The new Left 4 Dead 2 game has been officially released a few days ago! Well I have a very good friend that is addicted to the L4D game. Today I received a call from him asking me for a favor that is to purchase the L4D2 game for him using my credit card and then he will pay me back. A single game license cost $49.99 USD and there’s a four pack license that cost $149.99 USD. Since L4D2 is such a highly anticipated game, I’ve decided to purchase the 4 pack license and give the remaining 3 away on this blog!

About Left 4 Dead 2
Set in the zombie apocalypse, Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) is the highly anticipated sequel to the award-winning Left 4 Dead, the #1 co-op game of 2008. This co-operative action horror FPS takes you and your friends through the cities, swamps and cemeteries of the Deep South, from Savannah to New Orleans across five expansive campaigns.

You’ll play as one of four new survivors armed with a wide and devastating array of classic and upgraded weapons. In addition to firearms, you’ll also get a chance to take out some aggression on infected with a variety of carnage-creating melee weapons, from chainsaws to axes and even the deadly frying pan. You’ll be putting these weapons to the test against (or playing as in Versus) three horrific and formidable new Special Infected. You’ll also encounter five new “uncommon” common infected, including the terrifying Mudmen.

Continue reading on how to participate in this L4D2 game giveaway…
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Last month I’ve written an article on executing any file when application crashed or stopped running. All I need is a small portable software that monitors for a process availability. When the process crashed, the monitoring software will automatically run a batch file containing a few more commands to run. A game server with intensive mod can cause daily random crashes and it’s important to make sure that it auto restarts the game server when that happens. So far everything is working as expected except it’d have been better if I can include an email or SMS notification when the server crashes.

In order to do that, I found a small portable tool called Blat which can send an email using command line. Blat is a Win32 command line utility that sends eMail using SMTP or post to usenet using NNTP. Command line application is very different from graphical user interface (GUI). In programs with GUI, there are buttons and boxes for you to enter the details but for command line, everything must be typed out in a single line. It’s not so user friendly but very flexible.
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I am using Windows Remote Desktop to connect and remotely manage one of my Windows server. I understand that there are many other better remote control software such as VNC but I try to minimize the installation of third party software on the Windows Server 2008. If you don’t know what is Remote Desktop, it is a protocol developed by Microsoft, which allows you to view the display and control the mouse and keyboard of another computer at different location, as if you were sitting in front of the computer.

I never had any problems with Remote Desktop, except for only one annoyance which is if I leave it idle for a few minutes, it auto logs off and I had to re-enter the password to login again. This is very annoying whenever I am reading the log files or the console messages that is displayed on screen. Fortunately I’ve found the setting on how to disable remote desktop auto logoff on idle.
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I’ve been using two service (Feedburner and Feedblit) as email subscription for this blog site. Actually both of it does the same thing which is to email my subscribers whenever I posted something for the day but I can’t really remember how did I ended up with two. All this while Feedblitz has one advantage over Feedburner that is to use the article’s topic as the email subject and it is enabled by default. However for Feedburner, I can only set a static subject which is “The Latest from Raymond.CC Blog”.

Feedburner is something that I set and forget so I don’t really log in to check what’s new. Thanks to PrinceOfAndalus, he informed me that I can now configure my Feedburner account to use today’s topic as the subject. This is certainly a good news to over 80,000 subscribers who has been putting up with the crappy subject for years.
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Last year I’ve posted a promotion for PC Tools File Recover but it is for version 6.1 and the license update subscription last only for 4 months. If you didn’t know, all of PC Tools software are subscription based, meaning that your license is still valid and not expired, you are entitled to all new versions, unlimited smart updates and customer support for a year. When your license has expired, so is all the benefits above but you can still continue using the software without limitations.

Today I’ve just discovered a new method to obtain a free 1 year license for the latest version of PC Tools File Recover 7.5. This version of File Recover incorporates a number of enhancements if compared to the previous v6. It has significant speed improvements in searching & recovery of deleted files and enhanced file recovery quality & support for more file types. Continue reading on how to obtain your free 1 year PC Tools File Recover license key worth $29.95.
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Two is better than one. Well that’s not always the case when you have two wives or antivirus. Most computer experts would not recommend you to have more than 1 antivirus because they are not built to work with each other as antivirus nowadays are very sophisticated because they need to protect themselves real time from being disabled by viruses. If your computer have no problems in running two or more antivirus, then I’d say that you’re lucky and I pray that you won’t end up not able to boot up Windows one day.

However, some antivirus are made with multiple antivirus engines which will not conflict with each other. Most of the time the antivirus company will only say they use “multiple” engine but never say which antivirus engine. As far as I know, F-Secure, GData, eScan and TrustPort uses multiple engines. Using multiple antivirus engine can surely catch more virus but also reports higher false positives. Maybe using a multiple antivirus engine to protect your computer real time isn’t such a good idea but it’s a whole different story if you use a multi AV engine BootCD to scan a computer infected by virus.
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I like the network connection icon for XP that is in your notification area compared to Vista or 7 because it’s very clear and visible whenever you have network activity. The connection icon for Vista and 7 has improved with nicer and smoother looks but I personally felt that the “blink” is not bright/visible enough to know if there are incoming/outgoing traffic.

All keyboards has LED so you can easily tell you if you have Numlock, Capslock and ScrollLock enabled/disabled. I found a small tool called Network Lights which really doesn’t do much except giving you a nice little indication on your network traffic by blinking your keyboard LEDs whenever you have outgoing or incoming packets on network interface.
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