It is the 1st of May today and as I’ve promised, I will select 10 lucky subscribers from my newsletter which has commented in the article as winners. There are a total of 195 entries on Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus giveaway. I copied all 195 participants email address to a list randomizer at random.org. The first ten that appears after shuffling the list will be the lucky winners.

Congratulations to nchcoloh, waqas_abdulrazzaq, flashkidz3221, zewdu_c, geminithang266, utkarsh30june, mybiggerman, micro_dynamix, samyun112233 and rodrigo.provasi. You should receive an email from me shortly together with the Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus license key code. Please check your JUNK/SPAM folder if you did not receive my email after a day.

For those that did not win, please do not be despair. Remember yesterday I said that I will be posting about getting commercial software for free on this whole week? Today I will share with you on how to get full retail version of Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus for free!


If you go to Spyware Doctor website, you can find that it has 3 versions of Spyware Doctor. The paid, trial and starter version. Obviously the paid version has all the features and the trial version offers time unlimited real-time protection (free spyware blocking), but does not remove threats detected during on-demand scans, updates may also differ to those supplied to registered users. Weirdly the Starter edition listed there is actually Spyware Doctor WITHOUT antivirus. It is offered for free as part of Google Pack.

After a little digging, I found 2 links that is offering Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus starter edition. First link is a promotional hidden link from PC Tools website and the second link is from vnunet. Out of curiosity, I tested all 4 versions (trial, starter edition from pctools, starter edition from vnunet and paid version) to see what are the differences because I want you to use the best and most updated Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus.

1. Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus from PC Tools hidden promotional link
– Starter Edition
– After installation, product version shows 5.0.5.259
– Intelli-Signatures detects 199,382 threats
– AntiVirus Engine version 4.3.11

2. Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus from vnunet
– Starter Edition
– After installation, product version shows 5.5.0.212
– Intelli-Signatures detects 217,606
– AntiVirus Engine version 4.4.5

3. Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus Trial version (Before activating)
– Trial version
– After installation, product version shows 5.5.0.212
– Intelli-Signatures detects 217,606
– AntiVirus Engine version 4.4.5

4. Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus Paid version (activated)
– Paid version
– After installation, product version shows 5.5.0.212
– Intelli-Signatures detects 666,525
– AntiVirus Engine version 4.4.5

The hidden promotional link is offering old version of Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus compared to vnunet. I also noticed that the trial version and vnunet starter edition is pretty much the same except you can get a 30% off the retail price if you upgrade from vnunet starter edition to paid version. You can see from the intelli-signatures that the paid version is able to detect much more threats compared to the starter edition. The starter edition doesn’t have Startup Guard, Browser Guard, Process Guard, Cookie Guard, Keylogger Guard, Network Guard and Site Guard, so I guess that explains the significant drop in Intelli-signatures.

In my opinion, Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus offered by vnunet is the best option if you do not want to pay for it because it is able to scan and remove threats while trial does not remove threats detected during on-demand scans. For those that wasn’t so lucky to win this lucky draw but want to use Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus, you can use the version offered by vnunet.

[ Download Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus Starter Edition ]

Found a very interesting website that captures billions of web pages and archive them.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is a service that allows people to visit archived versions of Web sites. Visitors to the Wayback Machine can type in a URL, select a date range, and then begin surfing on an archived version of the Web. Keyword searching is not currently supported. Imagine surfing circa 1999 and looking at all the Y2K hype, or revisiting an older version of your favorite Web site. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine can make all of this possible.

I tried searching for www.raymond.cc at the internet archive wayback machine and I found…


The empty page before this blog even began.

Then I also found the first design I used for this blog.

Brings back the memories…

Anyway, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. Terabytes is not very common and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine already has petabytes of data!

If you have a web site, and you would like to ensure that it is saved for posterity in the Internet Archive, and you’ve searched wayback and found no results, here’s what you can do to allow the Internet Archive Wayback Machine crawl your web site.

Method 1: Visit the Alexa’s “Webmasters” page.

Method 2: If you have the Alexa tool bar installed, just visit a site.

Method 3: While visiting a site, use the ‘show related links‘ in Internet Explorer, which uses the Alexa service.

Sites are usually crawled within 24 hours and no more than 48. Right now there is a 6-12 month lag between the date a site is crawled and the date it appears in the Wayback Machine.

[ Visit Internet Archive Wayback Machine ]

There is something that has always annoyed me about the way windows shares are displayed to a user – they get to see all of them!

Yes I know about putting a $ after the share, such as c$, or admin$, but what about those shares that the president of the company wants to have – and doesn’t want his employees to even know that they exist?

Finally Microsoft has put out a utility to fix this.


It is called “Access-based Enumeration”. It is only available for Windows 2003 SP1.
Here is a typical shared folder with a few folders beneath it. The user does not have permissions to the Microsoft folder however it still appears.

Once you start the Microsoft Access-based Enumeration installation, you get asked a simple question:

If you select all, then access based enumeration will be enabled for all current shares on the system – otherwise you will need to set them each individually.

Once the install is finished, a new tab appears when looking at the properties of a share:

When enabled, Access-Based Enumeration will hide the folders and files underneath a share when the user who is mapped to the share has no permissions to read them. This is a security friendly and end user friendly feature, if you don’t have permissions to see it you shouldn’t and if you don’t need to see it you won’t!

Too bad they don’t have this type of functionality for 2000, or 2003 without SP!

The official download page for Microsoft Access-based Enumeration is located here:
Microsoft Access-Based Enumeration

I wonder how many of you tried netCut after reading yesterday’s article? Don’t you find it kind of hard to believe that netCut has been available for so long yet so many computers is affected by this attack just because of the standard of ARP. Attacking computers with netCut seemed to be fun for script kiddies but the person who got cut is no fun at all.

If you felt that your Internet connection that is shared on network being cut off when others is working fine, then here is how you can determine whether if someone is really poisoning your ARP cache. Other than that, if you’re connected to a public wi-fi, you should protect your computer against these attacks. Even when you think you are on a paid wifi which seems to be safer, you’re wrong because someone could cut off your Internet and then spoof their computer as your computer to get free internet on a paid wifi.


I did some research on how to protect against netCut and here are a few working ones. Not all can protect against netCut, for example Anti Netcut by tools4free and StopCut. Both of these anti netcut tools doesn’t work and annoying as well because every once in a while, an advertisement window will popup. In fact I even got a warning from Comodo Firewall that Anti Netcut is trying to secretly connect to a FTP server. In the Arcai’s netcut Software 2.0, there is a checkbox “Protected My Computer” which supposedly to protect your computer against Arcai’s netcut Software but it didn’t work on my Windows XP SP3 computer.

A working third party software that can intercept ARP spoofing/ARP attacks/ARP poisoning, intercept IP Address conflict, prevent Dos attack, safety mode, ARP flow analysis, protect ARP cache, active defense, locate attacker and ARP virus cleaner is AntiARP.

There are 2 version of AntiARP which is the Personal Edition and the Server Edition. Unfortunately both versions are shareware. The Personal edition can only work on desktop operating system such as Windows 2000, XP and Vista. If you want to use it on Windows server based OS, then you have to go for the Server edition which cost more. It can automatically block netCut’s attack and also let you know who is the attacker.

So far I found out that the free Comodo Firewall is able to protect your computer against ARP poisoning but you have to enable it as it is disabled by default. Click on Firewall at the top bar and then click Advanced button at the left pane. Go to Attack Detection Settings and check “Protect the ARP Cache”.

As for Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 users, sorry to let you know that it doesn’t block netCut attacks.

Very rarely we get a full 1 year license for free on popular antivirus such as Kaspersky. As far as I know, there were a few 6 months license promotion on and off but as for a full year, the first time was from China Kaspersky forum, followed by Barclays offer (2 years), then the Windows 7 launch party. Today I got an email Nisith informing me that currently there is an on going offer that allows anyone to obtain a one year Kaspersky Internet Security 2011 license for free!

This is a Chinese promotion and you can only use the activation code to activate the Chinese version of Kaspersky Internet Security 2011. The activation fails if you try to use the code on the English installer. The web page to obtain the license says that the promotion will end in 25 days but I have a feeling that it will not last long because there are a few methods which I’ve discovered on how to switch the Chinese interface to English which is now widely known. Simply follow the few simple steps below on how to get your free Kaspersky Internet Security 2011 activation code valid for 1 year worth $59.95.

1. Visit http://song.kaba365.com/

2. Enter your email twice at the 2 boxes and click on the button.

3. A new window will open and you have to key in the exact 5 digits you see on the window to verify that this request is legitimate.

Then clicking the button will show your personalized 20 character license key.

Now you’ve got your Kaspersky Internet Security 2011 license. If you can read Chinese and don’t mind having a Chinese version of Kaspersky on your computer, then go ahead and download the Chinese installer from the link below.

http://download.kaba365.com/kaspersky/kis11.0.1.400zh-Hans-CN.zip

Installing should be quite easy since most software requires you to click Next until it is completed. However since this installer is in Chinese, you can follow the step-by-step screenshot on how to install Kaspersky Internet Security 2011 Chinese edition.

If you want to switch to English interface, the first thing you must do is to turn off or disable Kaspersky Self-Defense. You can do that by right clicking on the Kaspersky tray icon at notification area and select the seventh option which will open the Settings window.

Then click on the buttons by following the numbers which will disable the Self-Defense in Kaspersky Internet Security 2011.

Next, click the Windows start button and type regedit in the “Search programs and files” bar. Right click on regedit.exe that is shown at the start menu and select “Run as administrator”. Navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\KasperskyLab\protected\AVP11\environment\

Look for SkinSwitchDisabled, double click on it to edit and change the Value data from 1 to 0 and click OK. (If you get “Error Editing Value, Cannot edit SkinSwitchDisabled: Error writing the value’s new contents”, it means you did not disable Kaspersky Self-Defense).

Now open Kaspersky program and simultaneously press SHIFT+F12 which will instantly switch the interface to English edition. Do note that the language interface change is not permanent. Every time after rebooting your computer or restarting Kaspersky will require to press SHIFT+F12 to use the English interface.

For more reference, you can refer to my previous article on how to switch from Chinese to English interface in Kaspersky. There are 3 methods on that article and I would say that the first method (Shift+F12) is the best. There is another one which is renaming folders from EN to zh-Hans-CN and zh-Hans-CN to EN in C:\Program Files\Kaspersky Lab\???????? 2011\Skin\loc\ but it is causing the error “This application should be reinstalled”.

Do note that you have to activate this KIS2011 license key within a week or else it will get deactivated. It means this free license has only 1 week of shelf life to prevent people from harvesting tons of keys and make money by selling them as long as they can. This free offer from Kaspersky seemed to be public and NOT leaked which means you won’t risk your free Kaspersky Internet Security 2011 getting deactivated after a few days.

You might be here because you’re having titlebar problem with your Internet Explorer. When you run Windows Explorer or start Internet Explorer, the text in the title bar may be displayed as a single letter (for example, an “M” or an “E”). It might be your Internet Explorer’s titlebar contain garbage characters, or title bar truncated to 1 character. See an example below.

This Internet Explorer title bar problem can’t be fix by editing the registry. After a little searching, I found a solution to fix this problem.


It seems that Google Toolbar has been reported to sometimes produce truncation of the title bar text. Uninstalling and reinstalling Google Toolbar will fix the problem.

To uninstall the Google Toolbar from your system, use the Add/Remove Programs utility in the Microsoft Windows Control Panel.
1. Click Start
2. Select Settings
3. Select Control Panel
4. Double click the Add/Remove Programs control panel icon
5. Select Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, and then click the Remove button.

Once you’ve done uninstalling Google Toolbar, go to this link to download and install the latest version of Google Toolbar.

If uninstalling and reinstalling Google Toolbar didn’t work for you, try the solution suggested in Microsoft Support.

Late last month I’ve given out 100 license for BitDefender Internet Security 2010 to subscribers and there are 5 more winners that has yet to claim their prize. I’ve used a different email address to contact them hopefully it won’t go into their spam/junk folder. Just one day after the BIS 2010 giveaway, a kind person by the name of BB-Style from Germany sponsored 55 Norton Antivirus 2010 genuine license keys valid 366 days worth $2197.25 for the next giveaway!

I knew that the Norton 2010 products should be released somewhere around September based on previous versions release dates and I thought of only giving out the 55 NAV 2010 licenses after I get back from my honeymoon. After discussing with my wife, we both think that it’d be better to give it away before I leave since I will be gone for a month! Even when I am back, I probably won’t have time for this blog yet since I have to deal with many pending issues.

I’ve given a quick test on Norton Antivirus 2010 and I was IMPRESSED by the performance and also the intelligent virus detection. As usual, to be eligible for the lucky draw, all you need to do is subscribe to my daily article and write a comment at the end of this article. The lucky winner will be randomly picked and announced at tomorrow’s article.


Norton AntiVirus 2010, developed and distributed by Symantec Corporation, provides malware prevention and removal during a subscription period. It uses signatures and heuristics to identify viruses. Other features include e-mail spam filtering and phishing protection.

Here are the new features in Norton Antivirus 2010 which are not found in older versions of NAV:

Norton Insight Network

Norton Download Insight

Norton File Insight

Norton Threat Insight

SONAR 2 Behavioral Protection

Norton System Insight

The speed of scanning is very fast. I did a full scan on a clean Windows 7 Ultimate installation and the first time took 568 seconds (9 minutes 46 seconds) to complete the full scan on 65472 items. When I ran the full scan again for the second time, it only took 328 seconds (5 minutes 46 seconds) to scan 64578 items. The amount of items and time takes to scan has decreased because the number of trusted and skipped files has increased.

Next I tested Norton Antivirus 2010 against 23 current virus, worms and trojans that are circulating around the Internet. I turned off Antivirus Auto-Protect, dropped all the virus, trojans and worms into desktop and scan it. There seems to be a bug on the manual scan because it took 254 seconds to scan and “process” all 23 files. 20 out of 23 has been automatically quarantined. The 3 virus that was missed by NAV 2010 is the private trojan, an autorun.inf file and a trojan downloader which is created by Sality worm. When I tried to run the private trojan and trojan downloader created by Sality worm, a few seconds later SONAR detected security risk which blocked the file preventing from being ran and deleted it. As for the autorun.inf, it is pretty much harmless because it is pointing to a file that does not exist. All I can say about the SONAR II is its really impressive. It also checks how many users in the Norton Community have used this file.

If you open Windows Task Manager, you can only find ccSvcHst.exe that takes up around 10MB+ of memory. But when I used Process Explorer to view the running process, there are actually two ccSvcHst.exe process.
The memory usage for one of the process can get really high during scanning but after a while Norton would intelligently clear off the memory usage, dropping it to merely less than 10MB for both process.

Norton Antivirus 2010 is DEFINITELY BETTER than 2009 because of the SONAR II. Norton Antivirus 2010 runs on Windows XP (32-bit), Windows Vista (32-bit and 64-bit) and Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit). The system requirements are 300 MHz or faster processor, 256 MB of RAM (512 MB RAM required for Recovery Tool) and 200 MB of available hard disk space.

For those that already have a valid license for previous versions of Norton Antivirus, you can update to the latest Norton Antivirus 2010 for free. Visit the Norton Update Center, click the “Update Me Now” button download the AutoSetupPkg.exe to update your NAV to the latest v2010. There are times when this tool will wrongly detect that you are using the latest version when you have an old version. If that happens on you, click the “Choose My Product Manually” link to manually download NAV 2010.

I have the habit of launching the icons from quick launch more often than in desktop. Reason is when all the Windows are open, I needed a simple and fast way to show desktop, switch between windows and also to run software that I use very often such as Firefox. Although I am aware of shortcut keys such as Win + D to show desktop, Win + M to minimize all opened windows and Win + Tab to switch between windows but I seldom use it. Maybe I’m just not use to it.

Here is a question that I recently got in forum which is how to restore the missing Show Desktop and Flip3D Switch Between Windows shortcut if accidentally deleted it? First of all, make sure that you or someone else did not accidentally disable the Quick Launch bar. Simply right click on the taskbar, go to Toolbars and see if Quick Launch is checked or not. If not, checking it will bring back the Quick Launch bar with your Show Desktop and Windows Switcher Flip3D shortcut. If you’re sure that both of the icons are not there, here’s how to restore it back.


The easiest way to restore both Show Desktop and Switch Between Windows icons is to go to this location.

C:\Users\Default\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

If you can’t see the Default folder, you’ll have to go to Control Panel > Folder Options > View tab and select “Show hidden files and folders”.

Copy both of the icons to your profile’s quick launch. Your profile’s quick launch folder would be at:

C:\Users\[YourUserName]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

If navigating to these browsers are way too confusing, the easier way would be opening My Computer, type shell:Quick Launch at the address bar and hit Enter. That’d bring you directly to YOUR profile’s quick launch folder. Now paste the copied icons there.

If somehow the default user’s quick launch icon are also gone, then you can download both of the icons from the link below and extract them to your Quick Launch folder. They are taken from my Vista computer.

[ Download Vista Shows Desktop and Window Switcher Shortcut ]

Shutting down in Windows has been the same since Windows 95 which was 16 years ago. All you need to do is click on the Start button and the obvious Shut down menu will be displayed. Because of this, no one really ask how to shut down Windows. If Microsoft placed the Shut down button somewhere that is hard to find, then a lot of Windows 95 users will simply press the power button to turn off their computer which can damage the hard drive.

I’ve downloaded the Windows 8 Developer Preview ISO which is available for free and installed it on my Parallels Workstation 6 virtual machine. I’ve stopped using VirtualBox because there was an incompatibility and I had to make the switch. The Windows 8 installation is quite similar to Windows 7 but the biggest change would be the Start menu. The Windows 8 Start Menu takes over the whole screen rather than just displaying a bar with shortcuts.

When I am done messing around with Windows 8, embarrassingly I couldn’t find the Shut down button! After a bit of effort, I discovered how to shut down in Windows 8.


If you’re at the Start page, you will need to go to Desktop first. Then move the mouse cursor to the most bottom left on the screen where the Windows Start button is without clicking on it.

A menu will automatically appear showing Settings, Devices, Share, Search and Start. Click on the Settings menu.

The settings page will be displayed at the right hand side of the screen. Click on the Power icon and select Shut down.

Alternatively, the old method of bringing up the Shut Down Windows dialog box by pressing Alt+F4 at Desktop still works. I believe many computer illiterate users will have trouble finding the shut down button but then thanks to newer generation computers that is able to properly shut down the computer even if the user presses the power button (lightly, not for a few seconds) on the computer case.

I have to be honest that I am a very traditional guy. If I am used to something that never breaks, I will continue using it until I get so familiar with it that I feel tough to make a change. One example is I still prefer to use my old laptop because it has Windows XP rather than my new and faster Acer laptop or Dell All-In-One desktop because they came with Windows 7 pre-installed. I know as a technology guy I have to keep up with upgrades so I slowly started to use Windows 7.

If you are familiar with Windows Vista, switching to 7 isn’t going to be much of a problem unlike from XP to 7 because so many things has changed! One of the changes which I am not used to is the missing Quick Launch in Windows 7. I normally keep my Quick Launch toolbar in XP very small with only 3 icons and they are Internet Explorer, Firefox and a Show Desktop icon to conveniently minimize all opened windows and programs.

Normally you can easily enable the Quick Launch by right clicking the taskbar, go to Toolbars and select Quick Launch but it’s not there in Windows 7. By default, Internet Explorer is already pinned and I thought I can just pin Firefox and Show Desktop icon and it’ll be done but somehow I just couldn’t pin Show Desktop. After messing around for an hour, I finally managed to pin IE, Firefox and Show Desktop icon together to taskbar but there is a problem where the pinned icons doesn’t look and behave the same as Quick Launch icons when either one of the pinned program is running.

After a lot of testing, I found out that there is no way to make the pinned programs to work like the Quick Launch icons. Then I figured I had to somehow create a Quick Launch toolbar in Windows 7 and I managed to get it right.


1. First, I unpin all default programs from taskbar.

2. Unlock the taskbar by right clicking the taskbar and select “Lock the taskbar“.

3. Right click Taskbar, go to Toolbars and select New toolbar…

4. Simultaneously press Alt+D and type the following path below and then hit enter.

%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\

5. Use the mouse to select the Quick Launch folder shown in the window and click the “Select Folder” button.

6. You should see Quick Launch word appear on the right side of the taskbar. Right click on it, go to View and select Large Icons. Then again right click on the Quick Launch word and uncheck both “Show Text” and “Show title” by clicking on them.

7. Now move your mouse cursor to the dotted lines that is next to the start menu button until it shows the two arrows pointing left and right.

Left click and hold, drag it right to the end past the Quick Launch toolbar and once you see that the Quick Launch icons ended up at the left corner of the taskbar, drag the dotted lines back to the left.

8. Right click on the taskbar and select “Lock the taskbar“.

Now I have a quick launch toolbar that works exactly the same as in Windows XP.

If you didn’t know, you can use a shortcut key WIN+D to show desktop and CTRL+N to open new browser window for Firefox/IE. It clearly looks like Microsoft is trying to remove the quick launch toolbar in Windows 7 but luckily it is still possible to bring it back.

A software can be programmed to secretly connect to the internet. This is done in background and is not visible to users unless they know how to check. “Phoning home” is a term that is used to describe a software connecting to its own server probably to send statistical data or even to verify the validity of the license. As useful as it is for software developers, it can also be a threat. Malware such as Remote Administrative Tool (RAT) trojan with reverse connection capability is able to automatically phone home and connects to the hacker giving the hacker full control over the computer.

If you are the adventurous type that downloads and play around with a lot of software especially the dangerous ones such as keygenerators, patches, hack tools, then you must be even more careful to check if it is secretly phoning home. For computer newbies, running a firewall and letting it take care of everything would be the best choice. You can choose the best firewall listed at Matousec which list Comodo Internet Security 4 as the best firewall.

There are many ways to check for application that connects to the Internet and I will share with you the method that I use which can easily help you determine if a specific software is connecting to the internet.


You probably heard about using netstat via command prompt, TCPView from Sysinternals, CurrPorts from Nirsoft but I find them a little difficult to analyze since it monitors and displays ALL applications that connects to the Internet. Sometimes I have downloaded an executable file and I would only want to check on that. The tool to use is Process Explorer.

Process Explorer is a free and portable tool by Sysinternals which is similar to Windows Task Manager but it is way more advanced. The good thing about using Process Explorer to check for connection to the Internet is the ability to easily check on a single or multiple process and not all. Simply double click on any process from the list in Process Explorer and go to the TCP/IP tab. It will show both TCP and UDP connections that is made from the process. The only drawback about using Process Explorer to check for application phoning home is the inability to save the log of connections. Once the connection has been made and closed, it will be removed from the TCP/IP tab.

If you noticed that some software are secretly connecting to the Internet and there is no way to turn it off, you can either use firewall to block the connection or add it to your HOSTS file at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc so that it redirects the hostname to 127.0.0.1. There is limitation in using HOSTS file because it can only translate from host name to IP address. This is also one method on how software pirates block software from phoning home which checks the validity of the license if they used an illegal keygenerator to activate the software. None of the software above such as Process Explorer, Netstat, CurrPorts, TCPView and etc is able to monitor connections made by rootkit. We should definitely look at some rootkit discovery tools in future articles.

[ Download Process Explorer ]

For most email servers, when it receives an instruction to send an email, the message is sent immediately and it won’t be possible for you to cancel an email that is already sent to the recipient. When an email reaches the recipient’s inbox (which normally takes less than 1 second), the only “probable” solution to cancel the email is to ask the server administrator to manually delete the email but the chances are slim because server administrators normally wouldn’t respond to such request as that would be an intrusion of privacy.

Gmail changes this by adding a very unique experimental feature where you can Undo Send emails. Basically after sending an email, you have a maximum of 30 seconds to cancel the sent email by clicking the Undo link. This is made possible by simply adding a queue before Gmail servers sends the email and not by deleting the email on the recipient’s inbox. You can verify this by sending a test email to yourself and you will notice that the email will only arrive in your inbox when the Undo link is removed. This Undo Send feature is disabled by default and only works on web based Gmail.


To enable Undo Send feature, login to your Gmail account, click the Settings icon located at the top right of the page and select Settings from the menu. Click on Labs tab and look for Undo Send by Yuzo F. Alternatively you can also type Undo Send at the search box to quickly find the feature. Select the Enable button and click the Save Changes button.

By default you only have 10 seconds to Undo the sent email but you can set it to 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds in Settings. Access the Settings page again and this time at the General tab, look for Undo Send and set the Send cancellation period to 30 seconds so that you have the most time to cancel the email.

After enabling the Undo Send feature, whenever you’ve just sent an email, a notice box will appear at the middle top of the page saying “Your message has been sent. Undo. View message“. Simply click on the Undo link to cancel the sent message.

Unfortunately this only works on the web based email and not on email clients with Gmail’s SMTP. If you close the browser while the message is still in the queue, the email will be sent instantly and there is no way to Undo it even if you managed to re-login to Gmail within 30 seconds.

Early this year I’ve listed top 10 free data recovery software which can be used to recover data from accidental deletion. The reason I listed ten data recovery software instead of one is because not all can do its job properly. Let’s face it. Most freeware developers doesn’t put 100% of their hard work into it because they don’t get paid for doing that. The freeware that they created might be their interest which they create in their spare time or even a promotion to its shareware. So in my opinion, shareware is better than freeware MOST of the time but it has a price to pay.

Today I discovered a method to obtain PC Tools File Recovery genuine license key which normally cost $29.95 for free. You can get your free license now and have that software in your hand so you don’t have to panic and know what to do when you accidentally deleted important data from your hard drive.


PC Tools File Recover allows you to recover critically important documents, or other files, which have been lost by accidental deletion. These files may be lost by emptying the Recycle Bin, or using other deletion actions that bypass the Recycle Bin altogether. Such actions include Windows Shift-Delete, command line deletion, deleting excessively large files or using applications that delete files without the Recycle Bin.

When a file is deleted from the Recycle Bin, or if the recycle bin is bypassed altogether, the file can no longer be recovered by the Windows Operating system. The content of the file still remains on the drive, relatively intact, until the section of the drive it occupies is overwritten by another file. File Recover identifies the contents of such lost files on the hard drive and allows you to recover them. If a file has been partially overwritten, File Recover attempts to reconstruct as much of the file as possible with the remaining contents. This allows you to salvage at least part, if not all, of that recovered file to continue using it as required.

File Recovery Features

Recovers files instantly from hard drives, floppy drives and other types of fixed media. If you are a home user or a network administrator, File Recover fills a critical gap in your data protection strategy

Rapid scan engine – a typical hard drive can be scanned for recoverable files within minutes

Scan all files and directories on selected hard drives

Search for a recoverable file using part or all of its file name

Utilizing a non-destructive, read-only file recovery approach. File Recover will not write or make changes to the section of the drive from which it is recovering data

Batch file recovery (recovers multiple files in one action)

Works around bad-sector disk areas. Recovers data where other programs fail

Supports standard IDE/ATA/SCSI hard drives, including drives larger than 8 GB

Supports hard drives formatted with Windows® FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS file systems

Follow the step by step instructions below on how to obtain the free PC Tools File Recover genuine license key.

1. Visit this page, enter your name and email address and click Request Free License button. It is important that you enter a real email address because the license key will be sent there.

2. Check your email. You should receive an email from PC Tools (sales@pctools.com) with the subject Free File Recover License‏. Note down the Name and License Key.

3. Download File Recover from this link and install.

4. Run File Recover software after installation, click Register button located at the left side of the program and enter the Name and Key which you received from the email.

That’s it! Only 4 simple steps to get the genuine license key for PC Tools File Recovery. One thing I really like about File Recover is it has built-in heuristic file type algorithms for recovering files of specific types (such as .avi, bmp, .cab, .jpg, .xml and etc..). There is one good and bad news about the promotion of PC Tools File Recover. Good news is you get to use a $29.95 data recovery software for free and the bad news is it only last up to 7th September 2008. Well, at least it is better than nothing… Perhaps I’ll find something new and even better before it expires.

Argh, 2 days ago my computer was having problems.
First, I remembered entered a CD-R which I burn but couldn’t read, this shouldn’t happen!
After that, my computer started responding very very slow. I shut it down and stopped using it for a day.
When I boot it up the next day, I get the error message “A disk read error occurred. Press ctrl+alt+delete to restart”. However, CMOS detects the hard drive.
I searched around the internet and forums, and no one had the exact fix for this problem.
Hardware Analysis has the biggest discussion on this problem with 171 replies.


Some fixed it by the following methods and some unable to fix it.
1. Changing IDE cables
2. Change the jumper settings and not using Cable Select
3. Use recovery console and type fixboot
4. Use recovery console and type fixmbr

I first tried fixing it by playing around with the hardwares but unable to fix it.
Then I have no choice but to use software which will risk loosing my datas. I tried running chkdsk but unable to.
I also tried fixboot and nothing happens. Still the same error message. Finally I tried fixmbr and it says successfully fixed my master boot record.
Boot it up, and still unable to boot up to Windows. I boot it up to recovery console but this time I am able to see the C:\ drive.
When I list the directory, oh my, all the unknown/unreadable characters listed out. I know then, my hard drive is corrupted!
I’ve got no choice but to hook it up on another computer, run a disk recovery program to get back all my datas and reinstall Windows.
After reinstalling the Windows, it still has problems. I ran chkdsk and found BAD SECTORS! The nightmare of hard disk.
I formatted my hard disk with low level format with PowerMax from Maxtor FOR Maxtor.
After doing that, I scan my hard disk and voila, everything is okay.

It seems that this problem is caused by sharing your Hard disk with CD ROM on the same IDE cable.
Explanation by Davy Dane.
When connecting HD and CDROM/CDRW/DVD etc. to your computer you should follow these standards.
Don’t connect a HD and CDROM/CDRW/DVD to the same IDE port.
Connect the HD to IDE 1 and Connect the CDROM/CDRW/DVD to IDE 2 unless
You have an SATA HD then you can connect the CDROM/CDRW/DVD to IDE 1 but still never connect a HD and CDROM/CDRW/DVD on the same IDE port.
I believe there are now new DVD drives that run at 100 speed (DMA 5). If you have a 100/133 Speed HD and a 100 speed DVD drive then it’s ok to connect to the same IDE port.
When setting jumpers on HD and CDROM/CDRW/DVD drive always set the master to “MASTER ONLY” and the slave to “SLAVE”.
NEVER CHOOSE “MASTER W/ SLAVE (even if you have a slave)” or “CABLE SELECT” or “32 GB LIMIT”.
Make sure you have the correct speed cable on your HD. You need a 133 speed cable on your HD. It’s the thinner cable with the coloured end. The thicker cable for your CDROM/CDRW/DVD only runs at 66 (DMA 4).
One way of checking the speed of your HD is by going to the device manager/IDE Controllers right clicking on the channel and choose advanced settings. Your HD should be set to DMA 5 or DMA 6 (primary IDE). If it’s DMA 4 then you have the wrong speed cable connected to your HD.
Plug the Black end connector of your cable in your “MASTER” and the grey middle connector in your “SLAVE”.
Never plug the middle grey in the MASTER.

That makes sense doesn’t it? 😉

That’s not the end of my computer problems. I tried reinstalling Windows again after low level format, and it kept on giving blue screen during installation. I took off the unneeded hardwares such as Network Card, Sound Card, etc… one by one and tried installing the Windows.
Finally, i had 3 RAMs, 512 on slot 1, 256 on slot 2 and another 256 on slot 3. I took off slot 2 and 3 and tried installing Windows and this time no problem. I used a tool Memtest86+ and ran test on my RAM, and yes indeed there are problems with my 2nd and 3rd ram.

Here’s the memory test i conducted:
Test 1: Slot 1 – 512MB + Slot 2 – 256MB (stick 1)
Result: Got error on Slot 2

Test 2: Slot 1 – 512MB + Slot 2 – 256MB (stick 2)
Result: Got error on Slot 2

From the 2 test above, looks obvious that both my 256MB RAM has problems.
But wait, there is another test to conduct.

Test 3: Slot 1 – 512MB + Slot 3 – 256MB (stick 1)
Result: NO ERROR. (Can you believe that?)

Test 4: Slot 1 – 512MB + Slot 3 – 256MB (stick 2)
Result: No ERROR. ( I can’t believe it too!)

My conclusion is, the Slot 2 on my mother for RAM is damaged. And, for desktop PC, I would use FAT32 rather than NTFS on drives that contains Windows Operating System. I don’t want to go through all that again…

Davy Dane did said that “Most people think this has to be a HD problem but that’s not true. I had this problem when I had a bad VIDEO CARD, RAM, and MODEM before.”
I think he’s probably right too. The bad memory might have given wrong information on bad sectors. DUH!

Update: I tried to use Slot 1 and Slot 3 to install Windows XP and doesn’t work. I can only stick with 512MB of memory for the time being…