Few days ago I was trying to help a friend troubleshoot a computer problem using teamviewer. For some weird reasons when I gave him the direct link to download the Teamviewer QuickSupport module, Windows Live Messenger gave me an error “The following message could not be delivered to all recipients” message.

I thought that MSN blocked the link because there was an .EXE extension which can be unsafe so I tried uploading to MediaFire which the download link contains only random letters and numbers without the extension, but it still got blocked. I also remembered very clearly that I tried on Rapidshare but it was blocked too. Finally I had to ask him visit teamviewer.com and click on the “Join a Session” button to download the quick support module.

I googled and found some people also had the problem of MSN blocking Mediafire links. I really thought that this is the case but after doing more research, it appears to be different and MSN doesn’t hate or intentionally block MediaFire links.
Read the rest of this entry »

Sniffing packets of a software is one of the reverse engineering method to find out what data is being sent and received. Packet sniffing is mostly done by more advanced users and most of the time, hackers themselves. Many years ago when I was in the 8th-wonder team, our leader of the clan ad4 used packet sniffer and discovered that anyone can change a person’s ICQ details without logging in to that user account. He created a simple tool which is able to change the details of any ICQ account, unfortunately one of the clan member masta abused the tool and ICQ found out about that exploit and fixed it within 24 hours.

Other than that, it is also useful to check if a program is harvesting any sensitive data from your computer. If you do not have a firewall, you wouldn’t know if the program that you installed is connecting to the Internet or not. The most popular packet sniffer that is free today is Wireshare (last time was called Ethereal), but I’d like to introduce a different one called oSpy which has the capability of even decrypting encrypted SSL packets.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been using Pingdom for at least 3 years already because they provide really good service and also the 1 minute checks from locations all over the world. I used to have problems sending SMS as notification and Pingdom’s support team fixed the problem really quick plus they even compensated more SMS credits to my account. I’ve always been using the Basic account because that is the cheapest plan they had back then. It’s pretty much a waste since I only have one blog site to monitor when the basic account offers checks on 5 websites.

My Pingdom account has just expired end of February and was billed $119.40 for a new invoice. I’ve just paid few thousand dollars for a years’ dedicated server at NetDepot and is really feeling the pinch for fork out another hundred bucks for a monitoring service. Moreover Adsense has stopped serving ads to this website and the revenue that is generated from other advertising companies is barely enough to cover the cost of this server. So I canceled my Pingdom account temporarily and thought that maybe I will re-sign up again at a later time when I have enough funds.

To my surprise I found out that Pingdom has started offering FREE accounts along with 20 SMS but limited to only monitor ONE website. Pingdom Free account is fine with me because I only have 1 website to monitor and can save money.
Read the rest of this entry »

The 20 winners of WinBootInfo has been chosen. Please refer to the screenshot below for the list of winners. WinBootInfo license is attached to a computer based on hardware ID, so you will have to install WinBootInfo first, run it and select “Click here to enter the key you already purchased…”. A new window will open that shows your hardware fingerprint. Note it down and wait for WinBootInfo management to contact you first. Then only send them the hardware fingerprint when asked to so that they can generate your unique key.

Thanks to MagicAndre1981, I found out that Windows 7 has a tool called Microsoft Windows Performance Toolkit which is included in Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Windows Performance Tools are designed for analysis of a wide range of performance problems including application start times, boot issues, deferred procedure calls and interrupt activity, system responsiveness issues, application resource usage and interrupt storms. This is something similar to WinBootInfo but basic computer users will find that it not as easy to use and understand.
Read the rest of this entry »

I have two things to share with you all today. First is I have 20 WinBootInfo license to giveaway, well I wanted to give them away yesterday together with the article but the author of WinBootInfo only got back to me today that they’re able to give out 20 licenses. Secondly, the promotional page for the free 1 year Trend Micro Internet Security 2010 is gone and if you visit the page, you will get a page that says “Not Found. The requested URL /iomega/en/ was not found on this server”. Fortunately I still know of a way to download it but you have to be fast because this method will not last very long.

As for those that would like to take part in the WinBootInfo license draw, just go to the end of this post and write a comment.
Read the rest of this entry »

Probably some of you have heard of BootVis, which can be used to check how long a Windows XP machine takes to boot, and then to optimize the boot process, sometimes considerably reducing the time required. BootVis can be considered as a very useful tool but unfortunately it can only work in Windows XP and it is no longer being supported by Microsoft. There is another alternative called Boot Log XP which is a shareware. It is easier to use compared to BootVis and it gives you important information about started drivers, running processes and loaded DLLs. Boot Log XP also only works on XP because it extracts information from binary ETL file (as BootVis) and interprets results using our own method.

The author of Boot Log XP claims that they are working on a new version which will support XP-64 and for Windows Vista/Seven but it’s been a long time they posted that on their website without any updates. So if you’re on Windows Vista or 7, you can use WinBootInfo as Bootvis alternative.
Read the rest of this entry »

Trend Micro has been around for a very very long time. Back then it was called PC-Cillin and now is renamed to Trend Micro. I still remembered the first time I heard of PC-Cillin when I was using my cousin’s 100Mhz computer. I wasn’t a big fan of Trend Micro antivirus products because it always didn’t score well when put being tested by AV-Test. The latest report shows that Trend Micro Internet Security 2010 ranks either second lowest or the lowest when compared to other commercial antivirus such as Norton, Kaspersky, G Data, Panda, Avira, F-Secure, Bitdefender, CA and PC Tools. On my latest antivirus 2010 performance test report, Trend doesn’t seem to put a lot of load on the Windows computer and it was even able to successfully block a crypted Bifrost trojan when many others failed to do so…

It is always up to the individual to determine if whether Trend Micro is the best or not because I do have a friend name Jay who is a very good coder and he thinks that Trend is the best. Heck he even recommends me to use it. Here’s a very good news to Trend fans because you are able to get hold of 1 year Trend Micro Internet Security 2010 license for FREE!
Read the rest of this entry »