Nowadays, most of the viruses/worms spread via USB drives. So, now if your USB drive is infected and if you double-click it to open it... BOOM the virus enters your drive. Unless your AntiVirus is updated till date, you don't have any means to identify whether there exists an infection in your USB drive. Even if your AntiVirus IS updated, chances are that the virus/worm is a new one and your AntiVirus doesn't have any record of it. So how do you decide whether your USB drive's infected or not without relying on your AntiVirus??

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If you've read my earlier post of the Office 2007 tweak, I've shown a little setting change that allows you to save all your Office 2007 documents as Office 2003 documents. However, this setting is valid only when you start a new document through the Start Menu, i.e All Programs --> Microsoft Office --> Microsoft Word (or similar application). Note that if you right-click in explorer and choose New --> Microsoft **** Document you'll still get a *.docx or similar Office '07 document.( Read more... )

Ever wondered if the Guest account in Windows XP could be given administrative access?? Well, technically speaking... yes.

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In today's age of the internet, file transfer is a common practice. However, to speed up the transfer, we compress the files since smaller files get transferred faster. The most common format used is the ZIP file. Later, when WinRAR came out, it attracted many web users because of its better compression ratio than the former WinZIP. As a result, although ZIP files are still widely used, RAR files have a higher priority.
After searching for about an hour on Google, I still couldn't find a better way to compress files to the max in WinRAR. So, I assume that until someone corrects me or gives me a better suggestion, I would use the following settings for WinRAR to attain the maximum possible compression. Here's how to go about it : ( Read more... )

Internet Download Manager aka IDM is one of the most popular download managers today. The best part about it which I like is that it reuses the available connection to start a new connection thereby avoiding excess memory usage. Now, consider a case wherein the server from which you're downloading the file offers say 10 connections for segmentation purposes. However, if you see the download progress window, you see that only eight connections (numbered 0-7) are actually active. Why?? Because that is the default setting. However, if you've messed around with its settings, you'd probably know how to change this behavior. For those who don't, here's how you do it :( Read more... )

OK now most of us must have already searched the Internet for changing the password of a User Account in Windows XP. The most common solution we encounter is using the " net user * " command. Although this method is the most preferred & stable one, it only allows you to change just the password. Now there's one more method which exploits a bug in XP to access the hidden "SYSTEM" account which has no limits to the user rights whatsoever. Here's how you go about it : ( Read more... )

This tweak helps to speed up the Internet connection speed by configuring a special buffer in the computer's memory in order to enable it to better deal with interrupts made from the NIC or the USB modem. ( Read more... )

For those of you who use AVG 8.0, you can back up your update files so that next time you reinstall AVG, you don't have to download ALL the updates all over again. Here's how you do it...
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Wgatray.exe is a process which provides a notification system for Windows Genuine Advantage product validation software. This program is a non-essential process, but should not be terminated unless suspected to be causing problems. It also consumes upto 50% CPU usage at startup... but this is just for a few seconds, so it hardly makes a difference.
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For those using Office 2007, at times you might be finding it very frustrating to know that your file cannot be read by your friend because he/she has got Office 2003 or lower. The reason is plain, Office 2007 by default saves every file with the *.$$$x type extension ($$$ ==> doc / xls /ppt etc.) which cannot be read in older versions of Office. However, there's a small tweak... a setting change rather.. to change this behavior. Here's how you do it...
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Following is a glitch in Notepad in Windows XP which I came to know about from the net. It's kinda weird...
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My second blog... after much thinking, I chose this topic mainly because it is a concept which is in itself, a straightforward concept but the name makes one curious. The practice of reverse engineering is in great use today, but very few know when & where it is used. So... moving along with the topic, let's learn about some basics...
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Ah.. good old Windows or Windows XP to be more precise. One of the widely used operating systems today... don't even think of Windows Vista... it lags.. it sucks... it squeaks... it still stays behind XP in terms of performance... don't believe me?? Check the evidence here

Coming back to XP, its an operating system with a better interface, functioning, software support and performance than its predecessors. Then again, you never get anything the way you want it... so XP's developers i.e. Microsoft have filled with numerous services which are completely useless and obsolete. These services (except those of your Anti-Virus) do nothing but eat up precious memory making you think that your PC is slowed down. But did you know that you can actually stop or even disable these services all by yourself?? Curious?? Well, here's how:( Read more... )