Raymond.CC Blog

Author: raymond

  • Solution to Successfully Burned CD or DVD Shows Blank Content

    I went to one of my work places today and one of the lecturers told me that her desktop’s DVD drive is unable to read a lot of discs that have been burned by students. The drive will only show a blank drive with nothing in it. The disc are then tested on her laptop using VSO Inspector’s disc surface scan and it did not report any problems. Another way to test if it is a disc or drive problem is to insert an original disc such as the provided HP recovery disc to the drive and see if it reads or not. I did that and it was able to read and display all the files in the HP recovery disc.

    This case is pretty similar to a few comments that I get occasionally where users are unable to boot up antivirus rescue cds after burning them to disc. I don’t really know what is the cause of this problem but I always burn my disc at the “LOWEST” speed and never, not even once encounter a computer that cannot read the disc (Windows CDs and DVDs, Hiren’s BootCD, Antivirus Rescue CDs, Linux Live CDs, Windows PE, ophcrack LiveCD) that I burn. I am not saying that we MUST burn it at the lowest speed but there are some drives out there that are less sensitive and will have problems reading disc that are burned at the maximum speed.

    You must be thinking why are there such super fast DVD drive burner available today when we have to burn it at a low speed? Well it is just normal that computer hardware gets faster and bigger in capacity. The manufacturers couldn’t be releasing a slower drive right? So we have a “choice”, to either record our disc in a faster or lower speed.
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  • 4 Ways to Force Complete Uninstall of Windows Live Messenger

    Windows Live Messenger is one of the most successful free instant messaging clients by Microsoft and they’ve discontinued it after 15 years to move their users to Skype which was acquired for $2.6 billion. Although Windows Live Messenger is still available to download from the Windows Essentials 2012 installer, attempting to sign in will always prompt you that a newer version is available and must install the newer version in order to continue. Clicking the Yes button will automatically download Skype to be installed on your computer.

    While it may seem impossible to use Windows Live Messenger, there are third party methods such as Messenger Reviver that can patch the necessary files in order to allow logging in to Windows Live Messenger 2012. Microsoft has recently shut down the MSNP18 protocol in March that prevented the older Windows Live Messenger 2009 from working. It may make more sense to use Skype today because Microsoft will one day shut down all their Messenger services and the Windows Live Messenger program is no longer being updated.

    Installing Skype should automatically remove Windows Live Messenger from your computer. However if you still find traces of Windows Live Messenger or Skype is unable to remove it, here are some ways to forcefully uninstall Windows Live Messenger from your computer.
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  • 10 Websites to Easily Help Decrypt MD5 Hashed Strings

    It is common to find websites that allow registration and the login information consisting of username and password is normally stored in the server’s database. Many years ago, passwords stored in database were clear text which is why it is possible to recover lost passwords. This is obviously unsafe because a hacker that manages to hack into the server will instantly have access to thousands of passwords. Other than that, less security minded people will probably use the same password for all online services and this will potentially allow the hacker to gain access to all other services belonging to the user.

    To solve this problem, a type of cryptographic hash function called MD5 had been introduced which was deemed safer at that time because it is a one way process. By converting the user’s password to MD5 and storing it on the server’s database, the hacker wouldn’t be able to instantly know your password, even if he managed to access the database. When you login, it simply needs to convert your password that you entered in your web browser to MD5 and compare it in the database. If it matches, then you’re allowed to log in. This also improves the password recovery function by sending a newly generated password rather than allowing you to recover your old password.

    Although MD5 is a one way process that cannot be programmatically decrypted, it is still possible to build a database or dictionary file containing MD5 hashes that matches a string because a string will always match the same MD5. For example, the string “password” will always match the MD5 “5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99”. MD5 is weak and many online applications such as WordPress no longer store password as MD5 hashes their database.

    So is there a way to decrypt MD5? Although not directly, it is possible to perform a reverse lookup. Here are 10 websites containing huge databases that offer online services to check if there is a matching string for a given MD5.
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  • 4 Tools to Increase TCP/IP Half Open Connection Limit

    The Microsoft Windows operating system has always been well known to be easily infected by computer viruses. This is why there are so many viruses that can infect a Windows machine, but very little in other operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS. Since viruses can spread quickly through the network, one of the efforts made by the Microsoft team in Windows XP is the half-open TCP connection limitation to slow the propagation of malware from the infected machine.

    This feature was implemented in Windows XP Service Pack 2 but has been disabled since Windows Vista Service Pack 2. This would also mean that any Windows operating system later than Vista SP2 such as 7, 8 and even 10 will not have this half-open TCP connection limitation anymore.

    The default number of maximum half-open connection is 10 and most people who download files using BitTorrent would normally want to increase it to 50. However most people don’t know that increasing the number of half-open connections does not increase the download speed, but it only decreases the time to connect to the maximum number of peers. Setting this limit too high may greatly slow down your router in making new connections. If you’re looking to increase the half open-connection limit, here are 4 tools to do that.
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  • 3 Network Bootdisk for Microsoft Network in Floppy and Boot CD

    Floppy boot disks used to be one of the most important tools for any computer technicians because they can be used to start up a computer in DOS mode when Windows cannot be booted. While in DOS, the technician is able to investigate the cause of the problem and even possibly fix it.

    In a Windows network environment, a custom floppy boot disk containing the compatible network adapter can be included which can be used to boot up the computer in DOS with networking support. This is very useful because you can map a shared drive to backup files by copying to them to the server and then restore the computer using a backup image created with Norton Ghost.

    Creating a network floppy boot disk from scratch may not be an easy task especially for beginners. Thankfully there are already 3 different ready made floppy boot disk that include drivers for most of the popular network adapters. Although it may sound impossible to use them today due to most modern computers coming without a floppy drive or because it might be difficult to purchase floppy disks from computer shops, there are workarounds to get them to work.
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  • 6 Tools to Forcefully Terminate a Full Screen Application or Game with Hotkey

    Every once in a while we’ll encounter a program that stops responding in Windows due to multiple reasons such as misconfiguration, conflicts between applications that are trying to do the same thing or a bug on the software itself. On newer Windows operating systems such as Windows 7, you are able to click on the X button located at the top right even when a program has hung and Windows will tell you that the program is not responding and you have the choice of either forcefully closing the program or waiting for it to respond.

    close the program

    However, sometimes a full screen game can block the standard hotkeys in Windows such as the Alt+Tab, Win+Tab, Win key, Ctrl+Escape or Ctrl+Shift+Esc as a way to stop you from getting back to the Windows desktop while the game is running to prevent cheating or hacking of the game. This can be a problem when the full screen game hangs and the only way for you to recover is to press the Reset button on your computer to force a cold reboot.

    Here we have 6 different free tools that can forcefully kill the foreground process by pressing a hotkey.
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  • 3 Ways to Slow Down or Speed Up YouTube and Other Flash Videos

    Websites such as YouTube and Vimeo contain millions of videos which can be very helpful in showing what you would like to learn. Obviously learning how to do something from an educational video is far more efficient than reading a few pages of text even if they come with images. The only problem is sometimes the steps can be a little too fast for you to follow where you’ll end up replaying the video over and over again until you finally understand it. Or, the video is too boring and you’d like to speed it up a little because you probably need to watch a small section of the video that you’re interested in.

    In this article we’ll be sharing with you 3 ways on how you can slow down or speed up video playback in YouTube including other flash video websites.
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  • 4 Ways to Force Incompatible Firefox Add-ons or Extensions to Install

    Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are the most used web browsers today. One of the most impressive features found on both of those web browsers is the amount of available free extensions or add-ons that you can download and install to modify the existing behavior of the browser or even add new features such as a FTP client (FireFTP), download manager (DownThemAll!), or advertisement blocker (Adblock Plus) without requiring a dedicated third party software. Currently there is more than a whopping 12,000 extensions that can be installed on the current Firefox.

    Although the extensions are very useful, the constant browser updates which are released every month can cause some of the extensions to stop working if they are programmed to only run with specific versions of Firefox.

    extension is incompatible with firefox

    This is actually a safety feature to allow the extension developers to fully test and verify that their extension is compatible with the latest Firefox and not crashing it. However there are times when it reports that the extension is incompatible with Firefox or you cannot install because the Add to Firefox button is grayed out with a text saying not available for Firefox. Here we have 4 ways to force the installation of incompatible extensions in Firefox.
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  • 5 Tools to Bounce Spam Email Back to Sender with Non-Delivery Notifications

    If you’ve ever posted your email address publicly in online forums or in the comment area of a blog, it is very likely to get harvested by spammers to send unsolicited emails to you. Another common way for spammers to easily and quickly create a database of email addresses is by using software to automatically generate millions of email addresses from a dictionary file and so coincidentally your username is found in their dictionary. This is why a newly registered and unused email address can still receive spam.

    The currently most used method to fight spam is to block it using an anti spam system which is either pre-installed in your email server, installing as a plugin to your email client software or a standalone program on your computer. Another way to fight spammers is to bounce a non-delivery notification back to the sender which they might take you off their email address list. Here we have 5 tools which you can use to bounce email back to sender.
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  • 3 Tools to Easily Create Port Forwarding on a Router

    Nowadays most people are connected to the Internet using a router instead of a modem. One of the main differences in using a router is your computer’s connection to the router is hidden behind it and not directly exposed to the Internet unlike using a modem. It is generally safer but also creates a huge problem which is a lot of applications that work over the Internet might stop working. The solution is to forward the port which can be a daunting task for a lot of users as it needs the correct IP address, port number and transport protocol (TCP/UDP) or else it won’t work.

    Fortunately the process of configuring port forwarding has gotten a lot easier through the years. Instead of connecting the router using a telnet client to view the text-based settings and manually typing commands to add a configuration, port forwarding is pretty much automatic these days thanks to Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). For automatic port forwarding using UPnP to work, both the software and router must support this feature.

    In this article we’ll show you how to add or check port forwarding in your router using a software and also to manage the port mappings of a UPnP router.
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  • 5 Free and Easy Ways to Access FTP without Full FTP Client Software

    FTP client software is normally used to connect to FTP servers for transferring files to the remote server. There is quite a lot of free FTP client software available to choose from but one of the most popular, if not the most popular is FileZilla. It is a fully fledged FTP client available in both installer and portable versions and is frequently updated and released under the GPL license which is not just free, but staying that way too.

    However there are times when we need to quickly access an FTP server from another computer to upload a file without going through the hassle of downloading, installing, configuring a full FTP client software such as FileZilla and uninstalling the program after we’ve finished using it.

    Here are 5 free and easy ways to do it.
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  • 7 Ways to Open PSD Extension Image Files Without Installing Adobe Photoshop

    Many of you will have seen an image file extension around called a .PSD. This is an image file format which is native to the very well known Adobe Photoshop software. While most people tend to use JPEG, BMP or PNG files for their everyday tasks, a PSD file (Photoshop Document) can store a vast amount of extra information about the image such as layers, masks, color profiles, transparency, text, alpha channels etc. PSD files tend to be high quality reference images such as those used in website templates or for desktop publishing. They are also lossless meaning 100% of the image quality is maintained at all times where something like JPEG will subtly lose image quality after every save.

    Since PSD files can be opened and edited by Photoshop, not everyone is willing to spend thousands of dollars on the Adobe Creative Suite just to edit a few PSD files. Even if there is are “free” versions of Adobe CS around on the internet, we would still be reluctant to install the few GB of software just because of the need to open and edit a few PSD files and then uninstall it once done.

    So here are are a few graphics related tools which we found that are able to open PSD files without Photoshop.
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  • 6 Ways to Chat in IRC when Cannot Install mIRC or Blocked by Firewall

    mIRC is a very popular software that is used to connect to IRC servers and chat anonymously with other users. The overall usage of IRC has declined a lot over the past few years with users jumping ship to instant messengers such as Windows Live Messenger, and now to mobile chatting applications such as WhatsApp, Viber, Skype, WeChat, etc. Although IRC is not commonly being used these days, there are still some small and independent companies that uses IRC as a channel to offer free chat support. Downloading and installing an IRC client software such as mIRC just for a quick use may seem a bit overkill. Other than that, it is also possible that a firewall in a company or educational facility may be blocking port 6660-6669 and 7000 (SSL) used by IRC.

    An easier solution to avoid installing unnecessary software and bypassing your firewall restriction is to use a web-based IRC client. All you need is a modern web browser and an Internet connection. Since a web based IRC client uses port 80 instead of 6667-7000, it is able to bypass most firewalls because firewall policies normally allow port 80 for their users to access websites. Here we have a total of 6 ways for you to quickly get connected to IRC servers without relying on installing third party software.
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  • FREE Fully Licensed Retail Version Lexar Image Rescue 3 Software

    Previously I’ve introduced PC INSPECTOR Smart Recovery which is a data recovery program from CONVAR for Flash Card, Smart Media, SONY Memory Stick, IBM Micro Drive, Multimedia Card, Secure Digital Card or any other data carrier for digital cameras. Other than that, I’ve also posted 10 more free data recovery software programs that work on PC and removable drives.

    The above mentioned software are the free ones and there are also paid data recovery software which we will be reviewing shortly. Some shareware are cheap while some are ridiculously expensive. As a general rule, most of the shareware are better than freeware because it comes with support directly from the developers themselves to make sure that you’re not having problems in using the software that they created. When trying to recover deleted images from a memory card or removable USB flash drive, it is important to use a trusted and reliable software or else the photos that you accidentally deleted are gone forever. Good news is I discovered that it is possible to use a recovery software called Lexar Image Rescue 3 that normally cost $29.99 for free! The best part is it works on both Windows and Mac OS.
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  • How To Test and Boot an ISO Image Without Burning to CD or DVD

    If you’re even a little tech minded, you would most probably know what an ISO image is by now. A lot of ISO images can be downloaded legally from the internet such as a Windows 7 install DVD, Live Boot CD’s and Antivirus rescue discs which all come in ISO form and you’ll usually have to burn them to CD, or use a utility to write the images to USB stick to test them out.

    Sometimes I would like to test an ISO image first before burning it to a CD. Recently I’ve been trying to merge a few ISO images into one to create a multi-boot CD. With the ability to test the ISO image first, I don’t need to waste CD-Rs. Even if I can use CD-RW, it is still inconvenient because I don’t need to waste my time in burning the disc and booting up my computer with the CD-RW.

    There are a few ways to actually mount an ISO in Windows to be able to read the contents of it. A portable tool which is able to mount and run the ISO virtually allowing you to test it quickly is MobaLiveCD. While MobaLiveCD is great for quickness and ease of use (because it can also be attached to your ‘Send to‘ menu), it uses Qemu as the virtual emulator and booting into larger ISO images can be incredibly slow.

    Boot Kaspersky ISO without burning to CD

    The image above shows Kaspersky Rescue CD booted up in a virtual machine without burning to CD. While something like MobaLiveCD is good at testing small images, for testing something larger, I think other virtualization software like Virtual PC, Windows 7’s XP Mode or VirtualBox are much better suited all round.
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