‘Blackouts’ and missing icons for users of pirated Windows this week

August 27, 2008 · Filed Under Security · Comment 

‘Blackouts’ for users of pirated Windows

Pirated Windows XP professional user beware, remember the nagging balloon that appear everytime you boot up windows? the Windows Genuine Advantage program Microsoft secretly introduce in SP2? Yes, it is back and this time it is meaner.

Starting Wednesday, users with pirated copies of Microsoft Corp’s Windows XP Professional operating system (OS) on machines that are Internet-capable could find their computer displays going black and with no screen icons visible.

There are 8.6 million users of Win XP Pro in Malaysia and about three million are expected to suffer the “blackouts,” according to Microsoft Malaysia.

To continue working, the user would need to reset the machine’s desktop background. Everything will return to normal. But when 60 minutes are up, the black screen will reappear and the user must go through the whole process again. Source: TheStar

Since this WGA feature is new, I doubt there are any cracks available, the only way to go about the system is to purchase a genuine XP Pro serial from Microsoft. How about downgrading your Windows to Home Edition?

For your information, Windows Vista and Windows XP Home Edition are not included in the latest ‘blackout’ experiment.

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How to Disable Remove Windows Startup Programs Application

January 11, 2008 · Filed Under How To and Online Tutorials · 1 Comment 

Bought a new computer but it appears to be sluggish? This is due to the ’startup’ programs that comes pre-installed with every software. Programmers loves to sneak in a few line of codes that enables their applications to boot up together with Windows, usually these programs runs at the background without our knowledge, thus using up RAM and processing power in turn causing our computer to be sluggish.

Here is a simple tutorial on how to disable these programs from booting up or starting up whenever windows Vista or Xp boot. First, select the ‘Run’ command.

How to Disable Remove Windows Startup Programs Application

Once done, a dialog box will appear and type ‘msconfig’ as shown in the image below. Hit ‘ok’.

How to Disable Remove Windows Startup Programs Application

Another dialog box will appear, select the ’startup’ tab and proceed disabling or enabling the programs that you wants it to boot up together with Windows. Hit ‘Ok’ when you’re done.

How to Disable Remove Windows Startup Programs Application

Restart your comp, the next time when your windows bootup, a dialog box would appear and it says, you have modify some setting… blah blah blah, just check on the only ‘check box’ that say ‘never show this again’ and hit ‘ok’.

That’s all folks, no software needed.

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How to Recover Your Windows XP and Vista User Login Password

November 28, 2007 · Filed Under How To and Online Tutorials · 1 Comment 

Please take note that this article is meant for those that lost their Windows user login password, it is illegal to perform this task on another person’s computer without their knowledge. Please use the following method wisely.

The tutorials are fairly simply, it does not require an intensive knowledge in computing to go about recovering your lost password.

Method 01 - Ophcrack is a Windows User Login Password Cracker

How to Recover Your Windows User Login Password

Ophcrack is a Windows password cracker based on a time-memory trade-off using rainbow tables. This is a new variant of Hellman’s original trade-off, with better performance. It recovers 99.9% of alphanumeric passwords in seconds.

ophcrack software screenshot password windows cracker

What makes ophcrack so powerful is the ability to crack Microsoft Windows user login password with the LiveCD function, no installation needed. LiveCD boots up before windows does, thus allowing it to load and starts cracking your Windows XP and Vista login password, this bootable feature makes sense because without your password you are completely log out of your own computer.

The only drawback of the cracker is when it comes to cracking passwords with alphanumeric more than 15 characters, fear not, the good news is, how many people actually have a 15 character password? Probably that is why you’re reading this post because you have a password that is so long that you’ve somehow forgotten about it, am I right? Anyway the software is free and here are some of the unique features:

  • Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
  • Loads hashes from encrypted SAM recovered from a Windows partition.
  • Bootable directly from the CD.

Note that the it only runs on Mac powered by intel processor, older Macs powered by Motorola G5 processor are not compatible.

Method 02 - Administrator Mode

How to Recover Your Windows User Login Password

The next scenario: What if you lost your Bios password and you’re not able to change the boot up sequence from Harddisk to CD-Rom, thus rendering LiveCD feature useless. Fear not, all Windows comes with the Administrator function, the question is, how do we bring up the administrator login screen?

Simple, hit ‘Ctrl’ + ‘Alt’ + ‘Del’ to bring up the alternative login screen, a new dialog box would popup, what you need to do is key in the user name as ‘administrator’, leave the password field empty and hit ‘enter’. Volla, you’re log into the default administrator user account. Run ophcrack to retrieve your forgotten Windows Login password.

Method 03 - Repair Windows

This method requires the original Microsoft Windows CD, TechTrax has an article ‘Forgot My Administrator Password!‘, they provide a step by step tutorial on how to recover your lost Windows XP password.

How to Secure Your Windows Login Password or prevent people from logging into your computer without your knowledge

Knowing that such a powerful Windows Login Cracker exist, what makes your computer secure? What are the odds of a stranger sneaking in and out of your comp when you’re not around, stealing your data, going through your browsing history without your knowledge?

How to Recover Your Windows User Login Password

With the availability of these methods as described above, the chances of people sneaking into your ’secure’ comp is possible. Windows user login password is really weak, what you need is a hardware security lock instead of a software based security, Rohos Logon Key is one of the many hardware security product for windows, it comes in the form of a USB drive, instead of a software based security where you key in your password, it turns your Windows Login requirement into a hardware security token, nobody can access your comp without the exact security USB key, problem is if your lost the USB key, you’re as good as dead.

Rohos Logon Key is considered to be the most convenient, user-friendly and smart password replacement application on the market. This protects your company from information theft.

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How to Recover Deleted Files and Folder in Windows

November 27, 2007 · Filed Under Software · Comment 

How to Recover Deleted Files and Folder in Windows

There are times when you accidentally deleted some files or folder, it could be an important file and coincidentally you have just emptied your recycle bin. The chances of recovering the file is pretty slim if you don’t perform a weekly backup or have the all expensive Norton BackUp installed. Fear not!

DataRecovery is a freeware written by a Japanese Company - Tokiwa, DataRecovery official site in English, the name implies it all, it is a file recovery software and it is free. According to their official statement, DataRecovery can recover deleted files and ironically it has a unique feature to wipe off any files from future recoveries. The user interface of the software is relatively straight forward, no installation required and it works with Windows Vista. The recovering success depends on the individual system configuration, for example the type of software running on the background, the file system FAT32 or NTSF and many more.

Some of the key features:

  • Support FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS
  • Recover NTFS compressed files
  • Prevent sensitive files from being recovered
  • Search by partial string in the file name

Download DataRecovery. If DataRecovery fails to perform the recovering task, try some of Norton’s product, the only drawback for Norton’s product is the cost, it doesn’t comes cheap and I believe DataRecovery could perform the same task for free, no cracks, serials, or keygen needed.

  • Norton GoBack allows you to try new software safely; recover deleted or modified files, and roll back system to better and healthy state.
  • Norton Save & Restore could create full backups of PC’s content, backup and restore individual files and folders.
  • Norton Ghost also allows you to full backup PC’s content. You can even encrypt backups to keep them secure.

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