If you go to somewhere like the Android Marketplace, sorry, I mean Google Play, you will find a huge number of backup and restore solutions for your Android phone. The problem is, most free apps available only support restoring the apps one at a time, or in the case of something like Titanium Backup, you have to pay for it. If you are someone who’s modded their phone and likes to constantly keep up to date with the latest custom ROMs, or you just prefer to reset your phone to default settings every so often, having to wipe your apps and restore each one individually can be rather tedious.

Many Android users like to store their back up apps on their computers instead on their phone memory so you have another copy kept safe just in case. There is a useful little utility around that makes it possible to backup and restore your phone’s APKs in one easy and convenient batch operation. Developed by XDA-Developers member hamsteyr, the APK Batch Installer Tool greatly reduces the hassle of restoring your backed up applications and games to your Android device.

The sound effects in Windows and third party applications are cool but can be disturbing and annoying at some times. You wouldn’t want your Windows Live Messenger messenger sound effects to play when you’re at a meeting or at night when your wife is already asleep. It is just humanly normal that we sometimes may forget to turn off the sound but we could prevent all that from happening by using a set and forget free software called Volume Concierge to automatically adjust the volume based on the rules that we set. The only restriction with this tool is it won’t adjust the volume when the schedule is missed probably due to the computer is turned off or the program is not running.

Few days ago I was playing around with a rogueware and investigating the possibilities on what I can do when the EXE association has been modified or broken. As we all know, the EXE association plays a very important part in Windows operating system because most programs runs under a EXE file. Some examples are a .reg file requires regedit.exe, .msi file requires msiexec.exe, .vbs requires wscript.exe, .txt requires notepad.exe, and many more. So now you can imagine how bad the situation can get if the EXE extension is broken which prevents you from a lot of solution to fix the problem. Fortunately running any program from Windows Task Manager that is launched via Ctrl+Shift+Esc hotkey uses the default Windows EXE extension rather than the associated EXE extension in registry.

One limitation which I’ve discovered when a program ran from Windows Task Manager is its not necessarily elevated. Running regedit.exe is fine because every time you run regedit will prompt the UAC elevation window and clicking yes will give you full control over it. However try running the command prompt (cmd.exe) from there and it runs without an administrator privileges, limiting you from making any system changes.

Even though the world of computing is becoming more portable and internet based, there’s still times when you need a hard copy of something whether it’s a photo or a document, and a printer is the go to hardware. Unfortunately, even printers have their own issues while you’re trying to use them and one of the most common issues is when one of the printing jobs gets stuck in print queue.

Quite often you can’t delete the offending job and it won’t let you print off anything else waiting there behind it. Most people will either disconnect or turn off their printer or reboot the PC to get it to work, but it’s not exactly an ideal solution. The more techie minded people will know there is a solution to the problem by using the Command Prompt to stop the print spooler service, or by creating a batch file, but what’s wrong with having a nice little GUI to save you the hassle?

Few months ago one of my client informed me that when they access their website through Google, they are being automatically redirected to an attack site reported by Firefox. However they have no problems accessing the website directly. When a trusted website is being redirected to an attack website, that is a sign of the website being hacked and some scripts were modified to created the automated redirection. When I viewed some of the PHP files, there were a lot of eval(base64_decode code being added after <?php in most of the PHP files. Removing the injected code manually is not really that hard when I can compress the whole website, download it to my computer, use TextCrawler to search and replace, compress the files to a ZIP file again, upload it to the website and extract.

After few weeks, I noticed that all of the Worpdress websites got infected by the malicious code again! What I previously did was only cleaning up the redirection but did not look further into the cause of the malicious code injection. After investigating, it seems that one of my client has activated a theme that uses an old and vulnerable TimThumb.php script when the latest version today is at 2.8.10. Replacing the old tiumthumb.php with the latest one should prevent the website from being injected with malicious code. To clean up the website, I found a PHP script that can automatically crawl all the PHP files on the website and remove any known malicious eval base64_decode code.

Keyloggers is a very powerful invisible software where it is able to monitor every activity on the computer and automatically sending the logs to the installer without the user realizing it. Have you ever encountered a situation where your friend or a family member wants to borrow your personal laptop just because they are bored? If you’ve protected your personal and sensitive files with an encryption software such as TrueCrypt, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re safe because you may never know if they’ve decided to secretly install a keylogger on your computer to monitor what you do. There are some solutions to keep your PC safe while allowing other people to use your computer such as enabling the Guest account or installing a software such as Returnil that is able to rollback the computer to the way it was with a reboot. However if you didn’t manage to take the precautionary measures, you can still find out a list of programs last run or opened on your computer with UserAssistView.

Whether you’re an I.T. professional or just someone who knows a fair amount about how to fix various PC problems, there will no doubt have come a time when you are, or were the go to person for your family or friends when something goes wrong with their machines. If they don’t live around the corner, it can sometimes be incredibly difficult trying to get a non technical person to explain over the phone what they were doing to encounter the issue or exactly what errors they are seeing.

Sitting there troubleshooting over the phone and trying visualize what the problem is and thinking what to tell them to sort it out it is often quite difficult when you can’t see the screen. Tools like Teamviewer, the new Avast Remote Assistance or maybe the Windows built Remote Assistance are options to hook up remotely to try and figure it out but connecting to the other user live is not always possible. If you do connect up in a remote session, you might not be able to recreate the problem because it could be intermittent.