Raymond.CC Blog

One of my wife’s closest friend resides in Texas and she has been there for many years already because she’s married to an American. She comes back to Malaysia once a year during the US summer holidays and my wife would be out with her pretty often to catch up on life. When she’s back in the US, the cheapest way to keep in contact is via phone call from Malaysia to US using Skype. I’ve checked Malaysia’s local telecommunication services such as iTalk, Ring-Ring card, IDD 132 and none of them cost as little as 2.3cents per minute.

The only annoyance is my wife has to turn on the laptop, sign in to Skype and then use a headset with microphone and headphones to have a clearer conversation compared to the built-in mic and speakers on the laptop. Her mobility is very restricted and I started to look for another solution. I found Belkin WiFi Phone for Skype which I thought it’s very convenient because it connects via wifi network and is like a cordless phone except that it cost about $180US.

Network scanning is an exercise for identifying active hosts on a network, either for analyzing purpose or security assessment, you may need some tools to help you on performing such exercises. There are lots of network scanning tools out there, some of them are free, some of them are chargeable and some of them are hardware appliance. I will not talk about hardware appliance as that is too expensive for us to use, and it is not practical for a single user usage, unless you are a hacker or trying to setting up a marvelous network environment in your own territory and willing to spend a lot on all these devices.

After perform network scanning, it is always good to have additional features provided by the tool itself, such as services monitoring, wake on LAN, remote shutdown and etc. Definitely, it will be good if the tool is free of charge.

If you get blue screen or automatic restart while playing games, recording using CCTV or using any intensive graphics software such as AutoCAD/Photoshop, very likely you have a faulty graphics card. There can be other reasons as well but the first thing you should check is your graphics card. It is obvious that when playing game, your Nvidia, ATI or other brand of graphics card will be working extra harder to render images to the screen.

Here is a free and useful tool to stress test your video card’s memory for stability.

I’m aware I’ve been swamped with classes, hence why I haven’t written all that much for the blog. But today is a special case, because not only is it my day off from classes but it is one of the days I don’t have anything due either. I’m going to be having a lighter course load in the coming months, making it easier on me to actually write for Raymond.cc, but there is no assurances that I can or will be writing more then one or two posts a month.

This aside, I’ve turned around and purchased a copy of ESET antivirus for myself while I was away, since it has given me officially no problems. Before I was using it, however, I was using Panda Cloud which as Raymond has reviewed, is a remarkable antivirus. Though I’ve had my issues with it myself, I can overall say that I stand by his opinion as well. They’ve just released version 1.3 to download, and if I didn’t have ESET as my antivirus, I’m sure I’d be downloading it.

If you want to troubleshoot a Windows system, definitely you will think about analyzing the event logs from the Event Viewer. Instead of looking at the event logs using Event Viewer, it is advisable that we save the log files as CSV format. After that insert the table in the CSV file, then we can analyze and sort the necessary information with ascending or descending order.

But normally when you read the event logs, you will find that there are lots of data to analyze. Especially when your system is having some problems, even more events will logged into the event logs which makes it even harder for you to track the correct event that cause the actual problem. Furthermore, if the issue occurs intermittently, then you will need to find out the trending from the event logs, such as how many times this event happened, how frequent it happened. After you gathered all these information, then you can drill down the errors and then perform in-depth analysis on the system.

Remember in the previous post I mentioned about how to simplify the system hardening process for Windows Server 2003 & Windows XP Professional system using Security Configuration and Analysis in Microsoft Management Console, you can easily locate those security templates inside MMC console, but if you try to do the same thing in Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 system, you will found that the security template is missing from C:\Windows\security\templates\ directory. So where to get those files and how to prepare the security hardening on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008?

Apparently, the location for the security templates is already changed to C:\Windows\inf\ directory. You can refer to below security template in the directory mentioned above:

• Defltbase.inf (Security template for default security settings of your system)

• Defltwk.inf (Security template for Windows 7, inside this inf file contains the default recommended security settings for Windows 7)

• Defltsv.inf (Security template for Windows Server 2008)

• Defltdc.inf (Security template for domain controllers)

Once I’ve remotely seen a computer running a few antivirus installed together with the real time protection enabled via teamviewer. You may think that it’s impossible because normally the antivirus setup installer will check for any installed antivirus before allowing you to proceed with the installation. It is in fact possible if you know where the setup installer checks and temporarily remove the data to trick the installer. However, installing multiple antivirus is never good because of conflict and also slow down. If you haven’t noticed, those antivirus with multiple engines such as Coranti is one of the slowest in performance.

However with AVERT, you can have up to 8 antivirus engines (Asquared, ClamWin, Vba32, Trend Micro, VIPRE, Sophos, Panda and Avira) and they won’t even slow down your computer at all. That is because they are on-demand scanners used to perform full scan and doesn’t provide real time protection.