Steps to Troubleshoot Software Errors

The following are some of the first steps to troubleshoot and resolve software errors:

1. Many software errors occur when your operating system, device drivers, and software programs are not updated with the latest releases from their manufacturers. For example, the Ccapp error occurs if a Norton product installed on your PC is not updated. This is the reason you must ensure that you regularly update your software products and device drivers and prevent PC errors due to outdated files.
2. If an error message indicates program conflicts, you must try to locate the program and then try to resolve issues with it. For instance, if the error follows a recent program installation, you must try to remove this program to see if the solves the problem. You may also try to use the msconfig (System Configuration Utility) to disable any unwanted program or service that may load at system startup.
3. As a regular PC preventive maintenance measure, it is recommended that you use an efficient and user-friendly registry tool to perform regular registry scan and clean up to maintain an error-free registry. Moreover, to maintain a healthy system, you must schedule regular antivirus and antispyware updates and full-system scans to ensure that your system is safe from the latest malware threats.
4. DLL error messages may also occur due to incorrect program installation or removal procedures. Quite commonly, computer users overwrite or delete a required DLL file in the process of adding or removing a program. Therefore, to fix DLL error in these cases, you may have to restore the DLL file (s) modified by these processes. You may have to update the installed software or reinstall the uninstalled software.
5. In none of your troubleshooting techniques work, you may perform a system restore to revert the system configuration to before you made the change that start generating software errors.

Steps to Troubleshoot Hardware Errors

The following are some of the first steps to troubleshoot and resolve hardware errors:

1. Turn off your Windows computer.
2. Check that all power chords and data cables are properly connected to their peripheral devices and the connectors on the motherboard.
3. Ensure that all computer components, such as memory, processor and other adaptors and connectors are properly seated in their slots.
4. Clean any dust or other deposits from these components. You can use a vacuum cleaner to perform the task.
5. Start your computer to see if the error has gone.
6. If it still persists, open Device Manager.
7. Here, see if any device is marked as not functioning.
8. If you find any, double-click the device and on the General tab, check the Device status section to see if any problems are indicated.
9. If there are any problems with the device driver, you may open the Driver tab to perform driver uninstall, update, or roll back, as required, to repair the error.
10. You may also choose to click on the Troubleshoot button on the General tab to launch the device troubleshooting wizard. This wizard helps you in identifying the cause behind the hardware error and enables you to perform appropriate resolution tasks.
11. If nothing works, you must get the hardware component that is generating the error checked for physical problems. In most cases, you might need to get this component replaced to resolve the error.

There has been no word about it from AVG team and they seem to be nonchalant about it.

In any case, I was not very happy with the LinkScanner function which was introduced in AVG 8.0 and had disabled it with the consequence of a permanent exclamation mark in the system tray icon. The automatic updates also had problems but it was corrected in the later upgrades.

I would suggest you to install Avira Antivir which is proving to be an excellent software. It hogs less memory resources than AVG and is also bandwidth efficient. Though it has an annoying ‘Please Register’ window which pops up during automatic update.

Another anti-virus worth considering is Avast. I haven’t tested the new version yet but my past experience with Avast hasn’t been too good as it failed to detect certain viruses in my USB pen drive with latest udpates.

Unless, AVG introduces an update which takes care of these problems, I would recommend you to shift to some other anti virus as suggested above.

ThreatFire (http://www.threatfire.com/) has become quite popular recently with its completely novel way of protection. So I decided to give it a try. And after a week, I really think this is a must.

The software claims to supplement the anti-virus that is already installed and gives real-time protection. It says that, instead of looking for known threats it tries to detect malicious behavior to guard against attacks. As yet, I didn’t encounter any threat but at least it works well with the anti-virus and firewall running simultaneously.

Installation is fast and easy.

The application is very easy to install and is lightning quick. No restart is required and it has a nice System Tray Icon with cool animation during scanning. I believe quick and simple installation is a hallmark of any tool worth its salt.

Perfectly Compatible with both anti-virus and firewall.

Not even once did I encounter any compatibility issues with my AVG 8.0 anti-virus and Comodo Firewall. It settled itself in the system tray and protection began immediately after installation.

I haven’t tested it with other anti-viruses yet. If you try it out with other anti-viruses, do let us know in the comments.

Automatic Update is excellent.

Updates are as it should be, silent and unobtrusive. Just a pop-up message indicating that the update has taken place.

Security Status Reports

ThreatFire has an interesting Security Status window where it shows all the threats and events analyzed. The stats are updated in real-time. For a week worth of reports, that numbers are quite astounding.

System Activity Monitor

I really liked the detail with which the history of the actions of the processes running is shown. It is better than Comodo or the ZoneAlarm firewall that I previously used. It even shows all the temporary files that are created and deleted by various processes. You can also see the registry changes done by a particular software. This information also includes ThreatFire itself! So you can see what the software itself is doing all the time.

It looks to me to be a professionally built software and is here to stay.

One of the important computer maintenance steps is Defragmentation and it is also the most neglected. Either because you don’t know about its usefulness or simply don’t know how to do it. And if you are not bothered, then probably you are wasting your time reading this!

What is Defragmentation?

Let’s say you have stored a movie file (.avi) in a folder on your root drive (usually C:). For all practical purposes, the file is stored in one and only one location (C:\folder\movie.avi) unless you have a copy of it somewhere else. But on the surface of the hard-disk, the file isn’t stored contiguously at one location. Instead bits of it are spread over the space in the hard-disk. This is because a hard-disk has to store many files and this is an easier way to store rather than storing everything together. So the files are fragmented.

But there is a drawback to this method of storage. Whenever you will access the above movie file, the system will have to find every pieces of the scattered file before presenting it to you. That can slow the process drastically depending on the size and fragmentation of the file. So the obvious thing to do is defragment!

Defragmentation is a process in which fragmented bits of all the files in the drive are brought together (made contiguous) so that the access speed increases, thereby increasing the overall performance of the system. Simple!

That’s all there is to defragmentation!

How to Defrag your Computer?

Here’s the easiest and quickest way:

Start -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmentor

Or simply type dfrgui.exe in the Run window. Select a drive and start the process.

But default windows applications are rarely that great and lack variety, features and vision as well! So get yourself Defraggler, a nice little tool which does the job pretty well. The great thing about it is that you can select individual files to defrag which is a great new feature lacking previously.

Ok, I will do it. But How Long Will It Take?

Well, it depends. Larger the hard-drive, more is the time required. The best time to do it is when you have nothing else to do with your computer and can stay away from it for 2-3 hours. With the above tool that I mentioned, you can select only part of your drive to do a quick defrag. So time should not be a factor now!

Great! How Frequently Should I Defrag?

How much is your computer usage? If you can’t leave your PC for even a minute, then you should think of defragging twice a month at the very least. But if you don’t use your computer that much and just hope that everything remains fine with your PC, then you should defrag once in a span of 2-3 months. That should keep your computer healthy!

Conclusion

There are some thoughts that suggest Defragmentation is not necessary but that is really for you to decide. As for me, it isn’t very taxing and should be done once in a while.

Have fun defragging!

What is an HTTP Cookie?

Before I tell you, why not see it for yourself? If you are using Windows XP, then it is pretty straightforward. Visit %rootdrive%\Documents and Settings\Cookies\ folder to view all the cookies. In Vista, type %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies\Low in the Run (Windows + R) window to view all the cookies.

What you may see is a long list of text files, all having names user@some-website. If you open it in Notepad, there will be some non-understandable data written in it. So now you know how cookie looks. But what exactly is it?

When you visit websites through a browser, the website collects certain data about you (e.g. IP Address, HTTP Referrer etc..). These things are unique to every visitor of that website so it makes sense to store it in the visitor’s computer rather than at the server of the website. The file in which such information is stored is called a Cookie. Usually these information are encrypted so that no one can view it.

How are Cookies useful?

Consider the Yahoo! Login page. Look at the option of “Keep me signed in for 2 weeks unless I sign out”. If you mark this option, you won’t have to enter your login information again for the specified time period and will be able to login directly. A real time-saver! How does Yahoo! (or any other website) do that? It is very easy. It stores the username and password with which you login in a Cookie at the time of first login. Now when you come back after two days and open Yahoo! in your browser, it will look for a Cookie on your computer. If found, it will get the username and password from there and log you in directly bypassing the login step.

But there is a risk involved here. If instead of you, somebody else visits Yahoo! from the same computer, they will have access to your inbox. Hence the warning, “[Uncheck if on a shared computer]“. So you should check that option only if you are logging in through your personal computer.

That is the most important reason for using a Cookie. By storing various other information about you, websites can understand your internet surfing style and other private things which you might not want to share. But you can’t really stop websites from tracking you and disabling cookies altogether is also not an option since they are needed by all websites to work properly. So take care of the following things to be safe.

Deleting Cookies

On your personal computer, you may not need to delete the cookies, but if you are on a public computer (cyber cafe’s) then do not forget to delete the cookies and cache after you have finished surfing.

In Internet Explorer, go to Tools->Internet Options. In the General Tab, click on Delete button under Browsing History. Then select Delete All to get rid of everything that you have done with the browser.

In Firefox, just press Ctrl + Shift + Del, select everything and press button “Clear Private Data Now”. Easy!

That’s all you need to know about Cookies. Now they shouldn’t trouble you anymore!

Torrents have become quite popular for file sharing. The high speed is one of the hallmarks of sharing through torrents. Here are some tools to ensure that you get the most out of torrents and in the simplest way possible.

Torrent Resources / Search Engines

You can look for your favorite torrents in any of these excellent resources.

1. Mininova

It is fast and simple torrent sites with various movie, games and documentary torrents.

2. The Pirate Bay

Another cool torrent website.

3. YouTorrent / PizzaTorrent

Well, you need not really visit the above resources with this search engine to help you. It indexes all the above resources and some more with nicely tabulated results. If it is not found here, probably it is nowhere.

Torrent Clients

4. uTorrent

The first and the most popular torrent client. It is light-weight and very handy.

5. Azureus

Another quite popular torrent client. Useful for people who download heavily.

6. ABC

Very popular torrent client.

7. BitLord

It has an in-built search engine as well!

8. BitComet

It was once a very popular client but uTorrent has overruled it.

These are some of the tools for torrents. If you know any other which is good, tell us in the comments.

Related: Torrents Terminology & Tips: A Quick Look

Since torrents run with the support of community of geeks, the interface is a bit difficult to understand. There are some terms which popped up by themselves which you should know to have a good understanding of torrents.

Terminology

1. Seeds

Those users who have the complete file and are sharing it for other users to download are termed as Seeds. Obviously there has to be at least one seed for the file to be successfully downloaded by others. A Seed is only uploading data and not downloading.

2. Peers

Unlike Seeds, those users connected to the server who have only partially downloaded the file are called Peers. Peers are also sharing (uploading) their part of the download but they need seeds or peers who have the remaining part of the download. Once the peer has finished downloading the file, it becomes a seed.

3. Upload-to-Download Ratio

It is the ratio of the amount of file uploaded to the amount of file downloaded from a server. It is recommended to have the ratio close to 1 i.e. upload as much as you download. Since it is a community you should share the file you have downloaded by seeding it. There are other advantages of sharing as indicated below.

4. Tracker

As I had told you in my previous post, their is a server which handles all the users downloading the file. This server is called Tracker. If it is down, then the download will fail. You need to connect to the tracker to start downloading. All this information is present in the torrent file.

5. Swarm

All the seeds and peers together are collectively called Swarm. It includes everybody that is connected to the server. The Average Swarm Speed is the approximate average of the speed of all the users who are downloading the torrent. Faster the average swarm speed, faster is the speed of download.

These are all the terms you must know before you begin downloading.

Tips for Torrent Downloading

• A torrent must be in good health for you to be able to download it. The health of a torrent can be analyzed by the number of seeds and peers that are active for that torrent. More number means better health.The higher the number, the better will be the speed with which you would be able to download.
• Torrents come and go. Popular torrents stay on but others might die. The community is huge enough to support most of the useful torrents out there.
• Number of seeds also determine the speed with which you will be able to download the torrent. Preferably the number of seeders should be greater than the number of peers.
• For fast torrent downloads, uploading is very important. The server will recognize a user with low upload-Download Ratio and will decrease your speed of downloading. Always set the upload speed according to your ISP’s specification and slightly lower than your download speed otherwise it will harm your downloads.

Great! Now I want to start downloading!

Easy! I know you are really excited to start downloading and I won’t delay it. So here is all that you will need to begin downloading.

Torrent Client

This is a software which will reside on your computer and do all the dirty work for you. I would suggest uTorrent or Azureus for starting out. The small torrent files (.torrent) are opened by these clients for downloading.

Torrent Resources

Internet is a huge resource for downloading torrent files. You can google for torrents to begin with or visit these sites which have lots of torrents for downloading.
Mininova
The Pirate Bay

So that’s it. Have a good time with torrents!

Related: What the Heck Are Torrents and How to Use them?

Those of you who have been around the internet for quite some time or spending your time with a geek friend, would have heard of the term Torrents. Ask your geek friend about it and he might ignore you saying he would tell it later. It is not that he doesn’t know it… the tough part is to explain to others what exactly it is. But to understand a concept, you need to know why that concept was evolved in the first place and how it is advantageous to you.

What’s the general idea of Torrents?

Here’s the general idea:

Torrents are used to download large (small as well) files from the Internet at a very high speed.

Now who wouldn’t want to do that? So it is useful and you should know about it.

The Conventional Downloading Method

Up till now, you had been downloading in the traditional way… The file is present on a server, you connect to that server via FTP, HTTP, Telnet etc.. and request for its download. There are some interesting points to note here:

• As you are downloading the file, pieces of it are coming to you at certain speed. You are not uploading anything.
• There is only one connection between you and the server. (Download Managers usually have multiple connections for faster download.)
• Pieces of the file being downloaded is sequential and not random. This order has to be maintained.

The Torrent Downloading Concept

The other concept of downloading files from the internet evolved from file sharing. If you have a file to share on the internet, you would allow everybody to connect to your file and let them download it. By extending this logic, let the other users who are downloading the file also be allowed to share the part of the file they have downloaded. In this way, a user will have more than one sources of files to download. More the number of downloaders, more will be the number of sources of files.

A program was written in Python (a programming language), to control the behavior of such a downloading scheme and the flow of pieces of the file being downloaded. This is the concept of torrent downloading.

You will agree that to implement such a concept, a server will have to keep track of all the users who are downloading, the number of users who have finished downloading but are still connected and other such things. This information will have to be stored in a separate file so that new users can connect and download as well. This file has an extension of .torrent to distinguish it from other files. It has a size of very few KBs… That is what a torrent is.

Well, I think that is enough for this post. In my next post I would tell you the tools to start downloading stuffs! Watch out…

Further Reading…

Torrents Terminology & Tips: A Quick Look

Top Apps to Make Most of Torrents

One of the biggest source of viruses for most computer users has been their pen drive. On the internet, you really need to do something foolish to get your system infected, but with pen drives it is too simple.

A bit of carelessness is all that is required for your PC to get infected.

Why Pen Drives are a Big Threat?

As you know, a pen drive is a portable device which is meant to move data from one computer to another in a quick way. So, they have to connect to lots of other computers whose safety is beyond our control. Since the virus-makers also know this, they program the virus multiplicity algorithm in such a way that an infected computer will immediately pass the virus to the pen drive as soon as it is connected and detected by the Operating System. Yes, even before the Autorun feature is activated. Hence it is very important to take care while working with pen drives.

It is Unavoidable…

The network at my college is full of viruses. Sometimes I think there is more viruses than data in all those computers! But while copying project related data, I had to use a pen drive as it is a quick and easy solution. If you are to use your pen drive on an infected system, it has to get infected. No anti-virus software can stop that.

The solution lies in cleaning the pen drive regularly.

How to Handle an Infected Pen Drive?

First of all, never ever use the Autorun feature for pen drives. Usually, viruses set an executable (.exe) file to run upon activation of the Autorun feature, which will surely infect your computer in no time. So if you are using the autorun feature, disable it. At the very least, let Windows ask you what is to be done when an external device is connected.

As soon as the pen drive is connected, scan it with an anti-virus software to remove all traces of viruses that may be lurking in your pen drive.

That’s all there is to it. Once the pen drive has been scanned, you can use it like any other partition of your hard disk.

Something to Remember

• Don’t bother about your pen drive getting infected. That’s fine.
• Never use the Autorun feature on pen drives even if you are sure that it is virus free. Just in case…
• Always scan your friend’s pen drive before using the data in it!