Ever since Windows 7 was officially released, many antivirus company such as Kaspersky, Panda, ZoneAlarm, IObit, F-Secure and a-squared was fighting to give out free license subscription for a limited time because they know that Windows 7 is such a huge success and many users would be on the look out to find an antivirus that can run on Windows 7. Yesterday I got to know about another promotion for ESET NOD32 v4 by PCGamesHardware which gives a free 6 months subscription from ivan_baroveca in forum. If you don’t know what is ESET NOD32, it is an antivirus software package made by the Slovak company ESET and is commonly known as NOD32. If you check out this comparison page, it shows that ESET wins in terms of detection, performance and awards when compared to Norton, F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee and AVG.

All PCGamesHardware provided was a ZIP file to download which contains a cfg.xml file. As far as I know, ESET products are activated based on username and password. Every subscriber has their own unique username and password that can be used to download the installers and also to obtain the latest ESET virus definition. So I opened the XML file with notepad, took a quick look and found the username in clear text but the password is encrypted. Normally NOD32 username would start with EAV- followed by 8 random numbers and Smart Security with ESS-.

Continue reading on how to license ESET NOD32 v4 with the cfg.xml file provided by PCGamesHardware.
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One of my client’s website that regularly requires updating is quite troublesome because it involves uploading at least 10,000 small files. What I normally do is compress all the files into one single ZIP file, upload and then use DirectAdmin’s built-in File Manager to extract it. I had to do that because when I try uploading a lot of small files, the FTP connection will timeout (TM Net, our Malaysian ISP is to be blamed) but weirdly when I upload a single big file, I can get a constant 40+KBps upload speed and never gets timeout.

Recently I’ve been very busy and can hardly spend any time to update my client’s website. So I intend to hand over everything to my client so that I can have more free time to myself. Before that, I will have to make sure that everything is in order and the steps to update the website are all written properly in step-by-step order.

One of the problem that I am facing is I cannot allow my client to use the DirectAdmin’s built-in File Manager because my webhosting subscription account is not a reseller type and I cannot create an account for him nor I can give him my existing username and password. A normal FTP client can do mostly what a PHP File Manager does except that it cannot command the server to extract an archive file that is already uploaded on the remote server. Fortunately I am able to install other third party PHP File Manager to replace the DirectAdmin’s File Manager.
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If you have a website, sometimes you would want to block visitors coming from a country. For example you are running a promotion for certain countries and you don’t want visitors from other country to see it. Other than that, many years ago when I was in the e-book selling business, there are two countries (I am not going to reveal) which has very high chargeback cases, meaning they buy with their credit card and then inform their credit card company that they did not authorize the charge. The credit card company will then reverse the charges, allowing the buyer to get the intangible product for free by cheating. No matter how much proof I provided to the company that charged the credit card, the buyer still gets the advantage of reversing the charges.

So my last resort was to block the whole country and sending them to a Forbidden page that says “You don’t have permission to access / on this server. Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request”. It did reduced the amount of chargebacks significantly and I didn’t notice any drops on the sales because the legitimate buyers comes from other countries.

To block a country using .htaccess, you must first need to know the IP address range but Block A Country and Country IP Blocks simplifies all that.
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I have my own private RapidLeech server which is hosted in Malaysia and it’s very useful whenever I am downloading a file at a very slow speed. I can make use of the server that has a very fast connection to download the file for me and save it to the server and then I will download it from the server. Since the server is located in the same country as I currently am, I am able to achieve maximum download speed. The only thing I have to worry is I have to make sure that my hosting does not run out of the given bandwidth which is 200GB. Once I exceed the bandwidth limit, all websites will be suspended until it reset in the new month.

I’ve updated to the latest Rapidleech v42 pr-t2 because the v41 wasn’t working very well. After the upgrade, I am seeing an error message at the footer of the rapidleech page which says “getCpuUsage(): couldn’t access STAT path or STAT file invalid“. I have tried installing RapidLeech on another server and there’s no such error message. It is supposed to display a nice information on server space and CPU load.

That error is not a big deal but I don’t want that error message to show. There are 447 files in RapidLeech archive and I am certainly not going to edit one by one with notepad and search for the getCpuUsage keyword. So I use TextCrawler to automatically help me find a keyword across multiple files and folders.
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Few days ago there was a newly signed up user in forum requesting for help. Initially his computer had some error messages that pops up during Windows startup and he tried using some third party software to fix it. However it ended up making his computer unable to run any exe programs at all including the icons on desktop. He was very sure that he only changed the ProgramFilesDir value from C: to D: in registry. From what I know, this only changes the default location of Program Files where software are installed but no matter what, we all tried to help him undo the changes he made. I showed him how to run registry editor but he wasn’t able to as he kept on getting the error message “This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action“.

After spending a few hours trying to help and without any success, then I started thinking maybe this problem is caused by another factor which I’ve encountered before in Windows XP. Somehow a virus managed to corrupt the .exe association in registry causing the user unable to run any programs. I used TeamViewer to remotely connect to his computer and tried running this command “assoc.exe=exefile” in command prompt which should fix the problem but don’t know why this command has been denied. I checked his user account and he is an administrator. I then tried to use DougKnox’s EXE registry fix but that failed too because I wasn’t able to import the .reg file since it requires regedit.exe. I also converted the .reg file into .exe file which can imported into registry without using regedit and that too didn’t work.

After 2 days, I am glad that I finally managed to fix the problem.
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There has been quite a lot of complaints about Avira recent updating problem that hangs and counts time elapsed endlessly. Check Avira forums and you will see how many people are complaining over it. Honestly I do not use Avira even though I say that Avira is the best free antivirus because I have commercial license for Kaspersky and Norton. If compared between a paid and a free software, I prefer to use paid because I am eligible for prompt support. So I installed Avira on my test computer and researched for a few days on what’s happening to Avira’s update servers. I wasn‘t very sure at first but now I am confident to share with you on my findings and also the temporary fix until Avira fix the problem at their side.

One of the main difference between the personal and premium edition is the premium edition gets to update the latest virus definition using Avira’s Fast Premium update server. This is true because the Avira AntiVir personal edition gets the latest virus definition from personal.avira-updates.com and the premium gets it from premium.avira-updates.com. There are only 4 premium servers and as for the personal update servers, there are 24 of them. I am able to download the virus definition at full speed from any of the 4 premium servers but as for the 24 servers that are used for personal edition, I get timeout most of the time on 20 servers and only 4 ipv6 servers are working.
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As usual when I was screening through all the new posts in forum to see if there are any spam and also any computer topic that I can help, I saw an interest question asked by Rizzano. He wanted to know if there is anyway to make Firefox auto save password without clicking the Remember button. In Firefox, even if you have the option “Security Remember passwords for sites” checked in Tools > Options,the browser will still display a notification bar at the top that asks “Do you want Firefox to remember the password for “Username” on website.com?” with three buttons “Remember”, “Never for This Site” and “Not Now”.

The first thing that came to my mind was perhaps there is an addon that can do this but I couldn’t find any that can make Firefox auto save password without prompting. After spending nearly two hours researching on how Firefox saves the password, I managed to find a way on how to make Firefox save the login information to the Firefox Saved Passwords manager.
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