Tips & Tricks

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2006-03-22T09:31:00.000+05:00

a blog about technet computer and rlates stuff bdtmz
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80 Super Security Tips

2005-10-19T23:57:00.000+05:00

Whether your PC is 3 years or 3 days old, it faces the same, sometimes scary security issues. Viruses want to attack your system the moment it goes online, spyware is piggybacking with your mail and trying to slide in along with online ads, Trojans lay in wait at every turn and Phish—perhaps the sneakiest attack of all—smile at you while trying to steal your identity.
There are ways out of this mess. These tips can show you what to do, help you better understand the threats and be ready with a plan of counter attack.
It's time to take back your computing life.
Begin perusing our security tips library!
Ads Masquerading As Security Warnings
Advanced Windows Tools Expose All
Anonymize Your Domain Registrations
Avoid Deals Too Good to Be True
Back up System State in Windows 2000
Backing up your Windows Registry
Be careful at public Wi-Fi hotspots
Be careful when reading online mailing list archives
Beware of Rogue Antispyware and Antipop-up products
Block known spyware sites
Browser Hijacks and You
Buy password-cracking software
Change The Privileges Of An Application
Change Your Internet Explorer Layout
Changing Antivirus Protection
Check files safely
Clean up that Boot
Close Windows Messenger Service Hole
Command the Windows Firewall From the Command Line
Debug Websites With Microsoft's Fiddler Powertoy
Disable Windows XP and Me system restore
Don't Sweat The Fragments
Don't attract spam by replying to it
Don't fall for Cyber protection racketeers
Don't fall for fake No Spam lists
Don't get bluesnarfed
Don't get scammed by Online Job offers
Don't open undeliverable messages
Fix Your Hosts File
Free Antivirus Resources
Get A Personal Digital Certificate
Get AOL Not To Block Your Mail
Get Better Security Zone control of My Computer
Get Firefox Nightly Builds
Get help from volunteer forums
How to fix a broken internet connection
How to recognize a browser hijack
Install a pop-up blocker
Install The Updated Netcraft Toolbar
Install the Windows Recovery Console
Intro To Phishing
Investigate That Mystery Executable
Keep it safe on the road
Keep status bar showing
Lock Your Domain Registrations
Log off AIM when visiting other machines
Make a BartPE Boot Disk
Making IE more secure
Migrate To WPA For Better Wireless Security
Opening ports in the Windows Firewall for broken applications
Opening Ports in XP Service Pack 2
Outlook Attachment Security
Playing it safe on eBay and other auctions
Removing/Blocking MyDoom
RunAs adjusts your privileges
Safe Kiosk Computer Usage
Scan Your Network For Vulnerabilities
Setup Limited Users in Windows XP
Setting Up a New Computer the Safe Way
Setting up trusted sites in IE
Slipstreaming Updates into an XP Install
Starting your PC in Safe Mode
Submit Virus Samples To 17 Different Scanning Engines
Support your candidate, not scammers
Turn off your PC at Night
Turning off Outlook's auto-www
Unhide file extensions
Unplug that modem
Update gift PC's
Use Passphrases, Not Passwords
Use System Restore
Use TCP Port 587 For Mail Submission
Use the WinZIP Virus Scanning Feature
Using stronger passwords
Using the XP Firewall
Web site security - know who you are doing business with
What the heck is that file?
When your antivirus or spyware scanner say's it can't fix a file
Wipe data for good
Wireless router security

Spurious Warnings Atop Outlook Messages

2005-10-18T23:53:00.000+05:00

Microsoft Outlook uses a rectangular bar above the message header to display information and warnings about the message you're reading. It may report that you replied on such a date, that an attachment was suppressed, or that line breaks have been removed. Sometimes, though, you might see a very different message—perhaps something like "This message violates the USA PATRIOT Act" or "ERROR: Microsoft Outlook detected. Get a REAL email client!" As it turns out, anybody who can control the custom headers for outgoing e-mail messages can cause such a warning to appear. E-mail server administrators have this level of control, as do spammers, hackers...and you! Here's how.
Outlook itself doesn't offer sufficient control over e-mail headers, so your first step will be to install and configure the free Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client. Now launch Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles, replacing username with your actual username.
Within this folder, you should find one other folder whose name is a random collection of letters and numbers followed by .default. Open this folder and look for a file within it named user.js. If that file is not present, right-click in the right-hand pane, select New Text Document, and rename the resulting document to user.js, answering Yes when Windows asks if you're sure you want to change the extension. Right-click the user.js file and select Edit to open it in Notepad. Then add the following line to the end of the file:
user_pref("mail.compose.other.header", "X-Message-Flag,Reply-By");
Save the file and quit Notepad.
Now launch Thunderbird and start a new message. Enter the To: address as usual, then click in the space below the word To: to see a list of other available headers. Select X-Message-Flag from the list and enter your chosen warning message. Add the subject, compose your message, and send. A recipient who uses Outlook will see an official-looking warning, though most other e-mail clients won't show it.
You can also force Outlook to use red text for your message's line in the message list. All you need to do is add a date and time to the Reply-By item in the header and make it a time that has already passed.
To do so, pull down the same list below Thunderbird's To: field and add your X-Message-Flag warning, then pull down the list on the next line and choose Reply-By. The date/ time must include your time-zone adjustment in the following format: Apr 1 2005 12:00 -0800. The time information will be appended to the warning message you created.
Now that you've seen how easy it is to make Outlook display an arbitrary warning message, you know to take such warnings with a grain of salt.

Windows Vista: Twenty Questions

2005-10-17T22:54:00.000+05:00

Can you change the time without being an admin?
David E.
No. Because of various legal reporting requirements, the date/time stamp on files and e-mail messages can be sensitive information, so a standard user isn't allowed to change the date or time. You can, however, change the time zone, and that's what most people want. —Neil J. Rubenking

What can you tell us about the structure/architecture of this new OS? Is this a rewrite of XP?
Robert Dolliver
When Microsoft first started talking about Longhorn, it gave the impression it was going to do a complete rewrite. At this point, though, Vista is being built on top of the latest version of Windows Server 2003, Microsoft's most robust OS. But much of the core OS has been rewritten. The biggest effort was spent on going through all the code and eliminating defects. I'm sure it won't be perfect, but it's certainly heading in the right direction.
—Michael J. Miller

Have you tested Windows 95/98/NT3/NT4 applications with Vista's File and Registry Virtualization?
AI
File and Registry Virtualization should work no matter which version of Windows the program was written for. This security feature is specifically aimed at "legacy" programs such as those you've mentioned. We can't guarantee it will work properly with these older apps, but it certainly is intended to.—NJR

Will older hardware—printers, scanners, and so forth—work with Vista?
Al Velasco
There's every possibility your old hardware will either require a new driver or won't work at all with Windows Vista. Microsoft provided an "Upgrade Advisor" for Windows XP to check for such conditions and let you prepare. We hope the company will do something similar for Longhorn.—NJR

If I try out Beta 1 on my home computer, what kind of functionality will I lose?
Alice Parker
The beta is "not meant for use on production systems." Translated, that means that you shouldn't install it on a system that contains any irreplaceable programs or data. Just about any functionality might not work, and many features aren't implemented completely. The product looks pretty good and includes most of the expected elements, but you shouldn't depend on it.—NJR

Will Windows Vista dual-boot with Windows XP?
Parthasarathy Mandayam
Yes, even the beta version will dual-boot. Use a partitioning utility to create an area of unused disk space into which Beta 1 will install, then install by booting from the Beta 1 CD. (If you start the install from within Windows XP, you won't be able to format and use that unallocated space.) Run the install as usual. Our observation is that when you boot to XP, you'll see two OS-selection prompts, one from Beta 1 and one from XP. But you can definitely boot either operating system. Note, however, that the beta does not install as an upgrade; you shouldn't count on being able to uninstall it if you install it over an existing Windows XP.—NJR

When you do a search in Vista, will the results appear as you type, as with Apple's Spotlight?
Douglas Decarme
Yes, the results appear right away. As with many third-party search tools, each character you type narrows down the list to items that begin with what you've typed up to that point.—NJR

Windows XP's search engine often failed to find files. Will Vista be any better?
Bob Smith
XP's search is incredibly mediocre—and that's being kind. Vista's search will be a huge improvement. Whether it will be better than the indexed desktop search tools from X1, Yahoo!, Google, and so on is questionable, though. On the other hand, it will likely be more tightly integrated into the OS than those other tools can be.

We use a number of 16-bit utilities. Will 16-bit apps run in the Vista environment?
Michael Hartry
We've tested some 16-bit apps and they do run, so there's a fair chance yours will work, too. But you'll definitely want to test them, because the programs won't be allowed to compromise the operating system's security.

Will I be able to install Vista on a Celeron 466-MHz PC?
Nikhil Baxi
Microsoft's stated requirements include a "mainstream Intel or AMD processor," which fits the Celeron. But the requirements also insist on 512MB RAM and the "designed for Windows XP" logo. I'm not sure your Celeron will meet that last condition, but Vista might work anyway.

What is your estimate on the time it would take to deploy the new OS, and how much employee training is needed?
PM
It very much depends on your environment, but deployment should be much easier. You install and set up Vista using a single image file, and in some cases you can even add and remove features individually from the image file. The base OS won't require a lot of retraining, but of course there are differences. We'll know more when we see the final UI in Beta 2 (expected in early 2006)

Will the image-based install replace Ghost?
Robert Royce
No, that's not its purpose. Big companies will use a deployment tool called (at present) XImage to build and maintain their company-specific installation images, but the average user won't have much to do with these images after the initial installation

How well will drive defrag and drive cleanup work?
Rodney Hall
How well things will work and other performance issues can't be answered now. The beta is definitely not performance-tuned. Wait for Beta 2 at least.

Will there be a "classic" view so you can retain the Windows 2000 look and feel?
Paul Wigutow
Yes. Systems without the graphics power to run Aero or Aero Glass will automatically use the classic view. But you can choose to use it in any case, regardless of hardware.

If you do things like change the screen resolution or move the taskbar, will they affect all user accounts on the PC or just the account that made the change?
Robby Criswell
That depends. By observation, the taskbar position is retained on a per-user basis. But the screen resolution (at least in Beta 1) is global—change it for one user and you change it for all

Please explain what WinFS is and what it will provide. What is the difference between NTFS and WinFS?
Kurt Moskal
WinFS (Windows Future Storage) is a database-backed layer on top of NTFS. Or rather, it will be if and when Microsoft releases it. The average user won't see it; it's the kind of feature that makes a difference only to developers. Assuming WinFS does reach release, it may change the way we use the file system . . . or not. Using it, a developer can cause any object to be treated as part of the file system, including objects inside standard files.—NJR

Windows XP indexing caused a fair amount of overhead. Is this improved in Vista?
Michael Sexauer
There's some overhead with any indexing, but Vista's speed seemed reasonable on a notebook. It's certainly better than the basic indexing service in XP (but then, so are Windows Desktop Search, Google Desktop Search, Yahoo! Search, and X1).

Is Giant AntiSpyware included in Vista?
John Lanier
Microsoft has stated only that there will be additional spyware protection in Beta 2 or later. Since the company bought the rights to Giant's product (what's now Microsoft AntiSpyware), we're guessing that this product will be at least part of that protection. But Microsoft isn't saying.

Is Windows Vista a 64-bit operating system?
Dale Linneman
Microsoft has stated that the 64-bit edition will be released on the same schedule as the 32-bit edition, and that there will be very little difference other than the obvious ability to run 64-bit programs.

Font Size in Balloons

2005-10-16T00:56:00.000+05:00

I like using the "comment" feature in Microsoft Word, especially when typing notes for a presentation. The comment box can help to remind you of additional information. But I'd like to increase the font size within the comment box. Is there any way to do this?
Walter Koch
If you want to change font size in the comment balloons on the fly, you're out of luck. You can highlight text within a comment balloon and apply many kinds of formatting—make it bold or italic, or change the typeface, color, and highlight color—just about everything but the font size. One workaround is to view the comments in the Reviewing Pane. If the Reviewing toolbar isn't visible, right-click in the toolbar area and select it. Now click the Reviewing Pane button (by default, the rightmost button on that toolbar) or click the Show button and select Reviewing Pane. You can now see your comments with all formatting in a pane at the bottom of the Word window.
But if you want to use a different (fixed) size in the comment balloons, that you can do—by modifying the style called Balloon Text. Choose Format Styles and Formatting from the menu. Look for Balloon Text in the list; you probably will not find it, as it's hidden by default. Click the drop-down list labeled Show at the bottom of the Styles and Formatting bar and select Custom. This will display a Format Settings dialog with a list of checkable items titled Styles to be visible. Find Balloon Text in this list and check its box, then click OK. Now select Balloon Text in the list, click the down-arrow button next to it, and choose Modify. Pick the typeface and font size you want, check the box titled Add to template, and click OK.

Tips and Tricks for Hacking Google

2005-10-13T13:50:00.000+05:00

Extreme Google Local

Think Google Local (formerly Google Maps) is cool and useful? As Al Jolson used to say, "You ain't seen nothing yet!" There are many amazing applications that layer information on top of Google Local, such as live traffic information, crime maps, and so on. All this is made possible because Google freely publishes an Application Programming Interface (API) that lets people create applications on top of Google Local.
Here's a short selection of some of the best:

Google Traffic Maps (http://traffic.poly9.com/) Want to make your morning or afternoon commute a little easier? Before you leave home or the office, head to this site, then type in your city and state or zip code, and you'll see a map that shows you a Google map of your area, with traffic hot spots superimposed on top of it. Click a spot to get details of the holdup.

NYSee (www.nysee.com) If you live around New York City, you can do even better—this site shows you locations of live traffic cams throughout the metropolitan area. Click on any to see the live view of traffic. The page also includes traffic advisories for specific locations.
Zip code finder (http://maps.huge.info/) Having trouble finding a zip code for a location? Just head to this site, click a location on a map or do a search, and you'll be shown the zip code. It's also a reverse zip code finder, so you can type in a zip code and it will show you where it is.
Find cheap gas (http://www.mywikimap.com/) One thing you can count on—gasoline isn't getting any cheaper. But driving from gas station to gas station trying to find the least-expensive prices is self-defeating, because you'll spend so much extra time and money driving around. This site solves the problem. Head to it and search for cheap gas using the "regular" tag, include your zip code, and you'll be shown locations of the least-expensive gas within five miles.

Update Blogger from Anywhere
Google owns the big blogging service Blogger (www.blogger.com), which makes it easy for anyone to create their own blogs for free. And a couple of free tools from Google make it easy for you to update your blog without having to visit the Blogger site.

To update your blog wherever you are on the Web, first download and install the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com). Then turn on its Blog This! feature by clicking the Options button, clicking the More tab, checking the box next to "Blog This!," and clicking OK. The Blog This! button now shows up in your toolbar.

When you're on a Web page that you want to write a blog entry about, click the Blog This! button, type in your Blogger user name and password, and a small window opens that already contains the title and URL of the page you're visiting. Type in your blog entry, and you can use built-in tools for formatting text and creating links. When you're done, you can save a draft or publish the entry right away to your blog, by clicking "Save as Draft" or "Publish."
Another free add-in lets you update or edit your blog when you're using Microsoft Word. Go to http://buzz.blogger.com/bloggerforword.html and download the add-in. It installs new buttons that let you post to your blog straight from Word. After you write your post, click the "Publish" button to publish it, and click the "Save as Draft" button to save it as a draft. You can also edit posts you've already created. Click the "Open Post" button to open your last 15 posts right into Word, so you can edit and post them. You'll of course need to be connected to the Internet to do all this. The add-in requires Windows 2000 or higher and Word 2000 or higher.

Dig Deeper into the Web with Google AutoLinks
Google's search technology makes it easy to find untold amounts of amazing information and maps. But it often takes too much typing or too many clicks to get there. If you're visiting a page with an address on it and want to map that location, for example, you have to copy the address to the Clipboard, head to Google Local, and paste the location into Google Local before you see the mapped results.

The Google Toolbar AutoLinks feature eliminates all those steps. A little-used feature of the Google Toolbar, it searches every page you visit, looking for addresses, VIN (Vehicle Information Number) numbers, book ISBN numbers (every book is identified by a unique ISBN number), and more. Then it creates a link on the page itself for each piece of information it finds. Click an autolinked address, for example, and you'll immediately be sent to a map of the location in Google Local. Click an ISBN number, and you're sent to the Amazon page about the book.
To use the feature, download and install the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com). Then turn on its AutoLink feature by clicking the Options button, clicking the Browsing tab, checking the box next to AutoLink, and clicking OK.

Now whenever you're on a page in which you want to dig deeper, click the AutoLink button. It creates links to whatever it can and highlights those links on the page. It also creates a list of every AutoLink on a page, as shown in the nearby figure

Tips and Tricks for Hacking Google

2005-10-13T13:47:00.000+05:00

Other Google Services

Browse Froogle's Hidden Directory
Froogle (http://froogle.google.com) is a great place to find deals on just about anything you want to buy online. Type in a product name or type of product, and you'll find links to the products for sale, allowing you to compare prices and features. But Froogle has one problem compared to other price-comparison sites such as PriceGrabber (www.pricegrabber.com) or NextTag (www.nextag.com). It apparently doesn't have a directory, so you can't browse for products—you can only search using the usual bare-bones Google search.
In fact, though, there is a hidden Froogle directory you can browse. Get to it at http://froogle.google.com/froogle/?cat=0, pictured in the nearby screen.
The directory works like any Web directory. Click to categories and subcategories to find the products you want. What makes the directory particularly useful is that when you browse through it, you can do highly targeted searches. When you're at a category or subcategory and you do a search, you're searching only within that category or subcategory, instead of all of Froogle, making it easier to find your desired product quickly.

Turn Your Google Homepage into an RSS Reader
Google's new Personalized Home page is a departure from the classic, bare-bones Google screen. Similar to Yahoo!'s My Yahoo feature, it includes customized news, stocks, weather, and other information. But its best feature may be its ability to become a simple-to-use RSS reader so that you can keep up with your favorite blogs and other RSS feeds.
If you haven't yet created your Google Personalized Home page, go to Google and click "Personalized Home" at the top of the page. If you have a Google account, you'll have to sign in. If you haven't yet created a Google account, you'll be prompted to do so.
Once you create your account, go to www.google.com. It won't be the usual bare-bones screen. There will be a variety of news and content there. To add new sources of content, click "Add Content" and click the category and type of content you want to add, for example, news from the New York Times or Movies information. But the amount of content you can add like this is relatively limited compared with all the information available on the Web. The real power of the page is in its ability to display RSS feeds.
To add an RSS feed, click "Add Content" and then "Create a Section." If you know the URL of the feed, type it into the box and click Go. The feed will now automatically be added to your Personalized Home page. Under the feed will be the headlines of posts; click on any head to see the full article in the Web site where it originated.
It's easy to rearrange feeds on your page; you can drag the entire feed to any location on the page by moving your mouse to the right of its name until a four-headed arrow appears, then dragging it to where you want it to be. To change the number of headlines that appear on your page from the feed, click "edit" next to the name of the feed and select the number of headlines you want displayed (you can choose between one and nine).
What if you don't know the URL of the feed, or you want to search for feeds? Click "Create a Section" and then type in the term that describes a feed you're interested in. A list of feeds appears, as shown in the nearby figure. Select a feed and click "Add," and the feed will be added to your page.
Search Through and View TV Shows with Google Video
As we were preparing this story, Google was testing yet one more amazing search tool: a way to search through and then view TV shows, including news, entertainment, and more, for free. The search includes not only national networks, such as ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN, but also local programming and shows from around the world.
At press time, no link could be found to the service from Google, so you may not be able to get there unless you know the URL for it. By the time you read this, the URL may have been added to the list of Google's visible services, but if not, here's the secret URL: http://video.google.com.
When you type in a search term, Google Video searches through closed-caption transcripts of TV shows, then displays a list of shows that contains the term in the transcripts. Click the show for more details, including the date and time it was broadcast. In some instances, you'll only be able to see stills of the show and a transcript. In other cases, you'll view the video when you click it.
There are several ways to fine-tune your video search. You can, for example, search only through a particular network, by typing "channel" in front of your search, then the channel you want to search, and then your search term, like this:
Channel:CNN Iraq
(For a list of channels you can search, go to this Web page: http://video.google.com/video_about.html#channels)
You can also search only through a specific show, by typing "title" in front of your search, then the title of the show, and then your search term, like this:
Title: Nightline Iraq
If you want to make sure to also search through local news, you'll have to tell Google Video where you live. To do that, click Preferences, then type your zip code in the Location box and click Save Preferences.

Tips and Tricks for Hacking Google

2005-10-13T13:43:00.000+05:00

Gmail

Use Gmail As a POP3 Account
Gmail is a Web-based e-mail service, but if you can also use your normal e-mail software to send and receive mail from it. It's a two-step process: First configure Gmail, and then configure your e-mail software to use Gmail.
In Gmail, click Settings and then click the "Forwarding and POP" link at the top of the page. The nearby screen appears.
If you want your e-mail software to retrieve all the e-mail you've ever received on Gmail, choose "Enable POP for all mail." Be careful before making this choice, because you could end up downloading hundreds of megabytes of mail when you make your first connection to Gmail using your e-mail software. Keep in mind that even if you have only a few messages in your Inbox, that's not all the e-mail you have in your Gmail account. You might have hundreds or thousands of messages in your Archives folder.
If you choose "Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on," only those messages you receive after this point will be downloaded to your e-mail software.
Next, make your choice about what should happen to your Gmail messages: Should they be kept on the Gmail server, and if they are, should they be kept in the inbox or in the archived mail? Here are your choices.
Keep Gmail's copy in the Inbox
This will leave all new mail on the Gmail server, and leave it in your inbox. That way, even after you download it to your PC, it will stay in the Gmail inbox on the Web, as if you hadn't read it.
Archive Gmail's copy
This will leave all new e-mail on the Gmail server, but instead of putting it into your inbox, it will move it to your archived mail. So, whenever you visit Gmail on the Web, if you want to see the mail, go to your Archive.
Trash Gmail's copy
This will move all the messages to your Trash, where it will be cleaned out by Gmail on a regular basis.
Now it's time to configure your e-mail program to get your Gmail mail. You set it up as you do any other new mail account. For your POP3 server, use pop.gmail.com, and for your SMTP server, use smtp.gmail.com. When setting it up, make sure to tell your software to use a secure connection (SSL) for both SMTP and POP3.
Here's how you would set up Microsoft Outlook for POP3 Gmail. After you've enabled POP3 access in Gmail, launch Outlook and choose ToolsE-mail Accounts. Choose "Add a new e-mail account" and click Next. From the Server Type screen that appears, choose "POP3" and click Next. On the screen that appears next, enter your Gmail name, your e-mail address, and your username and password. In the Incoming Server (POP3) box, type "pop.gmail.com," and in the Outgoing mail server box, type "smtp.gmail.com." Check the box next to "Remember password."
Now, click More Settings and then choose the Advanced tab. In both the POP3 and SMTP sections, check the box next to "This server requires an encrypted connection (SSL)." When you do that, the port numbers for the servers will change. For POP3, the port number should change from 110 to 995. If it doesn't, type 995 in the Incoming Server (POP3) box. For SMTP, type 465 in the Outgoing Server (SMTP) box. Now click the Outgoing Server tab. Check the box next to "My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication." Select "Use same settings as my incoming mail server." Click OK. Click Next and then Finish. You should now be able to send and receive mail using Gmail.
Import Your Contacts into Gmail
You've most likely got dozens or hundreds of contacts in your existing e-mail software. The last thing you want to have to do is retype them all into Gmail. You don't have to, if you use this tip—you can import contacts into Gmail from your e-mail software. Gmail can import contacts in the comma-separated values (CSV) format, so first you have to export your contacts into a CSV file and then import them into Gmail.
How you export your contacts varies according to your e-mail software. In Outlook, choose File->Import and Export, and the Import and Export Wizard launches. Choose "Export to a file," click Next, and from the screen that appears, choose "Comma Separated Values (Windows)." From the next screen, choose your Contacts folder, and click Next.
From the screen that appears, give the file a name (a .csv extension will be automatically added to it), browse to the folder where you want to save it, and click Next and then Finish. Your contacts will be aved in the .csv file.
Now that you have the file ready, go to your Gmail account and click Contacts on the left side of the screen. Click Import from the upper-right side of the page that appears. Click the Browse button; then, navigate to the folder where you've exported your contacts, select it, and click Open. Click Import Contacts.
After a minute or more, depending on the speed of your Internet connection and how many contacts you're importing, you'll get a message telling you that your contacts have been imported, and listing the total number of contacts you've imported. Click the Close button. Now your contacts will be available in Gmail. To see them, on the Contact screen click All Contacts.
Customize the From: Address on Outgoing Mail
Many people use Gmail as a secondary e-mail account to, for example, send and receive mail when they're away from their office. That means that they may want to send mail from Gmail, but receive a response from the recipient using their normal or primary e-mail software.
There's a way to do it, by customizing your From address on outgoing mail from Gmail. So you can, for example, have your primary, non-Gmail address in the From field, so that when people respond to your mail, it will go to your primary account, not to Gmail.
Here's how to do it.
Click the Settings link along the top the page, and then click the Accounts tab.
Click "Add another email address." Enter your full name in the "Name:" field. In the Email Address box, enter the From address you'd like appear in your outgoing Gmail messages.
You also have the option of having the mail go to yet a third e-mail account, instead of to your Gmail account, or to the alternative From address. If you want to do this, click "Specify a different reply-to address" and then enter the e-mail address where you want the mail to go. Click "Next Step >>," and then click "Send Verification" to complete the process. Gmail will send a verification message to your other e-mail address to confirm that you'd like to add it to your Gmail account. You'll need to click the link in that message, or enter the confirmation code in the "Accounts" section of your Gmail account to complete the process.
Once you've verified that you'd like to add the address to your account, you can start sending messages using your custom From: address. Whenever you compose a piece of mail, in the From field, choose either your normal Gmail address or the new address you just added.
Get Instant Gmail Notifications
One problem with Web-based mail like Gmail is that there isn't always a way to check your e-mail automatically or have it alert you when there's new mail waiting. But a Gmail add-in from Google, Gmail Notifier, solves the problem neatly by alerting you when you have a new Gmail message. And it does more than alert you; it shows you the subject lines, who sent the message, and a brief snippet of the e-mail itself, so that you can decide whether it's worth your while to open Gmail and read the full message. It runs as a little applet in your system tray, so you don't need to be running a browser in order to use it.
Download it from http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/. After you install it, you'll be prompted to log into your Gmail account. It then runs as a small icon in your system tray, and when you have new mail, it shows a small alert, as you can see in the nearby figure. To view the mail, double-click the Gmail Notifier icon, and you'll be sent straight to your Gmail inbox.
By default, Gmail Notifier checks for new e-mail every 2 minutes. If you want to check your mail immediately, left-click it and choose Check Mail Now from the menu. And if you want Gmail Notifier to go back through your inbox and show new mail, left-click it and choose "Tell Me Again."
Solve E-mail Overload with Labels and Filters
Gmail is free and easy to use, but its several gigabytes of free hard drive space can sometimes turn into too much of a good thing—with all that space, you might not bother to delete old mail. If you think managing e-mail clutter on a desktop mail client is difficult, just try doing it in a Web-based app like Gmail.
You can solve the problem using two somewhat confusing Gmail features—labels and filters. A label is the term that Gmail uses for a mail folder, so when you create a new label, you're sort of creating a folder into which you can put all e-mail related to a topic—for example, family, friends, projects, and so on. A filter, on the other hand, applies rules to incoming messages and handles them according to those rules. Filters and labels go hand in hand—first you create labels, and then you create filters to route e-mail into those labels. So, for example, you could use a filter to route all incoming mail from your mother automatically into the "Mama" label.
From your Gmail inbox, put a check box next to a message or a group of messages to which you want to apply a label, and choose "New Label" from the drop-down box at the top of your Gmail inbox. (If you're already reading a message, choose New Label" from the drop-down box at the top of the message.) From the screen that appears, type in the label name and click OK. The new label will be created, with the piece of mail in it. It will appear on the left side of your Gmail screen, underneath "Labels." Click the label name, and you'll see all the mail you've checked on your inbox when you created the label. To add mail to the label, go back to your inbox, check all the mail to which you want to apply the label, and select the label name from the drop-down box.
Labels function slightly differently than folders. When you apply a label to a message, it doesn't actually move out of your inbox; it stays there but also shows up in your label. So you can have the same message appear in numerous labels as well as in your inbox.
Now that you've created a label, create a filter that routes all new mail to that label as soon as you receive it. Click "Create a Filter" from the top of a Gmail screen. The screen shown in the nearby figure appears.
Choose the criteria you want to use for the filter, for example, someone's name, the subject of the message, whether it has an attachment, whether it contains certain words, or doesn't contain those words. Then click "Next Step." Choose the action you want the filter to take, which in this instance will be to apply a label, so check the box next to "Apply the label" and choose the label from the drop-down list. If you'd like the mail not to appear in your inbox, and instead appear in the label (and in your Gmail archive), check the box next to "Skip the Inbox (Archive it)". Click "Create a Filter" and the new filter will be created, and the matching incoming mail will be automatically routed to the label you've created.

Tips and Tricks for Hacking Google

2005-10-13T13:35:00.000+05:00

We all live in Google. It's more than merely the one of the best search sites on the planet; it has become a constellation of sites and services, from desktop applications to Internet-based applications and destinations, and it's even branching out into offering free Wi-Fi service.
In short, Google is its own universe—and like the universe after the Big Bang, it's constantly expanding.
That means that becoming Google-savvy is as important, and possibly even more important, than becoming Windows-savvy. After all, Microsoft Windows is just an operating system. To do anything useful with it these days, you need Google or one of its many services.
To help you get the most out of this brave new universe, we're presenting more than 30 Google tips and tricks. They'll help you get more out of the Google Desktop search application; Gmail, Google's unique and useful free online e-mail; and a variety of other Google services, such as Google Video, Google Maps, Froogle, and more. Oh yes, we forgot . . . Google is a search engine too, isn't it? So we include tips for better Google searching as well.

Google Desktop

(Note: For the tips in this section, you'll need Google Desktop, Google's free desktop search application. Get it at http://desktop.google.com/)
Change the Location of Your Google Desktop Index
Depending on how many files you have on your PC, the search index Google Desktop creates can get pretty substantial—easily 1GB or more. If you don't want the index clogging up your main drive, you can easily move it to a different drive. To move it, follow these steps:
Exit Google Desktop.
Open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop Search, where USERNAME is your user name.(Note: Local Settings is a hidden folder, and you might not be able to see it. If you can't, you can unhide it. To unhide it, In Windows Explorer, choose "Folder options" from the Tools menu. Click the View tab, and under "Hidden files and folders," click "Show hidden files and folders." Then click OK.)
Move the entire Google Desktop Search Folder to a different drive. You don't have to replicate the entire original folder path—you could, for example, move it to D:\ Google Desktop Search.
Open the Registry Editor by choosing Start->Run, typing regedit, and clicking OK.
Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Desktop.
In the right-hand pane, double-click "data_dir" and change its value to the new location of the Google Desktop index, for example, D:\ Google Desktop Search.
Exit the Registry editor.
Restart Google Desktop search.
Google Desktop search will function as it normally does, except that the index will be in its new location.
Revisit the Past with Google Desktop
Have you ever wished you had a diary of your computing workday—a detailed rundown on every file you opened and saved and when you did it, every Web site you visited and when you visited it, every e-mail you received? Perhaps you need that information because you're a consultant or get paid by the hour. Or maybe you want to retrieve a file or e-mail, but only remember what day you worked on it or opened it, but not much else about it.
In those cases, you can revisit the past using the Google Desktop's Browse Timeline feature. This nifty tool will show you, for any day, all the files you opened and saved, the sites you visited, and the e-mail you received, in a minute-by-minute breakdown, as shown in the nearby figure.
To browse your timeline, double-click the Google Desktop icon, and from the screen that appears, click "Browse Timeline." You'll be brought to today's timeline, with your most recent events at the top. (For the Google Desktop, everything is an event—a file, an e-mail, a Web site, and a chat.) To open a file or e-mail, or to visit a Web site, click on it, and it'll open in your application, browser, or e-mail software. Navigate to earlier parts of the day by clicking "Older" or "Newer." Jump to different days using the calendar and drop-down list on the right side of the screen.
You can also filter the events, so that you could, for example, only view documents, or e-mails, or Web sites. To do so click "emails," "files," "web history," or "chats" at the top of the window.
The timeline has one drawback: For those who use their PCs frequently (which means most of us), it gets very cluttered, with hundreds of events and files every day. There's a way to cut through the clutter, though. You can remove any event from the timeline. When you remove an event, you don't delete the underlying file, e-mail, or whatever. You only remove it from the timeline. To remove events, click "Remove events" on the right side of the screen. All the events shown on your screen will be displayed, with boxes next to them. Check any you want removed, and click "Remove."
Power Up Google Desktop with Plug-Ins
Google Desktop does plenty, but there's a lot it can't do. Wouldn't it be nice, for example, if it would sort your results by name and date? How about the ability to index and search more file types than Google Desktop can normally do?
You can do that, and a lot more—even including controlling your iTunes player—with Google Desktop Plug-Ins. They're free and they install right inside Google Desktop. To get them, go to http://desktop.google.com/plugins/. Here's a list of some of the more useful and intriguing ones:
Google Desktop Extreme
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/i/gdsextreme.html
This is the ultimate tool for power searchers. It lets you sort your results by name, date, file type, or relevance, and offers auto-complete for faster typing of searches and to recall previous searches. It'll also show thumbnails when you browse images. There's more as well, including the ability to use skins.
Archives plug-in for GDShttp://desktop.google.com/plugins/i/archives.html
One thing that Google Desktop Search won't do is index and search inside archives, such .zip, gz, tar, and rar. So if you have archive files, you won't be able to find what's in them. This plug-in solves the problem. It indexes and lets you search through 7z, arj, bz2, cab, gz, tar, rar, and zip archives. It also will search through nested archives as well, so if you have ZIP files within ZIP files, you'll be able to find them.
Google Desktop Extra Images Plug-in
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/i/extraimages.html
Google Desktop indexes and finds many standard image files, including jpg, gif, bmp. But what if you've got .tif, .pcx, .wmf, or other file types? Turn to this plug-in, which indexes dozens of graphics file types, and lets you find them with Google Desktop.
System Monitor
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/i/sysmonitor.html
This neat little applet runs in the Google Desktop sidebar and monitors and displays information about your system—the amount of CPU being used, input and output performance, virtual memory being used, and other things at which uber-geeks like to stare.
gdTunes
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/i/gdtunes.html
If you use iTunes to play music, give this sidebar applet a try. It lets you control the player, and includes controls for play/pause, next song, previous song, repeat one/all/off, shuffle on/off, show/hide iTunes, and song rating.
Manage Your Google Desktop Indexing
After Google Desktop installs and indexes your hard drive, it continually updates that index. By default, it indexes your C:\ drive, but no other drives, and no network drives.
You can, however, change all that—you can add new drives, including network drives, and you can tell it to exclude specific folders, URLs, entire domains, and file types. And you can turn the indexing on and off at will.
Most of this is controlled from the Preferences page. To get to it, right-click on the Google Desktop icon in your System Tray, and choose Preferences. You'll see a screen like that shown in the nearby figure.
To add another drive to index, or to add a network drive or folder, click "Add drive or folder to search," browse to the drive or folder you want to index, and click OK. You'll have to do this each time you want to add a new drive or folder. Click Save Preferences, and the new drive and folder will be indexed when Google Desktop does its normal indexing.
To exclude a folder or even an individual file, from the index, click "Add file or folder to exclude," browse to the drive, folder, or file you want to exclude, and click OK. You'll have to do this each time you want to exclude a new drive, folder, or file. To exclude a URL or domain, type it into the box next to Add file or folder to exclude, and click Add URL. Make sure to include the http://. If you add a domain, all the pages and subdomains underneath it won't be indexed. Click Save Preferences, and the folder, drive, URL, or domain will be immediately excluded from the indexing.
To exclude entire file types, go to the Search Types section, uncheck the boxes next to any file types you don't want to be searched, and click OK. The files will be immediately excluded from the index. When you choose this, files already indexed aren't actually deleted from the index. Instead, Google filters them out when doing a search. So if you decided to include that file type, those files already indexed will show up in your search results
Power Up the Sidebar to Read Blogs and RSS Feeds
The Google Sidebar is one of those features that you either love or hate. When you install Google Desktop, it's turned on by default and runs down the right side of your screen, and displays a wide variety of information in individual panels—news articles, e-mail, clips from the Web, photos, and more.
I've found that most people turn the Sidebar off, because it takes up screen space and is usually too confusing to use. But when configured properly, it's a great tool for displaying and alerting you when there are new blog posts, new e-mail, and more. Here we'll show you how to use the Sidebar as an RSS reader.
Start off by killing the clutter so that it'll be easier for you to read blogs and other RSS feeds. By default, the Sidebar displays far too many panels; it includes everything from photos to stock information, weather reports, e-mails, news, and even a "Scratch Pad" for taking quick notes. To remove a panel, click the down arrow at its far right, and select "Remove." To remove many at once, click the down arrow at the top of the Sidebar, select "Add/Remove Panels," and remove the ones you don't want. Make sure that you leave the Web Clips panel, because that's the RSS reader.
By default, the Web Clip panel picks up two RSS feeds—the CNN top-stories feed and the official Google blog. To add others, click the down arrow on the Web Clips panel, choose Options, then type in the URL of the RSS feed you want to add and click "Add URL."
What if you don't know the feed URL? No problem. As you browse the Web, Google Desktop automatically gathers the URLs of RSS feeds as you go. So head to the blog or page you want to read using RSS, and Google will automatically pick up its URL. Once you've visited the pages, follow the steps for adding an RSS feed from scratch, outlined in the previous paragraph. You'll notice at the bottom of the screen the names and URLs of all the RSS feeds associated with pages you've visited. Select the one you want to read in the sidebar, click Edit, then press Ctrl-C to put it into the Clipboard. Click OK, and then when you're back on the Web Clips Options page, paste it into the "Add URL" box and click "Add URL." If you're looking for an RSS feed for a site you've recently visited, click the Add Recent Clips button, highlight the RSS feed you want to view, and click OK twice.
Once you have the feeds you want, they'll automatically show up in the Sidebar. Click any you want to read, and it will expand out so you can read the entry in the Sidebar itself. Click the headline to visit the entry on the Web site.
If you want to see more than the handful of entries, click the double-headed arrow on the Web Clips pane, and a long list of entries will appear.
(Note: If you want to check out a Google service devoted only to reading RSS, check out http://www.google.com/reader.)

Spyware and Adware: A Warrior's Guide

2005-10-12T08:50:00.000+05:00

In a recent discussion with Symantec Corporation, I learned that Symantec found itself forced to start dealing with spyware and adware simply because users of Symantec antivirus programs really couldn't tell the difference between a system infected with malware (virus, Trojan, worm, and so forth) and a system infested with adware or spyware. In fact, I was told that for the past 3 months, nearly one out of every five calls for help to Symantec ended up involving spyware or adware rather than malware.
Before you feel sorry for those poor ignorant folks who can't tell the difference, stop and think about the most common symptoms. As it happens, some forms of spyware or adware can present the same sorts of telltales that malware can—namely diminished performance, system instability that can be occasional or more constant, mysterious appearance of new processes, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or User Datagram Protocol (UDP) ports opened for no apparent reason, and so forth. However, other symptoms of adware or spyware—such as increased pop-up ads, or changes to default home pages or search engines—seldom occur from malware, if ever.
These days, malware experts recognize that certain threats should rightly be called blended, in that they combine virus, worm, and sometimes even Trojan characteristics within a single executable. But in some cases, the same is true for spyware, in that it may include Trojan characteristics (reporting of data gathered or harvested from user machines has to occur somehow, and some such software uses Internet Relay Chat [IRC] or other instant messaging services, or may simply open specific ports to signal its readiness to serve up information on demand; other types are more aggressive and include back doors or clients designed for unadvertised and unauthorized remote access). Likewise, some adware also includes mechanisms to transfer ads to user machines so that they can be displayed even when a PC isn't logged on to the Internet (and boy, can that ever give you a case of the creeps the first time that happens)!
The boundaries between malware, adware, and spyware are getting harder to draw cleanly, so we can't help but observe that Symantec isn't the only vendor with a well-known set of anti-virus tools (not to mention other personal and organizational security offerings) that is taking steps to exclude adware and spyware using its protective shielding—there's an increasing trend among the major players to make antispyware/anti-adware part of their offerings, and to include such functionality in their bundled products as covered in Appendix A. But where a sense of urgency and importance in protecting one's PC from malware is pretty well understood and established, protecting oneself against adware, spyware, and other forms of unwanted software and content is really just starting to take hold. In fact, in a July 2004 report from Trend Micro (makers of PC-Cillin, another well-known antivirus package with growing antispyware and anti-adware coverage) includes this chilling statement: "Reports now show that nearly one in three computers are infected with a Trojan horse or system monitor planted by spyware. These hidden software programs gather and transmit information about a person or organization via the Internet without their knowledge." According to definitions presented earlier in this book, it's hard to say what's spyware and what's malware because of these capabilities—it's really both!
Microsoft's Protect Your PC Web page fails to make this case. Although the company clearly recognizes the importance of patching a PC's operating system (and especially, of keeping up with security updates), strongly recommends the use of a firewall, and stresses use of up-to-date antivirus software, it omits mention of any need to protect PCs against adware, spyware, spam, and other forms of unwanted software and content. I'd argue that the company's more protective security defaults in Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), along with the pop-up blocker in Internet Explorer (IE) and the more capable Windows Firewall, signify Microsoft's growing sensitivity to such matters. But the company's failure to mention adware or spyware does not mean you needn't worry about its potential impact on your PC, or that you shouldn't add some kind of antispyware and anti-adware software to your personal PC security arsenal.

What Are Spyware and Adware, Really?
You've already seen formal definitions for these terms earlier in this book, but their essence is that both types of software enter a system uninvited and often without soliciting permission. Whereas adware may sometimes claim it's been granted permission because of terms and conditions buried somewhere in fine print in a multipage software license or end user license agreement—you know, the ones where you click "I agree" without necessarily reading all the fine print—most experts agree that claims of full and open disclosure as a result are not credible or terribly ethical. Spyware seldom seeks to cloak itself in respectability, but some kinds of spyware—especially browser cookies designed to profile visitors who return to a Web site—may also be granted user permission through licenses or usage agreements. What's different about spyware as compared to adware is that it gathers information about users so it can report it to a third party. What's different about adware as compared to spyware is that it seeks to create conduits for sending or displaying advertisements (and may also collect user information to better target ad selection based on user preferences, sites visited, items purchased, and so forth) as a primary objective.
How would you classify an item of software with the following characteristics?
• Shows up uninvited, and attempts to foil various potential means of detection (antivirus, antispyware/anti-adware, and sometimes even firewall software). Does everything it can to stay hidden and remain undetected. These are characteristic of spyware, adware, and malware alike.
• Scans all files on the computer on which it resides (especially e-mail messages, documents, text files, and other sources of personal information), harvesting names, addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, bank account information, credit card numbers and other related data, and so forth). Stores all of this information in some covert manner, possibly encrypted. This is a typical characteristic of more malicious forms of spyware.
• When some time or data collection threshold is passed, opens a "safe" port on the infected computer and uploads all harvested data to a server elsewhere on the Internet. As soon as the upload concludes, the open ports are closed and the software goes back into hiding. Alternatively, the software could create an e-mail message, and then use a client e-mail package to send it or employ its own built-in Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) engine. This opens a back door to communicate private, confidential information without a user's knowledge or consent and is characteristic of spyware and some Trojans.
First, it's important to state that, as I write this chapter, no known malware or spyware exhibits this exact collection of characteristics. Security experts also believe that malware is changing from a hobbyist or "mountain climber" mentality (those who do things for fun, or because they can or want to prove they can) to more of a professional criminal mentality. Now that repeated exploits have demonstrated how vulnerable common operating systems and applications can be, professional criminals can't help but recognize serious opportunities to practice identity theft and use that information to steal money from unsuspecting Internet users. Many American households carry $20,000 or more in combined lines of credit and unused credit card balances; without careful fraud detection and alerting from card issuers, those same households might have to wait until their next statement to realize they've been victimized. Right now, the code to do all of the things described in the preceding list already exists in bits and pieces, so now new technology is needed to stitch them together and create a single program with all those characteristics.
Facing a threat of this nature, who cares if it's spyware or a Trojan? In fact, it's a blended threat and one with economic consequences of enormously grave proportions. Although I'm aware of nothing like this in the wild just yet, it's probably just a matter of time before something indeed comes along.
Why Install Antispyware/Anti-Adware?
Financial Armageddon aside, less damaging forms of spyware and adware have their own downsides. From the standpoint of simple irritation (or user's rights), nobody likes to see an unwanted piece of software changing home page selections, resetting search engines, or installing unwanted toolbars, ad engines, or other things designed to enhance somebody else's opportunities to take advantage of your Internet access. Likewise, because some adware or spyware causes system performance to degrade, or makes systems unstable, it's simply got to go. In Chapter 4, you should have gotten the sense that manual removal of spyware or adware can be time-consuming, tedious, and sometimes downright difficult. Because that's increasingly the case as new forms of adware and spyware are discovered, I believe installing antispyware/anti-adware software is both appropriate and effective.
Remember also that there are two ways in which antispyware/anti-adware software is designed to be used:
• Scanning, detection, and removal—This uses the software to systematically examine a system's memory, important data structures, and files to look for traces of spyware or adware. During the scanning process, all such identifications are logged and then reported to the PC's user. Users can decide on a wholesale or a per-item basis which items they might wish to keep or remove, after which the software handles cleanup and removal activities automatically for all selected items.
• Real-time detection and blocking—This requires that antispyware/anti-adware software be running all the time, and that it be allowed to inspect all incoming data on a PC—instant messages, file transfers, e-mail, Web pages (and active content), and so forth. If the antispyware/anti-adware software sees something it recognizes as malign, it can block it from entry and either alert the user or write a log entry to a file. If it sees something suspicious (or potentially risky, like a change to your Windows Startup Items), it can warn the user of a pending change or arrival and require the user to grant explicit permission before it will be allowed to proceed.
At this point, it's entirely reasonable to ask: "Where does antispyware/anti-adware software get the information it needs to recognize known items?" and "How does antispyware/anti-adware decide what represents suspicious behavior?" The answers both come from deep inspection and analysis of known instances of spyware and adware, as does the answer to another important question: "Given some known spyware or adware item, how does antispyware/anti-adware know how to clean up after it and remove all traces of its existence?"
In an important sense, all antispyware/anti-adware software consists of four important parts:
• Software that monitors system activity and is able to intercept certain types of activity or data transfer that might contain spyware or adware. This means inspecting incoming data and alerting users about specific types of behavior associated with adware or spyware (changing search or home page defaults, adding toolbars or Startup Items, and so forth). This maps to the blocking function that requires antispyware/anti-adware software always to be running in the background.
• A database of telltale filenames, Registry keys, and other information it can use to profile known spyware to compare against observed characteristics on some particular system, or in data seeking entry into a system. This kind of information is generally called a definition or a signature because it helps to identify specific items of adware, spyware, or other unwanted software. This database maps to the scanning and identification function whereby antispyware/anti-adware software inspects all files, memory, the Windows Registry, and anywhere else such software might leave telltale traces behind.
• A database of cleanup activities associated with specific adware or spyware items, so that once they're recognized, cleanup and removal can be automated and users relieved of that responsibility and effort. Should a scan ever report signs of infection, this makes it relatively easy to initiate cleanup and removal operations.
• A reporting tool that can gather information about a system that shows symptoms of infestation, but where no known spyware or adware can be identified. (The software can also use the same facility to report bugs or other failures about itself as well.) Although users can refuse to share such data with software developers or vendors, this is a valuable means of data-gathering when new forms of adware or spyware are encountered in the wild, and provides important clues (and can often lead directly to the offending software) that will help in the creation of spyware or adware definitions and cleanup/removal tools to counter them.
Hopefully, it's obvious why any scan should be preceded by a download of the latest software updates and any new adware or spyware definitions: the latest and greatest software and databases will maximize chances of detecting and cleaning up after something new.
Scanning for Adware and Spyware
Assume you've installed antispyware/anti-adware software on your computer (if this assumption is incorrect, you might want to jump ahead to the "Top Antispyware/Anti-Adware Picks," section, where you can read about candidates for and the processes involved in installing this kind of software on your PC). After such software is installed, you should use it immediately to scan for possible spyware or adware infestation. This guarantees a clean start for your system going forward (or will help you clean up and restore your system to a more or less pristine state).
This usually means digging into program menus and finding out how to use a program's scanning capabilities. Let's take a look at how you'd do this with Spybot-Search & Destroy (as I wrote this chapter Version 1.3 had just been released; the relevance of this description will vary as version numbers change, but it should still give you an idea about what's involved in this effort). Here are the opening steps involved in scanning and starting a repair (I'll describe the rest verbally, because system restarts make it nearly impossible to capture screen shots during that process):

1. Launch Spybot-Search & Destroy. I did so by clicking Start@@>All Programs@@>Spybot-Search & Destroy (menu heading)@@>Spybot-Search & Destroy (program name). You can also click Start@@>Run, type %ProgramFiles%/Spybot - Search & Destroy/SpybotSD.exe in the Open dialog box, and click OK. This produces the screen shown in Figure 7-1 .
Note%ProgramFiles% is a runtime variable that translates into the root directory where Windows XP puts programs by default. On an unaltered installation that's usually C:\Program Files.
2. In keeping with best usage practices, click the Search for Updates button next. This will automatically look for, download, and install any software or definitions that have been added since the last time updates were checked.

3. To scan a system, click the Check for problems button. The program begins scanning the system on which it's running, showing a progress bar at the bottom of a window. When the scanning process completes, you'll see a screen like the one shown in Figure 7-2 , which lists an issue with a DSO exploit as the only problem discovered.
NoteThis vulnerability actually refers to potential vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer that relate to default Security Zone settings. Apparently, they're not fixed in the version of IE that ships with Windows XP SP2 because Spybot-Search & Destroy discovered them in a clean, unused installation. That said, the fix is minor, entirely automatic, and prevents a vulnerability that permits code to execute without requesting permission and without using Active Scripting or ActiveX. For more information on this common problem, see http://forums.net-integration.net/index.php?showtopic=9126&hl=dso+exploit.

4. At this point, you can clear any items you're not sure about (or you might even want to visit your favorite search engine and read up on problems by name to help you decide what to do). In most cases, however, it's entirely safe to leave everything selected and then click the Fix Selected Problems button to let the software do its thing. That's because Spybot–Search & Destroy saves backup copies of any items it removes, and you can always use the Recovery item in the left pane to restore something if your system gets flaky afterward. For the same reason, the software creates a System Restore point before it starts fixing any items, so you can always get back to where you started even if your system won't boot; this notification screen appears in Figure 7-3 .
After this point, the software goes through cleanup and removal operations for each of the problems it attempts to fix. For DSO Exploit, this meant agreeing to permit the program (and the system) to shut down and restart. On that next startup (because Spybot-Search & Destroy inserted itself into the Run Once Registry key), the program ran before normal program loads completed, so it could undertake cleanup operations on files that would otherwise be loaded into memory and therefore more difficult to remove. According to documentation I found on this problem (see the preceding Note), the program rewrites some Registry entries that must be handled during startup. I experienced no problems from these changes and have observed outstanding results from everyday use of this software.
Notice that Spybot-Search & Destroy handles all the messy details that can make manual removal and cleanup so much work, right down to creating restore points and inserting itself into the Windows startup sequence. (This is why you had to boot in Safe Mode to conduct manual repairs, because handling keyboard input requires that bootup be completed.) I believe that automated repair is usually better than manual, because it takes all the precautions that human users in a hurry may sometimes be tempted to skip, and because it is presumably tested very thoroughly to make sure it's working (and safe for most systems) before it's released to the public.
Before I move to the next section and talk about blocking spyware and adware, we'd like to make one more valuable point about regular system scans. Our point provides the answer to this question: "If you scan immediately after installing antispyware/anti-adware software, and keep that software updated, why are regular scans necessary?" Remember that there's always a time lag between discovery of spyware or adware in the wild and corresponding definitions and cleanup and removal routines. If you should get infested on Tuesday with something new, and download a new set of definitions and cleanup and removal routines on Friday, chances are pretty good that a Friday scan will also detect and repair that infestation. When it comes to spyware and adware, blocking is not always 100 percent effective, so regular scanning (and clean-up, when necessary) is absolutely essential!
The Online AlternativeIf you'd rather not install antispyware/anti-adware software on your system right away (or at all), you can still take advantage of numerous excellent scanning services online. I'll give you a list of URLs for such sites right after I explain why I don't consider this to be an entirely satisfactory alternative to installing this kind of software on your PC. It's because, for whatever reason, there don't seem to be any online scanning services that also offer cleanup and repair. Sure, they can find the stuff, but they don't seem to be inclined to fix it (probably for the very good reason that such software has incredible power to do harm as well as good, and most people aren't comfortable turning that level of system control over to a Web site). Keep this caveat in mind as you scan this short list of quality online spyware scanners (all of them download software to your system to do their jobs, by the way, but most of them remove all traces of same when they finish):• PestPatrol's PestScan does an excellent job of ferreting out and reporting on spyware and adware (http://www.pestscan.com).• Spy Audit-This is the scanning part of Webroot's excellent Spy Sweeper product, or something very close to it (http://www.webroot.com/services/spyaudit_03.htm).• XBlock's X-Cleaner is no longer available on their own site, but you can still access and use their tool through Spyware-Guide.com (http://www.spywareguide.com/txt_onlinescan.html).
For still more alternatives, visit your favorite search engine and use something like free online spyware scan as a search string. You'll be amazed at the number of offerings that pop up!

Blocking Spyware and Adware
In the previous chapter, I explained that pop-up blockers work by inspecting incoming Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Extensible Markup Language (XML), JavaScript, and other markup or code to look for evidence of pop-up advertisements. If such evidence appears, the browser is instructed not to open a new Window; if no such evidence is found, it's allowed to proceed. Blocking spyware and adware can be a bit trickier because there' s more, and more complex, code to read and decipher and because, in far too many cases, users deliberately (but usually neither consciously nor willingly) initiate the downloads without knowing that adware, spyware, or malware elements may lurk within their contents.
This is where recognition by element name (especially items like filenames, DLL names, or Registry keys and values) can usually permit identification to occur before requests to write such elements are allowed to go through. This works fine for known items of spyware and adware, because they have already been analyzed, profiled, and their telltale characteristics recorded and enshrined in various databases. But what about new spyware or adware that hasn't yet been dissected or cataloged?
That's why certain characteristic behaviors are often flagged for alerts by antispyware/anti-adware programs. Thus, when you install legitimate Windows programs that add to the Windows Startup Items, you'll be queried just to make sure those changes are on the up-and-up. They can't proceed until you give your permission, on the theory that you'll be expecting this interaction when you're installing wanted software, and warned about potential problems when unwanted software is trying to install itself. The same drill applies to default home page and search engine settings: if you jump into IE and change these settings for yourself after you've installed antispyware/anti-adware software, you'll have to approve those changes with the built-in monitor before they'll "take" for good.
Although this involves a little more activity and some possible minor inconvenience, I think it's worth it for the added sense of security this protection provides. In fact, you don't need to become at all concerned until such a dialog pops up without a good reason! At that point, some investigation—including updates to your software, and a scan for adware and spyware—is probably a good idea.
In the next section, I present some leading antispyware/anti-adware products. But with this market sector currently exploding, be aware that new products show up almost on a daily basis. Also check with your current antivirus vendor to see what they might have to offer in this space. Nearly all of the major antivirus players, such as Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro, FRISK, and so forth, have recently begun to offer, or soon plan to offer, antispyware/anti-adware products, and to include such coverage in their current offerings or product suites.

Securing Bluetooth Devices

2005-10-12T08:30:00.000+05:00

As Bluetooth becomes more pervasive, it's likely to become the target of more security threats.
With the ability to act as a wireless networking method between devices up to 30 feet apart, Bluetooth technology is integrated into a range of devices, including cell phones, notebooks, and PDAs. Cars like the Toyota Prius are Bluetooth-enabled, as are a number of specialty products, from medical equipment to gaming consoles. Even Microsoft Windows XP SP2 includes Bluetooth support.
Bluetooth devices are subject to various security threats. While they aren't yet near the level of those associated with Wi-Fi networks, expect that to change as Bluetooth's popularity grows. Don't let the short operating range fool you—in a world where most people have cell phones, a Bluetooth--related risk may be as near as the person in line behind you or in the car next to you.
In order to communicate, Bluetooth devices must first "pair" with one another. While there are Bluetooth-enabled devices you would want to pair with—your PDA and printer, or your cell phone and notebook—you generally don't want your device paired with that of an anonymous user. Bluetooth handles such situations with various security modes, but it's up to you to see that they're enabled. If you leave your device in "discoverable" mode, any Bluetooth user within range can try to communicate with it.
The Bluetooth specification is largely secure; it's possible to pair devices so that information passed between them is encrypted. But there have been problems on the implementation side; a prime example is the Cabir virus, which spread via Bluetooth connections and infected cell phones using the Symbian Series 60 interface by exploiting a vulnerability specific to the Symbian code. Not every Bluetooth-related security risk is platform-specific, however.
Bluetooth's popularity has given rise to a series of security risks known as bluejacking, bluebugging, and bluesnarfing. In Bluejacking, a person discovers and then anonymously sends a business card to another Bluetooth device. Bluebugging is more serious, in that it lets another Bluetooth user connect to and issue commands on a remote cell phone or PDA, using it to make calls, send text messages, or even eavesdrop on conversations. Bluesnarfing lets a Bluetooth user connect to other devices in range, in order to gain access to their contacts, calendar, and more. As users store more personal information on Bluetooth devices, the need to address potential security and privacy threats becomes more pressing.
Thankfully, securing Bluetooth devices isn't too difficult. Pair your devices securely, using a strong (eight characters or more) PIN code. Always pair them in a private location to reduce the chances of your PIN code's being cracked. To eliminate the risk of unknown users accessing your device, configure it to function in Bluetooth's nondiscoverable mode.
Periodically check the vendor's Web site for updates or security patches for your device. Even cell-phone manufacturers now post security patches for their products as vulnerabilities are discovered. Applying these updates can be the difference between leaving your device exposed to the latest threats and avoiding such dangers completely.
Never accept Bluetooth messages or pairing requests from unknown users. The Cabir virus infected systems only when users accepted its incoming message and then chose to install the attached file. Take the same precautions with a Bluetooth request as you would with an e-mail message with a suspicious attachment.
As the reach of Bluetooth grows, it may become an increasingly popular target for security threats, including viruses, hacking attempts, and, potentially, Trojan horse–style attacks. It's worth giving the protection of your Bluetooth devices more than just a cursory thought—and to do that before the first big wave of Bluetooth security risks hits.

Testing Post

2005-10-11T02:19:00.000+05:00

affordable car insurance

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Time and Date in XP's System Tray

2005-10-07T23:44:00.000+05:00

Is there any way that I can get the Windows XP system tray to show the date as well as the time? If so, how can I make this happen?
John D. Leith

This is a frequent request from PC Magazine readers. Fortunately, it's quite easy to get the date (and day of week) displayed in the Windows XP system tray.
First, right-click a blank spot on the taskbar and see if there's a check mark next to the menu item titled Lock the Taskbar. If so, click that menu item to remove the check mark. Now use the mouse to drag the top edge of the taskbar upward until it snaps to twice its normal height. When the taskbar is this high or higher, the clock displays three lines rather than one, showing the current time, the day of the week, and the current date. You also have more room for taskbar buttons representing active applications.
Of course, doubling the height of the taskbar makes it occupy more screen space than before. You can configure the taskbar to autohide, but you then lose the always-available time and date view. If you want to keep a normal-height taskbar yet still see the date in the notification area, you'll have to resort to a third-party utility. Dale Nurden's TClockEx (www.rcis.co.za/dale/tclockex) will do the job, and it's free.

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2005-10-04T02:26:00.000+05:00

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2005-10-03T19:56:00.000+05:00

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2005-10-03T01:47:00.000+05:00

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2005-10-02T12:53:00.000+05:00

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2005-09-30T20:48:00.000+05:00

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2005-09-30T09:14:00.000+05:00

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2005-09-30T01:24:00.000+05:00

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2005-09-29T14:00:00.000+05:00

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2005-09-28T02:43:00.000+05:00

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2005-09-27T23:05:00.000+05:00

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2005-09-27T19:42:00.000+05:00

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2005-09-26T14:20:00.000+05:00

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2005-09-26T01:43:00.000+05:00

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2005-09-25T13:59:00.000+05:00

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2005-09-05T23:28:00.000+05:00

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Clean Your PC

2005-07-24T04:00:00.000+05:00

this tip has been taken from pcmag.com

Even our high-tech machines are subject to everyday dirt, dust, and even greasy fingerprints. Any exposed parts can suffer because of dirt; PCs run hotter, monitors grow dimmer, printers jam, keyboards stick, and scanners deliver scratchy images. But what cleaning methods are both effective and safe? What should you apply when the user manual says "nonalkaline cleanser and a lint-free cloth"? Is Windex or Formula 409 okay? Can you use an old T-shirt? A damp paper towel? Here's an overview of how to keep your computer and peripherals clean.

You can do most cleaning with a microfiber cloth (such as those sold to clean eyeglasses and camera lenses) and warm water applied to a clean, all-cotton T-shirt or a second microfiber cloth. Dry microfiber cloths remove dust and finger oils from glass and other surfaces. Stains require a water-dampened cloth. (Warm water should always be the first liquid cleanser you try.) When the cloth gets dirty, wash it, and rinse it well. Avoid most paper products; facial tissue, paper towels, and toilet paper contain cellulose, which is scratchy, while products such as Kleenex Cold Care contain oil that soothes your nose but streaks everything else.

Most cans of compressed air are really compressed gas (and called that). Some are Freon substitutes (but less damaging) with some ability to dissolve grime. Hold the cans upright, and don't breathe the gas.

Monitors
A CRT's glass face may be coated, and LCD faces are plastic, so they can be delicate. Clean first with a dry microfiber cloth. (A monitor-cleaning brush works for dust.) For persistent grime use a microfiber cloth dampened with water, followed by a dry one. Avoid ammonia-based cleaners such as Windex. Antistatic wipes can help with CRT displays, though today's CRTs have much less static than those sold a decade ago. Vacuum the vents to remove dust; don't use compressed gas to blow dust in.

Be wary of display-cleaner sprays and wipes. Some are not safe for certain monitors, but unfortunately manufacturers don't give model-specific cleaning instructions.

Computers
Almost any cleaner that doesn't dissolve the finish or leave scratches is fine for the average PC case. Laptop cases require gentler cleaning with a microfiber cloth or with cleaning wipes (sold by Belkin, Falcon, Kensington, and others). Vacuum your PC's air ducts; don't use compressed gas and never use a commercial air compressor. Vacuum the keyboard lightly or use a cleaning wipe; rub gently so you don't pop off (or vacuum up) a keycap and its spring.

To clean the inside of a PC, turn off the power, then pull the power cord. Ground yourself by touching a water pipe, radiator, or the center screw on the wall outlet first. Vacuum gently and carefully; a plastic vacuum-cleaner nozzle can discharge static. Blowing residual dust out of the case innards can keep heat sinks and other parts clean, but don't shoot compressed gas from an inch or two away, and never shoot it into a drive opening. Use cleaning disks ($10) on dirty optical and floppy disk drives.

Scanners
Use a dry microfiber or lint-free cloth moistened with water or a mild glass cleaner on flatbed scanners. (HP says isopropanol- and butoxypropanol-based cleaners like Cinch, Spic And Span, Sparkle, and Glass Plus are okay.) Cleaners with ammonia or isopropyl alcohol may leave streaks. Cleaners with abrasives, acetone, benzene, or carbon tetrachloride may damage the glass. Only a few flatbed scanners let you clean the underside of the glass.

Sheet-fed scanners can be gently vacuumed to remove paper lint. You can also use fax, ADF (automatic document feeder), or scanner-cleaning sheets; run these sheets through a couple of times. With some, you moisten the fuzzy sheet with an included cleaning liquid first. Higher-end sheet-fed scanners and printers let you replace slipping rollers; for the others, wipe the rollers with a cloth soaked in pure rubbing alcohol (clear, not green). If you can reach the scanning elements, clean them with a microfiber cloth; using compressed gas might leave a slight residue.

Printers, Etc.
Most print quality problems are cured with new toner or ink cartridges. But if your cartridges are fairly new and your output is still subpar, try these steps. On ink jets, run the light cleaning cycle, then the deep one. Clean laser printers with laser-specific cleaner sheets. If toner spills on your clothes, brushing it off and washing them in cold water might save the garments.

Vacuum the rollers and housings of roller-ball mice, or use compressed gas. Clean the glides on optical mice with rubbing alcohol. Cleaning wipes are fine for the bodies of mice, printers, and cables.

Spray compressed gas into jacks and plugs. Never lick or moisten jacks to improve electrical contact: It helps for a few minutes, but leads to corrosion.

Antistatic sprays applied to carpets and drapes may keep dust from clinging to computer devices. Use commercial sprays or mix water with fabric softener in a 2:1 ratio.

If your first pass at cleaning doesn't unstick a keyboard or make a floppy disk work, it's probably time to buy a new one. This also goes for CD or DVD read-only drives, mice, sub-$100 printers, and older flatbed scanners. Today's low peripheral prices often make replacement the best option. But cleaning regularly (and at the first sign of any dirt build-up) will make any peripherals, as well as the PC itself, last longer and run better.

More Hardware Solutions:
• Setting Up a Wireless Entertainment Network
• The Traveling Shutterbug
• Digital Photography Travel Tips
• Printing Great Photos from Inkjets
• Prints and the Resolution
• more

Text-Messaging Resources

2005-07-23T05:31:00.000+05:00

all the articles have been taken from pcmag.com

Text messaging, or SMS (Short Message Service), long popular in Europe and Asia, is surging in the United States, where it has grown dramatically since the carriers agreed on pricing structures for intercarrier messaging in 2002. If you use SMS only for text messaging with friends, you're missing out on the many directories and other services that your cell phone can access. We've highlighted a few of the top resources to start your transition into the mobile-messaging market—they're all free (except FeedBeep), apart from your service provider's text-messaging fees. Whether you seek travel advisories, the latest ball-game scores, RSS feeds, good sushi, or new friends, these services will return the information you need to your cell phone's screen.

Smarter SMS

SMS: 6107267837;

www.smarter.com/sms

Fire a text message with a product's name, SKU, or model number to 6107627837, and Smarter.com will quickly reply with the lowest online price it can find. This is just a ballpark figure, however—we found that the prices listed on Smarter's Web site were more up to date (and lower) than what its SMS service said.

4INFO

SMS: 44636; www.4info.net

The online directory 4INFO is similar to Google's SMS search, with a few interesting exceptions. You can search sports scores by messaging 44636 with the name of your favorite team. Look up your horoscope by texting your zodiac sign, or check flight information by entering the carrier and the flight number.

UPOC

SMS: 8762; www.upoc.com

Once you sign up your cell number at Upoc's Web site, you gain access to a free, SMS-searchable social network. On most carriers, you can then text 8762 with a variety of commands: .who M 21-25 NY Computers will find a male computer enthusiast from New York age 21 to 25, for instance. Upoc also features interest groups, which let you join and text a number of users at once.

Synfonic

SMS: 16504307183

www.synfonic.com

Synfonic is another free, SMS-searchable online directory with most of the common options: movie times, sports scores, 411-esque directory service. You can also text message 16504307183 to receive the weather forecast for your ZIP code. Cooler still, Synfonic has a ZIP code–based search for local Wi-Fi hot spots. Just type wifi [your ZIP code] in your message to Synfonic, and you'll be on your way to Internet access.

411SMS

SMS: 3109043113; www.411sms.com

The 411sms service offers exactly what its name suggests: a directory-based service you can text message to access phone book–style information. Make sure you follow the Web site's instructions for setting up your phone before requesting information. Once ready, try using the handy language translation service. For example, if you message 3109043113 with the phrase E2F hello world, 411sms will reply with "hello world" in French. Bonjour, monde!

FeedBeep

www.feedbeep.com

You can have RSS feeds messaged to your cell phone with FeedBeep. The $2.95 basic package gets you 10 to 30 messages per month, while the $14.95 monthly plan lets FeedBeep send you 100 to 200. You can track listings from craigslist, catch the latest deals from Overstock.com, or receive practically any RSS feed that's available on the Internet.

MSN Autos Traffic Reports

http://autos.msn.com/everyday/ trafficreport.aspx

Sign up for a free .Net passport and receive Microsoft's traffic alerts directly on your cell phone. You can customize the alerts for various metropolitan regions, as well as set the severity level for alerts you want to receive. MSN Autos will even send you alerts according to a personalized time frame: For example, start getting the latest traffic updates an hour before you leave work to plan the best commute home.

Head Off Spyware, Viruses and Malware

2005-07-19T01:10:00.000+05:00

Baselining Your System

Once you've done the scanning necessary—for viruses, spyware, adware, and so forth—to make reasonably sure your PC isn't operating under a cloud of sorts, you can take a look around your system to see what's normal. Computer geeks sometimes call this kind of activity "baselining" a system, because it's intended to provide you with a snapshot of what's normal for your PC.

You'll find several components of interest when establishing a baseline for your PC. One of the most important components involves taking a look at what processes are running and active on your system right after startup, before you fire off any applications. That way, they'll include only those processes that Windows itself launches at startup to do its job, and those associated with other programs that normally launch during startup (many items in this latter category will be related to the firewalls, anti-virus, anti-spyware, and other security or safety components I recommend elsewhere in this book, in fact). In the sections that follow, I describe some methods for taking snapshots of a normal baseline, including process and file inventories.

Creating a Process Inventory

It's easy to take a process inventory at any time on a Windows XP machine. Simply right-click the task bar (usually at the bottom of your display area unless you've moved it) and select Task Manager from the resulting pop-up menu. To see the list of processes running on your PC, click the Processes tab at the top of the window, as shown in Figure 12-1.

Tip
By clicking the heading button in any column on the Task Manager Processes tab, you can cause the processes to be sorted on that field value. Thus, for example, click CPU Time to sort processes according to the amount of CPU time they've consumed since the last reboot (hint: System Idle Process always wins, so look in line 2 and lower for potential causes for concern). Click again on the same heading to reverse the sort order (by default, the highest values show up first, so clicking again causes the lowest values to show up first). Same thing goes for Mem Usage (memory usage), which can also be pretty revealing when it comes to understanding where your system resources are going.

Of course, unless you want to copy all this information by hand, it might be more sensible to record it to a file. That way, you've got something to compare things with later when you go back to check this list. Because you're trying to compare current conditions to what passes for normal on your PC, I recommend you do this right after startup, before launching any additional applications. Fortunately, the built-in Windows tasklist command makes this job easy; here's how you can ensconce this data safely in a file named tasklist-yymmdd.txt (substitute two-digit codes for the year, month, and day so you can tell when the snapshot was taken):

1. Open a Command Prompt window by choosing Start@@>Run, typing cmd (or cmd.exe, if you prefer) in the Open text field of the Run dialog box, and then clicking OK to execute those instructions.

2. To see a list of active tasks on your system, type tasklist at the command prompt. This produces a display like that shown in Figure 12-2. For more information on the tasklist command, type tasklist /? to display online command help. Also, you can sort the process names alphabetically by typing tasklist /nh | sort (this drops the column headings from the output and then sends the resulting process names and info to a sort utility to sort them in descending alphabetical order by process name).

3. At the command prompt, type tasklist > C:\tasklist-yymmdd.txt, where you substitute two-digit values for year for yy, month for mm, and day for dd.

Note: Indeed you could cut and paste the text directly from the command window that's shown in Figure 12-2, but I go on to Step 3 and have you repeat the command, piping the output directly into a file. I think it's an easier and more straightforward way to grab this information and put it some place you can find it again. The syntax I show for the command writes the output to the root of the C:\ drive. If you follow those instructions verbatim, you may want to move that file somewhere else so you can find it more easily at another time.

4. Type exit at the command line or click the x-shaped close control in the upper right-hand corner of the command window to close this window

Understanding What You See

For each entry under the Image Name heading (appears in both the Task Manager Processes display and in tasklist command output), you determine what it represents and whether it's benign (as it should be) or malign (which means it needs rooting out). Let's look at a reformatted version of the tasklist output in Table 12-1 (entries were alphabetized and some column data removed), which ties into the 16-item numbered list shown after Table 12-1.

Table 12-1 Tasklist Command Output
Image Name	PID	Mem Usage	Explanation
alg.exe	124	2,584K	Application Layer Gateway (1)
CCAPP.EXE	1296	23,892K	Common Client application (NAV; 2)
CCEVTMGR.EXE	1632	3,732K	Symantec Common Client Event Mgr Svc (NAV; 3)
CCPROXY.EXE	1912	6,076K	Symantec Common Client Proxy Server (4)
CCSETMGR.EXE	1608	4,312K	Background task associated with NIS (5)
cmd.exe	2884	872K	Windows command shell (Command prompt window)
csrss.exe	928	816K	Windows client server runtime subsystem (6)
explorer.exe	1520	19,180K	Windows Program Manager a.k.a. Windows Explorer
explorer.exe	2784	2,696K	Child process of Windows Program Manager
hh.exe	2556	16,748K	Windows help program
iexplore.exe	2776	22,480K	Microsoft Internet Explorer (7)
lsass.exe	1020	1,348K	Windows Local Security Authority Service (8)
mgabg.exe	1960	1,840K	Matrox BIOS Guard (works with graphics card)
msmsgs.exe	748	2,944K	MSN Messenger Traybar service (9)
NAVAPSVC.EXE	1992	8,220K	Norton AntiVirus auto-protect service (10)
NOPDB.EXE	500	10,096K	Norton Speed Disk process (11)
NPROTECT.EXE	236	5,284K	Norton process protects recycle bin (12)
pdesk.exe	552	3,620K	System tray app for Matrox graphics card
realsched.exe	2896	176K	Scheduler program: prompts for RealOne updates
SAVSCAN.EXE	300	616K	Symantec's anti-virus scanning software
services.exe	1008	3,504K	Used to start, stop, and manage system services
smss.exe	404	408K	Session Manager Subsystem (13)
SNDSrvc.exe	464	3,360K	Symantec Network Driver Svc (part of NIS2003/4)
spoolsv.exe	1788	5,036K	Windows print spooler service (14)
SpySweeper.exe	1284	10,196K	SpySweeper anti-spyware/anti-adware background task
svchost.exe	624	3,272K	Windows system process to service dynamic link libraries (DLLs) (15)
svchost.exe	1180	4,772K	Windows system process to service DLLs (15)
svchost.exe	1228	3,688K	Windows system process to service DLLs (15)
svchost.exe	1308	27,376K	Windows system process to service DLLs (15)
svchost.exe	1356	2,440K	Windows system process to service DLLs (15)
svchost.exe	1408	3,484K	Windows system process to service DLLs (15)
symlcsvc.exe	532	520K	Symantec Core Library Code (common code items)

System	4	224K	The Windows System process

System Idle Process	0	16K	Runs whenever CPU is idle
ups.exe	572	1,788K	PowerChute uninterruptible power supply (UPS) monitoring tool
winlogon.exe	964	7,964K	Windows process to manage user logon and logoff
wmiprvse.exe	3924	4,560K	Windows Management Interface (WMI) provider service (16)

1. The Application Layer Gateway is a Microsoft executable that provides functionality for the Windows Firewall and for Internet Connection Sharing for Windows XP. I find no evidence to indicate this process may be impersonated or subverted by spyware, adware, or malware, but many attacks that attempt to shut down local security will attempt to shut down this process as part of that effort.

Note: All of the executables that start with CC are part of the Symantec Common Client runtime environment, used for Norton Internet Security (which includes Norton Personal Firewall, Norton AntiVirus, Norton AntiSpam, and various other components in the test installation). This includes entries 2, 3, 4, and 5 on this list. There are no known attacks that impersonate these Norton components, as best I can discover.

2. CCAPP.EXE is part of the Norton AntiVirus system. No documented attacks or impersonations on many of these components, though some malware may attempt to shut down one or more of these components to bring down Norton security shields.

3. CCEVTMGR.EXE provides a general event management registration and reporting service for all Norton Internet Security components.

4. CCPROXY.EXE provides a mechanism for proxying Web access requests within Windows environments where the Norton Personal Firewall is active; it's designed to let the software screen outgoing Web requests according to security and suitability criteria (the latter in connection with Norton Internet Security's Parental Controls).

5. CCSETMGR.EXE provides a mechanism for launching various Norton Internet Security or Norton AntiVirus components at startup, and for scheduling LiveUpdate automated downloads.

6. cmd.exe is the Windows executable for the command-line environment (this appears only if you have a command prompt window open when the snapshot is taken). No known impersonation or attacks are documented, though some malware may open this process to handle scripts if system security is sufficiently compromised.

7. csrss.exe is the Windows client server runtime subsystem. Its job is to provide common windows, thread management, and graphics capabilities to all subsystems running in the Windows environment.

CAUTION: At least one known virus impersonates csrss.exe, so be very suspicious if you see more than one instance with this name (there should be only one).

8. lsass.exe is the Windows local security authority subsystem service that handles the logon process, user authentication, and generates session-specific security tokens that are compared with user and group permissions to determine whether resource access requests are granted or denied. The Sasser worm specifically attacks this system component, as do some varieties of Nimos and Lovgate.

9. msmsgs.exe is what the MSN messenger service users to advertise its presence, and to include a traybar icon on the Windows XP desktop (installed by default in Windows XP and subsequent service packs). Although no attacks on this component are documented, some attacks use file transfers inside the application to try to deliver infected payloads to users.

CAUTION: Several documented viruses use msmsgs.exe as their process names. You should never see more than one instance of this process name (or even one if you disable the Windows Messenger application). If you don't use Windows Messenger, in fact, it's perfectly safe to terminate this process. If you don't use Messenger at all, or if you don't mind starting it up manually yourself (use the Run command, type msmsgs.exe in the Open: text box, then click OK), you can stop it from running on startup as follows: Start@@>All Programs@@>Windows Messenger@@>Tools@@>Preferences and then uncheck the check box that reads "Run Windows Messenger when Windows starts."

10. NAVAPSVC.EXE is Norton AntiVirus's auto-protect service; its job is to screen inbound and outbound file transfers, e-mail attachments, and so forth to block viruses from entering or leaving your PC. No known attacks are documented, but this is clearly something many types of malware will try to turn off if possible.

11. NOPDB.EXE is associated with the Norton Speed Disk utility in Norton SystemWorks; its job is to permit Speed Disk to launch during startup when the user requests this service. No known attacks are documented, nor any attempts to turn off or defeat this service. You won't see this on your machine unless it's also running Norton SystemWorks.

12. NPROTECT.EXE is associated with the Norton Protected Recycle Bin set up as part of Norton SystemWorks; its job is to prevent the Recycle Bin from being emptied without obtaining user confirmation. No known attacks are documented, nor any attempts to turn off or defeat this service.

13. smss.exe is a Microsoft process involved with creating, managing, and deleting user sessions.

CAUTION: Numerous viruses run using the smss.exe image name, so be sure to preserve only that version that resides inside the C:\Windows\System32 folder (all others are illegitimate).

14. spoolsv.exe is the Microsoft print spooler service, which stores pending print jobs on your PC until they can be sent to the designated printer for output.

CAUTION: Numerous viruses run using the spoolsv.exe image name, so preserve only that version that resides inside the C:\Windows\System32 folder (you can even end this process, too—you just won't be able to print unless you manually restart the Printer Spooler service or reboot your machine).

15. svchost.exe runs as a process that supports common Windows dynamic link libraries (DLLs) for lots of services. In fact, you'll see one instance of this executable in the processes display for each such group of services that shares a common set of DLLs in the Windows runtime environment. Figure 12-3 shows tasklist output that's been crafted to document what services are involved in each of the six svchost.exe instances present in svchost that appear therein—notice the wide variety and large number of services involved. No known attacks or attempts to turn off this process are documented, but it too should be found only resident in the C:\Windows\System32 folder (though you will find copies in service pack or CD image folders as well).

Note: The precise command syntax in Figure 12-3 is tasklist /svc /fi "imagename eq svchost.exe". Restated in something closer to English, this means show me all the DLLs for the services that every instance of the svchost.exe file uses. What you see in that display are various instances of svchost, where the first relates to distributed communications and terminal services, the second to remote procedure call services, the third to a whole bunch of services that call common presentation dlls, the fourth to DNS caching behavior, the fifth to various kinds of remote access, and the sixth to a still digital imaging service that runs in Windows XP.

16. wmiprvse.exe is a manifestation of Microsoft's system management application program interfaces (APIs) at the runtime level; it's a rearchitected version of the WMI interface introduced in Windows XP (and also supported in Windows Server 2003) to support all WMI services through a single provider service. That's why you'll find it running on your system someday because you've recently installed an application that draws on WMI support, or a Microsoft update that does likewise. As with svchost.exe, you will occasionally encounter multiple instances of this software running at the same time—this is normal.

CAUTION: Some viruses that impersonate this service have been reported—most notably Sonebot.B, Gletta.A.Trojan, and various flavors of Sasser. The only valid instance of this code resides within the C:\Windows\System32\wbem directory.

By getting a sense of what's normal for your system, you can use Task Manager or the tasklist command at any time you've got reason to be concerned about your system to check one snapshot against the other. If you do your homework on the initial snapshot, you'll need to check up only on new items to figure out where they're coming from, and what kinds of trouble they might portend, if any.

This probably leads to a perfectly valid question: "How do I find out about process names on my PC?" Indeed, my own listings here are examples that will contain some (but not all) of the items that will show up on your machine. To document your unique collection of processes, open Task Manager and check the Processes tab, or create your own tasklist output file as described earlier. Then, you can use the various entries in the Image Name column on Google, Yahoo!, or the search engine of your choice to learn more about these processes—especially, whether they should be causes for concern or otherwise. I got my information from a whole variety of sources online, along with an excellent tool from Liutilities called WinTasks 5 Professional (see the "Resources" section toward the end of the chapter for more details on this offering).

Note: To get a definite sense of what "Safe mode" really means for Windows XP, try booting your machine into that mode (hold the F8 key down just as Windows starts booting and then select Boot in Safe mode from the resulting character mode menu that appears on your screen). Whereas my normal Windows XP boot shows 30-plus processes, in Safe mode I get only 12 (not counting taskmgr.exe, which runs only to show me the other process names), and those include only basic system elements necessary for operation: csrss.exe, explorer.exe, lsass.exe, services.exe, smss.exe, System, System Idle Process, and winlogon.exe, plus "only" three instances of svchost.exe! This really shows how few elements are needed to run a minimal, stripped-down version of Windows.

Rough and Ready Performance Metrics

Although Windows XP does include a marvelous utility called Performance (it's in the Administrative Tools folder in the Control Panel) that you can use to measure system performance very accurately, you don't really need that tool to get a sense of what's normal on your PC. Instead, you can use a watch with a second hand because pinpoint accuracy isn't really overwhelmingly important (hence the title for this section).

Instead, create a text file or take notes with results from timing typical activities on your machine. They should include some or all of the following items:

• Normal startup time (cold boot)—Start timing as soon as you turn on the power to your PC and stop when the Windows login prompt appears (if applicable), or when the booting process has completed (if not).

• Normal restart time (warm boot)—Restart Windows XP (Start@@>Turn Off Computer and then click the Restart button) and start timing simultaneously; stop timing when the Windows login prompt appears (if applicable), or when the booting process has completed (if not).

• Start time for commonly used applications—These might include Office components, Internet Explorer (or whatever Web browser you use), and other applications that take at least a short time to launch (to give you enough time to have something to measure). Launch them from the Start@@>All Programs menu sequence and start timing as you click the application name on its pop-up menu. Stop timing when the application is ready for your input.

By comparing your baseline timings with those taken at another time, you'll be able to tell if your machine is running more slowly than usual or not.

Other Snapshots Worth Gathering

Tip
Finding differences isn't necessarily a bad thing-especially if you've installed a security update or a service pack since the last snapshot (in that case, you should expect to see things change so much that you'll really want to create a new baseline after performing such actions). The same thing applies whenever you install new or update existing software as well: make a new baseline! In general, it's only when you find instances of familiar file names in directories where they're not supposed to be (or in new directories for which you have no idea where they came from.) that you really have cause for concern.

Most professionals who go looking for signs of unwanted or malicious activity also depend on comparing before and after snapshots of key directories in the Windows file system and in the Windows registry. I touched on some of the techniques and tools involved in Chapter 4 of this book. If you decide you might want to use them on your own system, you'll need to get familiar with some new tools and techniques yourself.

The Windows directories where untoward things often happen include the %windir% directory (this environment variable usually points to C:\Windows on most Windows XP computers, but to C:\WINNT on Windows NT and 2000) and the %windir%\System32 subdirectory (a.k.a. C:\Windows\System32). By monitoring the contents of these directories, you can sometimes discover signs of unwanted software at work. By following the same steps to create a baseline snapshot now, and a comparison snapshot later, you can create a basis for investigation and see what's changed. Here's how:

1. Open a Command prompt window (Start@@>Run, type cmd.exe in the Open text field of the Run dialog box, and then click OK).

2. Type the following at the command line: dir %windir% /o:-d > winfiles-yymmdd.txt, where yy is the two-digit year, mm the two-digit month, and dd the two-digit day. Note that this captures only the files in this directory (you'd use the /s -d attribute instead of /a: -d to capture subdirectory data as well).

3. Type the following at the command line: dir %windir%\System32 /s /o:-d > win32files-yymmdd.txt, where yy is the two-digit year, mm the two-digit month, and dd the two-digit day. Note that this captures all the files in the . . .\System 32 directory and all of its subdirectories, so this can be a big file.

Tip
If you want to be sure you're comparing "after" snapshots to current known good working "before" snapshots, it's essential to rebuild your baseline snapshots every time you change something about your PC. This means after installing new applications or utilities, service packs or security updates; adding new (or removing old) hardware; and so on. All of these things change the Windows registry, file system, and the list of processes active on your PC. Without keeping up with changes, you may end up chasing phantoms instead of real problems. Thus, it might be a good idea to get in the habit of building new baselines each time you make a system change, and at least once a month (perhaps on the same day of each month, driven by an Outlook reminder?) to be doubly darn sure you're working from the latest and greatest known good working baseline of your PC.

If you use this same process for your baseline and then when you're conducting an investigation, compare the various files for the different dates involved, and you may be able to spot some differences. Files will be listed newest first, so hopefully, you won't have to look too deeply into any list to see new or unexpected items in the "after" snapshots that are missing from the "before" snapshots.

You can also apply the same technique to your Windows registry, but it takes a bit more effort. The idea is to snapshot and export the contents of major registry keys (HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT or HKCR, HKEY_CURRENT_USER or HKCU, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKLM, and so forth) or subkeys subject to change—for example, the HKLM\SOFTWARE key is the item to grab for before and after snapshots when installing software on your PC—to provide a basis for comparison.

If you don't want to spring for one of the tools I recommend in Chapter 4 (such as Registry Watch or Active Registry Monitor, which can perform such comparisons for you more or less automatically), you'll have to do a certain amount of setup and legwork to implement my suggestions (see also the next section, which specifically addresses issues involved in comparing snapshots to one another). Here's how to snapshot your major registry keys:

1. Launch the Windows Registry Editor: Start@@>Run, type regedit.exe in the Open dialog box, and then click OK.

2. Highlight the first major key in the registry, HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, as shown in Figure 12-4.

3. Click File and then Export in the resulting pull-down menu. The Export Registry File window appears, as depicted in Figure 12-5. Notice the file naming convention I used: RegSnap-HKCR-yymmdd.reg. This helps you to identify and reimport that data should you ever need to and provides the basis for automated comparisons explained in the next section.

Note: The Registry Editor saves exported files by default in .reg format. That's good, because if you want to read data exported from your registry, or want the ability to restore only specific, individual keys and values, stick with the default registry file type (.reg extension). You will find other sources that recommend that you save such snapshots in hive file format (which usually take the .hiv extension) but if you do so, please follow other instructions carefully, realizing that you won't be able to read the contents of those files (even using WinDiff they're pretty incomprehensible for the most part) and that you can import only entire hive files in one go. In addition to being human readable, you can also pick and choose the keys and/or values you want to import from .reg files into your registry, which makes them preferable for most uses, in my opinion.

4. By default, the file is saved in your My Documents folder, but you can navigate inside the My Computer or My Network controls to store its contents elsewhere. Click the Save button, and you're done.

5. Repeat for the other major registry keys (HKCU, HKLM, and HKU—you don't need to capture HKCC because it's dynamically rebuilt each time Windows starts up).

6. Close the Registry Editor (click the x in the upper right-hand corner, or use Registry@@>Exit menu commands).

Here again, you'll need to repeat this exercise later, so you'll have "after" snapshots to compare to your original baselines.

Comparing Differences

If you've a mind to avoid lots of reading and manual labor when comparing differences between one snapshot file and another, you're not alone. In fact, Microsoft includes a special tool called Windiff.exe that's designed to compare two versions of the same file (or two similar files, as will be the case here) to one another.

INSTALLING WINDIFF

WinDiff isn't installed as part of Windows XP (or other Windows versions) by default. You have to load your Windows XP CD or your latest Service Pack CD and install it from there. Here's how:

1. Insert the CD into your CD drive; the autorun program on the CD should launch the Windows XP install utility, as show in Figure 12-6.

2. Click the "Perform additional tasks" link that appears in Figure 12-6 and then click the Browse this CD button (this produces the display shown in Figure 12-7).

3. Open the SUPPORT folder to access the setup utility for the Windows Support Tools, as shown in Figure 12-8.

4. Double-click SETUP.EXE to launch the Windows Support Tools installation wizard. It will lead you through the rest of the installation process. If you decide you don't want to install the complete collection of Windows Support Tools, you can elect to install Typical Tools (rather than the complete set, which also includes Optional Tools) because WinDiff is included in the former subset.

5. When the installation is finished, close all open windows and you'll be able to start using WinDiff.

USING WINDIFF

Once you've installed WinDiff, it shows up by default in a directory named %ProgramFiles%/Support Tools (for most readers, this means C:\Program Files\Support Tools). Using it requires a little preparation and understanding, but it's really not that bad. Here's how:

1. To launch the program, double-click the entry named WinDiff (or WinDiff.exe) in the Support Tools directory. Alternatively, you can click the WinLogo key and R and then type "%programfiles%\Support Tools\WinDiff" into the Open text field of the Run dialog box (note: the quotes around the string are necessary because the file specification has blanks in it). Either way, you should see a display like the one shown in Figure 12-9.

2. Next, click the File command in the WinDiff toolbar menu. There, the first two commands are Compare files and Compare directories. This admittedly contrived example hinges on comparing two directory lists I made of some product keys I keep around, one before I went in and added a file and changed some values in another file, the other after making such changes. These two files appear side-by-side to show the raw data in the following code lines:

`Volume in drive D is Data and Storage`	`Volume in drive D is Data and Storage`
`Volume Serial Number is 2803-B30D`	`Volume Serial Number is 2803-B30D`
`Directory of d:\Test040928`	`Directory of d:\Test040928`
`08/05/2004 05:07 PM 39 bitdefender-key.txt`	`08/05/2004 05:07 PM 39 bitdefender-key.txt`
`09/19/2004 06:33 PM 60 NAV2005upg-install-key.txt`	`09/19/2004 06:33 PM 60 NAV2005upg-install-key.txt`
`08/05/2004 04:40 PM 76 NIS2004-install-key.txt`	`08/05/2004 04:40 PM 76 NIS2004-install-key.txt`
`09/17/2004 09:50 PM 368 NIS2005-install-key.txt`	`09/17/2004 09:50 PM 368 NIS2005-install-key.txt`
`07/11/2004 04:41 PM 30 NortonInetSecurityKey.txt`	`09/28/2004 04:45 PM 400 NIS2006-install-key.txt`
`08/23/2004 06:25 PM 58 opera-7-regcode.txt`	`07/11/2004 04:41 PM 30 NortonInetSecurityKey.txt`
`06/15/2004 03:23 PM 28 spysweeperkey.txt`	`08/23/2004 06:25 PM 58 opera-7-regcode.txt`
	`09/28/2004 04:46 PM 54 spysweeperkey.txt`
`7 File(s) 659 bytes`	`8 File(s) 1,085 bytes`
`0 Dir(s) 100,493,692,928 bytes free`	`0 Dir(s) 100,493,692,928 bytes free`

Note: I did take some liberties with these listings, including deleting unnecessary white space to fit it onto the page, and adding a blank line to the right-hand file listing to make the file count and free space lines match for both files.

3. If you click the Compare Files menu in WinDiff, the first window that pops open in response lets you pick the first file for comparison. Once you specify that file, a second window that lets you pick the second file pops up next. In my case, I compared a couple of directory listings named keyfilev1.txt and keyfilev2.txt that I deposited into the My Documents folder. After making these selections, a display like the one shown in Figure 12-10 appears (an analysis of this display, which is the meat of this whole section appears after the final step in this step-by-step sequence that follows the figure).

4. Once you're finished with WinDiff, click the red x in the upper right-hand corner, or select File@@>Exit to close the application.

The top line of the WinDiff display area shows the two files being compared. In the actual listing, lines with differences between the two files show up in yellow for the file 2 information, red for the file 1 information. This means that a line that's present in file 2 but not in file 1 (an added line) shows up only in yellow. This is the case for the unnumbered line between line numbers 9 and 10, where the listing for file NIS2006-install-key.txt shows up. A line that was present in file 1 but absent in file 2 would show up in red only (this does not occur in this example). A line that differs between the two files shows up in red first for the file 1 version and yellow second for the file 2 version. This is the case for lines 12 and [12] and for lines 13 and the unnumbered line that follows immediately afterward. These pairs of lines show that the file size for spysweeperkey.txt changed from 28 in file 1 to 56 in file 2, and that the total byte count for file 1 is 659, but 1,085 for file 2. This is just the kind of information you need to compare directory contents, registry files, and other items that may have changed. The appearance of a new file (for a product as yet unannounced, and by no means available) is a sure sign of monkey business, as are the changes in file size for the Spy Sweeper key and for the directory itself.

Working with WinDiff takes a little time and practice, but basically it takes two file names or directory specifications as input parameters (so it can have two things to compare to one another). By way of output, it creates a list of all the differences between the two files it finds, using color and other flags to show differences. This is merely handy when comparing process lists, which seldom exceed 40 or 50 items; it's absolutely essential when comparing Windows files or registry values, because they can easily number in the thousands!

That said, how can you tell when a change is significant? As I mentioned in earlier chapters in this book, anything that changes Internet Explorer defaults unexpectedly or unwontedly, adds entries to programs that are run automatically at startup (either in keys that end in \Run, \RunOnce, or buried in class definitions elsewhere in the registry), or removes other entries from those keys (so as to disable firewalls, anti-virus, or anti-spyware software, for example) is suspect. If a little practice doesn't build up your confidence, visit anti-virus and anti-spyware sites and look at the files, registry data, and other items they mention in documenting adware, spyware, and malware, and the items deleted or modified when removing such things manually. These all represent the kinds of things you're looking for and should help you zoom in on your local targets quickly and effectively.

Monitoring System Security

One of the biggest and best improvements in Windows XP SP2 is the introduction of the Security Center. This is a centralized utility that reports on what Windows knows about your system's current level of security, and that provides access to information to address any problems it reports (or at least, advice on what to check to make sure such problems don't exist). On a test PC running Norton Internet Security, for example, although Windows can tell that a firewall and anti-virus software are installed, it apparently can't report on their update status, as shown in Figure 12-11.

You can check in on this utility from time to time to see how Windows thinks you're doing in the security department. On the other hand, each time Windows starts up if there's a need to check status in any of the areas that the Security Center monitors, it'll pop up a warning message that tells you there's something going on that needs looking into. It's a vast step forward over anything else Microsoft has ever done before by way of security monitoring. That said, because it doesn't yet detect all anti-virus programs equally (I tried Norton AntiVirus 2004, BitDefender, and other packages mentioned in Chapter 9, but it could not access status information for all of those it could recognize) nor could it do the same for all third-party firewalls. I imagine this situation will improve as Windows XP SP2 becomes the norm, and more vendors add the necessary hooks into their products to communicate with the Security Center. For example, if I didn't use both the firewall and the anti-virus software built into BitDefender Professional v7.2, the program would report to Security Center that anti-virus software was not enabled, even though it was running and working properly. On the other hand, Norton Internet Security 2005 integrated with Security Center perfectly and would accurately report all status changes in the firewall and anti-virus capabilities separately and correctly. Again, I think this situation should improve with time, as these kinks are worked out where necessary.

Of course, I still think automatic update is the right approach for all security-related software, whether or not Security Center can track its currency and update status. With automatic update turned on and a current subscription, you're guaranteed to be able to keep up with what's likely to show up in your inbox or security perimeter next! My only regret is that Microsoft didn't choose to include antispam and anti-spyware/anti-adware monitoring features in the Security Center as well. Maybe in Windows XP SP 3?

Proper Password Handling

I'm going to make some recommendations about password structure and also about how to keep your passwords safe and sound. In an age where many Web sites have passwords, where you probably use a password to log into your Windows computer, and where even some programs and utilities may have passwords, there certainly are enough of them to go around.

So I want to start by shaking the foundations of your universe and say that your password is probably insecure if one or more of the following conditions are true:

• If your password appears in any kind of dictionary, it might be reproduced the same way (or at least from a word list that matches the entries in that dictionary, if not the definitions and other stuff).

• If you use familiar data in or for your password—like the names of your spouse, your children, or your pets, or perhaps your phone number, street number, or part of your Social Security number—crackers often customize their dictionaries with such data when attacking you.

• Same goes for birthdays, anniversaries, and other numbers that relate to you and your loved ones.

Since I just described most passwords that people use, what's a person to do? The answer lies in a good working understanding of password complexity. A sufficiently complex password is much more difficult to guess, and makes whatever that password protects much less likely to succumb to a dictionary-based attack. But what are the ingredients of a complex password? Glad you asked! According to Microsoft, and lots of other experts who provide password guidelines, a complex password is or contains:

• At least 8 characters, preferably as many as 14

• A mix of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and other symbols

• Is sufficiently strange and random to be difficult to guess, and unlikely to be in anybody's dictionary

• Follows some logic you understand, or some structure you can re-create, but that's unlikely for somebody else to be able to do likewise (unless you tell them, in which case you've violated a major password security rule)

Most dictionary attacks are smart enough to try obvious substitutions for vowels (@ for a, 3 for e, 1 for i, 0 for o, and so forth) so please don't fall prey to the idea that simple replacements for dictionary words gets you off the hook, either. An old friend and colleague of mine likes to explain what this means by using the example password Ie4PoTw/3I:Ps&O as an acronym for "I eat four pizzas on Thursdays, with three ingredients: pepperoni, sausage, and onions." Note that every other alphabetic character is upper- or lowercase, and there are a couple of numbers and three punctuation marks for good measure (and good complexity) thrown in. Use this approach as an example, but don't use this password, please: because it's in print, it just might show up in somebody's dictionary for that reason!

Next, here are five simple rules for passwords that you should violate only at your peril:

• Never write down passwords, unless they're stored in a very secure location (preferably a safe, but hidden in a locked drawer or lockbox is okay).

• Don't share your passwords with anybody. You never know when they'll violate any of the password rules. Administrators, bosses, and security staff are the only possible exceptions.

• Never e-mail your password to anybody (besides, doing so violates the previous rule, right?).

• Change your passwords regularly—at least every 6 months or so (frequency usually varies by how sensitive the materials and information you work with might be: in government top-secret workplaces, they routinely change passwords monthly, and sometimes, even more often than that).

• Don't use the same password for multiple sites, logins, or other password-protected assets. Otherwise, compromising one can lead to compromising them all (or as many as share the same password, anyway).

"Holy cow!" I hear you saying, "I need about 20 passwords! How am I going to remember all that stuff?" Good question! Fortunately, oodles and scads of password manager programs are available nowadays, so the only password you really need to remember is the one that unlocks that program (but that means it better be a really good password, comprende?). Numerous commercial password managers are available, but I mention a handful of my favorite freeware tools here believing that buying some or all of a firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware/anti-adware, and possibly even antispam software or services has probably depleted your budget somewhat by now. See Table 12-2 for some recommendations (use your favorite search engine with "free password manager" as a search string if you decide you don't like any of these).

Table 12-2 A Handful of Free Password Manager Programs
Name	Description	URL
RoboForm	Password generation, storage, and autotext app	www.roboform.com/
HyperSafe	Provides local or Web-based access to passwords	www.passwordsafe.com/
KeyWallet	Provides local password storage and access	www.keywallet.com/
Password Safe	Bruce Schneier's open source password safe	www.schneier.com/passsafe.html
Secure Data Manager	Open source password manager with annotations	http://sdm.sourceforge.net//td>

Grab one and use it with your newly invigorated and incredibly innovative collection of passwords. For my own part, I'm entranced with Schneier's Password Safe (he's a real star in the computer security world, and his stuff is great) as well as the Secure Data Manager (also known as SDM). Other possible do-it-yourself approaches might include creating password-protected files in Word or Excel, or perhaps using a password manager built into a third-party browser (Internet Explorer will happily manage passwords for you, too, but its protection schemes have been cracked enough in the past for me to be nervous about recommending that approach without this warning).

Stay Away from Risky Downloads

It's a truism I've mentioned throughout this book that most unwanted content and software arrives by invitation on most PCs, rather than by insidious or nefarious means. At this point, I assume you're convinced that threats are everywhere and that vulnerabilities can be exploited given the right opportunity. If you've installed a firewall, anti-virus software, anti-spyware/anti-adware software and have done what you can to protect your system from these threats, that doesn't mean you can do anything you want on the Internet.

It's important to recall that signatures and other means of positive identification inform most of what protective software can do for your PC. Indeed, the presence of anti-virus and anti-spyware/anti-adware software on your machine should protect you from known threats—but what about new or unknown ones? I look at software downloads much the same way as I do at e-mail attachments: okay if they come from a known and trusted source, but questionable if not downright dangerous otherwise.

To make my point as directly as possible, don't download software from unknown or untrusted sources. If you can't find a glowing review of some shareware or freeware program in a reputable publication or on a well-known Web site, you're tempting fate (and risking infection or infestation) if you copy a download to your PC, and then install the software it contains. Stick to well-known sources of shareware and freeware and resist the temptation to grab a cool-sounding or -looking tool or utility. Just because you can download anything you want, doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

When in Doubt, Play It Safe!

When you're working with your PC, cruising the Internet, reading e-mail, or diverting yourself in some hopefully enjoyable way, don't take unnecessary chances with unknown and potentially unsafe materials. Even though there is often some subterfuge or covert activity involved when unwanted software makes itself at home on a PC, it usually enters that machine through the front door, buried inside some supposed prize or possible treasure that users download. Although the protective software you install on your PC should protect you from routine threats, it's just not smart to open the door to potential infestation or infection.

The key to playing it safe is to do some homework before downloading anything. The best way into a download is through a link provided in a reputable publication (such as PC Magazine and other well-known publications that cover computing topics, tools, and technologies) or from a Web site that you know and trust (elsewhere in this book, I've cited sites such as The Ultimate Collection of Windows Software a.k.a. tucows.com, CNET's Shareware.com, ZDNet at www.zdnet.com/downloads, and so forth). Even if you find pointers to a program somewhere else on the Web, if the program's got sufficient capability and has generated real interest in the user community, you can probably find a copy of somewhere safer—if you take the time to look. Save yourself some possible grief, and do just that! Resources

Legions of great resources are available that explain what processes run on a Windows machines, which ones are benign and necessary, which ones are benign and possibly unnecessary (and how to do away with them if you decide you don't need them), and which ones are potentially dangerous or outright malign. I found three stellar resources while researching this chapter, but given the time I know I could find more.

• There's very good built-in process info at the "I am Not a Geek" (sez you!) Web site at www.iamnotageek.com/, but a search engine like Google seems to be the best way to dig into its contents because I couldn't find many of the articles Google turned up for me by trying to navigate my way into that site top-down. If you simply search on process names, you'll find this site popping up repeatedly, so why not just take the most obvious approach?

• The Los Angeles Free Net has a great collection of Web pages called "Startup Programs and Executables Listing" that includes links to information for a sizable and reasonably comprehensive collection of process image names (www.lafn.org/webconnect/mentor/startup/PENINDEX.HTM).

• Paul Collins maintains a decidedly comprehensive startup programs list that includes most process executables plus a raft of other items; you can access a search engine against that list at www.sysinfo.org or jump straight to the list at www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php.

If you're going to dig into the many command-line utilities that Windows supports, please avail yourself of Windows XP's built-in "Command Line Reference" for syntax information and examples to help you get things right. To access this reference, choose Start@@>Help and Support, and then type command line reference into the Search box in the upper left-hand corner of the resulting screen.

You can learn more about the WinTasks program at www.liutilities.com. I also found ready access to some, but not all, of the process information from my Task Manager list on its site by typing URLs constructed as follows: http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/>/, where you substitute the image name without the .exe extension for (so that looking up the Application Layer Gateway service, or alg.exe, would use /alg/ at the end of the aforementioned URL).

Although I already mentioned Jerry Honeycutt's outstanding book Microsoft Windows XP Registry Guide (Microsoft Press, 2002) in Chapter 4, because he explains how to compare registry versions using WinDiff therein, I think it's worth another mention here. He also wrote a peachy article for Microsoft entitled "Safekeeping the Windows XP Registry."

Microsoft's WinDiff utility is an amazing tool, if you're willing to take the time to learn how to use it. To that end, you'll find Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 159214 "How to Use the Windiff.exe Utility" extraordinarily informative (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;159214). If you're not really interested in lots of cryptic character display Chris Maunder has created WinDiff UI, a graphical interface for the program that's much easier to use and understand than WinDiff itself. You can read more about this tool and download an executable at www.codeproject.com/tools/runwindiff.asp.

The Windows XP product documentation includes a short but detailed technical description entitled "Password must meet complexity requirements". To see the company's official take on what makes a password sufficiently complex, please consult that Web page.

Summary

This chapter offered numerous tips and techniques for practicing system safety. In particular I explored the process of creating a system baseline to use as a comparison if things ever start to get weird on your computer, as well as some thoughts regarding monitoring system security, managing passwords, and some commonsense rules for downloading anything off the Internet.

The next chapter moves on to the final part of this book, and changes focus to reviewing the kinds of regular security routines that you should practice. I explore a regular security regimen in Chapter 13 to help you keep up with the current state of security (whatever it may be), and also describe in Chapter 14 the kind of automated scans and checks you should be performing on your PC on a regular basis. The idea is to maintain a level of security awareness and checks that will minimize the chances of an unpleasant surprise appearing from out of the blue!

Getting Your Color Right

2005-07-17T01:26:00.000+05:00

thanks to pc mag for this tip :)

Printing photos has changed dramatically since the days when getting acceptable color took a great deal of knowledge or even more luck. Today, you can pick almost any printer, camera, and scanner at random and use them together without a problem. If you have a well-trained eye, you might quibble with the color, but most people are usually satisfied with it.

For those who aren't, the fixes run the gamut, from simple steps that anyone who prints photos should know about to complex tools of interest only to professionals and the most demanding photo enthusiasts. We'll focus on the simple fixes here and take a look at the advanced tools in the sidebar "Color Calibration Tools."

Why Color Needs Managing

Colors are harder to match than you might expect, for a number of reasons. A major challenge in printing from a computer is translating color information from one device to another. Two printers that use different cartridges almost always use significantly different colors for each primary: cyan, yellow, and magenta. If you define a color in terms of the inks in the printer—say, 20 percent cyan, 45 percent yellow, and 35 percent magenta—the color you get will depend on the printer you're using. This same problem applies to cameras, scanners, and monitors.

One way to deal with this is to create a color profile for each device and use a color management scheme to adjust colors based on the profiles. But individual profiles mean separate profiles for every possible variation, including every change in resolution or paper. Worse, to get the colors right, you'd need to adjust the profiles every time you changed ink cartridges, since the new ink could be from a different dye lot.

A simpler approach is to agree on a standard way to describe colors and let manufacturers worry about how to translate between the standard and each of their printers, scanners, and cameras. That way, you shouldn't have to worry about color management, or even be aware of it.

The agreement that serves that purpose is sRGB, which was originally defined to standardize typical monitors. The goal was to let people use any monitor, printer, scanner, or camera and get acceptable color across the board without having to create and manage profiles or otherwise think about color.

The scheme works well, despite some limitations. It's supported by nearly every printer, scanner, and camera that have come out since early 2001. And unless you tell Windows otherwise, Image Color Management (ICM) 2.0 in Microsoft Windows 98, 2000, Me, and XP assumes that every device is using sRGB. Thanks to sRGB, most people never need to learn much about color management. Still, to get the color you want, it helps to know the basics.

Paper Matters

The most common reason for getting unacceptable color is printing on one kind of paper with the printer set for another kind. Many current printers have a paper sensor that's meant to prevent you from making this mistake. By default, the printer driver is set to detect the paper type and use the right color tables for that paper. In our experience, however, the paper sensor doesn't always pick the right paper type, particularly for printers that have settings for similar kinds of paper.

The best strategy is to set the paper type manually and use the automatic setting only as a fail-safe in case you forget. To do so, go to File | Print from the program you're working in, then click the Properties button. If, however, you're printing from the Windows XP Photo Printing wizard, click the Printing Preferences button on the appropriate wizard screen. Search through the options, changing them as appropriate. Any changes you make this way will apply only until you close the program you're printing from. To change the default setting for an option, open the driver by going to the Printers and Faxes dialog box, right-clicking on a printer name, and choosing Properties.

Some third-party photo papers come with recommended settings for popular printers; if yours does not, you'll need to experiment to see which paper setting gives you the best color. If you can't get acceptable color from any of the settings, switch to a different paper or consider exploring the professional-level tools that we discuss in the sidebar on page 76.

Let Your Driver Do the Work

Printer color management can take place in the printer driver, the application you're using, or the operating system. Unless you need the more sophisticated levels of color management, leave color to the driver.

In many cases you don't have to do anything; the printer is permanently set as an sRGB device. If you explore your printer's driver, however, you may find other options. If you're not happy with the color you're getting, make sure you haven't accidentally checked the wrong setting.

HP's current generation of drivers, for example, lets you choose among the default ColorSmart/sRGB (which is sRGB), Adobe RGB (of interest only if you have one of the few cameras that use this standard), and Managed by Application (the raw, device-dependent color; the setting to use if you want your application program to manage the color). If you want your driver to handle the color management, make sure it's set to sRGB.

Application-based color management is available in only a few programs, most notably Adobe Photoshop. Such programs typically take advantage of standard ICC (International Color Consortium, www.color.org ) profiles, which are available on Web sites and come with some devices; you can also create them yourself with the appropriate hardware and software (see the sidebar). If you choose an application-based approach, the color management will work only for that application, so you'll still need the driver to manage colors for other programs.

If you use application-based color management and your printer driver has a special setting for this (as with the HP drivers), you'll have to change the driver setting every time you use the application. Otherwise, both the driver and application will try to correct for the same color shifts, and you'll wind up overcorrecting. In fact, if you get poor color only when printing from a particular program, check to see if the program has a color management feature. If so, you may have accidentally turned it on.

To check the setting in Photoshop 7.0, choose File | Print with Preview, and make sure the Show More Options box is checked. In the drop-down list just below the check box, choose Color Management. Unless you want Photoshop to manage color, make sure the setting in the Source Space box is Document and the setting for Profile in the Print Space box is Same As Source. (To use Photoshop's color management, you'd pick the appropriate profile to use instead.)

In the Windows world, color management at the operating-system level is widely ignored. HP, for example, says that none of its current drivers support it. But even HP recommends using the default Windows settings, since the feature could conceivably affect colors with some programs. To check the setting for a printer in Windows XP, choose Printers and Faxes on the Start menu, right-click on the printer, and choose Properties, then the Color Management tab. Depending on the printer, you may or may not see a list of profiles. If you do, ignore them, make sure color management is set to Automatic, and click OK.

The Best Printing Path

Many, if not most, ink jet printers today can print either from a computer or directly from a camera or memory card. But memory limitations in the printer often restrict color-rendering algorithms to less sophisticated versions of the ones in the printer driver. If you're not satisfied with the color from direct printing, try moving the files to your computer and printing from it.

The color should be better. If it's not, look for differences in settings between the printer's built-in menus and the printer driver. For example, the default paper-type setting for direct printing is often glossy paper, since the assumption is that you're printing a photo, while the default setting in the driver is usually plain paper.

There's one important exception to the rule that printing from the computer gives better color than printing directly. If you're making copies on an AIO, giving the copy command from the front panel will often result in a closer color match to the original than giving the command from a control program on the computer.

Specifics vary from one AIO to the next, but in general, if you give the scan command from the AIO's front panel, the color information will go directly from the scanner to the printer, with no intermediate stops. The two are usually fine-tuned for each other, and there's only one translation step, from what's called the color space for the scanner to the color space for the printer, so you should end up with a close match.

If you give the Copy command from your computer, one of three things may happen. With some AIOs, the command simply tells the AIO to copy, just as if you had given the command from the front panel. With others, it sends the scan to the computer to take advantage of the superior algorithms in the driver, but stays with only one translation step, so the color may improve.

With still other AIOs, however, the scan goes to the computer, where the driver first translates the colors to the monitor's color space, then from the monitor's color space to the printer's color space before printing. Much like in the game of telephone, some data gets lost at each step, so the final colors will not be as close a match as with the other two approaches. The best way to avoid this problem is always to give the copy command from the front panel of your AIO.

Nearly Effortless

Thanks to sRGB, color management today is a classic example of the 80/20 rule—the idea that you can get most things 80 percent right with 20 percent of the effort it takes to get them 100 percent right—except in this case the split is closer to 90/10. If you want to go further, check out "Color Calibration Tools." But rest assured that with the information we've covered and a capable printer, you already know enough to print photos that will easily stand up to what you'll get with film dropped off at your local drugstore.

Color Calibration Tools

If you want something closer to perfection in your photos than what you get from sRGB, plenty of tools can help.

You might want to try basic monitor calibration, which consists largely of making sure your brightness and contrast controls are adjusted properly. A good place to start is at www.displaymate.com/demos.html, where you can download the free DisplayMate demo program to use as a calibration tool.

If you want to move to the next level, we highly recommend the full version of DisplayMate, which is what we use at PC Magazine Labs both to calibrate monitors and to test them. You'll also find a wealth of useful information on the DisplayMate site, including instructions for how to use DisplayMate to calibrate your printer.

For still more sophisticated calibration, you need a package that creates ICC profiles based on measurements taken with a colorimeter (which measures colors in a manner similar to the way the human eye sees them). You can then use the profiles with the color management features in programs like Photoshop.

ColorVision ( www.colorvision.com ) offers a range of excellent choices targeted at various types of user, from the digital photography enthusiast to the professional, and covering both monitors and printers. PC Magazine has looked at several of these packages, and we've generally liked them. ColorVision ColorPlus, a monitor calibration product ( http://go.pcmag.com/colorplus ) has a street price of $99. The ColorVision PrintFIX Suite goes for $399. Our review of the previous version can be found at http;//go.pcmag.com/spyderpro .

These products are part of the Pantone ColorVision product family, the result of a marketing alliance between ColorVision and Pantone ( www.pantone.com ). The current versions are built around a new, and presumably improved, colorimeter. Be advised, though, that these tools are best suited for professionals and perfectionists, as they require a lot of extra work for relatively little payoff.

Replace Your iPod's Battery

2005-07-15T02:17:00.000+05:00

Special thanks to pcmag.com for this tip :)

There are few products more popular than the iPod—except when it comes to battery life. The batteries in early iPods fail after a time (300 to 500 charge/discharge cycles or about two to three years) and just won't hold a charge. Even worse, there's no easy way to change the batteries. Angry owners sued and now Apple has agreed to some restitution ( www.appleipodsettlement.com ).

That's good news if you're the owner of a third-generation iPod: You're eligible for a free battery replacement or (at Apple's discretion) a replacement iPod, providing you still have your proof of purchase and file a claim by September 30, 2005. The news is not so good if you have a first- or second-generation iPod: You can choose between a check for $25 or a $50 store credit to use on Apple products (excluding iTunes). Well, at least that's something. But you're still stuck with your dead battery. What can you do?

The simple (and costly) approach would be to go with Apple's iPod Out-of-Warranty Battery Replacement Program ( www.apple.com/support/ipod/service/battery.html ). Send in your dead iPod along with a check for $99 plus $6.95 shipping and you'll receive an equivalent new or refurbished model with a fresh battery in one to three weeks. Besides paying more than three times the cost of a battery, which can be obtained online for around $30, you're not even guaranteed you'll receive your exact iPod back in the mail.

Why not avoid all of Apple's service fees? You really can replace the battery on your own: We'll show you how. Sure, you'll void the warranty in the process, but isn't that part of the fun?

Opening the iPod

We'll use Apple's standard 20GB third- generation iPod, though a similar process applies both to earlier generations and to subsequent versions, like the iPod 4G (fourth-generation) and iPod photo.

The best tool to open your iPod with is some type of stiff plastic wedge. The metal case can be permanently bent and the plastic on the case will scratch easily, so care and patience must be applied. Don't use a metal screwdriver, as the risk of damaging the case is much greater. Kits, including a battery and an implement to aid in opening your iPod (such as the wedges we'll use here), can be purchased from PDASmart ( www.pdasmart.com ), Laptops for Less ( www.laptopsforless.com ), or many other online resources. Make sure to choose the correct battery type for your model.

One thing you'll quickly notice is that there's no obvious way to open the case. There are no visible screws, tabs, or anything of that nature—just a sleek metal plate somehow affixed to the back of the iPod. The two halves of the iPod are held together by a series of plastic tabs that run along both sides of the case, holding the metal half of the device securely in place. Unfortunately, this ensures that taking the iPod apart, which isn't supposed to be done by consumers, is a tricky proposition.

First, work the plastic wedge along the seam on the side of the iPod until you are able to insert it between the metal back and the case (Figure 1). Slide the wedge along the gap you've created and pop out the tabs holding the case together (Figure 2). Your goal is to push each of the tabs inward until they are released from the metal half of the case. You should now be able to separate the back of the iPod from the front half (Figure 3).

Warning! The metal half of the case is connected to the top of the unit with a thin ribbon cable. To avoid damaging your iPod, carefully place the two halves of the case close to each other on a flat surface.

Removing the Hard Drive

With the iPod now open, you'll need to remove the hard drive, which sits on top of the other iPod circuitry, buffered by a piece of blue rubber (Figure 4). A small ribbon cable connects the hard drive directly to the motherboard. Slowly lift up the hard drive to disconnect this cable and set the hard drive aside (Figure 5).

Now that the hard drive has been removed, you have easy access to the battery. Carefully use a small screwdriver to pry the battery from its compartment. Be careful not to make contact with the circuit board below the battery, because you could damage it. Before the battery can be completely removed, you will need to disconnect the power cord, which is wrapped around part of the circuit board (Figure 6). You can use the same small screwdriver to help get the wires out from underneath the board.

Disconnect the battery from the motherboard by gently pulling the connector straight up. With the old battery removed, you can now plug in the new battery. The connector will fit only in one orientation; do not force it into place.

Now you can essentially follow the process in reverse and reassemble the iPod. But before you can place the battery into its compartment, you must wrap the battery power cord around the tip of the circuit board. Next, place the battery into the compartment, reattach the hard drive connector and the hard drive, and snap the two halves of the iPod together.

Be sure to charge the battery for a minimum of 3 hours before enjoying your "new" iPod!

Heading Off Spam

2005-07-14T01:05:00.000+05:00

Spam is infuriating, but the worst thing you can do is hit the Reply button and vent your frustration on the sender. If you're lucky, the message will go nowhere. If you're not, the reply will confirm to the spammer that your e-mail address is valid, and you'll get more spam than ever.

A more effective response is to report the spam to the offender's ISP, but spammers go to great lengths to cover their tracks. This article will teach you how to identify where spam originates so you can lodge effective complaints that could shut down spammers' Web and ISP accounts.

A Full Header

The From: and To: fields that you see in every e-mail message represent a small portion of an e-mail's header, and both of these fields can be easily forged. To see where a message truly originated, you must view the full header. Antispam tools, such as those we reviewed in "Slam the Spam" (February 25, 2003), examine headers and other message information to identify and filter out spam, but they don't always catch everything, and they don't complain to the ISPs for you.

How you view a header depends on the e-mail client. For Outlook Express, right-click on the message, choose Properties, click on the Details tab, and then click on the Message Source button. To learn how to view full headers with other e-mail clients, visit http://spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/19.html.

Figure 1 shows the full header for an unaltered e-mail message. The Received: block and the Message-ID: are the most difficult lines to forge, because they are added after a spam message leaves the offender's computer. These sections contain the clues to the message's source. On an unforged message, the Message-ID: line is added by the mail server that sends out the message. It usually ends with @ and the domain of the sender. In this example, the sender is Permutat@aol.com, and the Message-ID: ends with @aol.com. When the domain names in these two fields don't match, it's a sign that the sender is trying to remain anonymous.

The Received: block is the most revealing portion of the header. Most messages pass through at least three computers before arriving at the recipient's machine: the sender's computer, the sending mail server, and the recipient's mail server, from which the recipient retrieves the message. With more complicated setups—those with firewalls, for example—the message will pass through even more stops.

Every machine the message passes through adds a Received: line. The lines are added from bottom to top, so the top-most line is the last stop the message made. Because the Received: lines reveal exactly where a message has been, spammers sometimes try to confuse matters by adding fake Received: lines to their messages. Any forged Received: lines appear at the bottom of the list.

Decoding the Received: Block

The server name in the from clause of the Received: line can be forged easily, but receiving mail servers can check the true identity through reverse DNS, which shows the sending server's IP address. The IP address results appear in parentheses after the server name entered by the sender, which with spam is almost always forged. You can look up the IP address of the named server (more on this later) to see whether the data in the header is accurate or forged.

Read the Received: block from the bottom up until you find the injection point—the last forged line—which is where a message enters the Internet stream. This is generally the last line where the IP address doesn't match the server name. Most of the lines below the injection point are forgeries, although sometimes the line just below the injection point reveals the spammer's dial-up ISP.

To find the domain name associated with the IP address, you'll need a whois utility. Note that there are three whois databases to check, each for a different part of the world. A search at Geektools checks all three (www.geektools.com/cgi-bin/proxy.cgi).

Before filing a complaint, you should visit the Web site of the party that sent out the spam. Sometimes it belongs to a company that's in the business of sending spam, and complaining won't help. In this case, use a traceroute utility (again entering the IP address) to find the next service provider up in the chain and send your complaint there. You'll find a good traceroute utility at http://samspade.org/t.

If you want someone else to do the legwork, sign up for SpamCop's free reporting service: http://spamcop.net/anonsignup.shtml. You just copy the full header and text of the spam into an edit box and click a button. SpamCop figures out where the message came from, tests the servers it finds to determine whether they are open relays (servers that send e-mail from any source), and composes complaint messages to all the correct parties. You review the suggested addresses for sending complaints, uncheck any you think are incorrect, and hit the Send button.

There's another benefit to reporting e-mail abuse—besides the double satisfaction of revenge and promoting the greater good. Spammers use suppression lists for people who cause problems. If you get a reputation as someone who will complain to the authorities, you may actually start to see a decrease in your spam.

Control a PC for Free

2005-07-12T08:50:00.000+05:00

You really can be in two places at once. With a remote control solution, you sit in front of one computer and view the desktop of another computer in a window. Your mouse movements and keystrokes are sent over your network connection to the distant PC, which responds as though you were there in person, letting you run programs, manipulate files, or whatever else you need to do.

Remote-control software lets you access your home computer while you're at work (or vice versa) or use either your home or your work machine remotely while you're traveling. But it's also useful for long-distance troubleshooting (fixing your kid's PC while she's at college) and over-the-phone tutoring (showing a client in another town how to create a crosstab in Access). And with a remote PC connected to a projector, a 15-minute presentation across the country no longer requires a layover in Lubbock.

To make this work, you need a remote PC (the computer you want to control) and a local PC (the one you want to use to do the controlling). Sometimes these PCs are also called the host and the guest, respectively. You also need special software (which you may already have) installed on each machine. But there are two big hurdles that often make it difficult to get remote control working at all: dynamic IP addresses and firewalls.

Enter the Software

Remote control software has two components: a server that runs on the remote computer, and a client (sometimes called a viewer) used on the local computer to control the server. You'll need to set up the server component before you can run the client.

Microsoft includes a very good, though basic, remote-control program called Remote Desktop with Windows XP Professional. (It also comes with Windows 2000 and Server 2003, but there it's called Terminal Services.) You can control the PC from any system running Windows 95 or later.

To start the Remote Desktop server, right-click on My Computer in the Start menu and select Properties. This gets you to the Systems control panel. Choose the Remote tab. Turn on the Allow users to connect remotely option, and click on OK.

To control the system from another Windows XP Professional system, click on your Start menu and select All Programs | Accessories | Communications | Remote Desktop Connection. The client software is also available on the Win XP Professional and Home Edition CDs. Type the IP address, name (if it's on your local network), or host name (if you're using dynamic DNS) of the remote computer, and click on Connect. Click on Options to save your settings into a file for quick access next time.

With any luck, you should be prompted with a log-on box. Remote Desktop uses the same authentication system as Windows, so you'll need to enter the username and password for an existing user on the remote system. (Go to Control Panel | User Accounts to create a new user or configure a password for an existing user.) If the remote PC has an account with the same username and password as the current user on the local PC, you'll be logged on automatically.

Since Remote Desktop is meant to help you access another one of your machines, it blanks out the screen of the remote computer when you connect (unless you're controlling a PC running Windows 2000/2003 Server), so people walking by won't be able to see what you're doing. This means you can't use it for presentations or tutoring. For that, Microsoft offers Remote Assistance, which is similar to Remote Desktop but clumsier; it's available through Win XP's Help & Support Center. For further security, Remote Desktop requires the owner of the remote PC to log on again when the remote session is over.

Remote Desktop lets you control performance, screen size, and device sharing, and it even enables you to launch specific programs on connection. It provides more than pure remote control; it offers file transfer as well, by mapping your local drives to the server.

If Remote Desktop's limitations are too restrictive, consider VNC, a free, open-source solution that runs on just about every platform in existence. (You can, for instance, control Mac OS X from your Windows box, or even control Windows from your Palm-powered PDA, and there are no restrictions for Win XP Home.) There are several varieties of VNC available, but the most secure flavor is arguably TightVNC, available from www.tightvnc.com.

Although the option is available in most VNC types, VNC doesn't automatically blank out the screen, so two people—one local and one remote—can simultaneously control the same desktop, and each can see what the other is doing.

Another convenient aspect of VNC is that the viewer (client) software is only a single (about 300KB) EXE file. It doesn't need to be installed, so you can run it just about anywhere, including on public PCs and ones at the office that have been locked down to prevent software installation. VNC's major limitation is that it doesn't offer file transfer. For that, its users often resort to e-mail and FTP.

If you choose to use Remote Desktop or VNC, you'll probably need to figure out how to circumvent private and dynamic IP addresses and firewall restrictions. We show you how to do this below. But users of Windows 98 or later have another good, free alternative, LogMeIn Free. This remote-control solution lacks the file-transfer and synchronization capabilities of the fee-based versions of LogMeIn, but unlike Remote Desktop and VNC, it runs as a service, so the client can be run from anywhere that you can access LogMeIn's Web site, and the tool is able to circumvent most difficult networking issues.

Devil in the Details

Because Remote Desktop and VNC don't have any service acting as an intermediary, your local and remote PCs and their networks must be set up to allow a direct connection between the two computers. Here's what you need to do.

For computers to be able to talk to each other across the Internet, each needs a public IP address. This address is typically assigned to the router on the network that the PC is connected to; the router then assigns a private IP address to the system. (In most cases, the address will look something like 192.168.1.xxx) The router uses Network Address Translation (NAT) to let its PCs interact with systems on the Internet.

First, you need to determine the IP address of the remote PC. If both computers are on the same home or office network, you can use the remote PC's local address. Open a Command Prompt window on the remote system (Start | Run | cmd and click on OK), type ipconfig, and press Enter. (Or, in Windows 9x/Me, go to Start | Run | winipcfg.)

In order to access the PC over an Internet connection, you'll need to find its network's public address. Fire up a Web browser on the remote PC and go to www.annoyances.org/ip; here, you'll see the IP address of your computer as it is seen on the Internet (e.g. 63.87.252.186). (If you're controlling someone else's PC, you'll have to request this information; just ask your partner on the other end to read or e-mail the IP address to you.)

The catch is that most IP addresses are dynamic; routers assign IPs to PCs when they boot, so a single machine may have different addresses from one day to the next. And your DSL or cable provider likely gives you a new IP every time you connect to the Internet (the same is true for dial-up service, but you'd never want to try controlling a PC remotely over a 56K modem). If you want to use remote control regularly, you'll need to make your settings more permanent.

Set and Forget

If the remote PC is connected to a router, you can assign a static (non-changing) IP address to the PC. (This address only has meaning within the remote PC's local network.) Go to Control Panel | Network Connections>, right-click on the connection that you'll be using, and select Properties. Highlight Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), click on Properties, and then select Use the following IP address. In the dialog box that comes up, type the local IP address you got in the last step (for example, 192.168.1.xxx), then enter 255.255.255.0 for the subnet mask and the IP address of your router (usually 192.168.1.1) for the gateway. You should be able to get the addresses of your DNS servers from your router's status screen; otherwise, contact your ISP. Click on OK when you're done.

The IP address of your Internet connection is a different matter, though. Usually the only way to make a dynamic Internet IP address static is to upgrade to a more expensive service, so unless you feel like paying an extra $25 each month, you'll want to sign up with a free "dynamic DNS" service such as www.no-ip.com or www.dyndns.org. The provided software, which updates the service with your current address, lets you connect to your computer with a steady host name like "karp.homeip.net" and forget about any fly-by-night IP addresses.

Poking Holes in the Remote Firewall

The next hurdle is the firewall (and, for most people, the router) that has been dutifully keeping your remote-control software from working.

Firewalls are designed to protect a computer by blocking unwanted network traffic. In order to use most remote-control software, you'll have to create an exception manually in the remote PC's firewall to permit two-way communication. (If you don't have physical access to the remote computer, you'll have to contact whoever does and walk him or her through this process.)

If the remote computer is running Windows XP SP2, the built-in Windows Firewall is likely active. Go to Control Panel | Windows Firewall and, if the firewall is enabled, choose the Exceptions tab. You need to know the port number your software uses; for instance, Microsoft Remote Desktop uses TCP port 3389, and VNC typically uses 5800, 5801, 5900, or 5901. Click on Add Port, type the port number, come up with a name for the exception, and click on OK. There should already be an exception set up for Remote Desktop here (otherwise, create one); just place a checkmark next to any exception to permit it, and click on OK when you're done.

We recommend the use of a more powerful software alternative to the Windows Firewall, such as ZoneAlarm Pro 5.5, PC Magazine's Editors' Choice, especially if a router is not present. If you're using ZoneAlarm, you'll need to add the IP address and subnet of the local computer (or the router's IP address or range of addresses the router assigns) to its Trusted Zone. Follow the directions in the Help index under adding | to the Trusted Zone.

For any other software firewalls, check the program's documentation for exclusion instructions.

Next comes your router. If you don't yet have one for your home or SOHO network, get one. They're cheap and provide strong protection to supplement a software firewall; we recommend using one even if you only have a single PC. Open your router's setup screen, typically a Web page located at 192.168.1.1 (check the documentation), and go to the Port Forwarding screen (sometimes called Applications & Gaming). Each entry on this page represents a different service to be routed; simply add a new one, specifying the appropriate port number along with the IP address of the PC to be controlled. (This is why the PC needs to have a static IP address.) Finally, give the entry a name (e.g. "remote" or "Dimitri"), and click on Save Settings. These exceptions somewhat compromise the security of your firewall, so don't leave them open when you're not using them.

If you're trying to access a PC that's behind a corporate firewall, you probably won't be able to create any exceptions unless you're chummy with the administrator, which leaves you with two choices: Either to dial into your company's VPN network (again, talk to the IT people) and control the remote PC from the firewall, or to use a Web-based product.

Paid Web-based solutions such as GoToMyPC or LogMeIn Pro combine great features and ease of use, but among Remote Desktop, VNC, and LogMeIn's free product, most users should be able to find an effective way to access their desktop remotely without spending a cent.

Eliminate Formatting in Outlook Or Outlook Express

2005-07-08T23:29:00.000+05:00

I often use copy and paste to take content from one e-mail and add it to another. Because of the cost of ink and the limited knowledge of some of my friends, I usually like to make fonts smaller and change them from color to black. But I often have a hard time changing both the font and the color, and sometimes I can't do either. I'm wondering whether this has something to do with the originator's programs. In any case, I'd appreciate any help that you can offer in this area.

Jan Bendus

Whether you reply or copy/paste, cleaning up formatting in HTML-based e-mail messages can be tough. Just because the sender liked pale green text against a background of clouds doesn't mean your reply needs to be equally illegible. The easiest solution is to convert the message to plain text and then, if desired, back to HTML. To do that in Outlook, you would select Format | Plain Text from the message's menu, click Yes to confirm you want to discard the formatting, and then select Format | HTML. Using just the keyboard, you can accomplish this by typing Alt-O, T, Y, Alt-O, H. In Outlook Express, you'd select Format | Plain Text, click OK to confirm, then select Format | Rich Text (HTML). Again, this would be Alt+O, X, Spacebar, Alt+O, and R on the keyboard. Once you've removed the unwanted formatting, you can format the remaining text any way you please.

Inserting an Address Bar Code in Word

2005-07-07T23:34:00.000+05:00

In Microsoft Word 2003, is there a way to get the address bar code on a letter for use with a windowed envelope?

William Lanzana

It's easy enough to add a bar code when you're using Word's Envelopes and Labels dialog to print the envelope. You just check the box Delivery point bar code in the Envelope Options dialog. But when you're using windowed envelopes, the entire address, including the bar code, has to be printed on the letter inside the envelope. In that case, you use a bar code field:

Select Insert | Field from the menu.

Choose Barcode from the list at left.

Check the box titled Bar code is US zip code.

Enter the ZIP code.

Click OK.

If you see something like BARCODE \u "10016" \* MERGEFORMAT, press Alt-F9 to switch from viewing field codes to viewing field results.

Optimizing PDF Files

2005-07-06T23:37:00.000+05:00

Many factors have contributed to the success of Adobe's PDF format. One key benefit is that you can put all kinds of content inside a PDF and know it won't get changed. Also, the content is accessible to almost everyone through the free Acrobat Reader.

But the format is not perfect, as anyone who encounters a huge, lumbering PDF file knows. It's tricky to reduce file size without diminishing the quality of your content. And the target user must be able to open your file.

You can make PDFs with a variety of tools, including most desktop publishing and graphics programs and some word processors. If your program doesn't output PDF files natively, you can buy Acrobat from Adobe or a host of third-party tools that present PDF creation as a driver you access like a printer. Whatever tool you use, three factors you should consider are file size, quality, and compatibility. Here are nine rules for optimizing your files.

Find a preset. Unless you're familiar with concepts like color space conversion, image resolution, and compression, you'll produce better results using an output preset in your content creation program. For example, Adobe InDesign has seven output presets ranging from Screen to Prepress, while the Acrobat Printer Properties window, accessed from programs like Microsoft Word, has presets like "High Quality" and "Smallest File Size." Experiment with the presets. If necessary, tweak them rather than starting from scratch.

Choose your output: screen or print. A critical decision in image-rich documents is the resolution of the images. Computer screens display images at 72 dpi, so images encoded at this resolution look perfect and can be very compact. By contrast, most printers output at 300 dpi or higher, so 72-dpi images will look grainy and blurry. If you output at 300 dpi, though, you'll greatly boost file size. (Our story "Prints and the Resolution," at go.pcmag.com/ printsresolution, shows why 300-dpi resolution may not be necessary.)

When you're optimizing PDFs for on-screen viewing, print them before distribution to assess quality. If high-quality print output is necessary, consider producing and posting two files, one for quick viewing and one for printing.

Compress just once. It's helpful to compress images for image-rich files. You can apply compression either when outputting from your content creation program or later within Acrobat itself. If you compress your images at both stages, however, you'll compound compression artifacts and degrade quality.

The best option is to produce your final PDF file with your content creation program, using either native controls or an Acrobat or third-party printer driver, and to skip reencoding within Acrobat. If that's not possible, you can output without compression from your content creation program and then compress to the final target in Acrobat.

Go grayscale. Using grayscale images rather than color can reduce file size by as much as 25 percent.

Use RGB for screens. When producing for screen-based displays, always output in RGB color rather than CMYK. You may achieve savings of 50 percent or more.

Find the fat before you cut. Acrobat's PDF Optimizer can perform a "Space Audit" that marks the components of the PDF file by size and percentage, so you can focus your file-size cutting efforts (click Advanced | PDF Optimizer, then the Audit Space Usage button). For hands-on users optimizing in Acrobat, this tool is the place to start.

Use common fonts. In text-intensive PDFs, embedded fonts can use lots of space. You can remove them, saving as much as 40KB per font. But if the viewer's system doesn't have them, Acrobat uses a substitute, which can lead to garbled results. If you need to save on file size, use only common fonts such as Arial and Times Roman, which you can safely leave out of the document.

Don't forget about compatibility. Adobe adds more advanced compression techniques to each version of Acrobat, producing ever-decreasing PDF file sizes, but readers then need the latest viewer to open the file. You can use Acrobat's File | Reduce File Size command to apply a later Acrobat version to your PDF file, but in a corporate setting with fixed configurations, choosing too recent a version can produce a document that no one is able to read.

Compress multimedia files before embedding. When embedding audio and video files into PDF documents, compress them beforehand to more compact, streaming formats like QuickTime or Microsoft Windows Media.

You can typically encode speech audio to around 48 Kbps without any obvious degradation, while music needs at least 96 Kbps. Video encoded at 300 to 400 Kbps at 320-by-240 resolution can look good, but below 200 Kbps quality gets dicey. Even at these stingy compression rates, file size adds up quickly, so mind your file size when adding multimedia content to your PDFs.

Using these tips, you should be able to greatly decrease the size of your PDF files, often without your readers noticing any difference in quality.

Genuine Microsoft Windows

2005-07-05T23:48:00.000+05:00

I got a call from one of my students who's in a panic because the Dell computer his son gave him came with what Microsoft said was a bootleg copy of Windows XP Professional. He was trying to download the free Microsoft antispyware application and innocently went ahead with the "validation." What should he do?

Ken Buckner

Many download pages at Microsoft.com now contain a note indicating that the download is intended for customers running "genuine Microsoft Windows" and inviting visitors to validate their copy by clicking a button. At present, validation is optional, but Microsoft recently made it mandatory for those using Norwegian, Czech, and simplified Chinese versions of Windows XP. Eventually validation will be mandatory for all versions. If you see the "Validation Recommended" message, we suggest you click Continue and make sure that your copy of Windows passes the validation routine.

Usually the validation system will accept your Windows installation and you'll return to the download page, now showing the message "Genuine Microsoft Software." In some cases you'll have to enter the 25-character Product Key (found on the Windows XP CD or on a sticker on the PC's case). But what happens if you can't find that key, or if the validation routine rejects it? For now, you can slide along without validation, but eventually, if you want any Microsoft downloads beyond automatic Critical Updates, you're going to have to bite the bullet and purchase a valid copy of XP.

Microsoft strongly recommends that you reinstall Windows XP on your computer using the new CD. (See our guide at http://go.pcmag.com/reinstallwindowsxp . You may also find "How to Migrate to a New PC" at go.pcmag.com/migration helpful.) The company admits, however, that you may well be able to get by without this somewhat daunting step. Simply run through the validation sequence again and supply the Product Key from your newly purchased software. As long as the original installation used a key from the retail channel, this should serve to validate your installation.

Use a Foreign Keyboard in XP

2005-07-04T23:56:00.000+05:00

I live in the U.S. but I occasionally correspond with people in Norway. I use Windows XP. Is there a way to set up my keyboard so that I can use the three extra Norwegian letters? Of course it would be nice to be able to turn this off when not communicating with Norwegians.

Gary Norsk

In Windows XP it's not at all hard to enable one or more alternate keyboard layouts and switch between them. Open Control Panel and launch Regional and Language Options. Click the Languages tab, then the Details button, then Add. Select the desired language and keyboard layout and click OK. Now click the Language Bar button, check Show additional Language bar icons in the taskbar, and click OK again and again until all dialog boxes are closed. This lets you switch to the Norwegian keyboard. You will, of course, have to learn the correct key locations for the Norwegian keyboard layout.

Another option, which does not require using a different keyboard layout, is to learn the ANSI codes for the additional Norwegian letters. To enter one of these letters in most programs, hold down the Alt key, tap out the numeric code on the keypad at right (not the top-row number keys), then release Alt. Here are the codes: Æ = 0198, æ = 0230, Ø = 0216, ø = 0248, Å = 0197, å = 0229. You could also use Insert | Symbol to enter the characters, but if you know the codes, it's probably quicker to enter them by hand.

Importing Bookmarks into Firefox

2005-07-02T00:00:00.000+05:00

The PC Magazine Top 100 Sites story ( http://go.pcmag.com/top100websites ) lets you download all the links. But how do I install them in Firefox?

Bart Gold

The 2005 Top 100 Favorites download ( http://go.pcmag.com/favorites ) includes two elements. One is a program that will install all of the sites as Internet Explorer Favorites (with the option to uninstall using Add/Remove Programs). The other is a simple HTML file that can be imported into Firefox, Netscape, or Opera. If you choose File | Import from Firefox's main menu, however, you don't get an option to import bookmarks from a file—all you can do is import the entire configuration from whatever other browser Firefox finds.

To import this or any other bookmark file into Firefox, first select Bookmarks | Manage Bookmarks. In the resulting Bookmarks Manager screen, select File | Import. This time you'll get an option to import From File—select it, click Next, and follow the prompts.

Undiscovered Microsoft Office Extras

2005-07-01T09:02:00.000+05:00

You use Microsoft Office for its primary applications: Word, Excel, Outlook, and, depending on your edition of Office, PowerPoint, Access, and more. But if you have Office 2003, regardless of edition, you'll find several other useful tools tucked away in the Microsoft Office | Microsoft Office Tools group on the Windows Start menu.

If you use Office's default installation settings, either eight or nine Office tools will show up in the menu; the Microsoft Office Access Snapshot Viewer installs only with editions that include Access. Some of the menu items will actually point to programs on your hard drive. The rest install the apps the first time you try to run them (so make sure you have your Office CD handy or know where the files are on your network). Four of the tools are mini-applications; the rest are utilities. Here's a quick introduction to each.

Microsoft Office Picture Manager effectively replaces the Photo Editor app that came with earlier versions of Office, although it offers fewer editing features. As its name suggests, it's much more concerned with managing photos and other images than with editing them. In fact, it's similar to—and actually as capable as—some standalone album programs that come bundled with scanners and cameras, and it goes far beyond the simple viewing features in, say, Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. It's a highly useful tool for organizing and viewing images, as well as for basic editing of images in BMP, EMF, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and WMF formats. In addition, it will let you compress files in most of these formats and convert from one format to another.

The interface superficially resembles Windows Explorer set to View | Thumbnails, but it has many more features. Picture Manager's left pane does not show the complete hierarchy of folders on your hard drive, as Explorer does. Instead, the pane shows shortcuts to specific folders. If you have images in folders scattered across your drive, or on multiple drives, you can create shortcuts directly to each folder.

If you want to be able to move anywhere on your drive, you can do that too. Just add a shortcut to a folder that contains subfolders, choose the shortcut, then move to the subfolders. If you add a shortcut to, say, your C: drive, you'll be able to navigate to anywhere on the drive.

To add a shortcut, choose File | Add Picture Shortcut, then navigate to the folder you want the new shortcut to take you to. To add shortcuts automatically, choose File | Locate Pictures, use the task pane to enter a location to look in, and click OK. If you choose to look in Local Drives, for example, Picture Manager will search all your drives and add shortcuts to any folder that includes files in the right format. You can also delete any shortcuts you don't want by right-clicking on them (or selecting them and hitting Shift-F10) and choosing Remove Shortcut. Do not select Delete, which will delete the actual folder and any files in it.

One useful feature is the ability to convert files to other formats. Select a file or files, choose File | Export, then pick the format to convert to—BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, or TIF—from the Export With This File Format drop-down list.

You'll also want to experiment with the editing tools on the Picture menu, which let you do things like crop, rotate, adjust brightness and contrast, remove red-eye, and resize and compress the image. If you make a change you don't like, Edit | Undo will let you back up multiple steps. More important, changes aren't permanent until you give the File | Save command. When you close Picture Manager, if you haven't saved your changes, the program will ask whether you want to.

Microsoft Office Document Scanning and Microsoft Office Document Imaging work together. Capture a page in the Document Scanning tool and it will hand the scanned image over to the Document Imaging tool. If you start a scan from Document Imaging, it will call on the Document Scanning tool for the actual scan. These apps are worth knowing about because, in combination with Windows XP, they give you a poor man's document- management capability similar to what you'll find in the bundled software for document scanners. This is too often missing from low-cost, desktop flatbed scanner packages. And it goes light-years beyond the wimpy Windows Scanner and Camera Wizard, which has no OCR feature.

When you open Document Scanning, it may ask for a scanner to use. If it doesn't, and you have more than one scanner driver installed, click the Scanner button and pick the scanner you want from the drop-down list. You'll also see two check boxes in the dialog box. If you want to open the driver before scanning each time, so that you can check or change settings, be sure to put a check in the box labeled Show Scanner Driver Dialog Before Scanning.

You can control most settings through the program's presets. To see the settings, highlight each in turn, click the Preset Options button, and then click Edit Selected Preset. (Notice that you can create additional presets by choosing Create New Presets.) Work through the tabs and Advanced button options to see or change the settings.

Two options are worth special mention. Choose the General tab, and you'll see a Create Shortcut button. Click it to add a shortcut to the current Preset on your desktop, so you can scan simply by double-clicking on the shortcut. If there's a type of scan you regularly repeat, this can be handy.

Choose the Processing tab, and you'll see an OCR option to recognize text in the scanned image. The OCR feature makes the file searchable in Document Imaging and readable by the Windows XP Indexing Service to give you basic document-management capabilities. Go to Start | Search, search for a word or phrase in the file, and then open the file in Document Imaging. You can then search for the word or phrase within the document using Edit | Find. The ability to create an indexable file is a big strength of the combined apps. In informal tests, we were able to find all the references we searched for.

You can also export the text to a Word document from Document Imaging with Tools | Send Text to Word. (And if you didn't recognize the text when you scanned the document, you can choose Tools | Recognize Text Using OCR first.) The Document Imaging tool offers other features too, like the ability to add annotations. The options are largely self- explanatory. Work your way through the menus to see what's there.

Another useful feature is that you can change the order of pages in a multipage document by dragging and dropping. You can also drag pages from one Document Imaging window to another. You'll notice that Document Imaging supports two file formats: TIFF and MDI (Microsoft Document Imaging). To share your files with others, you may want to use TIFF; if, however, someone saves a TIFF file in another program, the text information will be lost if you've recognized the file with OCR, so you'll have to recognize it again. MDI has the advantage of producing smaller files. In a quick test, we saved a 1.2MB TIFF file as a 333KB MDI file.

Microsoft Clip Organizer is both the organizing tool its name promises and a collection of clip art, some of which installs on your system and some of which is available for downloading from the Web through Tools | Clips Online. The File | Add Clips To Organizer option works similarly to the equivalent in Picture Organizer, to let you add clips manually or automatically.

Here again, the program is straightforward, and you can learn it easily by exploring the menus and the choices on the task pane. Be sure to try out View | Search, which lets you search within clip art collections or across multiple collections for keywords. You can also add or delete keywords from a clip by right-clicking and choosing Edit Keywords.

Microsoft Office 2003 Save My Settings Wizard is just that, a wizard for saving the settings of your Office applications. It can also restore settings you've already saved. Once you've saved the settings to a file, you can move the file to another machine to change the Office 2003 programs on that system to your preferred settings all at once. This is a convenient way to customize the settings on a new system when you're upgrading your computer, for example.

Microsoft Office Application Recovery will close down an Office application that's stopped responding. It also gives you the option to recover your work.

Microsoft Office 2003 Language Settings lets you set the language options for Office programs by adding or removing languages from the Enabled list. You can also change the default language for Office programs. Change from English (U.S.) to English (U.K.), for example, and Word's spell-checker will start accepting colour as right and marking color as wrong.

Microsoft Office Access Snapshot Viewer lets you view Access report snapshots, which you can create using Access itself. The utility comes with versions of Office that include Access. You can create report snapshots to share information with people who don't have Access, and either send a copy of the viewer along with them or send a link to a site where the viewer can be downloaded. (By default, the program Snapview.exe is located in C:\ program files\common files\microsoft shared\snapshot viewer. You can also download it from Microsoft's Web site.)

Digital Certificate for VBA Projects lets you create a self-signed digital certificate. Without the certificate, the Office macro security feature will treat macros you created yourself as suspect and, depending on the security setting, may either ask whether to enable them each time you open a file with macros or simply disable them. You can use the self-signed digital certificate to tell Office to trust the macros.

You're bound to find some useful programs within that often neglected Microsoft Office Tools menu, whether it's for managing your photos and other image files, setting up a document-management system, creating certificates for your macros, or publishing your Access data. Once you try them, you may find that they're valuable additions to your toolkit.

Installing a New Motherboard

2005-06-30T09:11:00.000+05:00

If you've been thinking about building a new PC or upgrading an existing one, but the prospect of installing a motherboard seemed too daunting, have no fear. All it takes is patience, a few tools, and a willingness to work inside the cramped quarters of a PC case. Here we'll assume that you're starting with an empty case or that the old motherboard has been removed.

The tools you will need are a Phillips No. 2 screwdriver, forceps or needle-nosed pliers, and a flashlight. An antistatic strap and mat are highly recommended, especially in dry climates; at the least, you will need to be near a light switch or metal lamp to ground yourself frequently. Your workspace should be well lit and have a table big enough to hold the case horizontally. Installation should take about an hour, if you're starting with an empty case.

We'll focus on motherboards that adhere to the ATX specification, though a few new ones may be in BTX format. If you're installing a Micro-ATX motherboard, the process is similar, but with fewer screws.

Set up the case. If you have a tower case, lay it on its side on the table. Remove any panels and internal drive bays—and maybe the power supply—to maximize your work space. Check the location of the motherboard mount points, which are either bumps or hex-head nuts that will accept the mounting screws. Test the screws in the mount holes before you try to install the motherboard.

Install the I/O shield. The I/O shield is a thin aluminum plate—with holes cut for the keyboard, USB connectors, serial ports, and the like—that you need to insert into a corresponding cutout on the rear of the case. (If you forget to do this, you will have to remove and reinstall the motherboard.)

You may have to punch out additional flashing on the I/O shield to make room for optional I/O connections for your particular motherboard. Do this before installing the I/O shield.

Insert the motherboard. Decide if you want to install the processor, CPU cooler, and memory before you install the motherboard. With some small PC cases, it's easier to do it that way; with others, it's easier to add these components later. (Unfortunately, there is so much variation between cases that we can't give specific recommendations.) If you have an aftermarket CPU cooler that requires a bottom plate underneath the motherboard, you'll have to put that in before installing the motherboard.

The installation is pretty simple. First, be sure to ground yourself. Align the motherboard so that the back-panel I/O ports slip into the matching holes on the back of the I/O shield. You may have to fold some flashing out of the way on the shield itself. Once the ports are through the holes in the shield, the motherboard should be almost aligned with the mount points.

Get a screwdriver and screw ready, then put one hand on the back of the motherboard (the side closer to the front of the case) and gently apply pressure toward the rear of the case to align the screw holes with the mount points. The first screw you should attach is the center one on the motherboard. Do not screw it all the way in.

Attach the remaining screws, one by one, around the edge of the board. You may need to wiggle the board a bit—don't try to force a screw in, or you'll risk stripping it or its mount point. Stop tightening as soon as you meet resistance. An electric screwdriver with adjustable clutch set to minimum force works well here. If you drop a screw into a tight space, use the forceps or pliers to retrieve it. If the motherboard is partially screwed down, you can even upend the case.

Attach wiring. The power connections are pretty simple. Newer desktop motherboards have a primary 24-pin connector and a secondary 4-pin connector to deliver dedicated power to the CPU. Some server or workstation boards may have an 8-pin secondary connector instead of a 4-pin one. Older ATX boards have a 20-pin primary connector and the 4-pin secondary connector.

The front-panel connectors are typically at the rear of the motherboard (nearer the front of the case). These include connectors for the power switch, reset button, power LED, and hard drive LED. They may be color-coded, and are usually in a tight cluster.

Most motherboards have connectors for more USB or FireWire ports if you need them. Follow the instructions in your manual to install these.

Once you've attached all the wiring, you're done. You still have to install the processor, memory, and expansion cards—but those are topics for another time.

Listening to Office

2005-06-29T09:14:00.000+05:00

Proofreading text or numbers you've entered from an original, whether by typing or by way of an OCR program, usually works best with two people—one to read the original out loud while the other checks it against the copy. With Office 2003, however, you can dispense with the second person and let Office read the copy instead. You can even have Office read your e-mail to you, if you know how.

Assuming you've installed the Office speech options, the text-to-speech feature is easiest to find in Excel. Choose Tools | Speech | Show Text To Speech Toolbar, and Excel will open a toolbar with five buttons. If you choose the Speak On Enter button at the far right, Excel will read back everything you've typed in a given cell each time you hit Enter. This is particularly useful when you're entering a long list of numbers and don't want to keep moving your attention between the original and the screen. But be sure to click the button again when you're done to turn the feature off.

Alternatively, you can choose the By Rows or By Columns button to tell Excel whether to read the data across or down. Then select the cells you want read, and choose the Speak Cells button on the far left of the toolbar. You can also choose Speak Cells without selecting cells first, but it's generally a better idea to select them, since Excel's guess about which cells to read may not match what you actually want read. To interrupt Excel reading the cells, choose the Stop Speaking button.

In Word, the feature works a little differently. To open the appropriate toolbar, choose Tools | Speech. You may see a message welcoming you to Office speech recognition and telling you that you have to adjust your microphone and train Office. For now, choose Cancel to bypass the training and open the Language toolbar.

If you see a message box in the toolbar tagged "Dictation," "Voice Command," or "Listening," or if Word starts entering text in the document in response to ambient noise, it means you've activated the speech-recognition feature at some point. Click the Microphone button to toggle the feature off. You can turn it back on when you want it by choosing the button again.

By default, the Language toolbar will not show a choice for speaking text. But if you click on the down arrow at the extreme right of the toolbar, you'll see options for Speak Text and Pause Speaking. Choose each of these in turn to add them to the toolbar. You can then use them much the same way as the equivalent buttons in Excel.

Choose Speak Text to tell Word to start reading the text. The button will change to a Stop Speaking button. Click it if you want to stop completely or stop and then start again from the beginning. Or you can click the Pause Speaking button instead, which will change to a Resume Speaking button. Click it again, and Word will pick up at the same spot where you paused. As with Excel, you can select the text you want read before giving the Speak Text command. Otherwise, Word will start at the current cursor position.

You can use the text-to-speech feature in Outlook also, but only if you use Word as your e-mail editor. To see if Outlook is set to use Word, select Tools | Options, then the Mail Format tab. Look for, or add, a check in the box labeled Use Microsoft Office Word 2003 To Edit E-mail Messages.

When you create a message in Outlook with this option checked, you're actually using Word. If you want to hear the message read back to you while you're editing, use the same commands as if you had loaded Word directly. You can also tell Outlook (or Word) to read a message that's already been sent or received, but there's a trick to that.

If you call up the Language toolbar when reading a message that's been sent or received, you'll find the Speak Text button grayed out. Give the command to forward the message, however, and Outlook will open it for editing in Word, complete with an active Speak Text button. When you're done listening to the message, simply close the window with the forwarded version without saving it.

Finally, you may want to change the voice or the reading speed. To do so, go to the Language toolbar, choose Tools | Options, the Advanced Speech button, and then the Text To Speech tab. In the Voice Selection section, the drop-down list will let you change the voice. Pick one of the choices offered, and use the Preview Voice button to listen to it; after hearing a few, you can decide which you like best. Similarly, in the Voice Speed section, you can adjust the speed along the scale from slow to fast, and use the Preview Voice button to hear the effect. Choose Apply to accept the new settings, then click OK to close the dialog box.

On-The-Go Tips

2005-06-28T00:49:00.000+05:00

When it comes to computers, it's all about power, and notebook computers are no exception—it's just that power has a few more meanings on these PCs.

Set Power Options

On a desktop, power options are about convenience—how long should the system idle before starting the screen saver?—but they have a much more profound effect on laptops, namely on battery longevity.

You'll find Power Options in the Control Panel, and within it, several mobile-use–specific battery options, including Portable/Laptop, Super Power Saver, and Max. Battery. You can tweak these settings beyond the presets to determine how long the system waits to turn off monitors and hard drives, and when to stand by or hibernate (depending on whether it's plugged in or on battery power)

Use External Monitors

Laptop screens, especially on small, thin-and-light notebooks, can cause eyestrain with all-day, every-day use. You may want to connect a second monitor to your laptop to use instead of, or in conjunction with, the LCD screen that's already on the machine. As long as the graphics card can handle it—most laptops' can—Windows will make it very easy for you.

To start, plug the second monitor into the laptop's output port or docking station. Then find the hot key to send what's on screen to the external monitor. Depending on the notebook, pressing the hot key (typically, Fn plus an F-key) will either page through configurations much as Alt-Tab pages through your open windows, or simply activate the configurations, blanking the notebook display and activating the external monitor, then activating both.

You can also use the external display in concert with the internal display to extend your viewable display area. Right-click on the desktop and select Properties, then choose the Settings tab. You'll see both monitors represented in the dialog box. If the second monitor is grayed out, right click on it and select Attached. Set the screen resolution and color quality for this second display. Windows generally assumes that the external display is to the right, but if it's on the other side, just drag the on-screen representation to match your layout.

With that monitor still selected, make sure there's a check in the box labeled Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor. Choose Apply and your desktop will take advantage of the additional screen space. It's that simple. You can now drag applications back and forth between the two displays.

Split the Difference Between Standby and Powering Down

When you go through a normal shutdown (clicking on Start then Shut Down), you're given a set of options, including Shut down, Restart, Stand by, and, if you've enabled it on your Win XP system, Hibernate. Hibernation saves the current state of your system to disk, so the system can completely power down but be restored to the same state when restarted. The battery doesn't drain in this state, but restarting won't be as quick as from Standby mode.

If the Hibernate option doesn't appear in your shutdown options, launch Power Options from the Control Panel, click on the Hibernate tab, and check the box labeled Enable hibernation.

Go Straight to Hibernate

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We told you in the General Tips section how to create a shortcut to shut down your Windows system automatically. But you can create a simple command-based shortcut to do the job. Right-click on the desktop and select New | Shortcut. Type this case-sensitive command into the dialog box: rundll32.exe PowrProf.dll, Set

SuspendState.

Advanced Find and Replace in Word

2005-06-24T20:18:00.000+05:00

The Find and Replace function in Microsoft Word is extremely useful, but I can't always make it work the way I want. For example, if I want to change the color of every instance of a specific word in a document, I can't put an example of that word in color into the Replace with box. And the same holds for symbols—I am trying to remove a symbol from scanned documents but can't do that either.

Melvin Turetzky

It's true that you can't type a colored version of your search term into the Replace with box, but you definitely can use Find and Replace to change formatting. Type the word you want to color in the Find what box. Click on the More button to expand the Find and Replace dialog, and click within the Replace with box to select it. (Even if it was selected before, clicking on More switches back to the Find what box). Click on the Format button at the bottom of the dialog and choose Font from the menu that appears. Select the drop-down arrow under Font Color and choose the color you want. The Replace with box remains empty, but the formatting to be applied is listed below it. When you click on the Replace All button, that formatting will be applied to everything that matches the text in the Find what box.

As for using a symbol in the Find and Replace box, the easiest way is to copy one instance of the symbol to the clipboard and paste it into the Find what box. By the same token, if you want to replace specific text with a symbol, you can create one instance of the symbol, cut it to the clipboard, and paste it in the Replace with box. Just select Insert | Symbol from the menu, find the desired symbol, and click on Insert. Cut that symbol to the clipboard, paste it into the Replace with box, and you're ready to go.