I’ll bet that headline got your attention!
We all know that the purpose of computer passwords is to protect personal information that you’ve stored on your computer, and in your online accounts.
With access to your passwords, cyber-criminals (they come in all shapes, sizes and flavors - so don’t be fooled), can and will, steal your identity and without a doubt severely compromise your financial security. Stolen passwords have the potential to cause serious havoc in your life.
There are numerous ways of course that a password, or software license key, can be stolen. Popular methods employed by cyber criminals include, but are not limited to:
Hey, Hey, Hey!
AskTheAdmin here again with another free tool that I can’t live without. As TheAdmiN I have literally over 10,000 servers in production. Most of them are on the same corporate open license program and have the same serial number and need no activation. BUT there are more than a few machines that are not owned by my company and were installed, configured and shipped to us as-is.
When one of these machines crash or are about to fail there is little I can do other than call the respective company’s support staff. I hate relying on other people!
If you have been a computer user for a while, then you may have heard of FloppyOffice, which was - as you probably already guessed, a portable office software suite on a floppy drive!
Now in 2008, you probably can only find floppies in the dark recesses of closets, boxes and landfills - but FloppyOffice has been reincarnated as Tiny USB Office, which offers a wide variety of free, standalone portable software.
Tiny USB Office can be installed on any flash drive, even the 128MB ones, because it only takes up only 2.5MB of space on a drive, so you will still have plenty of space for your documents.
In my capacity as “the guy who knows something about computers”, I occasionally get a phone call from a frantic friend or acquaintance to come round and help them fix their computer. Their problems normally come about because they’d thought they’d see what would happen if they deleted the “Windows” folder or because they thought it was their lucky day when someone emailed them an attachment entitled “nakedBritneySpearsphotos.exe”. I guess you get the idea what kind of people we’re talking about.
We’ve already talked about Linux and why you should try it, but probably the hardest part of getting used to Linux is getting it in the first place. For Windows users, the simplest way is to use Wubi: it runs from Windows, installs Ubuntu to the drive of your choice, and automatically creates a setting in the Windows boot loader to add a second boot option for Ubuntu.
Last year I wrote an article on the benefits of encrypting your PC folders with Truecrypt and I also briefly touched on being able to encrypt your USB stick with Truecrypt. Well, the other day I received a nice new 2GB USB stick as a freebie and so I decided to install John Haller’s Portable Apps on it. But first I headed on over to the Truecrypt website to install the newly updated 6.0 encryption program.
We all love our USB drives, don’t we? You should probably be using some portable apps on your USB drive – if not, check out our huge list of portable applications for your USB drive here.
In this post, I want to cover a few apps that will make managing your USB drive easier. In essence, I’ll talk about tools that can be used to make things easier if you’ve got a USB drive – not about apps that work from your drive.
So here we go - five applications to make things easier if you’re using a USB thumb drive.
The problem with having so many removable devices - back-up drives, USB sticks, CD disks, DVD disks and so on is that when you put them into your computer, you then have to go searching in Windows Explorer to see where what drive it is running on so you start it and access it. Lots of clicking around which is not very productive.
I was looking at Lifehacker the other day and they mentioned a tool called Desk Drive which is supposed to solve that problem so I decided to see what it was all about.
No matter how good a PC you have at home, there are often times that there is no other way but to use a public computer to get the work done.
When I say public computers I refer to computers at airports, cyber cafes, libraries or even a friend’s computer. Beware the computer may be spying on you!
This guide applies to those situations where you have to use anything but your own PC. So I invite you to Make Use Of these:
Tip 1: Use portable software or LiveCD wherever possible
Got a USB Pen Drive? They’re great for backups. Do you carry files across in USB drives? It might sometimes be exhausting to copy files and folders to and from your hard drive and USB Stick. There’s an easy way to sync files between your hard disk and USB Flash Drive. Here’s how:
2. Run SyncToy from the Start Menu
3. You’ll now have to create a Folder Pair
4. Choose a Left Folder (this is a folder on your PC’s hard disk) and a Right Folder (this points to your removable USB Pen Drive)
Hey MUO Readers have I got a sweet suite of free tools for you network admins and regular end users. Being in the networking world for so long I have loads of tools in my admin tool box (My USB Stick). But recently a fellow tech blogger Paul Bauer introduced me to a nifty program that has more than 175 applications and features.
Did I stutter?
There are so many applications in here that I can not even begin to list all of them here. It puts A LOT of tools at my fingertips in its < 25mb install The program is aptly named Net Tools 2008 and it was written by Mohammad Ahmadi Bidakhvidi.
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