Raymond.CC Blog

Author: raymond

  • 5 Free and Portable Microsoft Office Alternatives

    Let’s say you want to open some office documents such as spreadsheet on a cybercafe. If the cybercafe is using licensed software, you can be certain that you won’t find Microsoft Office installed on the computers because the license is just too expensive and mostly people go to cybercafe to play games, check emails and web browsing.

    Or probably the Microsoft Office installed on your computer is unable to run and you urgently need to open a document file when you cannot get help at the moment to fix the problem. You are left with the choice of either to use some of the online cloud based office suites such as Google Docs, Windows Live Office, Zoho, ContactOffice or simply run any of these 5 portable free office suites directly from your USB flash drive.
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  • Mac OS X Mountain Lion Theme On Windows

    Although Windows has dominated the operating system market for many years already, there is still quite a number of people that prefers Mac over Windows because of advantages such as stability, lack of virus, secure because it is built from Unix and of course the Mac itself looks beautiful. The operating system known as OS X has always looked awesome too and when Windows Vista was released, you would have heard numerous times that a lot of the newer Windows interface is copied from Mac OS X. Unfortunately you cannot just download and install Mac OS X on a non-Apple PC unless you are willing to use some of the hacks that can be found on the Internet.

    One of the best and easiest way to have a feel of the latest Mac OS X Mountain Lion on a non-apple computer is to simply install a theme. This way you can still be familiar with the computer usage as it is still Windows except the interface resembles Mac OS X Mountain Lion.
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  • How To Install USB Mass Storage Device on Windows 98

    Although Windows 98 has been out of general circulation for well over a decade now, it might come as a surprise to some people that it’s still actively in use, especially in a business or specialized environment for running old software. There is actually a third party Service Pack for Windows 98 Second Edition which is still being updated well into 2013, even though Microsoft ended their support for Windows 98 on the 11th of July 2006! Obviously, hardware support from all major manufacturers has ended years ago so if you or your company still run Windows 98 in some capacity, it’s incredibly difficult to find compatible hardware and software for it.

    As an example, a company I did some work for a while back purchased a Kingston Data Traveler USB flash drive for backup purposes on a computer that’s still running Windows 98.  The problem is, due to some obsolete software that needs to run on Windows 98, the computer cannot be upgraded to newer versions of Windows such as 8, 7, Vista or even Windows XP. I’ve tried compatibility mode on Windows XP and it doesn’t work either, so it’s either upgrade the software or continue using Windows 98. Updating the old software is very expensive, so the decision was to stay with Windows 98 and try to source parts that can support this ageing operating system.

    Kingston USB flash drive

    The immediate problem was getting the flash drive to work. Windows 98SE is actually not too bad at handling mass storage drivers for a USB storage device IF you have a driver disc that accompanied it or a download is available. 98SE doesn’t come with a generic mass storage driver that would install support for all standard USB storage devices like newer Windows versions, so not every device you insert will simply get recognised. Predictably, Kingston offers no support for their devices in Windows 98 so no driver can be installed to pick up the flash drive.
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  • 5 Tools to Remove Unnecessary Startup Entries and Boot Faster

    It seems like every other piece of software these days wants to install a component that starts when you boot your computer. This can be quite a frustrating experience when the computer boots up Windows very slowly, and then you have to wait for all the unnecessary hidden processes to load and everything to get itself into the the system tray. Waiting for a few minutes or more is not uncommon after the desktop is visible while these extras are loaded and the computer is still virtually unusable until it’s all finished.

    List of Unwanted Startup Programs

    Not only does this problem cause the machine to boot much slower, these startup items also consumes more system memory, can increase internet traffic, and use extra processing power to keep everything running in the background. With that in mind, it makes sense that reducing what starts with your PC can make a BIG difference. And not just to the speed of your Windows boot, but also some improvements can be made to general all round performance.

    Disabling programs from booting with Windows is one of the most common system tweaks you can perform and it’s even easily possible through Windows itself. Here’s a few programs that can display your list of startup items and help to disable or delete them.
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  • Logon Windows Using USB Drive without Typing Password

    You may have noticed that some commercial software especially accounting related ones requires a USB dongle connected to the computer in order to run the program. The USB dongle works as a physical license where it is difficult to pirate or even reproduced to share with people that you know. Unlike password or serial number that can be cracked, forgotten, or stolen without your knowledge, using a physical device such as an affordable USB flash drive as a password seems to be a good idea. Some laptops do come with a biometric fingerprint reader where you can login using your thumbprint but it is not normally available on desktop computers.

    Using a long password is essential to prevent against cracking with Ophcrack that uses rainbow tables but then it can be easily forgotten and it might be troublesome to type in such a long password every time you want to login. One easy way to go around this is to login to Windows using your USB flash drive.
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  • 2 Tools to Check the USB Devices Used On Your Computer

    A lot of computer devices and gadgets uses USB connectivity to connect to the computer because it offers the convenience of immediately initializing the device, unlike the using the PS2 keyboard where it needs to be connected before Windows is started up to work. Other than that, most of time the USB device will work without even require to install a driver. Although convenient, USB also poses a security risk where someone can easily steal a huge amount of data out from the computer by just plugging in a really fast 128GB USB flash drive. Locking up the computer when you’re away from the computer should stop this from happening but you may never realize that there are times when you are careless and forgot to lock it.

    Fortunately Windows keeps a history of all connected USB device not for the sake of forensics but for performance purposes. Here are two free tools that reveals all USB devices that were connected to your computer.
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  • 5 Free Tools to Repair and Preview Corrupted AVI Files

    Although MKV video format are gaining popularity these days as you can find many movie rips and HD camcorder records in MKV, AVI video format that was very popular many years back are still commonly being used today. One of a good reason to use AVI format is the built-in Windows Media Player 12 that is built in to Windows 7 can most of the time play AVI files without installing any third party codecs. There are also many screen recording software such as CamStudio, HyperCam 2 and Bandicam that saves the video recording to AVI only.

    It is possible to encounter a corrupted AVI file where it doesn’t play on any media player software at all including VLC Media Player. One example is the popular CamStudio that outputs a corrupted AVI file when the result file is at several gigabytes. Opening on Windows Media Player would prompt an error window saying “Windows Media Player encountered a problem while playing the file“.

    Windows Media Player encountered a problem while playing the file

    Here are 5 free methods that you can use to repair or fix the corrupted AVI video file.
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  • View and Delete Thumbnails in Thumbs.db or thumbcache.db

    If you’ve accidentally downloaded a sensitive image file that can get you into trouble, deleting the file from Windows is just not enough even if you’ve perform a secure wipe. Forensics people can still retrieve the image from your computer, thanks to the thumbnail caching feature. When you open a folder containing a lot of images, the thumbnail caching feature will greatly improve the time that takes to show the images via thumbnails rather than regenerating them every time you get in to the folder.

    In Windows XP, the hidden thumbnail file which is thumbs.db are placed at the same location of the images but in Windows Vista/7, the thumbnail files are stored at the user’s folder but will still generate thumbs.db when you access shared network folders.

    View thumbs.db

    This thumbnail caching feature can be an invasion of privacy and we’ll show you how to view the thumbnails inside the database cache file, clear them and and also how to disable it from caching more thumbnails.

    Here is how to do it.
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  • View, Examine and Delete Internet Explorer INDEX.DAT Contents

    Every web browser uses database method to store the history locally on the hard drive for faster access and one example is Firefox that uses SQLite database. Unless you have a SSD hard drive or put your Firefox profile’s database in RAMDisk, eventually Firefox web browser will come to a crawl when the SQLite database file size gets too big. Internet Explorer too does the same by storing it in a file called INDEX.DAT. If you search in your hard drive, you will probably find more than 20 index.dat files where each of them are used to store different information such as cookies, history, cache, form data and etc.

    One well known problem in Internet Explorer is even if you delete all browsing history in Internet Explorer by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Del, the index.dat file size remains the same and is not re-sized. Not only that, it does not really clear all of the index.dat entries because some of them still contains old caches, cookies and history information. Using the famous CCleaner with additional rules also does not fully clean up all the history especially the ones with .IE5 in temp folder. You also cannot manually delete the file because it is locked and being used by Windows Explorer unless you do it in Safe Mode.
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  • 10 Free Anti-Malware to Scan and Remove Malwares

    Many years ago there were many antispyware software available to use when malwares wasn’t so sophisticated. Scanning the infected computer from safe mode with Spybot and Ad-Aware is usually enough to remove most if not all of the spyware infection. Spyware is just one type of a malware that self installs on a computer and spies on what you do on your computer. You don’t find a lot of spyware nowadays which is why some of the well known antispyware programs such as a-squared Anti-Malware, AVG Anti-Spyware, Lavasoft Ad-Aware and Webroot Spy Sweeper which has turned into a full anti-virus software or some have renamed to anti-malware.

    Most of the malwares today are a combination of different malware categories so that it is powerful enough to achieve a high infection rate and stays installed for a longer time without being detected or discovered by security software. If you suspect a malware infection on your computer, don’t be too quick to install as many antivirus software you can because it may create more problems and conflicts. Antivirus programs are heavy that comes with over a hundred megabytes plus some malwares are capable of bypassing antivirus detection. Instead, you can try out some of the free anti malware programs listed below which are much lighter and doesn’t conflict with an antivirus software.
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  • How to Identify Fake Torrents Uploaded by Anti-Piracy Organizations

    The amount of traffic being used on BiTTorrent is more than half of all the Internet traffic even after many ISP tried to disrupt the user downloading experience by blocking or throttling the download speed. This restriction placed by ISP can be easily bypassed using VPN or an online service such as Boxopus that helps you to download BitTorrent and then offers it to you as HTTP download. There are other parties that also tries to do their part in fighting BitTorrent such as uploading fake torrents that the downloaders will connect to fake trackers and revealing their identity, or uploading contaminated files that may allow the uploader to gain access to the downloader’s computer.

    It is important to make sure that you’re download a verified torrent and not the fake ones. The problem is most BitTorrent users doesn’t know how BitTorrent works other than waiting for a couple of days, the download will complete and they get what they want. Here we offer a few tips on how to detect and avoid downloading fake torrents to keep you safe.
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  • 6 Free Screenshot Capture Tools with Awesome Features

    Describing an occurrence using merely words is sometimes not enough for other people to believe what you said. Hence having a screenshot is very useful because it can be treated as a proof of something that you saw, for example a rare error message that happens randomly or even a website that is being defaced by a hacker. Although capturing a video is so much better, but it involves using a software that may be a bit difficult for basic computer users to use. Moreover it requires more time and effort to edit the video and upload it to video hosting websites.

    You can take screenshots directly in Windows and save them as image files by pressing the Print Screen button on your keyboard, run Microsoft Paint, Wordpad or Microsoft Word, and press Ctrl+V to paste the screenshot to the program which can then be saved. Windows 7 comes with a very simple screenshot capture and image editing tool called Snipping Tool. It is able to snip free-form, rectangular, window or full screen and allows you to draw in freehand, a highlighter and an eraser. Although it is good enough to capture a screenshot, but you will need a much powerful screenshot capture tool with effects in order to produce a better looking screenshot.

    Snipping Tool

    After tested more than a dozen of available free screenshot tools which most of them comes with identical features, we have finalized with 6 screenshot capture programs that has some really awesome features.
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  • 3 Easy Methods to Search and Download MP3 using Google

    The reason why Google being one of the best search engine today is because of their smart robot that is programmed to crawl and index tons of pages together with their excellent algorithm in returning relevant search results to searchers. Googlebot is well known for indexing whatever it finds unless it is specifically blocked using robots.txt or the meta noindex tag on the webpage. Even though Google.com only shows a box where you can type the keywords that you want to search and Google will try its best to determine what are you looking for, you can actually use search operator commands to have more control over the results that will be displayed on your browser.

    The search commands are definitely useful especially if you’re trying to check the linkbacks to your website, to have an idea if Google has completely removed a website from their search engine probably due to violation of their guidelines and etc. It can get a little dangerous because a specially crafted search command would reveal a list of websites with live streaming webcam, serial numbers or even password files.

    In this article we will show you a few methods on how to easily search for MP3 since the Gnutella network is pretty much dead after LimeWire being shut down and FrostWire became a BitTorrent client.
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  • Send 100% FREE Instant SMS Worldwide

    With applications such as WhatsApp, Viber, Skype and etc for smartphones, many people get to save a lot of money because the messages sent and received from the apps are virtually free. However these applications rely on the data plan and not the mobile network. If there is no Internet connection on the smartphone, the messages cannot be sent nor received which could result in the delay of receiving the message.

    Although SMS are more reliable compared to the messaging apps for smartphones, there are times when the SMS gateway server cannot cope up with the load such as on Christmas. It is important not to pass urgent messages via SMS or messaging apps but you should call them instead to relay the message yourself.

    As previously said that the SMS are sometimes more reliable than messaging apps, but it cost money to send a single message to a contact. There used to be a method where you can send SMS using your email but most of the mobile providers has disabled that feature due to abuse. You can find a lot of websites that claims to offer free SMS service but unfortunately most of them don’t work.

    You can try sending a test SMS message to yourself and you probably won’t get it which makes you think if they’re collecting mobile numbers for spamming purposes. After testing a bunch of websites, we finally found one that is able to send SMS for free!
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  • vLite is a Windows Vista Configuration Tool that creates Vista Lite

    Microsoft Windows Vista takes a lot of resources, as anybody who has used it will tell you. Anyone who moved from XP, I’ll refrain from saying “upgraded“, would have most likely had a real shock at how much memory gets used for even simple things in Vista, where XP in comparison, is pretty lean and mean. 1 Gigabyte of RAM which is plenty for most things in XP, suddenly becomes a bare minimum just to get Vista onto the desktop!

    Many of you will remember, or still use a tool called nLite which has been hugely popular for letting you remove a number of features from XP that you don’t want or need. Things like the annoying search dog and the old MSN were just a few that could be removed easily. What you can also do is integrate Windows updates, Service packs, third party drivers, and also your own third party software to make a clean XP install as efficient and up to date as you want. It will then create an ISO for you to burn and then install the slipstreamed XP.

    As Vista is in even greater need of slimming down by removing unneeded or useless components, a utility to perform a similar trick to nLite is not only welcome, but essential. So here is the tool for easy removal of the unwanted components in order to make Vista run faster and to your liking. vLite can also create the bootable ISO when you have finished the modifications.
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