ClamWin shines for being an open-source anti-virus program with file and directory scanners, scanner scheduler, automatic downloads of virus databases and more. It does lack a real-time scanner, which could be a big con, but for basic protection and its price, it’s a great product to have on your PC security arsenal.

Have you used Clam AV or ClamWin? Share your experience in the comments section below!

To support my arguments and recommendations made at the end of this article, I have to provide some background information. So let’s start with the basics…

How Does A Laptop Battery Work?

The type of battery found in laptops today is called Lithium-Ion (Li-Ion). In this type of battery, lithium ions are loosely embedded (intercalated) in the porous carbon of the anode (negative electrode). When the battery is used, the ions flow from the anode to the cathode (positive electrode) through the electrolyte and the separator. This process releases energy and results in a discharge of the battery. When charging, energy is applied to make the ions move in the opposite direction. A charge thus forces them to return to the anode.

How Do Lithium-Ion Batteries Age?

Theoretically, this process can go back and forth forever. Practically, however, the lifetime of a battery is limited. What happens is that ions get trapped and are no longer available to flow from the anode to the cathode. In other words, the battery loses capacity over time. In fact, Li-Ion batteries start aging the moment they are produced.

What Causes Lithium-Ion Batteries to Age?

Several things:

1. High voltage and Overcharge
   Laptops typically have a charge threshold, which prevents overcharging and high voltage. However, constantly keeping the battery at a full charge also is a stress factor that contributes to aging.
2. Heat
   Room temperature (21°C / 70°F) or higher temperatures promote chemical reactions, ultimately causing Li-Ion batteries to lose capacity.
3. Low Temperatures
   Temperatures below 0°C (32°F) can damage materials inside the battery.
4. Prolonged Storage
   Li-Ion batteries self-discharge at a rate of approximately 8% per month at 21°C (70°F). This increases with higher temperatures. When stored over long periods of time, the battery can reach a state of deep discharge (charge below 20%).
5. Physical Shocks
   Batteries can break.

To Remove or Not To Remove

As indicated in the introduction, the answer is: yes, remove the battery to extend its lifetime!

When you continuously run your laptop on a reliable AC power source, you should definitely remove your battery. Firstly, the battery will not be exposed to heat from your laptop. Secondly, there is not even a remote chance that it will be overcharged or exposed to high voltage. Hence, removing the battery eliminates the two main causes for battery aging.

When I say remove, I don’t mean that you should simply take out the battery. Please turn off your laptop, remove the battery, and then boot your laptop. For safety reasons, please do not remove the battery while your laptop is running.

What Should I Do To Increase My Battery Lifetime?

You can do multiple things. I wrote an entire article on this topic (link above). Below you will find a summary.

Proper treatment of a Li-Ion battery:

• never discharge battery below 20%
• always partially discharge, then recharge
• cycle* battery every few weeks or after 30 partial dis/charges
• charge at lower voltage (if possible)
• never leave charged battery in laptop when running on AC power

* Cycle means that you discharge the battery to around 20% and then recharge it fully. Going below 20% equals a deep discharge, something you will want to avoid.

Preparing a Li-ion battery for storage:

• charge battery to 40-50%
• remove from laptop
• put into an air-tight zip-lock bag
• store in fridge at 4-8°C
• re-charge to 40-50% every few weeks

When storing your battery, take note how fast it self-discharges and make sure it never goes below 20%.

For times when you have to run your laptop on battery, you should have a look at this article: 20 Ways To Increase Laptop’s Battery Life

What are your experiences with laptop batteries? Do you go through all the hoops to extend the lifetime of your battery?

Image Credits:MedusArt, Pavel Ignatov, D.R.3D, Andresr

Hunting for device drivers isn’t such a task anymore, anyway. Most of your Windows drivers will never need to be touched right out of the box. Your video card is in its own sacred territory though. Video card drivers are updated more frequently than, for example, your network card’s drivers. Updating your video card drivers can show a huge performance boost across your system, as well. Keeping these drivers up to date is quite essential if you’re a gamer.

If you’re buying a new Windows PC today, your graphics card will manufactured by one of two companies: NVIDIA or AMD. Having such a limited choice really lends toward making updating the drivers a very painless experience. So painless that both websites happen to have automated resources that will (probably) allow you to make updating your video card drivers as simple as a few clicks.

Finding Your Video Card Card Model

Step one is actually figuring out what we’re looking for. Let’s start by going to your Control Panel and then to Device Manager.

From there, you’d going to want to click on the Display adapters header to expand the tree.

From here, it should be easy to see what your video card is. As you can see, I have the ATI Radeon HD 3200, ATI being owned by AMD.

Let’s just call this next step a shortcut. Right click on the name of your video card and click Update Driver Software…. It should bring up the following.

The first option, displayed there, is what you want to click to automatically search online for driver updates. If it finds updated, awesome. Go ahead and follow through to install them. If not, you’ll get the following message.

However, in respect to that note about not trusting automated software earlier, we aren’t going to listen to Windows. Windows could be wrong. So, now that we’ve figured out what kind of video card you have, let’s proceed on our quest.

NVIDIA Cards

NVIDIAers can simply click this link: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

You’ll then see the following near the bottom.

Option 2 is what you’ll want to go for here. I’d recommend using Internet Explorer while running this automated check because it tends to handle ActiveX and browser plugins a little better than most browsers (surprisingly). It may prompt you to install an ActiveX control or bring up a software installation prompt. Go through with it. It’s safe. Afterwards, you’ll either be presented with a screen telling you that you need updated drivers or that your drivers are up to date, or that the automated check failed.

If the automated check failed, I strongly recommend you go back and wade through Option 1, manually selecting your card to update.

AMD Cards

If you’re using an AMD/ATI GPU, you want to go here: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

From there, you want to try to Automatically Detect and Install (to the right side). Again, be on Internet Explorer while you do this. Feel safe to install and run any prompts that come up during the process because browser plugins are required to know what card you’re using. If it is successful, you’ll be told your card is up to date or that it needs updated, otherwise it’ll tell you that the scan could not be completed.

In the event that the scan fails, go back and follow their five-step process to pinpoint your exact video card drivers. This is the safest way to go about the update.

One thing I’ll never recommend is that you go about using automated software like SlimDrivers or Driver Magician. Even in the best of faith, these programs don’t know your system as well as you do. In worse cases, these programs are filled with spyware and adware that can really damage your system.
I’d like to recommend that you not just Google updates for your drivers either. Get them directly from the manufacturer as I’ve laid out for you. It’s not smart to trust updates from that-one-official-driver-site.com, you know?

Good luck in refreshing the visuals of your system and if you encounter any issues, shoot me a comment here.

These might include scrolling text across various windows, and a second screen full of real-time graphs rolling from right to left, showing every last detail about the status of every computer system on the network – CPU usage, battery levels of all of the laptops, and remaining hard drive space on all systems.

Wouldn’t it be cool to have an application that would offer such a display?

We’ve covered a number of programs that provide some real-time status displays like that, like SpeedFan that Kyle and Guy covered. The most elaborate tool for viewing all of your computer information is probably Speccy, which Karl covered.

The problem with all of these is that they either offer too much or too little information. Maybe there are a few things you want to track on your network or your computer system, but you don’t want to have to dig through all of that other stuff. What if you could customize your own computer monitoring system using Windows Script, and then display the details in a really cool, real-time charting system that is open-source and absolutely free?

Developing Your Own Cool Real-Time Statistics

There are two stages to doing this. You don’t have to be a programming expert. Once you understand how to go about obtaining data from your computer (or any computer on your network) using Windows Script, you’ll be able to build this system to display whatever you like, and only what you want.

The following script will query your computer system for the current CPU load in percentages.

<script type="text/javascript" language="VBScript">// <![CDATA[
Option Explicit
On Error Resume Next
Dim oFSO, sFile1, oFile1, sFile2, oFile2, sFile3, oFile3, sText
Dim colResults, objResult, strQuery
Dim strResults
Dim x
 
Set Shell = wscript.createObject("wscript.shell")
Set oFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
sFile1 = "CPULoad.csv"
sFile2 = "DriveSpace.csv"
sFile3 = "BatteryStatus.csv"
 
'***Open New File to write CPU Load***
Set oFile1 = oFSO.CreateTextFile(sFile1, 1)
 
'Define the WMI query
strQuery = "SELECT * FROM Win32_Processor"
 
' Run the query
Set colResults = GetObject("winmgmts://./root/cimv2").ExecQuery( strQuery )
 
'Identify the CPU load
For Each objResult In colResults
 	strResults = CStr(objResult.LoadPercentage)
Next	
 
oFile1.WriteLine strResults
oFile1.Close
 
Set oFile1 = Nothing
set colResults = Nothing
strResults = ""

The key lines here are the select statement that looks at “Win32_Processor”, and the “objResult.LoadPercentage” line, which extracts the CPU load percentage from the system results. Finally, as you can see toward the bottom of the code, the data that’s extracted gets written to a csv file.

After creating the file and writing one line, the next step is to create a loop that continues polling the computer system and updating the csv data file with updated data. Here’s what that loop looks like:

'***Write New CPU Load every 5 seconds***

For x = 1 to 50
 
	WScript.Sleep 5000
 
	'***Update CPU Load File***
	Set oFile1 = oFSO.OpenTextFile(sFile1,8,1)
 
	'Define the WMI query
	strQuery = "SELECT * FROM Win32_Processor"
 
	' Run the query
	Set colResults = GetObject("winmgmts://./root/cimv2").ExecQuery( strQuery )
 
	'Identify the CPU load
	For Each objResult In colResults
	 	strResults = CStr(objResult.LoadPercentage)
	Next	
 
	oFile1.WriteLine strResults
	oFile1.Close
	Set oFile1 = Nothing
	set colResults = Nothing
	strResults = ""
Next

This will loop 50 times, waiting 5 seconds between each system query and updating the data file. You could use a while loop to make it an infinite loop if you want and just have it constantly running in the background, but for this example I’m using a limited loop that runs for just over 4 minutes. Here’s what the output file looks like after the script has run for a while.

This is a cool system to query system information for data and then output that info to a constantly-updated text file. This gives you real-time information about anything the Windows WMIC system has available. Just to give you a glimpse of what sort of information is available, take a look at the Microsoft Technet page on WMIC – it’s pretty impressive.

But the real coolness-factor comes from using LiveGraph – an open-source plotting tool that will read in the real-time data you’re writing to the CSV files, and display those in an updated graph display.

When you install and run LiveGraph, you just tell it what CSV file to query, and move the slider over to the left to have the program check the data file every 10 seconds or so.

Here is what LiveGraph looks like after the windows script above has been running for a couple of minutes. LiveGraph updates automatically and as more data gets added to the file, the chart scrolls across the screen with the latest CPU load.

Once you’ve gotten this far, you can fill a whole screen up with cool real-time graphs of whatever information you’d like, by adding additional sections to your windows script that query other information about your computer or any computer on your network. For example, I added the following section to query the system for the current battery level of my laptop.

'***Open New File to write Battery Level***
Set oFile3 = oFSO.CreateTextFile(sFile3, 1)
 
'Define the WMI query
strQuery = "SELECT * FROM Win32_Battery"
 
' Run the query
Set colResults = GetObject("winmgmts://./root/cimv2").ExecQuery( strQuery )
 
'Identify the Battery Level
For Each objResult In colResults
 	strResults = CStr(objResult.EstimatedChargeRemaining)
Next	
 
oFile3.WriteLine strResults
oFile3.Close
 
Set oFile3 = Nothing
set colResults = Nothing
strResults = ""

After adding another section to monitor the realtime level of my hard drive, I finally had three data files accumulating realtime data about my systems.

The beauty here is that you can customize the system with whatever you like – it doesn’t have to be computer information, you can poll network status, ping computers on your network, query HTML files and extract information that you can display in a real-time graph on your screen.

I love the display, and now kick off the windows script on my PC startup, and just make it run in an infinite loop. For now it’s providing system info about all of the PCs on my network, but plan to play around with extracting real-time info about my overall network bandwidth use and information polled off the net. With VB Script and imagination, the sky’s the limit.

Give the script and LiveGraph a try, and play around with adding your own information and data to the system. What kind of cool graph displays did you come up with? Share your experiences and thoughts in the comments section below.

There is the standard way of managing services which most people use because it’s well-known and fairly easy. This involves going into Administrative controls or going into the control panel, hunting down the Services utility and doing what you need to do.

If you want to manage the services that are running on a different computer or server on your network, you need to go to computer management, connect to the remote machine, and then manage those services.

There’s nothing at all wrong with taking this approach – in fact system administrators everywhere use these standard Windows utilities to manage the infrastructure across the enterprise. But, what if you could monitor, stop and start services by typing in a single line at the command prompt?

Controlling Services From the Command Line

You may need to stop services running in a client computer so that you can reinstall some software. Or maybe you need to restart services that are running on a server because some software isn’t working properly.

Up until now, you’ve probably managed services on client machines running on your network using the standard services utility. This is the Services tool that you launch in the Administrative Tools section of the control panel.

In Admin Tools, you can either go directly to the Services tool, or open up computer management if you want to access a different computer on your network.

To access a different computer, just click action, “Connect to Another Computer” and then type the network name of the computer.

Then you can open up the services tool.

An Easier Way To Manage Services

So anyway, that’s the long way. The shorter and faster way is to use the command “SC”.

You’re probably familiar with the NET command. The SC command is nearly identical to NET, except that it can also create a service, in addition to monitoring, stopping and starting them. Best of all, you can issue the SC command against other computers over the network (assuming you have admin rights).

Doing an SC query against a computer will give you all of the installed services and whether they are running. When you issue the command “SC \\**computer-name** query |more” – you’ll get an output as shown here.

As you can see, this gives you the state of the service, the type of service and other parameters. For the sake of our exercises here, we’re going to pay attention to just the state of the services.

If you want to list only the services that are currently not running (stopped), then you would issue the command, “SC \\**computer-name** query state= “inactive” |more”

The |more part of the command makes the output pause on each screen so that you can scroll.

As you can see, those services are all stopped. Now, instead of having to dig through all of those services, if you know the name of the service, you can just issue the command “SC \\**computer-name** query **service-name**”

That will report back with the current status of just that service and nothing else. To remotely stop a service, all you have to do is issue the stop command, “SC \\**computer-name** stop **service-name**”

The output will show a state of “STOP-PENDING”, but after a few moments, if you query that service again, you’ll see that it is no longer running. You can start it by issuing the same command, but replacing “stop” with “start”.

Creating A Script To Query, Stop Or Start Any Service

Okay, so now that you’ve got the basics down, it’s time to write a script that will stop any service that you want without the need to remember the exact command string. We can do this by writing a trusty Windows Script, as follows.

<script type="text/javascript" language="VBScript">// <![CDATA[
   Option Explicit On Error Resume Next Dim WshShell Dim strInput Dim strComputer Dim x Dim blnGetList Dim strStopStart set WshShell=CreateObject("WScript.Shell") x=0 strComputer = InputBox("Enter the computer or server name:") Do while x=0    'Query User for Service to check    strInput = InputBox("Enter the service name or DONE:")    If strInput = "DONE" or strInput = "done" then 	x=1    Else 	strStopStart = MsgBox("Stop Service? Yes-Stop, No-Start", VBYesNo, "Stop Request")        'Send commands 	IF strStopStart = vbYes then       	    WshShell.run "cmd.exe"             WScript.Sleep 1000             WshShell.SendKeys "sc \\" &#038; strComputer &#038; " stop " &#038; strInput &#038; " >> c:\temp\results.txt"
            WshShell.SendKeys ("{Enter}")
            WScript.Sleep 1000
            WshShell.SendKeys "exit"
            WshShell.SendKeys ("{Enter}")
 
         Else
 
      	    WshShell.run "cmd.exe"
            WScript.Sleep 1000
 
            WshShell.SendKeys "sc \\" &#038; strComputer &#038; " start " &#038; strInput &#038; " >> c:\temp\results.txt"
            WshShell.SendKeys ("{Enter}")
            WScript.Sleep 1000
            WshShell.SendKeys "exit"
            WshShell.SendKeys ("{Enter}")
	 End If 
 
  End If
 
Loop
 
WScript.Quit
// ]]></script>

When you run this script, it’ll ask you for the name of the service that you want to stop or start.

And then whether you want to stop or start the service.

Using the “>> c:\temp\results.txt” command, it outputs the stop and start results and errors to a text file that you can use to see whether the command worked.

When I ran the script above, I followed it up with a quick query of the service before and after running the script.

As you can see, the service I stopped – helpsvc – was running. I ran the Windows Script to stop it, queried it, and it was stopped.

If you wanted to get really fancy, you could add a section to the script that outputted all of the currently installed services on the PC to a text file that you could review before deciding which service to stop or start. The command for that would be “sc \\” & strComputer & ” query > c:\temp\services.txt”.

As you can see, the SC command can be a pretty powerful and efficient way to manage services on any computer, and if you have some talent with Windows Scripting, you can even automate the process to make your job even easier.

Do you think the SC command could come in handy for you? What about an automated script that runs the command? Share your ideas and thoughts in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

There have been a few cool apps listed at MUO to help organize files, such as Nancy’s review of NiftyBox and SmartShuno, and Jeffry’s list of simple tips – all for organizing files on a Mac. I wanted to find a similar app that can help on a Windows PC. While you can do this by just opening up Windows Explorer and sorting out the files one at a time, there is an application called Stuff Organizer that can really help speed up the process of…well….organizing your stuff.

How Stuff Organizer Can Streamline Your Disk Cleanup

The way it does this is by helping you to organize files not based on where they are stored, but on what they are. It’s sort of like creating a file folder and labeling the folders “Applications”, “Games”, “Pictures”, “Videos” and so on.

In other words, it doesn’t really matter where the files are stored, Stuff Organizer creates a database that connects each file with the file’s location as well as any other information that you want to connect with that file to better organize it.

Within each category of file type, you can create sub-categories to even better sort out those files. In my case I want to separate photos that I want to use with my articles from the family photos that I’ve taken on our last family vacation. Right now, all of the pictures are stored throughout the “My Pictures” folder.

To get started, create your new category and then click on “Add stuff” to either add a directory or files.

Browse to the files that you want to add. With files, you can choose multiples. Keep in mind that if you click the “Unpack” box, any ZIP or RAR files that you include will automatically unpack. Stuff Organizer comes with the Unpack extension installed by default.

The software can be used in two ways – or both ways, depending on what you want to do. Whenever you select a file or group of files, you can either leave the target path blank, or you can include a target path. If you include a target path, it is sort of like using Stuff Organizer to move files out of one folder and then re-sort them into a new folder. This is probably what most people will want to do – use Stuff Organizer simply as a tool to go through their hard drive and sort out the mess of files in a way that makes more sense.

However, if you leave the target path blank, the software will simply mark that file under the category you’ve created, but its path will remain unchanged. If you do this, you aren’t physically organizing the files, you’re simply creating a sort of virtual database where the file locations are stored. Stuff Organizer becomes your one-stop “index” where you go to find files.

The reason for doing this may be that you are a programmer and you have applications that use log files or initialization files, and the path can’t change. If you struggle to find those log files, then Stuff Organizer can help – because all you have to do is open up the “Applications” folder to find the log file. With Stuff Organizer, you don’t have to remember where things like that are stored – the software remembers for you.

If you do leave “Unpack” selected when adding files, the processing window that pops up will take a little longer to go away – but you can see the progress as each file gets unzipped and sorted into the target directory.

In my case, this really came in handy, because there were a number of small apps that I kept losing because I couldn’t remember where they were stored. By adding them under the “Applications” category folder, they’re a single click away from now on.

For each file, you can also include search tags and a description. If you use the search tags well, as your Stuff Organizer database grows, you can simply do a fast search using the search field, and find your file in seconds.

The software comes with the functionality to unpack an assortment of archive files, including iso, tar, rar, zip and more.

It also comes with a bunch of already installed plugins, like the IMDb plugin that will automatically retrieve movie information for video files, and a PlayMusic plugin that will create a playlist file for all of your music and play them from within the program.

When your well-organized file cabinet gets extra huge, you’ll also want to make use of the database backup utility that’s available under the “Settings” dropdown menu. This will ensure that all the hard work you put into organizing everything never gets lost.

Just like in real life, organizing a huge mess is never easy, and it’s never something that you really want to start getting to work on either. At least with a program like Stuff Organizer, you will have a tool that will streamline the organization process and make it a whole lot easier.

So give Stuff Organizer a try and see just how simple and fast it is to get your digital house back in order. Share your thoughts about the software and whether it simplified the cleanup process for you in the comments section below.

Image Credits: ShutterStock

We described a similar method before, but it required a few external utilities. This time I’ll assume you have a working Windows 7 computer with an existing DVD drive somewhere – and a working installation DVD to go with it. You’ll use this machine to format, set up, and copy over the relevant files to a USB stick. You could also do this without a DVD drive from the ISO, but in that case your job would be a whole lot simpler because you could use the official ISO -> USB creator.

Note: You cannot use this method to install to a Parallels virtual machine. Your only option in that case is to use either a physical DVD or an ISO download and connect to that to the VM instead.

You’ll need:

• A working Windows 7 system with a DVD drive and administrator rights.
• A Windows 7 installation DVD.
• 4GB USB drive or larger.

This will also work with larger external hard drives instead of a USB thumbdisk, but be aware that all the data on the drive will be formatted and deleted.

Open An Elevated Command Prompt

Click Start -> All Programs -> Accessories and right-click on Command Prompt. Select Run As Administrator. Of course, you need to be able to authenticate as the administrator on the PC you’re using.

Partitioning The Disk

Type:

DISKPART

This will open up the partitioning application. Next, type:

LIST DISK

Figure out which of the drives listed is your USB drive, and note the number. It’s crucial you get this right, or you’re going to end up losing data on other drives.

Next, type the following series of commands, but replace the DISK number in the first line with the appropriate number from the above list. Here, my disk is number 1. Don’t confuse this with PARTITION 1. That number should not change, even if your disk is 3.

SELECT DISK 1
CLEAN
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
SELECT PARTITION 1
ACTIVE
FORMAT FS=NTFS
ASSIGN
EXIT

Make It Bootable!

The format step may take a little while (it actually took about 30 minutes on my machine). When you’re done, put in your installation DVD if you haven’t already. Note down which drive letter your USB disk and Windows installation DVD are located at.

Go back to your command prompt and type – assuming D: is your DVD drive with the install DVD, and U: is your USB drive:

D:/BOOT/BOOTSECT.EXE /NT60 U:

This will basically make your USB drive bootable.

Copy Everything

The final step can be done from My Computer. Just open up the installation DVD, highlight everything, and drag it over to your USB drive.

This will also take a while.

Now you should be all set – just insert the USB disk into your new PC, and enter the BIOS to adjust the boot order, or choose the option during start up which says Choose Boot Device.

Let’s hear it for computers with no noisy and clunky DVD drives! Death to physical media! Or not – what do you think? Are you ready to go DVD-less?

Some would say this only happens to Windows/Mac/Linux/Laptop/Whatever users; some will say these things only happen to people who don’t actually know how to use computers (until it happens to them, too). Don’t get me wrong, I love computers – they play a huge part in my everyday life and I cannot do without them. But we all have our own personal computer nightmares. These are mine. What are yours?

Broken Laptop Keyboard

This is one of the most annoying things I ever had to face as a laptop user. As long as you use a desktop computer with a standalone keyboard, a broken key is a mere annoyance. But when your laptop’s keyboard breaks, it’s elevated into a true nightmare status.

The image above may be extreme, but I definitely felt the urge to do just that on the several occasions I had to deal with a broken laptop keyboard. I don’t know about your laptop, but my keyboard breaks extremely easily. I can’t take the keys out to clean or do other  maintenance without breaking at least one key. Sometimes, I come home to find one of the keys lying loose on the keyboard. Why? Just because!

Even when not broken, putting a loose key back in place is comparable to rocket science, and sometimes it pops out again again every time I brush my finger next to it while typing. Did you know that some laptop keys have a complex plastic mechanism underneath, with microscopic pins and clips that break and bend when you breath on them? And did you know that every laptop, even similar  models from the same company, use different mechanisms for keys?

Once I took the bus halfway across town to try to track down a used keyboard which I could use for spare keys. It turned out to be from a slightly different model, and therefore used a totally different mechanism. True, you can find spare keys online, and I already had to order some in the past, but does it really have to be this complex?

Adobe Flash Plug-in

This is a good one. Adobe Flash Plug-in. Do you shudder just reading the name? I do, sometimes.

Before I dive into the rant, I will say that I appreciate what Flash has done for technology, and I do believe it has some positive aspects to it, but in everyday life, Adobe Flash browser plug-in can single handedly ruin my browsing sessions, my entire day and my sanity.

The all too familiar screenshot above is the least of it. When the Flash browser plug-in crashes, I actually know where I stand. It’s when pages take ages to load, or simply get stuck, all because of some small Flash element in an ad which you are not even aware of – this is when it gets dirty.

Lately, following a friend’s advice, I blocked my browser’s Flash plug-in. When I want to use Flash, I enable it manually. You wouldn’t believe the difference this has made to my browsing experience.  If you’re having similar experiences with Flash, I urge you to try it as well. This is one nightmare we can actually fight!

Windows Not Loading

I know Mac/Linux lovers will be all over me for this one. Some Windows fans might be too. But yes, this is one of my worst computer nightmares, although it has not come true in the past few years.

Let me start by saying that I grew up in a Mac house. I did not touch a non-Mac machine until Windows 95 was out (and we all remember what a fantastic OS that was…). It came as a complete surprise to me that the thing can decide not to load whenever it wants to. I remember the frustration of watching that “loading” screen, praying for it to go on and finish the loading process, only to have to give up and try to reboot – yet again.

This is something I went through again and again, until Windows 7 came out. Since then, this computer nightmare has not come true even once. But I still hold my breath for a few seconds every time I reboot my machine. Will it actually load again, or will it hang? I wonder how long it will take me to stop being slightly scared every single time I restart my computer and have to sit there watching that pretty “loading” animation. Maybe in Windows 2020.

Bottom Line

I have to stress again that I am not a negative person. We all have small things that drive us crazy, and these are just some of mine. After all, if we don’t talk about it, how will we ever be able to treat these lightly?

Now it’s your turn. What are your worst computer nightmares? Broken hardware? Bad software? Strangers playing with your setup? Share them all in the comments!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

But when you get one of those nasty little downloads – one of those little scripts or apps that dig its way deep down into the heart of your computer – it can be unnerving.

Suddenly, your keyboard doesn’t work quite right. Your CPU starts going haywire when you aren’t even doing anything. Your mouse starts flipping out every time you open a particular browser.

If you’ve ever been bothered with such a malware or virus software, then you know what I’m talking about. Those little apps sometimes latch themselves to the inner workings of your computer when you least expect it.

While we all trust antivirus software and anti-malware programs like IOBit or MalwareBytes to identify those nasty varmints, the truth is that sometimes things slip through the cracks.

Luckily, there is a new tool you can use to manually go through and clean up those evil processes.

Close the Door on Malware

The bottom line is that any malware is typically meant to run in some form on your PC, and somehow transmit information into or out of your computer via the Internet.

A very simple utility called CloseTheDoor lets you probe into the processes that are running on your computer, and analyze those processes at a level that usually requires a professional. The reason you can do this is because CloseTheDoor makes the analysis very simple and logical, putting all of the tools you need in one place.

When you first run the program, it performs it’s basic function fast and well. You’ll see a list of every process “endpoint” that is listening on any port on your computer whatsoever. The detailed list tells you the interface IP (if there is one), the port, communication protocol, process ID, and any associated services.

While this all may not tell you exactly what the process is right away, the information is an important first step toward recognizing that something is running on your computer that you do not want running.

In particular, look for processes without any associated company or description information.

Once you spot a process that looks fishy, and you want to learn more, just click on the “Selection” menu and then click on “Locate the executable file”.

As you can see below, by tracing down the actual executable, you will often be able to identify the software that kicked off the process. For example, in this case Windows Explorer opened to the path for PaperCut NG, which was an educational software package that I was testing recently.
This discovery told me that there was a process running that I didn’t know about, consuming precious memory. Uninstalling the software removed that process, freed up the memory, and ultimately improved performance.

If you click on “File” and then the summary, you will see a general report with totals for how many endpoints are listening on each interface IP address. You don’t need to be quite as concerned with the IP addresses as you do with the total number of processes that are listening on some port on your PC

The software also gives you an entire toolbox of shortcuts and tools you can use to troubleshoot any problem processes that you simply can’t seem to recognize as valid. Sometimes, there may be a process running that isn’t malware, but you really don’t want it running all the time. That may be from a startup shortcut being added to your Startup folder without your knowledge. You can check out things like that using the System configuration utility under “Tools”.

Here you can view running services on your computer, and more importantly you can view and disable or enable all of the applications that are set up to auto-startup when you boot up your computer. This configuration utility puts all of the Windows config tools that can help you with process analysis all in one convenient window.

Another fast way to analyze an unknown process is by right clicking the service in the main display, and clicking on either “Process services” to view the services that are kicked off by this process, or you can use any of the Google or Wikipedia links in the list to research exactly what the process might be, and what that particular port is usually used for.

If you click to view the services, you’ll get a table of all running services that were kicked off by that process. You can select any of these services and stop them if you want. More importantly, some of the detailed names for those services may also offer some clues as the what the mysterious process is really all about.

To help you do some extensive research on the processes and services that you find running on your PC, CloseTheDoor offers a list of online resources under “Internet References”. Click on any of these to open up your browser and review resources like a list of port numbers and their uses at www.iana.org, a list of all Windows services at Wikimedia.org or how to configure your firewall at Microsoft.

The bottom line is that there will always bee some new malicious app out there that somehow – no matter what protections or blockades you put in place – gets onto your PC. When things start heading south with your PC activity and performance, researching your running processes is always a really good idea, and CloseTheDoor makes the process simple and painless.

Try out this utility and see if it helps you identify things running on your PC that you didn’t know about. Share your experiences with the software in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

We’ve shown you the magic of live CDs more than once; we even wrote a handy live CD manual. So it should come as no surprise that we’ve already shown you Clonezilla, a live CD for cloning the entirety of your hard drive. This tool is great for cloning drives, but does not come with a GUI and includes a lot of cryptic language.

Enter Redo Backup, a user-friendly live CD that makes cloning or restoring your entire drive simple. Tell the program where you’d like your cloned drive to be and you’re pretty much set.

Backing Up, Backing Up…

Boot up Redo and you’ll see two simple buttons:

If backing up or restoring is what you have in mind, these are the buttons to press. Once you’ve established the drive you’d like to copy, you can pick a destination:

You can save your clone to another hard drive on your computer, another computer on your network or a USB drive; it’s up to you. You can restore your backup at any time by using the CD again.

But Wait, There’s More…

Redo is primarily a backup tool, but it can do more than that. Click the gear button at the bottom-right and you’ll find a small menu. Browsing reveals these tools:

You can use the Disk Utility to check on the health of your drives. The file recovery tool can help you recover deleted files, while the partition editor lets you add, remove or change the size of our partitions. The usage analyzer is a great way to visually examine what’s taking up space on your hard drive.

All these tools combine to make Redo Backup an amazing tool for working with filesystems. The disk’s accessories help a little more:

The web browser is the coolest thing, giving you access to the Internet while your computer backs up. A file manager, image viewer, terminal and text editor round things out.

Need more software? Don’t worry; you’ve got full access to the Ubuntu repositories. Check out the “Administration” menu to find Synaptic, or use the Terminal, and install the tools you need.

Download Redo Backup

Ready to get started with Redo? Download it now. Once you have the ISO file you’ll need to burn it to disk. Linux users can simply right-click the file to find the option to burn the ISO to disk. Windows users will need Infrarecorder or a similar tool.

Conclusion

If we taught you well, you will know the importance of backing up. This tool makes backing up the entirety of your hard drive simple, and for that I’m grateful.

How do you like this tool? Feel free to leave praises or complaints in the comments below, along with any questions. I’ll be around.