I found two magazines which is Chip and PC User that is giving free TuneUp Utilities 2008 genuine license key. Now I normally stay away from older versions of software and always try my best to use the latest version. The fact is, previous version works well too and before they came up with version 2009, I am sure the software developers worked very hard to make sure that the version 2008 is one of the best in the market.

All important settings are hidden in the Windows boot files and the system registry. The registry is the central database for Windows, in which settings for all applications and hardware modules are stored. Using regedit or other similar tools, you can open this special database and change its settings. The problem is that only experienced users know how to change the right settings among the cryptic entries in the registry. Most users don’t understand a word of the information contained in an open registry file. Even if you know the registry entries inside and out, a small typo in the registry can still lead to serious consequences and even complete system failure.

That’s where TuneUp Utilities 2008 comes in. The software helps both beginners and experts to make Windows meet their needs in a way that is better, easier and safer. All important system options are explained in an easy way and can be turned on or off at the click of your mouse. TuneUp Utilities 2008 will then make the necessary changes in the registry or boot files automatically.

1. Download and install TuneUp Utilities 2008 v7.0.8007. If the download link can’t work, try this mirror.

2. When you see a window that tells you that this is a limited trial version of TuneUp Utilities, click the Enter product key button.

3. There are 2 product keys that can be used to register TuneUp Utilities 2008. Either one will work and you can enter anything for the registration name.

Product Key 1 by PC User: LLYLB-ASGHK-ANKTM-DBYKS-QXQMT-ESRYC
Product Key 2 by CHIP: RFEAH-CDXKX-UMFBW-GSCES-YFWCM-WUHWB

Make sure you run the TuneUp Update Wizard after installation to grab the latest updated files. Do take note that TuneUp Utilities 2008 supports and automatically adapts to Windows 2000, XP and Vista both 32 and 64 bit. Enjoy tweaking and optimizing your Windows computer!

Technorati Tags: tuneup, optimize, free, software, diagnose

I have to admit that I never liked troubleshooting computer problems on Windows Vista computers. Until today I still think that Vista is buggy even after installing the latest Service Pack 2. One example of a problem that I am still facing until today is the latest Nero 9 hangs my laptop running Vista when starting to burn a disc. Yesterday I had to repair a laptop random crashing problem running Vista because it belongs to my boss. Can’t say no to boss right?

It takes time and not easy to find the cause of the crash which happens intermittently because it could be a software problem, could be virus or spyware, maybe the operating system got corrupted, conflict between softwares and finally hardware problem. Since it is my boss laptop, I dare not simply install or uninstall anything. I checked Windows Task Manager and there are a total of 79 processes!

So the first step I did was to disable all third party software and services from Windows startup and let my boss continue using it for a few days. It is possible to do that from Windows itself using the built-in System Configuration Utility (msconfig). Let me show you how.

Go to Start > Run and type msconfig. Alternatively, if you’re not using the Classic start menu, simply click the Windows Orb button and at the Start Search box, type msconfig.

Go to Startup tab and click Disable All button.

Now go to Services tab, check “Hide All Microsoft Services” and click Disable All button.

Click OK and restart your computer.

When Windows has finished booting up, run Windows Task Manager again and there’s only 40 processes compared to 79 just now.

At the General tab in MSCONFIG, there’s a selective startup which I can easily uncheck Load System Services and Load Startup Items but I did not want to use that. Reason is when I disable Load System Services from Selective Startup, it also disables Microsoft services such as Networking, Plug and Play, Event Logging, and Error Reporting. It actually causes more problems if you disable all of the services.

To enable them back, just run MSCONFIG, follow the steps above, except this time use the Enable All button. No harm done and you’d be surprise to know that most of the time a computer problem is caused by software conflicts.

Technorati Tags: services, startup, process, boot, msconfig

For the frequent comment posters in Raymond.CC Blog, you might have noticed an addition of random words to type in before your comment gets in. Well this blog site has been attacked by some people that has nothing else better to do in their life. Yesterday while I was writing an article, I noticed that the pending comments awaiting for moderation shows about 800+! I normally check for pending comments every few hours a day and it’s impossible for the comments to grow that much in such a short while. At first I thought those spam bots has found a new way to bypass Akismet but seeing those comments, it looked like it had been done by some script kiddie.

The Wordpress spam comment attack is pretty smart because it is definitely automated and all the IP address were different. I assume the wordpress comment spamming tool uses a list of open proxy and tries to post comments in every article. Fortunately I have configured all comments to be moderated so that inappropriate comments doesn’t get posted out and create unnecessary drama.

If your Wordpress site has been attacked by similar comments spamming tool, here’s what you can do to easily delete all Wordpress spam comments using phpMyAdmin and implement a simple CAPTCHA system to make the spammer’s life difficult.

Since the spam comments keeps in coming in, I had to do something to stop it first. Log in to your Wordpress Admin site, go to Settings > Discussion and CHECK “Users must be registered and logged in to comment“. Now the spam comments should stop since it requires an account. To be on the safe side, disable registration by going to Settings > General and UNCHECK “Anyone can register“.

When you’ve done both of the steps above, no comments will get in.

Now to clean up the spam that’s in moderation. Log in to phpMyAdmin, select the database that has Wordpress installed and go to SQL tab. Type the following command below and click the Go button.

delete from wp_comments where comment_approved = '0'

As you can see at the screenshot above, phpMyAdmin took less than 0.1 seconds to clean up 886 spam comments.

There are a few Wordpress plugins that can help you implement CAPTCHA in your comment form. As for me, I installed reCAPTCHA because other than preventing easy comment spamming, it also helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. Simply download wp-reCAPTCHA, drop it in plugins folder and activate. Sign up for a free reCAPTCHA account to get public and private key. Enter both keys in your Wordrpess’ Settings > reCAPTCHA.

Finally you will need to allow your visitors to post comments. Go back to Settings > Discussion and UNCHECK “Users must be registered and logged in to comment“.

The spammer took hours to spam the comment form but it took me less than 1 second to clean up the spam and another 3 minutes to install reCAPTCHA in my comment form. Do the math and the spammer sure looks silly. reCAPTCHA is not impossible to crack but the spammers would have to spend even more of their precious time and effort to do something that they don’t even gain anything from it.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, comment, spam, recaptcha, phpmyadmin

Nearly a year ago I’ve posted a tip on how to obtain a 1 year a-squared Anti-Malware license using a coupon code. For those that are still using it, I believe your license is about to expire and here’s a good news to you all! There is a new coupon code being circulated which allows you to convert it to a 1 year license. A year has gone by and many updates and improvements has been done on a-squared Anti-Malware. Last time it only scans for spyware but now it has integrated Ikarus scanning technology to detect and block computer virus.

a-squared Anti-Malware monitors all active programs in real time for dangerous behavior (Behavior Blocking) and can detect new unknown Trojans, Worms, Viruses and other damaging programs (Zero-Day dangers) without daily updates. The signature-based security (a-squared and Ikarus double engine) ensures a very high recognition rate of known Malware such as Trojans, Worms ans Viruses.

Just follow the steps on how to get a fully licensed 1 year a-squared Anti-Malware v4.5 that normally cost $40 for FREE!

1. First you’ll need to have an account with a-squared. Go to http://www.emsisoft.com/en/software/account/ and signed up for one. Just enter your name and email address.

2. Check your email address and you should get an email from Emsi Software (automail@www.emsisoft.com) with the subject Your user account information – Requires verification. Note down your password.

3. Go to http://cc.emsisoft.com and login with your email and password that you got from step 2.

4. Click on Manage Licenses on the left hand sidebar and click Get license by coupon code.

5. Enter the coupon code kam-nef-max-558 and click the Convert button. You should then see that a-squared Anti-Malware has added to the list with a 1 year license period.

6. Download a-squared Anti-Malware v4.5 and install.

7. After installation, you will be prompted to enter an account to login. Enter the same email address and password that you entered in Customer Center on the program and click Log in. You now have a full version of a-squared anti-malware valid for 1 year.

It is important that you run an update after installation to download the latest signature. The first update should take a while because I had to download a total of 17MB. According to Malware Research Group test conducted on June 2009, a-squared Anti-Malware is able to catch the most malware files compared to 18 other antivirus. A big part of the malware consist of trojans or backdoors.

For testing purposes, I copied 19 real current live virus that are circulating around internet and networks today and a-squared anti-malware did not block anything. When I did a scan, it manage to detect all 19 files are virus. It also managed to detect all of the older version of private stub for a crypter called BCD. Same as Microsoft Security Essentials, it could not detect the private trojan on manual scan and also when I run it even after enabling Paranoid mode.

When a-squared Anti-Malware is active, it has two processes which is a2service.exe and a2guard.exe both taking up 113MB. If you want to use a-squared Anti-Malware for on-demand scanning, disabling all real-time protection will drop the memory usage to only 10MB. If any of the background guard is enabled, the memory usage for a2service.exe instantly shoots up to nearly 100MB. During a deep scan, a-squared anti-malware never eats more than 50% of CPU uage. They developers of a-squared Anti-Malware should do something about the memory usage.

Offer still works so get it fast before it ends! Thanks to saturnguy62 for sharing this with us in forum!

Technorati Tags: a-squared, anti-malware, license, coupon, security

Whenever all these giant companies comes out with something new, you can find it written all over the Internet. Remember Bing, the new search engine by Microsoft? Well me and many others still think Google search results are way better. Then few days ago I heard about the upcoming free antivirus software called Microsoft Security Essentials created by Microsoft that will provide protection from viruses, spyware, rootkits, and trojans for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. As usual, it was posted everywhere and the first thing that came to my mind was is it necessary to create all that hype?

I personally don’t think that Microsoft Security Essentials will dominate the antivirus market even if it is bundled in future version of Windows. Just like Internet Explorer, it comes in every Windows but my monthly web statistics shows that there are more Firefox users than IE. I am very curious to see how good or bad is the upcoming free antivirus by Microsoft so I left work a little early today (of course with my boss’ approval) to test it out.

A good antivirus must have very good detection of known virus through signature and unknown virus through proactive method. Then it shouldn’t now slow down your computer when it is protecting your computer real-time and also during manual full scan. Scanning time and cleaning of virus should be fast. Finally, when an antivirus has proactive defense, there will surely be false detection but the numbers should be small.

The interface of Microsoft Security Essentials is very easy to use. It doesn’t have too many features to confuse a basic computer user. You have a tab to run a full, quick or custom scan, an update tab to update the virus and spyware definitions, a history tab showing you items detected as potentially harmful and the actions you took on each item and finally the settings tab to configure some options on MSE.

Virus detection (Signature and Proactive)
The virus detection on MSE is very good because it managed to detect all 19 viruses as a potential threat while RISING Antivirus 2009 (sad to say) only detected 75% of it. As for the proactive detection, I am not sure if MSE even has that as I couldn’t find any information about it. I have a private version of trojan which is detected by Kaspersky, Avira and NOD32 but is still undetectable by many other antivirus. MSE wasn’t able to detect the private trojan.

Scanning
A full scan takes 19 minutes to scan 160,000 items. I’d say that MSE has an average scanning speed as I’ve seen other antivirus software that scans at much faster and slower speed than this.

Real-Time protection
I plugged in a USB flash drive that has a malicious autorun.inf file and MSE immediately notify me about the potential threat it found. I also noticed that the real-time protection is a little slow. Meaning when I open a folder that has a virus which is detectable by MSE, it takes quite a long time to tell me that it is a virus. When I got fed up of waiting, I tried running the virus file, MSE blocks the file and prompts for action on the virus.

Action on detected items
Another problem with MSE is the actions such as removing and disinfecting an item is also very slow. This happens when MSE found a potential threat and you click either the Clean computer or Apply actions button.

Memory and CPU usage
There are 2 processes by MSE which is MsMpEng.exe and msseces.exe. Both process’ memory usage takes up an average of 60MB during idle and scanning. When running a full scan, the CPU usage goes up to around 40% but never above 50%.

The tests above are done on my desktop computer running a vanilla version of Windows XP Professional SP3 with latest hotfixes. Although the 19 virus that I had is very little to test on but they are real current live virus that are circulating around internet and networks today. As for the private version of trojan, it is also a very popular trojan (I won’t say what is the name) and good antivirus such as Kaspersky or anti-keylogger such as Zemana is able to detect the malicious (injection) activity even though it is not in the virus signature database. Do take note that Microsoft Security Essentials is still in BETA (testing) and if you’d like to try it yourself, you can download from the links below. The installer does a WGA check before allowing you to install.

For Windows XP: mssefullinstall-x86fre-en-us-xp.exe
For Windows Vista and Windows 7 (32-bit): mssefullinstall-x86fre-en-us-vista.exe
For Windows Vista and Windows 7 (64-bit): mssefullinstall-amd64fre-en-us-vista.exe

Technorati Tags: MSE, morro, microsoft, antivirus, security

I am always curious to know if it is possible to run an image file as an executable file. So far I only know about the double extension trick such as file.jpg.exe. If the user enabled “Hide extensions for known file types” in Folder Options, most probably the user will think that it is a JPG image file but in fact the .exe extension is hidden. That’s why the first thing I do after reinstalling Windows is to enable show hidden files and disable hide extensions for known file types.

Few days ago I was going through HackHound forum and found a tool called EXE-Forcer developed by steve10120 which claims to make any file extension execute like an .exe file. Before I run EXE-Forcer, I uploaded it to ThreatExpert to analyze and see what it does. It doesn’t do anything but a few antivirus vendor such as PC Tools, Symantec, McAfee, Sophos and Ikarus always flags it as a Trojan.

I ran it and was presented with a very simple interface with nothing on it. Right clicking on an empty space allows me to add an extension.

So I tried entering .ray extension and it was added to the program but nothing happened. I right click on EXE-Forcer again and this time I found the Build option enabled. So I selected Build and it prompts me to save an exe file to a location. Now I have another suspicious EXE file and since I don’t know what it does, I analyzed the file in ThreatExpert. This time ThreatExpert tells me that the file EXE-Forcer created will add new registry entries. From the looks of the registry modification, it seemed like it was trying to register a new file type to an EXE extension.

I ran the EXE file created by EXE-Forcer, and then I renamed a legitimate .exe file’s extension to .ray. As expected, I was able to run the .ray extension as an application after the registry modification.

This registry modification is pretty simple. It maps an extension of your choice to application. If you go to File Types tab in Folder Options (Can only be found in XP), you will see that the extension opens with %1.

EXE-Forcer works but already widely being detected as a malicious tool by most antivirus software. In fact, a simple command line would do the job. Simply type assoc.ray=exefile in command prompt will do what EXE-Forcer does. You can replace the .ray in the command line with any other extension you want to run it as executable. Hope you’ve learned something new today.

Technorati Tags: extension, EXE, exe-forcer, association, security

Another thing that I didn’t like in Windows Vista is it doesn’t have a built-in way to activate webcam to test if it is working or not. To test a webcam in Vista, I had to use the “Audio and video setup” feature from Windows Live Messenger. Like in Windows XP, when you have a webcam connected, you can activate the webcam from My Computer and see what’s on the webcam without using any other software. I wonder why did Microsoft removed it in Vista? Perhaps to give software makers such as CyberLink an opportunity to make money from their webcam software called YouCam?

CyberLink YouCam is a very popular webcam companion software which normally cost $34.95 that is bundled in some laptops such as HP. You can add effects to your web cam video, including adding emotion effects, avatars, frames, filters and distortions, take a series of quick web cam photos using the Burst feature, instantly capture or schedule a web cam video, upload a web cam video directly to YouTube, email web cam photos and videos directly from CyberLink YouCam to your friends, print off your favorites web cam photos and finally share and view PowerPoint files and images together during web cam sessions.

Computeractive magazine gave their readers a fully licensed YouCam version 1 and the offer has expired. Then ChrisKing posted a link in forum to YouCam version 2 but it is hosted in HP. I downloaded it, tried to install and got the error “This software can only be installed on a Hewlett-Packard system”. It may seem impossible to install YouCam 2 on non-HP laptops but you know me, I like to challenge myself by researching on how to make things possible and then share the knowledge with you all.

CyberLink YouCam 2 is NOT a driver for your webcam. It is a software that gives dynamic effects to your video from your webcam. Do take note that before you can install CyberLink YouCam 2, you must first have a webcam. If you don’t have one, you won’t be able to install.

1. First of all, you can download the full version of CyberLink YouCam 2 from here. The installer is hosted in a HP FTP server, if you can’t download, make sure you have access to port 21.

2. Next, extract the sp42568.exe file by right clicking on the file and select extract. 7-Zip is able to extract the installer file for YouCam 2. If your archiving software can’t extract, then try using Universal Extractor. You should have a new folder called sp42568 with a bunch of files inside it.

3. Now you’ll have to download the trial version of CyberLink YouCam 2. Extract the CyberLink.1707_YUC080401-01.exe file like what you did in step 2. This time you will have a new folder called CyberLink.1707_YUC080401-01.

4. Finally you will need to copy define.ini file from CyberLink.1707_YUC080401-01 folder to the sp42568 folder and overwrite it. Run the setup.exe file from sp42568 folder. Voila! You now have a full version of CyberLink YouCam 2! It can be installed on both Windows XP and Vista.

The latest version of CyberLink YouCam is now version 3 and I believe very soon you’ll find a lot of computer magazines started to give out free licenses for the version 2.

Technorati Tags: youcam, webcam, cyberlink, video, software