Techie's Lab!

Which Free antivirus is better for Windows?

2013-03-29T17:34:00.001+05:30

For having a peace of mind and not to worry about the personal data leaks / thefts and other annoyances, a home user’s must use list of programs should contain Antivirus in the top most slot!

Why?

With the recent trend of malwares that affect the computers, it is clear that some protection is needed in the first place to prevent a day at some computer service / repair shop, else be ready to spend a day of your precious precious time in setting things right.

First few questions that pop while thought process kick in are:

How much performance impact it will have on my computer ?
How does it perform against new threats ?
How are the detection rates and update frequency ?
What are all the features does the software have ? (This is a debatable question as it depends on whether one choose a free or a paid software!)
How easy it is to operate ? (Will my elders understand what it is saying? Does it annoy with too much of information ? Is it configurable to lock down with minimal annoyances / messages ?)
Are there any false positives? (Again a debatable Q and purely depends on the user type!)

Having armed with such and more questions, the options for a free antivirus program are endless!

The top notch are:

Avast
AVG
Avira
Comodo Antivirus (or Comodo Internet Security Premium (It’s a suite of security products))
Microsoft Security Essentials
Bitdefender Antivirus
Panda Antivirus (Cloud)

and sure there are more, but these should be sufficient. Out of all these, Avast and AVG have got reputed themselves to be the best of the breed. But Avira is not left behind and it scores high on performance compared to Avast or AVG.

It works fantastic on some of the older systems as good as on the newer systems.

Try it out and you will not be disappointed!!

Automating the retrieval of MSDN Product keys

2013-02-21T12:08:00.000+05:30

I know it can be a pain if you want to get all the product keys from MSDN subscription. With the new MSDN restrictions of key requests, one can get a maximum of 10 keys per day.

As a subscriber, I would like to have access to all my keys and I don’t agree with Microsoft on the key misuse prevention tactics. During the earlier years, I used to get all the keys at one shot, export them to an Excel document, have it printed and stuck to my wall for easy reference. Though I don’t use all the available keys, some where used frequently like OS installation keys etc., Mostly in an virtualized environments. But now, I can request only 10 keys per day and I have remember to do it every day religiously and with an exact time gap of 24 Hours+). Even if I schedule a reminder, some times it might not be possible to perform the operations due to other constraints and once the time exceeds 24 hours, it delays the fore coming day’s request by the current delayed period. I guess you understand me. (Hmmm. why would you visit my page anyways if you don’t! :D)

Ok. ranting apart, what would be the best way to automate the downloading of all keys (at least 10 per day but at regular intervals and without any human intervention)?

Well, the following is the solution created by me. I created a simple VBScript and a very small C program to automate the requesting of MSDN Keys.

Pre-requisites:

Windows System with Internet Explorer 8 (minimal and be it a Windows XP or 2003 for easier IE Automation! Sorry Windows 7 & 8!) with Silver light installed and working
- N.B.: I have not tested the solution on a Windows 7 (IE 9 and above). The solution was tested on XP and on IE8. Please forgive me for that.
Open TWebst framework installed from http://open-twebst.codecentrix.com/ (I have tested with the version 1.1.0.0)
VBScript file (GoToMSDN.vbs) as provided below
A really small executable (Only 511 bytes compressed) (MyTinyScheduler.exe) (Available at: http://www.mediafire.com/?6yuyt834nz64x3r as a RAR compressed file!!!) If your antivirus flags it as suspicious, please compile yourselves from the source code!!! Please request for the source code and I am happy to provide it! I might actually add it to the post if the requests are high!
- MyTinyScheduler.exe Program Description: It is a simple scheduler specifically created for this purpose which would launch the script at a 24 Hrs + 5 minutes increment day by day. You could easily create a delayed launcher yourselves either by using a Power shell script or even by using a simple batch script!!! Experiment!!)

VBScript: (to be named as GoToMSDN.vbs)

'Use the command line below to launch the script (or just double click the .vbs file):
' %windir%\system32\wscript.exe GoToMSDN.vbs

Option Explicit
Dim core
Dim browser
Dim iLoop
Set core    = CreateObject("OpenTwebst.Core") ' creates the OpenTwebst Core Object
Set browser = core.StartBrowser("https://login.live.com/login.srf?wa=wsignin1.0&rpsnv=11&ct=1360563667&rver=6.0.5276.0&wp=MCMBI&wlcxt=msdn%24msdn%24msdn&wreply=https%3a%2f%2fmsdn.microsoft.com%2fen-us%2fsubscriptions%2fkeys&lc=1033&id=254354&mkt=en-US") ' Navigates to the URL for login

Call browser.FindElement("input text", "id=i0116").InputText("<YOUR MSDN USERNAME>") ' Please replace <YOUR MSDN USERNAME> with your actual MSDN User Name
Call browser.FindElement("input password", "id=i0118").InputText("<YOUR MSDN PASSWORD>") ' Please replace <YOUR MSDN PASSWORD> with your actual MSDN Password
Call browser.FindElement("input submit", "id=idSIButton9").Click() ' Logs into the account
WScript.Sleep(30000) ' A sleep to make sure that the product keys page is loaded for slower networks! Does not harm in anyway!
For iLoop = 0 to 15 'Just to make sure that it processes at least 10 clicks! Mostly it works without any issues.
    Call browser.FindElement("a", "uiname=Get Another Key, index=1").Click()
    WScript.Sleep(5000)
Next
Call browser.FindElement("a", "uiname=Sign out").Click() ' The logout click!!
WScript.Sleep(40000) ' A sleep to make sure that the account is signed out! For slower networks! Does not harm in anyway!
browser.Close() ' Closes the OpenTwebst Core Object and returns the control to the scheduler program!

Steps to follow:

Please replace the <YOUR MSDN USERNAME> and <YOUR MSDN PASSWORD> with your actual MSDN User name and Password!
Create a folder in C:\> Drive called Automation, such that the path will be C:\Automation>. Copy all the files GoToMSDN.vbs and MyTinyScheduler.exe to the folder. If you would like to create a power shell or a batch file, just replace the directory appropriately.
- For example to call the script from a batch file, you could use the “%windir%\system32\wscript.exe C:\Automation\GoToMSDN.vbs” command
Just double click the MyTinyScheduler.exe and enjoy the key automation until all the keys are requested. By default, the program will execute everyday and request the keys (a maximum of 10 keys on your behalf), until the machine is shutdown or the MyTinyScheduler process is killed manually.

Once in a while, log into your account, export the keys and safeguard it!! As simple as it sounds!!

Happy hacking and tinkering!!

Official Google Blog: A different kind of company name

2010-04-02T04:37:00.000+05:30

Official Google Blog: A different kind of company name

Nice name for Google!!

Happy April Fools day!!

Enrolment Software for UIDAI - (Unique Identification Authority of India) - Another Microsoft Blunder waiting to happen???

2010-03-03T20:59:00.001+05:30

Just my thoughts about the UIDAI enrolment software request from Microsoft.

UIDAI is Unique Identification Authority of India., for those who have not heard about it can visit http://uidai.gov.in/ to know more.

Microsoft has been sending out mailers to all known Indian registrants with the title of (CALLING ALL .NET CHAMPIONS). It is a good effort to form a community for one of the biggest software projects that has ever happened in India. Well, the magnitude is enormous consisting of approximately 1180~ Million people spread across 3 Million Sq. Kms. (Amazing isn't?).

UIDAI and Microsoft wants people to write code for free(that's us people!! The oppressed software developers!!).

(Well, you have to qualify first! technically..) They (UIDAI, I am not sure about Microsoft's contribution on this project.) will not pay for any code that a person writes / contributes to the project. (I am not talking of GNUGPL here. Though I am one, for all ya GNU GPL Fanatics, it costs hell a lot of time and money to spend on free stuff. Think about it.(!)). So, they are looking at people's contribution for free (Free as in Beer! :)) which is not a good thing to do for such a large community project.

Why can't they ask the big corporations who are all involved in this project to give everything else for free too?

Shouldn't the hardware, storage, networking, bandwidth required for the project be free too? Also, electricity, data centres, back bone networks, interfaces, backups, BCP, DRP stuff, security, distribution of media / badges, well, almost everything that is involved in this project need to be free.

Why just the software need to be free?

With the current conditions prevailing in the dog eat dog market, only a truly, truly out of the mind person would be going around implementing stuff for free for UIDAI or Microsoft (I'm not talking about the GNUGPL stuff).

FYI, the request from microsoft is available at here.(http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/F/E/BFE235AA-B374-481D-9C2C-8579FD536D67/CodeContributionToUidai.pdf)

Probably Nandan Nilekani begs to differ. Probably he might even get all the required "software" and "hardware" resources from Infosys for free too!!

But hey wait!!! What happens to the ~412 Million USD ((INR) Rs. 1900 Crores) allocated budget? Whose pocket is it going to go? :)

Isn't this really the irony of the software developers?

Please post your comments / critics.

Simple Fix for Windows Black Screen of Death!

2009-12-02T00:34:00.004+05:30

Are you the one who is very much worried about the security patches of your Operating System?

Are you the one who is still attached to your Windows XP even after Microsoft has released Vista and Windows 7?

Well! We belong to the same group! :)

But being over paranoid sometimes (well, very rare!) has it's toll!

Spite of having all the unwanted services disabled, running a personal firewall, custom packet filter, two layers of defence, (no antivirus!! :) because of Virtual Systems! :)), you might have taken by surprise after updating the latest patch from Microsoft.

After rebooting, the shell never loaded! A bit of google revealed that the issue has been reportedly affected millions of people and known as the Black Screen of Death!

What's the quick way to fix it?
Here are the steps:

Press Ctrl + Alt + Del! Presto. The logon dialog displays or in some single user systems (task manager loads).
Select File, New Task Run.
Type Explorer.exe

You should be in your desktop right away!

Well, how to fix it?

Run regedit.exe
Navigate to the following key.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
Look for an entry call Shell on the right side panel. Delete it.
Right click, select New - String Value.
Name the key as Shell.
Double Click on the newly created value and type explorer.exe in the value text box.

Close Regedit and reboot. Voila! the issue is solved!

(N.B., You must be the administrator of the system to perform this operation!)

Well, for people who are not so comfortable in editing the registry, try the following program from PrevX which does the same operations programmatically!

The program is available from: http://info.prevx.com/download.asp?GRAB=blackscreenfix

Courtesy: Lifehacker.com

Wishes for a merry Christmas and happy new year!

Microsoft Stretch-IT xRM India Challenge Goof-ups!

2009-09-26T20:21:00.005+05:30

How many of you tried downloading the DVD from the Dynamics xRM site for Microsoft Dynamics xRM Stretch-IT India Challenge?

The DVD Links are:

CRM40ReadyServer.Part1
CRM40ReadyServer.Part2
CRM40ReadyServer.Part3
CRM40ReadyServer.Part4
CRM40ReadyServer.Part5
CRM40ReadyServer.Part6
CRM40ReadyServer.Part7

As you very well know the contest was to suppossed to over by September 24th, 2009, because of Microsoft's goof-ups, none could get the downloaded Virtual PC Copy of the Windows 2003 image of Microsoft Dynamics xRM to work.

Why??

Contrary to what Microsoft provided as the password for the Virtual PC in this instructions document, the password for image was Pa$$w0rd and not pass@word1.

Also, the Windows 2003 Image in the provided image was past activation and will not allow to activate or re-activate again.

Cover-ups??

Now that's the interesting part!

Because of the "Overwhelming response from the people of India!!!"(boy! that sure tickles the funny bone!!), (who can easily age by downloading the DVD image considering the available bandwidth here in India. Well some could not even download the DVD by the first completion date!!!) and to cover up the goof-ups, Microsoft has decided to strech the contest date to October-15th!!!. What now? you can ask Microsoft for a copy of the DVD mailed to your door steps directly!!!

Initial Contest details with dead-line as September 24th, 2009.

New Contest details with dead-line as October 15th, 2009.

As much as to say Microsoft's PR department is doing the job for the penny spent!!

Seagate data recovery in Bangalore

2009-07-20T15:51:00.000+05:30

Seagate Warranty Center
Seagate RMA Center
Seagate Service Center
Seagate Service Center

Well, well! some more references might be available for the Seagate HDD Service center.

The recent encounter of a 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 left me ice cold.

The drive was functioning without any glitches and on a fine day BIOS failed to identify the drive. No clicks, Nothing from the drive. It hums when connected to power, but not responding to identify drive command or none of the HDD Commands.

None of my four systems could identify the drive. Wanting to rescue to the data, a quick search yielded that the 7200.11 series of Seagate Barracude indeed has a firmware issue and seagate would replace it for free. But what about the data?

After checking warranty on the seagate warranty information page, located at Seagate Warranty Check Page, sighed a relief! The drive was in warranty, (though it wasn't five years since i've purchased the drive).

After contacting seagate warranty services, got to know that they might not be able to recover the data on the hdd. It contained multiple years photo archives and documents. Though not worrying about the documents, but most about the photos, I thought of visiting the Seagate Service Center in Bangalore.

To my surprise, the service center was relocated from the following address and the relocation was not published anywhere.

Accel Frontline Services handles the Seagate Warranty Replacement / Service Center across India.

The address from their site (http://www.accelfrontline.in/) was:

Accel Frontline Services
18/1, Cunningham Road
Bangalore - 560 052
Ph: 080 66279805 (Direct Line)
080 66279700 (Board Line)
Fax: 080 22258007.

But when visited, the service personnel informed that they are not handling Seagate HDDs at that location and provided another address:
So, the new address for Seagate Warranty Center Bangalore or Bangalore Seagate RMA Center or Bangalore Seagate Service Center is at:

Accel Frontline Services Pvt Ltd,
No: 2 & 3, 2Nd Floor, New Raja Building,
N R Road, Bangalore - 560002

Land Mark:
(Above Kamat Hotel)
Near City Market And Opp. Town Hall
Contact: +91 080 41231496.

The need to recover the data drove me there instantly! The service personnel were not promising about the recovery of the data and said that they will try. There was a sudden change of mind and I thought of giving it a try before I could giving it to seagate.

Followed the instructions at How to Revive a Seagate 7200.11 (http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=128807)".

Purchased a Nokia CA-42 Data cable from eBay, re-assembled it, connected to the Serial Communication Pins of the SATA HDD, fired up hyperterminal, followed the commands and bingo! after 15 mins, the drive was up and running.

As soon as the drive was recognized by the BIOS, updated the firmware using the following seagate page.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Firmware Update Page

All went well and the drive has been performing perfectly since then.

Turn Off LCD / Monitor while listening to Music!

2009-01-16T14:34:00.005+05:30

Well, One tends to stare at the monitor when the music is playing and some screen savers are running. But thinking about the current power crisis and go green initiatives, it is better to turn off the monitor to save some energy while listening to music during late nights. Most of the time, either winamp or other media players (if configured) displays nice patterns according to the beat of the music. But frankly, how many watch it for more than one song? (okey. for some it might be a couple of songs). But for people like me who sleep with music on and to prevent the hassle of switching on the monitor everytime the need arises to access, it becomes a pain if the monitor is CRT (which also coughs up a quick surge while initialising from power off mode to power on). Though LCD tend to consume less during the power on initialisation, it is better to keep them soft switched off.

After searching the net for such programs, I stumbled upon a freeware product called TurnOffLCD from Redmond Pie (redmondpie.com). But behold, though it was a small application, it required .NET framework to be installed. I am not complaining about that because almost all computers are loaded with that bloatware, people like me who carry a 32 GB Pen drive loaded with portable applications needed for day to day operations may not appreciate.

With quick whip in C, I recreated that application which is less than 1 KB in size and does the job perfectly. Below is the link for that application. Sorry for posting it in Rapidshare, as I do not have a server space where I can host it.

http://rapidshare.com/files/185856444/Tiny_Shut_Off_LCD.rar

Rapidshare premium account issues - Rapidshare-AG are you listening?

2008-06-26T11:59:00.004+05:30

People, If you are trying / saving hard to get a rapidshare premium account, just wait and think for a while...

Even if you pay rapidshare.com the money ($$$$) they want, they will put an IP Restriction on your rapidshare premium account. People at rapidshare.com are inexperienced, naïve, impractical and do not have any clue of what they are doing.

The scenario is that when you buy a premium account to download stuff, you tend to use it at more locations, at least occasionally if needed. Say, at home and at work for some serious file transfers. While you squeeze the net till it bleeds from home, the account would have logged with an IP Address. While you try to access using the crappy rapidshare.com premium account from another location genuinely, you are thrown with an error indicating that someone at your home IP is accessing the account (which obviously is you!).

Now tell me, if this is what you get after paying lots of money, what is the use of going for a premium account? Why would anyone want to go for a rapidshare.com Premium account?

If the rapidshare.com people are intelligent as claim to be, then they should think of alternative ways of restricting people from misusing the accounts. They should provide legitimate users with enough options / provisions to have control on the restrictive things.

In this case, they should have options in their premium page where the user can provide a list of IP Addresses / IP Ranges from where they would be connecting to and downloading. (Multiple IP Address and IP Address ranges are needed because not everyone has the luxury of Static IP Address).

Will rapidshare.com do this or keep getting flames for crappy stuff?

Rapidshare-AG are you listening?

If you don't know how to do stuff, HIRE ME or some good people!

People, if you want to change this, write to SUPPORT@RAPIDSHARE.COM and request for a change!

CUDA - Password cracking

2008-06-19T11:56:00.002+05:30

NVidia's CUDA takes password cracking to the next level. With programmable parallel multi-processors, bruteforcing of MD5, SHA1, NTLM, LANMAN, RC5 are taken to extreme levels.
A simple CUDA based MD5 cracker can crack @200+Million hashes / second on a GeForce 8800 GTX.

I am in the process of creating hash cracker for other hashes such as NTLM and SHA1.

More interesting links to be updated soon! Keep watching this space.

Free Licenses for SnagIT 7.2.5 and Camtasia Studio 3.1.3

2007-12-15T12:11:00.000+05:30

Wow!

The easy to use application for screen capturing / recording is given for free as a promotional offer from techsmith.com.

You get a fully licensed version of SnagIT 7.2.5 and Camtasia Studio 3.1.3 free from Techsmith.

SnagIT
This is an absolutely fantastic offer with all the features except a few ones like vista (anyways who wants Vista! :)) and Office 2007, direct capturing to applications, new callout styles and much more.

Download the demo version of SnagIt 7.2.5 from TechSmith FTP servers below:

ftp://ftp.techsmith.com/pub/products/snagit/725/SnagIt.exe [English]
ftp://ftp.techsmith.com/pub/products/snagit/725/snagitde.exe [German]
ftp://ftp.techsmith.com/pub/products/snagit/725/snagitfr.exe [French]

and visit http://www.techsmith.com/snagit/ukdn.asp to get your free license key for SnagIT 7.2.5.

Camtasia Studio

Even though some of the new features like Auto Pan and Zoom and Vista support are missing from this version, it is powerful enough for most common screencasting needs.

It supports recording of PPT presentations in this version.

This offer has another benefit. You can upgrade to the version 5 for half the cost ($150) of the original price which is around $300.

http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe

And visit http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/pcpls.asp to get you free license key for Camtasia Studio 3.1.3.

Enjoy the software and download it fast while it is available.

Have a great day!

Welcome!

2007-12-13T15:28:00.001+05:30

After long waiting time, I have decided to start a blog with interesting things which I find/create.

Watch out this space for more!