I found another good Flow chart

 

Nice.

Way to give away all the secrets... Pretty soon you are going to post the Colonel's Secret Recipe, too?

 

Ok, my tip of the week is the Google Safe Browsing Diagnostic page.

To read about it see here:

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot...to-rescue.html

I don't know how to access it any other way than this pretty much the site is
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/d...c?site=(insert site here)

so for AZ it's
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/d...=acurazine.com and guess what, it turn up something, sort of.



Scrib and Astro might want to look into this.

Other sites are a little worse for example myspace
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/d...te=myspace.com



SO if you're curious about a site check this page out. I wouldn't consider this site the end all be all in knowing if a site is infected but it's helpful.

 

This week I have a good one. I've uploaded an ISO of the Ultimate BootCD that I use. It's got a crap ton of stuff. I didn't make it but it's what we use at my IT job. It's got
memtest86
NTFS registry password editor
Norton Ghost (I use this all the time)
Super antispyware
A-squared AV
Kaspersky AV removal tool
Firefox
Defraggler
clamwin
avg
avast!
7-zip
DriveEraser
CCleaner
Cmos/bios password recovery tool
CPU-Z
diskcheck
HDTune
Imgmaker
ipsniffer
Keyfinder
keyreader
mbrfix
netstumbler
recuva
speedfan
spybot
tinyhexer
windirstat (my 2nd recommendation in this thread)
and a lot more...

With UBCD if you insert your a removable drive before booting from the cd UBCD will recognize it and you'll be able to access files and have limited space to install another program if you'd like. So if you want all the benefits of having a WinPE recovery/diagnostic disk without all the trouble of building it then this is it! ISO is a little under 700mb so it'll fit on one CD

you can get it here:

http://depositfiles.com/files/hkhq3wwsy

 

Ghost is freeware now?

 

great thread...

 

Last I checked....no.

But, I believe free trials are available.

 

I don't believe the version is a free trial. I've never used ghost before this but it seems pretty complete. I've used this version to do a full forensic image of an HFS+ formatted drive before.

 

The ultimate disk is great. Same with hirens, but it's not legal, so everything is a hacked version.

 

The software of the week this week is WintoFlash. It's a free neat little utility that will take install files from any Windows install disc and transfer them to a flash drive and make it bootable so you can install directly from a flash drive instead of a disc. If you use an iso mounting tool like daemon tools lite you can takes files from an ISO and convert any flash drive to a bootable install drive. I just tried it out with Windows 7 RTM ISO and it worked fine. I'm rebuilding my PC and will be using said flash drive to install W7 when all the parts get here.

It also works with liveCDs so you should be able to the the Ultimate bootCD .iso I posted last week and use daemon tools lite to mount that iso and then use WintoFlash to convert it to a bootable flash drive version! See how my tips synergize and build on top of each other!



http://wintoflash.com/home/en/

 

Cool program! I wonder if this will speed up windows installation. But from that screenshot, I always have doubts about an app with multiple spelling errors.

 

yeah english isn't the default language of the programmers and it's still a beta product. Though it should increase install times cause flash should be faster than a CD drive but that doesn't have anything to do with the program that just depends on the flash drive you're using.

 

This is nice for installs on machines w/o optical drives. Thanks Stunna.

 

Or drives with optical discs cause it should be a faster install medium.

 

well I need to reformat my sis-in-law's laptop this week so i'll give it a shot! Thanks stunna

 

so i downloaded and installed that mvps software.

this was after i reformatted my computer two weeks ago.

it works and blocks ads in everything from internet explorer to aim. however, ever since i started using mvps, i noticed that clicking the back button (in internet explorer) brings me to adsites (which the browser won't open). so i have to double or triple click to go back to the site i was on previously. ad sites i'm talking about are like ad.yieldmanager.

is this because mvps is blocking the ads on those pages? i notice a lot on yahoo.

i've scanned my computer with microsoft security essentials, adaware, spybot, malwarebytes, but i get nothing. and i just reformatted so i don't think there should be anything malicious.



thanks again for all your tips.

 

I haven't had any problems like that. What browser are you using?

The only thing I've noticed is that bing cashback doesn't work, google suggested sites don't work and when I try to watch a video on cnet it won't play cause it won't play the video until an ad plays first and if the ad doesn't play than the video won't play.

To fix the bing cashback issue you have to delete one entry from that long list. and that's the 0.r.msn.com entry. you can just search the HOSTS file for msn.com and you should find it. delete that entry and it will work fine. If in Vista/7 you have to open notepad first and to open notepad you right click on it and choose "run as administrator" from there open the file from within notepad and edit it.

 

internet explorer 8, i think. it's the latest one available to download for xp.

oh, and i couldn't watch how i met your mother on cbs.com because the ads wouldn't work.

 

well fuck CBS! that channel sux anyways

 

i know. but HIMYM rocks.

anyways, thanks again. lots of good info here.

 

I get this in Opera, too. It's because ads on some pages are held in IFRAMES, which are literally web pages embedded in web pages (Inline Frame). It's up to the browser to determine if, when one of those IFRAMES changes, it's considered navigation that should be recorded in history.

Think of the Ask search engine. When you click a result, you get a top frame with the Ask "toolbar" and the main frame with the search result. The main frame is an IFRAME. If the browser did not record teh navigation of teh IFRAME, the first time you clicked back, you would lose all the clicking around you did in the search result.

The more you know...

 

If anyone has any recommendations for software or tips you can shoot me a PM

 

My tip is download Sandboxie!

 

imaginary reps to you. thanks.

i was going mad because i thought it was some kind of virus.

 

I just used the flash drive I made to install Windows 7 RTM and it installed in 15 minutes! That's about ten minutes less than my optical drive.

 

Stunna, what would happen if

A) You just copied all of the files on your installation CD to a flash drive and boot from it
or
B) You create an ISO of your installation CD and somehow write it to a flash drive and boot from it

Do you know of any software that does option B?

 

nice tips. thanks Stunna!

 

WintoFlash does A, however if you wanted to do B then I'd use img burn to create the ISO from the disk image then use daemon tools lite to mount the ISO as a virtual drive in Windows and then use WintoFlash to copy it to a flash drive. Or you could just use WintoFlash directly from the install CD and then use img burn afterwards to make an ISO of the same install CD. No need to make an ISO then make a bootable flash drive from the ISO when you can make it directly from the install CD.

 

Does this only work with flash drives or would any USB storage device work? I've always done this with my Mac clients as installing OS X is WAY faster when the install media is a nice speedy external hard drive.

I have a 500GB HD paritioned to contain multiple versions of OS X install media. I like lots.

 

yeah it should work with any device flash or not

 

If WinToFlash simply does A, would I achieve the same results by just inserting my WinXP disc into my desktop, copying all the files onto a flash drive, and then plugging the flash drive into the laptop I am reformatting? Because after I used WinToFlash to copy the disc onto my flash drive, the items do not look the same:

WinXP CD:


WinXP Flash Drive:


Does your flash drive have similar items in it?

 

I've haven't tried it with XP only Win7 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and they looked identical to the source disk. I have noticed that on my old PC (I just rebuilt my PC last night) and my server are both really slow at loading from the flash drive. My server has been loading from the flash drive for about 10 minutes now and I still haven't gotten to a point where I can do anything. It seems like it's working but it's really slow. Now even when loading from CD these two PCs have been slow at loading the new WinPE install enviroment that the new Windows OS install discs use but it's even slower over flash than optical disc. However flash is more convenient for me than removing an optical drive from my PC installing it temporarily in my server and then removing it and reinstalling it back in my PC when I'm done.

 

For further clarification once the install process starts it's not slow it's just getting the install program loaded and going through the initial screens that takes forever. this happens with cds also with these PCs, don't ask me why.

 

This week I got a cool service called VirusTotal. It's a free online virus and malware scan service but what's different about it is that you upload a file to the site and it will scan it using 41 AV programs and show you their results. So if you've got a file that your AV is saying is infected and you think it might be a false positive you can upload said file to this site and it will scan it with 41 AV programs at let you know the results for each of them. It's kindof like a Supreme Court of AV programs that will tell if each thinks the file is infected or not.

www.virustotal.com

Also it's got an email service where you can email a file to scan@virustotal.com and put SCAN in the subject field and they'll email you back the results. Even cooler is there's a little 80kb download that adds Virus Total to the "Send to" list in the context menu. So if you right click on a file and choose send to > virus total it'll upload the file and then take you to the website!

 

This weeks software of the week is the Filehippo.com update checker! I've been wanting a tool like this for years and today I found it! Filehippo.com if you don't know is a software download site much like cnet's download.com or softpedia.com or many others, it hosts a bunch programs and updates for you to download. Basically what update checker does is scans your system for programs and what version you're running it then checks it's server to see if any newer version is available, it will even tell you if there's a new beta version available! It's free and you can set it to run every time you start Windows. The FileHippo.com Update checker is available here

http://www.filehippo.com/updatechecker/

Another similar program is Secunia PSI (Personal Software Inspector) and I've run that before. It is a little different in that its focus is on security updates. It's scan your system looking for programs and sees if there's any security update available for them. It is also free and is available here

http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/

 

Good of you to keep this going.

 

The downside with these file checkers is that usually it can't find the updated drivers it identifies as needing, however google fixes that...

 

what do you mean by that?

 

The ones I used will identfy an updated component (driver, software patch, etc), but when you click on the link to download the update, the link is no good. But you can google what you need and download it.

 

Filehippo is where its at. One of the best sites out there.

However, I don't use those tools personally. I'd rather just check manually or check when i have a problem. The less i have installed the better