Any amateur computer technician should know how to reset BIOS password because there are times when they need to access the BIOS and change some configuration such as boot order. The old school way of resetting BIOS password is by taking out the battery from the motherboard and let it sit for 5 minutes, then put it back and power it on. If you read the motherboard manual, they will tell you to switch the jumper to reset all CMOS settings. When it comes to HP computers, it is very different. I’ve tried taking out the battery and left it for a day but still the BIOS doesn’t get reset. There is no CMOS reset jumper on the motherboard as well. From the CMOS itself, you can even configure it to lock the casing and the BIOS access password has an extra security where it will be completely locked out if you specified 5 consecutive wrong password.

Now, if I don’t set BIOS password, some student will. If I set it, the student will try to brute force it and end up locking the BIOS completely. The only way is to call HP support center, wait for their technicians to come and clear the password for you. If the computer is within the warranty period, then there will be no charges but if the warranty is over, we’ll have to end up paying for it. I recently discovered a free tool that can be used to reset BIOS password from Windows.
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When a virus or malware is active on the computer, meaning that is it running in background, it can do a lot of damage to your computer. They can stop antivirus or antispyware from working, enable restriction on the computer by disabling task manager, sending keylogs to the hacker and etc. Since a virus needs to be active and running in background all the time, there is surely a method that it uses to auto run itself whenever Windows is booted up. Locating the auto startup entry is not difficult using Sysinternals Autoruns but virus makers have made it possible to auto re-add the startup entry whenever it is deleted.

That means you now have to first locate the virus process and terminate it, then only remove the startup entry. A virus disabling Windows Task Manager to prevent itself from being killed is no longer efficient since we can always use a third party task manager such as Process Explorer, Anvir Task Manager and etc to find the virus and terminate it. Some virus programmers have gotten smarter by protecting its process either through injection (firewall bypass) or a smart piece of code that creates a blue screen of death if you ever try to terminate the process in Windows.
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All newer version of Windows comes with a built-in image viewer. For example Windows XP came with Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, Windows Vista with Windows Photo Gallery and finally Windows 7 with Windows Photo Viewer. They are very useful because it has very basic features such as zooming, rotate and even playing slide show which are probably enough for basic computer user. All default image viewers in Windows can also open most common image formats such as JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF and PNG making most users don’t really need to install a third party image viewers.

One of my personal philosophy for computers are “less is better”. If you don’t need it, don’t install it. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. However after many years in fixing computer problems, I noticed many times that when I try to improve something that is working fine without problems, I will end up discovering a bigger problem and it would be even harder to fix. Today my recommendation to every Windows user is to use a third party image viewer and STOP USING the default image viewer provided by Microsoft. Reason is I recently found out that there is a private JPG exploit (selling as much as $4000) that when you double click on the JPG file and you can instantly get infected by malware turning your computer into a bot. This is either done by binding the malware into the JPG file or the JPG file is able to secretly download and run the malware. This updated JPG exploit is similar to MS04-028 but still unknown by Microsoft.
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I am sure most people have a Hotmail email account. For me, Hotmail was my first email account and my cousin helped me registered it 16 years ago. Back then the 2 most popular free email service provider was Hotmail and Yahoo. Google’s Gmail is still unheard of because they only started in year 2004. Back then most people were using ICQ messenger and for some unknown reason everyone started to switch to Windows Live Messenger (back then it was called MSN Messenger). As long as you have a Hotmail, MSN or Live account, you can instantly sign in to Windows Live Messenger.

However if you’ve noticed, some people uses their Gmail account or even their own personal domain name (such as raymond@raymond.com) to sign in to Windows Live Messenger. I never had the interest to know how to do that because I have my personal Hotmail account which I use to sign in to Windows Live Messenger. Recently one of my old friend that is not very good in computer wanted to use Windows Live Messenger to talk to his kids in overseas. He already have a Gmail account and he didn’t want to register an extra Hotmail account just for that as he claimed that old people find it harder to remember login names and passwords.
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Errors. They happen with Linux, with Windows, and with Macintosh, in every well designed program and much more noticeable in the poorly designed ones. After all, I know I’ve faced my fair share of bugs using betas and alphas long before they were considered stable, so has Raymond, and so has anyone else that I could think of. After all, these errors, these bugs, it’s how we learn that we’ve hit something a coder never expected us to encounter. But who can cover every error out there and how to fix it? After all, there’s a few times when I’ve misdiagnosed an error message, and it’s been proven that it’s a different error then I originally thought it was. And other then studying the nearly 16000 error codes that Microsoft itself uses… why not use something a far cry easier? Read the rest of this entry »

Emsisoft, the maker of Anti-Malware 5.0 has released a new free tool called Emergency Kit. It is well known that Emsisoft Anti-Malware 5.0 can make your computer slow compared to other major antivirus brand but its detection rate has been topping the ranks. There is a freeware version of Emsisoft Anti-Malware which allows you to scan and remove malwares but without the real time protection which needs to be installed on your computer.

As for Emergency Kit, it is portable and you can run it directly from your USB flash drive or from your computer’s hard drive without installation. This gives you the convenience of using one of the best detection engine that is able to detect more than 4 million known dangers but without installing extra files and registry to your computer. Basically the features of the freeware version of Emsisoft Anti-Malware 5.0 and the Emergency Kit are the same except that the freeware requires installation and auto loads a2service.exe process in background that takes up 1.5MB of memory.
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I received an email from Mariana asking me to review about a HTML5 remote desktop access tool they just released. It definitely sounds interesting because HTML5 is upcoming major update for HTML standard and one example is you can view YouTube videos directly from the web browser that supports HTML5 without using Flash player anymore. To remote control a computer using VNC, normally there is a server and a viewer(client) module. However by simply using ThinVNC, all you need to do is install the server module and you can access the remote computer from anywhere using just a web browser that supports HTML5. Currently Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera are HTML5 compliant. Internet Explorer users would have to wait until IE9 to enjoy the HTML5 support.

ThinVNC takes advantage of the latest web technologies like AJAX, JSON and HTML5 canvas to deliver a high-performance Remote Desktop access over the web, using HTTP and SSL protocols. Without the need for any plugin, add-on or any kind of installation on the client side, ThinVNC is the optimum way to ensure that you can connect to your remote computer from any place.
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