Sometimes when you try to play a video file in a player like Windows Media Player, you might receive an error that the file cannot be played, or a codec is not installed on your system. In fact, a number of audio and video playback issues can often be caused by not having the correct codec installed on your computer, a problem with the installed codec, or even the wrong version installed.

The term “codec” is made up of the words Coder-Decoder, and is simply a device or a piece of software that can encode or decode a piece of data, in our case audio or video data. If for example, you download a video from the internet, your media player has to have access to the same decoder that it was encoded in. A less experienced user probably couldn’t tell you if they have a certain codec installed to be able to play a file.

Finding this information can be quite difficult for an average user, but there are ways to get it. Here we’ll provide the manual way of finding your installed codecs through Windows and some automatic ways through third party software to help determine what video and audio codecs are installed on your system.
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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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I know many of us find it a hassle to search for drivers after formatting a computer. Although a lot of drivers will get picked up automatically by Windows, there could still be many left over that are important for the associated devices to function properly. For example, if you need a third party network driver to get on the internet which isn’t recognized by Windows, then you can’t go online to get the latest drivers for other hardware until the network driver is installed. That’s why I always keep the 3DPNet integrated drivers in my USB toolkit just in case.

It’s even worse if the computer belongs to someone else and they don’t have any idea what is on their computer, or even what a driver is sometimes. You’ll have to run third party software to identify the hardware components and search the manufacturer websites for the correct drivers. Some drivers such as display drivers from the likes of NVIDIA are very large in size (200MB+) and you’ll have to wait for them to download and then install.

Thankfully there are some free tools around that can backup and then restore your system drivers for you. Here’s a selection to have a look at.
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Video streaming is big business these days and watching Television programs or movies online is more popular than ever. Places like Netflix are the most common for paying subscribers but websites that show free videos like trailers, guides, or just plain fun clips are just as popular. These include Dailymotion, Vimeo, Facebook and even Amazon has recently launched a similar service.

The problem with a lot of videos now is they are uploaded in higher resolutions, such as 4K, 1080p or 720p, which means when you watch the video you need to have a more stable and faster internet connection to keep it playing smoothly. A simple solution to this is to download the video clip first and then watch it offline at your leisure, the clip can also be easily transferred to other devices such as phones or tablets for offline viewing while roaming.

Here we have 6 methods for you to download video clips from popular sites on the internet, there is a mix of ways so if one doesn’t work for you, another might.
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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.

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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Apart from password protecting data with an archiver or an encryption tool like VeraCrypt, another effective way of securing your files is hiding them inside other files so nobody actually knows they exist. The practice of hiding data inside other data has amazingly been around for thousands of years and is called Steganography. With computer based steganography, you can hide messages, text files, archives and almost any type of data inside images, audio files, video files, and etc.

There are also varying levels of security for steganography on your computer. These range from simply appending one file to another to full on encryption, compression, and obfuscation. If you are sending files containing hidden data to others, the recipients would need to know how to retrieve it, such as knowing passwords and the software used.

Here are 7 ways to perform steganography from your PC, all were tested on Windows 7 and 10 64-bit.
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An old friend contacted me today and asked me to help him to remove a virus infection on his desktop. I checked his computer and there is an enterprise version of antivirus called Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) installed but there were no Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager which acts as a server to manage the SEP clients on the network. It is possible that the Symantec Endpoint Protection is installed as an unmanaged client but the virus definition hasn’t been updated for a very long time and I couldn’t manually update the signature from the LiveUpdate program. I may as well uninstall the Symantec Endpoint Protection since it couldn’t update the virus definition to detect the latest virus and replace it with a free antivirus such as Avira, Avast, AVG or Microsoft Security Essentials.

I went to Control Panel and ran the Programs and Features shortcut icon. Found Symantec Endpoint Protection and I clicked on the Remove button. The progress bar ran for a while and a dialog box pop out saying “Please enter the uninstall password“.

I asked my friend and he don’t know the password. The Norton Removal Tool only works on home products but not for enterprise products. It is not possible for me to install any other type of antivirus if i do not remove the Symantec Endpoint Protection client first. Even if I could, it is still not advisable to be running two different antivirus at the same time which can cause conflict and slow down of the system.
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In every version of Yahoo Messenger, there is an option where you can save all your messages that you’ve sent and received from your contacts. The history are saved by default and can be disabled from the Preferences by simultaneously pressing Ctrl+Shift+P and click on Archive.

The messages are meant to be viewed only by the owner of the account because it requires logging in to the Yahoo account. However, due to the poor encryption of the chat log files that are saved locally on the hard drive, there are third party tools that can decrypt the encrypted .dat files and reveal the conversation without even running and logging in to Yahoo Messenger.

There are many tools that you can find to decode the messages archive for Yahoo Messenger but most of them are outdated. After testing all the tools that we can find, we found that the most up to date free tool to decode yahoo chat archive is Yahoo! Archive Manipulator. All you need to do is install the program and run it which will automatically detect the location of the history .dat file and display the messages in a tree view.
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As time moves on, the size of software and files found on your computer gets bigger. A photo will have more pixels in it and be larger, video files are now being distributed in 4K which means bigger file sizes than before. The same applies to games, some can now be as much as a 200GB download on platforms such as Steam. Applications are also growing, the latest Microsoft Office installation is now much bigger than it used to be.

As everything grows in size, it becomes more of a problem when you are trying to move or copy the files to a more restricted medium. For instance, you might be trying to send a video file via email which has an attachment size limit. Or you could be trying to backup or copy large files, such as ISO images, onto optical media or flash drives. If the file is too big for the space limit you have available, it needs to be split into separate parts.

Splitting files into smaller parts that can then be joined together again, later on, is done all the time on the internet. It’s also quite common to split a large file when you have to fit it onto several CDs, DVDs, or even floppies. Curiously Windows itself has the capacity to join already split files, but can’t split the file in the first place. For that you need a third party method, here are 8 ways for you to do it. All methods were tested on Windows 7 and 10.
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Knowing what hardware is present inside your computer by using just the tools present inside Windows might give you some idea, but it won’t be terribly informative. Something like MSInfo32 would offer some useful snippets of information about several different system components although it’s by no means complete. For instance, if you want to know the important details about your processor, graphics card, memory speeds, motherboard chipset and BIOS etc, it has to be obtained from somewhere else.

It can be frustrating when you’re troubleshooting and ask someone if they can tell you something like how much or what speed RAM they have installed, or what graphics chip is present and they don’t have a clue what they have or how to get you the relevant information. For a much better idea relating to the specification of yours or somebody else’s computer hardware, a 3rd party utility is the way to go.

Thankfully there are several around that can handle this and can range from giving you a general overview of the system components, to comprehensive in depth details of a single component such as the CPU or graphics card. Here’s a selection of freeware tools to help you extract the information you’re looking for.
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Microsoft Outlook 2010 is a premium and powerful email client software that is bundled in Microsoft Office Home and Business or the Professional version. It can also be purchased separately as a stand-alone program at $139.99 from the Microsoft Store website. It is mostly used in corporate companies that uses email as their main method to communicate with their clients. Other than able to send and receive email from POP3 email servers, it can also download the emails from Hotmail or Outlook.com through the MAPI protocol after installing the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector.

Many years ago, most web based email services such as Hotmail and Yahoo does not allow access from email clients unless they upgrade their account type to the paid subscription to enable POP3 and SMTP protocol for their account. Trying to access Hotmail from Outlook will prompt an error message saying “Access to Hotmail via Outlook or Outlook Express now requires a subscription. Please sign up at http://join.msn.com/general/Email“. The only way to remove this restriction is to subscribe to the Hotmail Plus which we had trouble cancelling the subscription at a later time. Thanks to Gmail for offering POP and IMAP services for free to their users, they created a competition where competitors such as Hotmail also started to allow email clients to access Hotmail.
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Unfortunately knowing when you have RAM memory inside your PC that has developed problems isn’t as straightforward as you might think. It can manifest itself in many different ways and problems with your computer which don’t seem in the remotest bit connected with RAM, could in fact turn out to be just that.

A computer that fires into life and then sits at a black screen and doesn’t do anything else is a common symptom of a bad module which needs taking out or replacing. A Windows install that keeps failing while unpacking files from the disc could also be due to a memory error. Even problems relating to disk read errors which sound the furthest thing from memory issues as you could imagine, can be caused by errors coming from the memory.

Testing your RAM for errors is something you can easily do because there are a few free tools around that can help you out, and all that’s needed is for you to run the program and let it check all your internal memory. Here’s a few different ways you can test your RAM for errors.
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Proxies has been around for many years and is still being used a lot today. The only reason why someone would want to use a proxy is to mask their IP address but sacrificing the speed and stability of their Internet connection. Another problem with proxies are they don’t usually last a long time and they may not be necessarily highly anonymous which may leak some of your information out. Other than that, proxy list are also often being used in software that does scraping. For example, if you try to scrape Google with your single IP address, Google will eventually detect it and block your request by asking you to answer the given CAPTCHA code. This restriction can be easily bypassed using a list of proxy and setting a timeout value.

Compiling a list of proxy addresses is a very tedious job if you do it manually. You will have to look up proxy websites and forums to compile the proxies into a list, remove the duplicates and test them for their speed, reliability, anonymity and status. Imagine doing that daily if you need a list of fresh proxies everyday. Fortunately there are software such as Forum Proxy Leecher that can automate the whole process and easily get you thousands of working proxies whenever you want.
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Thanks to USB sticks it’s now possible to put ISO images onto them and then boot the computer straight from the stick instead of burning them out to CD or DVD. This is a real plus if you don’t have an optical drive in your machine. Depending on the speed of your pen stick USB could be much faster than using even the fastest ROM drives. There are several tools available for all kinds of disc images to be written to USB, but each image could use a different loader to boot from which means there isn’t one single foolproof way of putting any image onto USB stick.

For example, a useful tool to put Windows 7 onto USB called WiNToBootic might be good for Windows 7, but is of no use for other ISO images. As most of us know, one of the best all round recovery and repair CD’s is Hiren’s BootCD and has long been one of the most valuable discs you could have in your repair toolkit. But getting Hiren from it’s default distribution format of ISO onto USB isn’t completely straightforward and you can’t just grab any ISO to USB tool and expect it to be successful.

The “official” method to achieve Hiren to USB direct from the Hiren website is getting a little old now and involves manually formatting the stick, installing the boot loader and then copying the files over from the ISO yourself. Thankfully there are much easier ways to get the job done with little more than a few mouse clicks.

Here’s 5 easy ways to install Hiren’s BootCD onto USB stick with the minimum of fuss, all you need is a copy of the Hiren’s BootCD ISO. The good news is that none of these tools need to be installed on your machine to be able to do it because they’re all portable.
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There are many backup software on the market and some of them does a really good job in making sure that there is an exact copy of the important files available at the backup drive. Although backing up of files is important, many people forget to backup the Windows product key or third party software license that is installed on their computer. When their computer crashes and had to reinstall everything from scratch, they had to go through the trouble of searching for the license number to activate the software that they’ve purchased. If the license key are misplaced and forgotten, they’d have to contact the software support team and provide them with proof of purchase so that they can reissue the license.

The problem is software licenses aren’t stored in one standard location where you can just copy the whole folder to backup and then paste it back to reactivate all the software. They are stored all over the place either in a form of an external file or a registry key. Fortunately we found 10 software that can scan your computer and recover the lost or forgotten product key licenses so you can back it up in case you need to reactivate them again. Computer technicians can also use these software to help customers recover their software license numbers from non-bootable drive.
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