Excellent Free Malware Removal Tips

This post is not for the ones who can afford to install and maintain pricey commercial grade anti-virus applications. This post is also not for corporate users. Rather I am posting this for most common home PC users who may, at times, find it difficult to buy, install and maintain commercial anti-virus application. When I say this, home PC users (my targeted audience) need not feel deficient because the efficiency and reliability of no commercial anti-virus application is beyond question. I have seen many users going down with popular and much-hyped anti-virus application.

Dear readers, let me ask you a few question. Did you notice any of the following strange behavior of your computer lately?

1. Windows loads too slowly. It takes forever to wait for a login screen to appear.

2. The hard-drive spins like crazy when you're not doing anything that requires constant reading/writing operations. For example, you may be reading email with no other applications open except for email client. There's no reason for the hard-drive to spin, but it spins!

3. Desktop wallpaper is replaced by something you definitely didn't install.
4. When searching via Google or other search engine you get redirected to ugly websites instead of those you clicked on.

5. Some websites are simply unavailable. This most often happens with sites of security software companies. The reason is evident: malware programmers don't want you to download any anti-malware cure and so they make their malware block access to most popular security websites likes McAfee or AVG (to prevent you from reaching the free malware removers which these websites offer quite a lot).

If you have noticed any of these, you are most likely infected with malware.

There is simple trick to see if your computer is already compromised with malware. Go to Start, Click Run and type MSCONFIG and click Ok. When the System Configuration Utility window opens select Startup Tab. Now check carefully the Startup items. If you see processes that show ‘something.exe’ in the Command Column, these are suspicious or, in most cases, malicious processes. Another trick to check these is to see if these ‘something.exe’ processes’ path in the command column start with the drive letter of your Primary Drive (means drive where is OS is installed – in most cases ‘C’). If the paths do not start with the Drive Letter, it’s a malicious process in all probability. Uncheck these entries and click Ok to save settings. Then restart.

Install one of the three following three Free Malware Removal Tools after downloading them from the links given below:

1. Malwarebyte's anti-malware
2. SUPERAntiSpyware
3. a-squared anti-malware

Do not under-rate these programs because they are free. Malwarebyte's anti-malware has the distinction of detecting and effectively removing three top most virus (Trojan) threats of 2008, namely, Virtumonde, Vundo and Zlob. Super Anti-Spyware has Direct Access Detection System and is capable of detecting and removing the pesky hidden viruses and rootkits. A-squared has virus database of over 1 million threats, which is very impressive. Download one or all of them from this link, where you get to know about these applications in much more details:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Remove-Trojan-Virus-for-Free

After installing, update for latest patches. Run full system scan twice restarting the computer after each scan.

I hope you will be happy to see the result. Good Day.

Anonymity in the Internet

In this age of the internet, almost everyday we spend time surfing the internet in whatever way. Most of us do this, oblivious to the fact that we are sending lots of information to the world by doing this. When we visit websites, those websites can pick up our ip-address. With this ip-address, those who mean harm, can access a bunch of information about us, including where we live.

There are ways to protect yourself from this, though. There are tons of websites that offer you tools to browse the internet anonymously. Most of these sites use so-called proxy-servers. So how do these work?

A proxy-server is a tool that lets you type in a url, and opens it for you. Instead of sending your ip-adress, it sends its own, and this way you are protected from people who are trying to register your ip.

Another danger that threatens your anonymity on the internet is e-mail. You may have thought it wasn?t such a big deal, but here?s a heads-up. When you send an e-mail, you send a number of things. One of them is the message you send, the visible part that is displayed in your web-based interface or outlook express window. Another is the so-called ?header?. In this header crucial information is stored, and the people you send e-mails to can read this header and extract that information. By doing that they can gather a lot of information about you.

So what can be done to stop this? There are a number of ways to send free anonymous e-mails. One of them is mail spoofing.

Mail spoofing means you use an SMTP server to fake e-mails. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, and it is quite simple to use. You just open a DOS command screen and type in:

telnet

o

smtp.example-server.com 25
HELO
MAIL FROM:
RCPT TO:
DATA
subject:
the body of your e-mail

.

QUIT

This way you can fake the sender details and send e-mail anonymously. This does have a downside, because although your real e-mail address is hidden, your ip gets sent along this way. However, the average internet user will be fooled by this neat little trick. I point out that this is more suited for jokes than real anonymity.

There is a way you can send completely free anonymous e-mails, namely through certain websites. These anonymity websites offer either tools so surf anonymously, as I have discussed, or they allow you to send free anonymous e-mails. You can do this by entering the recipient, subject, and body of your e-mail, and the site sends it for you, without revealing you identity to the person receiving the e-mail. They often put a message at the bottom of the e-mail explaining that this is an e-mail sent by an anonymity website and a little disclaimer. You can check this site for a test.

This is a completely anonymous way to e-mail.

So there are a number of ways to secure your anonymity on the web, with simple tools that are easy to find with the magic of google, we can surf anonymously, and send e-mails without revealing our identity. We don?t have to worry about being tracked down to our hometown just by visiting a website.

Largest ever Online Storage

As Internet penetrates deeper into our lives, our storage drives are getting more and more virtual. Starting with 25 Mb online storage space, google revolutionized it by providing GMail Drive, which was in the order of gigabytes. e-snips offered 5 Gb storage. Think how convenient it can be, you can upload your documents, presentations, movies, music, pictures in these Online Storage facilities and you never miss anything whenever you need them. You connect onto the Internet, log in your account and download the required file. When you are dealing with mostly text based documents, you simply upload the documents in scribd or docstoc, where your document gets converted to i-paper display. You can share it, publish it and download it. Possibilities are endless.

Coming back to online storage utility, ADrive beats all!!! It offers a whooping 50 Gb online storage for free in its basic version. Follwing are Basic ADrive features:

• Universal Access
• 50GB Storage Capacity (per account)
• File Sharing
• Folder/Directory Upload
• File Download
• Easy Search Tool
• Remote File Transfer
• International Character Support
• File History
• File History Recovery ($25 additional fee)
• Zoho® Editor
• ADrive Backup Client

Just check it guys. It's very very useful. Here is the link.

Microsoft Free World

The Linux computing crowd smells blood and wants to make a run at Microsoft’s Vista operating system.

Coinciding with LinuxWorld, IBM, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, Novell and Red Hat issued a joint statement promising “Microsoft free” desktops across the globe.

Well why I am not sad!!!! Let me tell you why. However user friendly it may look Microsoft Operating Systems never let you see what it's doing behind you. Facing a huge law suit in the EU for not making its source codes public, Microsoft is now coming on record about its code as far back as Windows 98!!!! So much for transparency!!!! So no wonder for the ones who doesn't so much like the very resource hungry OS Vista by Microsoft, the above news may sound like music.

Check out for a detailed update here.

Google Chrome

Once again google does it with its signature simplicity and elegance. Google has come up with its browser what they call "Chrome". I have come across many browsers, but when I tested Chrome, I was very impressed. Outwardly its very spartan in its looks (browsers should be like that, some of them cover half of your screen and you are so dazed with its look you cannot concentrate on the job at hand...which is browsing!!!).

It's still in Beta but two things you all must look out for in Chrome. One, its tabs are independent in a way that one doesn't lead other to crash and two, it runs V8, a high performance Java Script Engine.

Google Chrome is simplicity and efficiency nicely blended together. Highly recommended!!!

How to read Playboy and Penthouse in your computer

Surprisingly, you can read, Playboy, Penthouse, Lonely Planet, Reader's Digest ( all fresh from magazine stand!!!) in your computer over the web. All you need is a functional Internet Connection (preferably Broadband) and Firefox web browser. This is how you do it:

1. In your location bar type "about:config"

2. Enter "useragent" in the filter

3. Change the value for “general.useragent.extra.firefox” to “Mobile Safari 1.1.3″.

4. Open zinio.com/iphone inside browser and start reading.

Oh! don't forget to change back the value to "Firefox/3" or whatever you have. And for the people who have read this so far only for Playboy and Penthouse....pass it on to your spouses or girlfriend/boyfriends too. :) Good day.

MS Office 2007 sucks!!!!

I have a confession. I was never a fan of Microsoft. Microsoft's reach in personal computing is beyond question and for a long time user friendliness and Microsoft had remained synonymous...despite all that, I was never very charmed by Microsoft.

There are many reasons for my being circumspect about Microsoft. One great reason is affordability. Starting from its Operating Systems, office applications and even Chatting tools, Microsoft always charged heavily. It just makes me laugh that MSN, who started the concept of chatting once used to charge!!! And MSN Hotmail free Inbox size was 25 Mb....can you beat that? Thanks to Yahoo and Google...Microsoft is now running after us begging for registration to their Live Space!!! Quite a change of scenario, huh?

Another reason, and that brings us to this post, is lack of transparency. Microsoft's Office Suite ( I have yet to see an office that has all licenced versions of it!!!) or rather its latest version Office 2007 sucks!!!! It's resource hungry and offers nothing that open source programs like Open Office or Star Office don't!!! There is practically no reason why people or even offices will spend through nose to buy MS Office 2007. Naught.

If you are with me up to this, you may be warmly surprised that IBM, the one time looser to Microsoft is fighting back into the office productivity arena. They have started to offer Lotus Symphony which has a feature rich suite that contains word processor, spread sheet and presentation tools that combine all the functionality of Open Office, Star Office and even MS Office. This is a real platform-independent-program with an easy convertibility between .doc and .odt. And another great feature of Lotus Symphony is that you can open instances of word, spread sheet, presentation and even a browser sitting inside the same window and work back and forth in all of them (see picture).

This is from where you download Lotus Symphony absolutely free :