Geek Project: Save A Friend’s Computer!

So, you would NEVER get a massive virus, or trojan, infection, but your clueless friend would! So, be the hero! Clean their PC once it has been eaten!

Here are the things that you need:

Bleepingcomputer.com – Combofix
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/combofix/how-to-use-combofix

Kaspersky TDSSKiller
https://support.kaspersky.com/faq/?qid=208283363

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware
https://www.malwarebytes.org/

You will probably want to boot into Safe Mode before installing and running these tools, but by doing all these, chances are very good that you WILL save the day… unless you have a trojan that has written a “re-infecter” into the boot record of your hard drive in a hidden partition, then… sigh. Just go ahead and do a deep hard drive wipe and re-format, and re-install, Windows.

Of course, ALL this assumes Windows, because if they were running Linux… well, you wouldn’t HAVE to rescue them!

If you DO need to do a complete drive format and wipe, use Active KillDisk, available here:
https://www.killdisk.com/

World Backup Day is Saturday!

Yes, don’t be an April Fool! Back up your data!

World Backup Day 2012

“As we live an increasingly digital life, we can’t afford to ignore the enormous amount of data that we create. We’re well on track to make well over 1.8 zettabytes of data this year. That’s almost 57 billion iPads or 210 billion movies worth! Think about all the precious baby videos, financial documents, love letters, business emails and wedding photos that you’d lose if it isn’t backed up.

When a hard drive fails and the data isn’t backed up, it’s gone. And it’s not a question of if your drive will fail, it’s when. Remember, every single computer component will fail eventually.

The hard drive is the component in your computer that has the highest chance of breaking unexpectedly. A hard drive consists of a head unit hovering over a special disc that spins 7,500 times a minute! One little bump and that head could crash into the spinning disk. And the crash itself isn’t what causes the most damage. It’s the loss of the data on that drive. If any other computer component fails, usually a new part can be switched out and the computer will be exactly the same as before. On the other hand when your hard drive crashes, you won’t be able to get your data back (unless you have an massive amount of money to spend on data recovery).

Backing up is really simple once you’ve set up the backup process. There are a number of different methods depending on how you want to back up, and how safe you want to keep it. You can even set up multiple backups to better protect your files. It’s just a matter of taking the first step of recognizing the value of your data. A backup isn’t just an external hard drive, it’s a plan to automatically create multiple copies of your data.

A final point – once a year is NOT frequent enough for backing up data. World Backup Day was created to spread awareness and to get those who have never backed up to understand how important it is to keep your data safe. Once you learn how easy it is, you’ll be able to backup your life automatically!”

Geek Software of the Week: FreeUndelete!

FreeUndelete

Do you need to undelete files that you accidentily deleted? Well, here you go!

OfficeRecovery’s FreeUndelete

“FreeUndelete restores deleted files, including those removed from Windows Recycle Bin. In case of accidental removal of files on a NTFS (1.0 and 2.0) (default for Windows Vista, XP, 2000 and NT), FAT32, FAT16 or FAT12 file systems this is the utility to help.

Supported file systems:
NTFS 1.0, NTFS 2.0, FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32

The recovered files are saved into a new user-selected location to prevent overwriting the deleted files on the original media.”

Google Chrome 18 is Out!

And it has some cool new features!

Chrome 18 arrives with hardware-accelerated Canvas

“Version 18 of the Chrome Web browser has rolled out to the stable channel. The new version includes hardware-accelerated rendering for the HTML5 Canvas element on Windows and Mac OS X.

As we have recently reported, standards-based Web technologies provide an increasingly capable platform for game development. The major browser vendors are working to further increase the viability of open standards for browser-based gaming. Offloading Canvas rendering to the GPU helps reduce the CPU load of 2D games and improves performance. The feature has been available in Chrome for quite some time, but it’s now finally enabled by default.

Hardware-accelerated Canvas rendering is only available on systems with compatible graphics hardware. You can get some information about what features in Chrome have hardware acceleration enabled on your system by navigating to the ‘chrome://gpu’ URL.

Another key open standard that is relevant for gaming is WebGL, which provides JavaScript APIs for rendering 3D content in the Canvas element. In Chrome 18, Google has introduced a software-based backend for WebGL based on TransGaming’s SwiftShader. This will make it possible for users to view WebGL content on computers that don’t have compatible graphics hardware. Although it will open up WebGL content to more users, the software-based renderer doesn’t offer comparable performance to native hardware-accelerated WebGL.

In addition to these improvements, the Chrome developers have also been working to make various security improvements based on vulnerabilities that were exposed during the Pwnium competition. For more details about the Chrome 18 release, you can refer to the official release announcement. The software is available for download from Google’s website.”