Raymond.CC Blog

You may have heard of Kaspersky Rescue Disk which can be used to boot up a computer and scans the hard drive for viruses without even loading Windows. This is very useful when the computer is badly infected by malware and causing Windows unable to boot or is really too slow to do anything. Recently I discovered another free tool offered by Kaspersky called WindowsUnlocker which is useful in neutralizing complicated malware such as a ransomware that makes your computer unusable until you follow the on-screen instruction to transfer money in order to get the unlock code. The smarter ransomware starts automatically when Windows is booted up and even in Safe Mode, automatically prevent explorer.exe from starting and also blocking vital hotkeys such as CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to launch Task Manager which can be used to kill the ransomware process or manually run explorer.exe.

When all hope is lost, Kaspersky WindowsUnlocker can be used to fix the registry to stop the ransomware from automatically being loaded when Windows is booted up. It does not touch any of the files on your computer other than the registry. Once Windows can be started up normally, you can use a good antivirus to perform a full scan and remove any found malwares.

Font that is used on any websites can be identified using Firebug or Web Inspector. However that can be too complicated for some users. I have posted two Firefox plugins that is able to help you identify the font on a webpage but that restricts you to use Firefox and installing plugins. Here is WhatFont bookmarklet tool, created by Chengyin Liu, an undergraduate Computer Science student at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign which will probably offer the easiest and cleanest way to help you easily identify fonts on webpages. All you need to do is reveal or show the bookmarks toolbar on your Firefox web browser as it is hidden by default and drag the bookmarklet to the bookmark toolbar to install.

Most of the popular video players such as VLC Media Player and KM Player already support playing subtitles together with the video. However there is a restriction that the subtitle will only be displayed when the video is played. You cannot use it to play just the subtitle itself. The ability to play only subtitle can be pretty important for deaf or hearing impaired people. An example is Netflix still doesn’t offer closed captioning or subtitles for streaming movies and TV episodes even after announcing on mid 2009 which may take them a year to implement it. Last year The National Association of the Deaf has sued Netflix for failing to provide closed-captioning on most of its streaming content.

Other than just crossing your fingers and waiting for Netflix to provide closed-captioning and subtitles, you can actually use a subtitle player to just play the subtitles which can be easily downloaded for free. There are a few free subtitle players which you can find and download from Softpedia and to make things easier for you, I have tested all of them and found that Greenfish Subtitle Player is the best.

Back when I was using Windows 98 and XP, codec pack is the first thing that I will install after completing the driver installation. These codecs are required to play downloaded videos and sometimes even audio files or else you might end up hearing the sound but no video and vice versa. The only codec pack that I used before is K-Lite Codec Pack and I never had any playback problems with it. As for now, I have not installed any codec packs ever since I started using media players such as VLC media player and KM Player that has built-in codecs. Moreover most of time I watch downloaded videos in my WD TV Live player and not on my computer so there is no reason that I need to install any codec packs on my computer.

What I’ve learned last time was codec packs are very sensitive. After installing it and if it works perfectly, just leave it as it is and there is no need to update the codec pack. Reinstalling codec packs because of some playback problems may not even be advisable. You should probably try to use a tool called Codec Tweak Tool to scan the registry to detect and remove broken references to codecs and filters first.

We have already covered RegFromApp where you can use it to track real time registry changes by injecting it into the process that you want to trace. Other than tracking what registry changes are being made to a computer, it is also equally important to track the changes on folders. Here is a simple tool called Track Folder Changes which you can use to track real time changes on folders that you specify. By default, Track Folder Changes tracks the whole C:\ drive where normally the operating system is installed. You can easily change the folder that you want to monitor by clicking the browse button. Upon running Track Folder Changes, it instantly displays in real time a tree with the list of created/deleted/changed files in a specific directory and its subdirectories. The coloring on the files helps to easily determine if a file is deleted, modified or created.

I have heard about RegFromApp tool for quite some time but never really tested it because I am a very happy SysTracer user. SysTracer is able to take snapshots and then perform comparison to show the differences on the files, registries and applications. As for RegFromApp, the name itself sounds like it only monitors the registry which I think is not complete since I also need to monitor for file changes. Nevertheless, I am always a big fan of tools created by Nir Sofer so here is my review on RegFromApp.

After testing RegFromApp, the methodology is actually quite different from SysTracer because RegFromApp attempts to inject to a process and then monitors the registry changes in real time. Unlike SysTracer where I had to take the first snapshot, make the changes and then taking another snapshot to compare the differences.

Rogueware or commonly known as fake antivirus is a kind of scareware that misleads users into paying for fake or simulated removal of malware or that installs other malware. Once your computer is infected with a rogueware, it will either secretly download more real viruses to your computer which is kinda rare nowadays or it simply simulates that your computer is infected and offers you to clean it by buying the software. Although the simulated ones don’t seem to be really a threat to your computer because it doesn’t drop more malwares to your computer but it cripples your computer and nags the crap out of you until you give up and just pay them the money. Some rogueware is even programmed to defeat or disable antivirus or antispyware programs.

I have previously written about a free tool called Remove Fake Antivirus that is able to detect some rogue antivirus and clean them from your computer. Here is another similar tool called RogueKiller by Tigzy which in my opinion is more powerful in detecting and disabling Rogueware.