Look what I’ve found! A Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise keygenerator and also Microsoft Office 2007 Application keygenerator. I seriously don’t know what the application keygenerator is for. I have not tested it and I can’t tell you if it’s working or not. I downloaded this from a very reliable warez site. Definitely virus and trojan free.

As you can see at the two pictures above, it did say “Vista Offline Activator” coming soon. I can’t wait for that! There are still report saying that currently there are no 100% cracks for activating Windows Vista yet. So maybe this is the one! Let’s wait and see…

In the meantime, you can download the Office 2007 keygenerators and try them out.

[ Download Link Removed due to Copyright Notice ]

Everyone loves gadgets but not everyone can afford or willing to spend on them since they are not a necessity. I personally love gadgets too and I only buy what I think is necessary. The latest gadget that I bought recently is the Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote. The name of the gadget itself tells you that it is a universal remote that is meant to combine all your multiple remotes into one. I have 6 remotes sitting on my living room and they are for Television, AV Receiver, Satellite (Astro), WD TV (media player), ceiling fan and air conditioner. When you have that much of remotes lying around, there are times when you will need to look around just to find that particular remote because it is probably hiding it one of the corner at sofa. Moreover for older people who are not so technologically advanced, it can be very confusing for them to even watch a TV with so many remotes involved.

Now with this Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote, I can control all of the electrical appliances at my living area with only one remote and keep the others away. I go to know about this universal remote through my wife’s cousin-in-law and immediately went searching for one at our local Malaysian auction website (Lelong). When I got the remote, the remote looks pretty slick with a shiny surface and a full color touch screen. What I like most about this remote is you can turn on multiple devices with a single button, sort of like macro commands. For example, when I want to watch Astro, our local Malaysian satellite TV, I would have to turn on the TV, AV Receiver, and Satellite. The Harmony remote can do all that for you with a single click.


As good as it sounds, the setting up can be quite a pain. It took me a couple of days to get nearly everything right (even now it’s still not perfect but I can live with it). Even though setting up the Harmony remote is from the guided online setup, but it is not that easy.

First of all you need to add the devices to the Harmony remote by keying in the exact model of the devices. Then you can setup Activities, which is the same as macro commands to automatically turn on multiple devices. This part can be quite tricky as some devices takes longer time to power on, such as the Astro Byond (Pace) decoder. You will need to play around with the delay settings to get it right. The troublesome part is when the Harmony remote doesn’t work, you will have to connect the Harmony remote to your computer, tweak the settings, re-upload the configurations to the remote and then try again.

Logitech Harmony remote can control up to 15 devices and has support for 5000+ brands and 225,000+ devices. If the model is not in the list, you can use the infrared learning capability to copy the code to the Harmony remote. Amazon is selling the Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote at $165.55 but I bought it at $243 in Malaysia. Oh well, the price of imported stuff in Malaysia is always more expensive.

[ Visit Logitech Harmony Remotes Official Website ]

If you didn’t notice, nearly all bloggers that generates revenue from their website through advertisements never talk about AdBlockers. Reason is if they introduced a good advertisement blocker and you ended up using it, they’ll loose YOU (or perhaps a few hundreds or thousands depending on how much readers the site has) to view the displayed advertisements or clicking it because it is relevant to the visitor. Even Martin from Ghacks also mentioned “Turning off the adblocker helps me generate revenue. Each visit pays so to speak. Even if you do not click on the ads it helps me pay my bills.” I fully agree with Martin but the painful truth is people installing quality ad blockers have a 99.99% probability of never clicking on an ad to begin with.

There are anti-adblock scripts that is able to get pass adblockers but I wouldn’t want to embed that into my ads because it is like forcing you to view the ads when you don’t want to. Maybe you have a broadband subscription with limited bandwidth and don’t want to waste your bandwidth in loading advertisements. Anyway, today I am going to do something that bloggers never do, that is to introduce you a very good quality ad blocker software that has been in development for 9 years. Other than that, I am also going to show you how to register the software that normally cost $23.76 for FREE!



Ad Muncher is a system-wide ad blocker, dealing with annoyances like banner ads and popups along with new rich media ads like video ads, interstitials and floating ads. Many types of spyware and adware installers are also blocked, as well as third-party tracking systems. It works out of the box, without the need to choose what you want blocked or configure third-party filter lists, and works with all browsers and many advert-displaying programs such as ICQ, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Music Jukebox, SopCast, iMesh, BearShare, Pando, PalTalk, etc.

Ad Muncher has been in constant development for over nine years, and has been used successfully on millions of computer systems around the world. After these years of development and user feedback it has evolved into a rock-solid application with some of the most advanced advert and popup filtering systems currently available.

A quick list of features that differentiate Ad Muncher from many other advert removal products:

Not just a popup remover, also removing embedded adverts and many other annoyances.

System-level filtering of adverts in all browsers and most advert-displaying programs.

Extensive configuration options to tailor Ad Muncher to your needs.

Extremely fast filtering engine.

Continuing intensive development, with no end in sight for continually improving Ad Muncher releases.

Follow the steps below on how to register Ad Muncher for free.

1. Download and install Ad Muncher.

2. Run Ad Muncher, enter the name and code shown below and click the Register button.
Name: Request to remove by AdMuncher
Code: Request to remove by AdMuncher
This license is for Komputer Swiat readers living in Poland. If you’re not living in Poland, you should get the error message “The Komputer SWIAT license can only be used from within Poland, and you are connecting from appears to be in COUNTRY. If you are currently in Poland, please contact us for further assistance.”

3. Click Proxy Options button, check “Use proxy when contacting the Ad Muncher servers”. Make sure the Type is selected as HTTP, enter the address as 213.25.107.4 and port 80. Click OK and click Retry. The proxy address belongs to Poland so when you try to update or validate the license code with it, Ad Muncher will think that you’re in Poland.

4. Wait for a few seconds and you should see a dialog box that says “Your license was successfully verified. Thank you for supporting Ad Muncher development. Click Close to continue.

Whenever you need to update the program or advert list from Options > Updates, you have to make sure that you’re using a working Poland proxy or else it will tell you that the license can only be used in Poland. I am sure one day either the Poland proxy that I provided will stop working or Ad Muncher server starts blocking it. When that happens, you can search in Google for another working Poland proxy.

Ad Muncher installer is only 418 KB in size. The minimum system requirement to run Ad Muncher is Pentium 60, 32 MB ram, 2 MB disk space. Supports from version of Windows (95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista).

Note If you like my articles and would like to help, you can add my site raymond.cc to your filter list to stop filtering the ads or to allow the advertisement to continue loading. It does help to pay the bills even if you don’t click the ads. Thanks!

My apologies for the delay in posting this new antivirus benchmark results. The report was in fact ready since last week but only a selected amount of forum members gets to see it first to report on any typing errors. If you didn’t know, even if you have the fastest computer in the world, ALL antivirus is capable of slowing down your computer and I strongly believe that we have the right to know the real truth on how slow can the computer get with a particular antivirus software. Most if not all antivirus website claims that their antivirus is the FASTEST or LIGHTEST but after putting them into 18 different benchmark tests, it doesn’t really seemed like what it claimed.

One of our reader Liam K. posted in the comment that the well known fact of the two least memory-intensive antivirus programs are Avira Antivir for free and NOD32 for paid. Whether it is true or not, there are millions of users on the Internet using different kind of antivirus software and it is just not possible to ask them to uninstall their current antivirus and use either Avira or NOD32. Everyone has their own opinion on which antivirus works best for them and hopefully this benchmark tests that I am doing will help everyone to know why certain actions they perform on their computer seemed slower than before.


The antivirus are tested in a very fair manner where all the steps and methods are performed exactly the same on every antivirus. Default settings on the antivirus are used during benchmark since most users doesn’t change the settings. Antivirus developers would have known about this and adjusted the default settings to suit most users. It is not logical for the antivirus developers to enable the paranoid mode by default where it prompts the user for action on every little thing they do on the computer.

The good thing about the current method which I am using to display the chart is via FusionCharts where it uses flash to generate the chart in real time based on an external XML file. This allows me to easily add more benchmark results to the chart in future. For your convenience, I have also calculated the percentage difference to show the difference between using an antivirus and without the antivirus. All you need to do is just move your mouse cursor over the bar at the graph.

It takes a few hours to complete all 18 benchmarks on one antivirus and currently I have only tested 20. I will continue to benchmark more antivirus software whenever I can and update the chart. You can access the latest antivirus benchmark from http://www.raymond.cc/antivirus/ or from the top navigation bar where it says “Lightest Antivirus Test“. So far I’ve noticed that most of the time there won’t be much difference on the performance for the same brand of antivirus but different product. For example, the performance of Kaspersky Antivirus and Kaspersky Internet Security is pretty much the same. Do take note of the version number as well because newer builds could have better performance.

Oh and by the way, if you have a Facebook account, don’t forget to hit the Like button on the antivirus benchmark page to show your support on the new antivirus benchmark test.

Trend Micro has been around for a very very long time. Back then it was called PC-Cillin and now is renamed to Trend Micro. I still remembered the first time I heard of PC-Cillin when I was using my cousin’s 100Mhz computer. I wasn’t a big fan of Trend Micro antivirus products because it always didn’t score well when put being tested by AV-Test. The latest report shows that Trend Micro Internet Security 2010 ranks either second lowest or the lowest when compared to other commercial antivirus such as Norton, Kaspersky, G Data, Panda, Avira, F-Secure, Bitdefender, CA and PC Tools. On my latest antivirus 2010 performance test report, Trend doesn’t seem to put a lot of load on the Windows computer and it was even able to successfully block a crypted Bifrost trojan when many others failed to do so…

It is always up to the individual to determine if whether Trend Micro is the best or not because I do have a friend name Jay who is a very good coder and he thinks that Trend is the best. Heck he even recommends me to use it. Here’s a very good news to Trend fans because you are able to get hold of 1 year Trend Micro Internet Security 2010 license for FREE!


Trend Micro Internet Security 2010 has the following features to protect your computer:

Antivirus

Antispyware

Firewall

Protects Windows and Important Programs from Unauthorized Changes

Web Threats Protection

Spam Email Filter

Parental Controls

Data Theft Prevention

As usual, Internet Security suites normally offers a bunch of protections which probably you don’t need. For example, if you don’t use a POP email, then you don’t need Spam Filter. Also if you don’t have kids, you don’t need Parental Controls as well. You can turn them off and logically it should work slightly faster.

To get your free 1 year Trend Micro Internet Security 2010 license, all you need to do is just download the 149MB TIS175_IOMEGA.exe setup file from this promotional link. During installation, when asked to enter your Trend Micro Internet Security serial number, just select “Install a free trial version“. You will also come to a part where you need to activate the program by entering your email address. You will need to download around 75MB for the first update.

Thanks Flash113 from For-Free for sharing this tip.

I always believe that people who knows about computer living in the United States is very lucky. First of all, they can purchase nearly everything from the Internet and most of the time shipping it to your home is free! For people who live in other countries, we can order stuff from USA via the Internet but we’ll have to pay for the ridiculously expensive shipping fee and import tax which sometimes cost more than the product that we’re buying.

Other than that, members in the Microsoft Professional Accountants’ Network (US) can get one complimentary genuine product key license for Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2008 worth $199.95 for FREE! The best part is joining the Microsoft Professional Accounts’ Network cost NOTHING!


Office Accounting Professional 2008 is a complete accounting solution that helps small businesses save time managing everyday financial tasks, get organized, and grow their business online. With its familiar Microsoft Office interface, this program is easy to learn, so you can be productive right away. Smooth integration with other Microsoft Office programs makes information sharing simple and helps boost productivity.

By organizing all of your business information in one place, Office Accounting Professional 2008 helps you find the right information at the right time, so you can make better-informed business decisions. Plus, new features will help you sell products online, get paid faster, work easily with your accountant, and more.

To get the free complimentary license of Microsoft Office Accounting Professional, you’ll have to enroll your organization in the Microsoft Professional Accountants’ Network (MPAN). The steps includes providing your organization contact information, signing the Microsoft Partner Program legal agreement for your organization, and completing the registration process by providing profile information about you and your organization.

If for some reason you’re unable to get your free complimentary Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2008 product key after enrolling your organization in the MPAN, then you can head straight to http://www.ideawins.com/OA2008ProMPANStartDownloads1.aspx to generate your free Microsoft Office product key and then download the X14-19363.EXE installer. You are only required to enter your email address and the weird part is Microsoft doesn’t even have simple validation for the email address format. You will need an internet connection to activate the Microsoft Office Accounting using the 25 character product key.

Microsoft Office Accounting has a few version ranging from Express, Standard, Professional and Professional Plus. The Express version is free for anyone but it lacks of many features compared to Professional edition. Do take note that this complimentary free genuine Microsoft Office Accouting Professional 2008 product key is meant for members of Microsoft Professional Accountants’ Network and not everyone. Trust me, even if you manage to get the free license, this software would be quite useless to you unless you know accounting. Microsoft Office Accounting is not like the normal Microsoft Office which contains Word, Access, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

The Windows development team does not put a lot of effort on displaying information about your laptop’s or netbook’s battery information. If Windows 7 is installed on a computer with a battery, it will detect the battery presence and shows you the level of the battery charge. In Windows XP, it also shows you the battery level together with an estimated remaining time. Previously I have posted a software called BatteryBar which is very useful in giving you more information about your battery such as capacity, charge rate and etc. However BatteryBar requires installation and hooks three DLL files into explorer.exe, increasing the memory usage of Explorer.

Fortunately Nir Sofer has created a small (74KB) portable tool called BatteryInfoView that displays the current status and information about your battery. The displayed battery information includes the battery name, manufacture name, serial number, manufacture date, power state (charging/discharging), current battery capacity, full charged capacity, voltage, charge/discharge rate, and more…


Not all battery information are displayed on BatteryInfoView as some information such as battery temperature, manufactured date and serial number will only be displayed if the battery provides this information.

Running BatteryInfoView.exe will by default display the battery information. There is another view called “Battery Log” where a new log containing the status of the battery (Power State, % Capacity, Capacity Value, Rate and Voltage) is added every 60 seconds. You can change the log interval in the ‘Advanced Options’ window (F9). You can also easily create a HTML report by right clicking on the program and select HTML Report – All Items. The HTML report file (report.html) will be saved to the same location as where you run the BatteryInfoView.exe from.

BatteryInfoView is free, portable and works on any version of Windows, starting from windows 2000 and up to Windows 7. Since it is portable, this tool will be on my USB flash drive toolbox.

[ Download BatteryInfoView ]

Writing Chinese character is tough. I was really good at it when I was a small boy but when I stopped going to tuition, I slowly started to forget how to write certain Chinese words and eventually forgetting nearly everything. Writing Chinese is not as easy as English because if a character short of a dot, it’d bring a different meaning. Today I will be sharing with you about writing Chinese CAPTCHA.

A CAPTCHA is a program that can generate and grade tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown in the form, but current computer programs can’t. Actually cracking CAPTCHA is possible (jDownloader and CryptLoad developers are good at it) when it involves letters and numbers, but what if the CAPTCHA is in “chinese characters”? There’s no way for a computer user that don’t know a thing about Chinese to write or type out the Chinese character CAPTCHA.

I am going to show you how easy it is to write chinese characters to solve chinese CAPTCHA.


As far as I know, usually people type Chinese characters in computers using “pin yin” which means spelling of the sound. An example is “wo” means me or myself in chinese pinyin. IF you can read Chinese character but your computer is not equipped with software to write Chinese characters, you can still use Google Translate. Here’s another example, let’s say that the Chinese CAPTCHA shows this character 我 and I know that it means “me”, I open up Google Translate, select translation from English to Chinese, type “me” in the box and click Translate. The Chinese character 我 appears allowing me to copy the character and paste it to the CAPTCHA box.

I believe many of you doesn’t know how to read Chinese characters, so the above method won’t work. There are software such as NJStar Chinese Pen that cost $99 with Chinese handwriting recognition software that enables Chinese input using mouse. You can draw out the Chinese character using your mouse and it’ll automatically recognize what you’re trying to write and lets you paste the text whenever you want. Don’t worry because I definitely won’t ask you to buy or install something that you won’t be using and find it hard to uninstall because everything is in Chinese.

I found two sites that allows you to draw Chinese character online without installing any software.

1. NCIKU

The handwriting tool allows you to find characters by drawing them. Simply write the character in the box and select the desired one from the list that appears. The tool searches its character database based on the appearance of what you draw, the stroke order you use, and other factors. Even if you are unsure how exactly to write a character, the character you are looking for will most likely be included in results for you to recognize and choose from. Correct stroke order is not essential. NCIKU will find your character even if you don’t write it perfectly.
[ Visit NCIKU ]

2. Chinese-Tools

This tool allows you to enter Chinese character by writing it on the screen with the mouse cursor. Very useful when to check a character you don’t know the pinyin. Two things I don’t like about Chinese-Tools is it uses Java and it recognizes Chinese character according to correct stroke order. If you don’t know how to write Chinese, you definitely don’t know the correct stroke order.
[ Visit Chinese-Tools ]

I know for sure if I don’t tell you what is this article for, you’ll start bashing the hell out of me that this article is useless like what some of you all happily did these past 2 days. For your information, the reason on the existence of this blog is for me to write what I’ve learned about computers and not to impress anyone! I will be happy if you like what I like but if not, this blog site will be updated again tomorrow which probably will have something that you’d like.

This is a weblog (see how I usually start the article with a real life story?), not like some sites that is created just to make money by copying here and there. Anyway I’ll still inform you that this method can be used to obtain a 1 year free BitDefender 2009 license because they’ve upgraded their system with Chinese CAPTCHA to stop non-chinese users in registering a license.

Have you heard about a remote access software called ShowMyPC? No? Perhaps you’ve heard of Crossloop and TeamViewer? Well, they all share the same similarities which allows you to connect to another computer at a remote location dead easy without port forwarding configuration or finding out what is the IP address. The only thing that the 2 person involved in the remote access is to know the secret code in order to authorize the connection.

This kind of remote access software are meant for providing computer support to another person and not to connect to your home computer. Reason is there must always be another person over the other end to provide the password or allow the connection before it can connect. Just like LogMeIn Free, it is a very good remote access and desktop control software but for providing support, LogMeIn Rescue would be a more suitable tool.

Recently I discovered another free software called Ammyy Admin that can be used to easily connect to another remote computer to provide computer support without port forwarding and knowing the IP address of the other computer.


Ammyy Admin is a reliable and friendly tool for remote computer access. You can provide remote assistance, remote administration or remote teaching for your clients or employees regardless of their location. Ammyy Admin connects remote computers within seconds without any installation or configuration. You can view or control (using your keyboard and mouse) any applications running on the remote computers.

To get remotely access another computer, both end needs to download and run AMMY Admin. The computer that will be controlled is called the Client and the person who is remotely controlling another computer is called the Operator. The client will need to make sure that the Client tab is selected and then click the Start button.

If this is the first time that the client is using AMMYY Admin, it will automatically download a small 121KB target.zip file and drop the extracted target.dll in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\AMMYY. Then the client will need to give the operator the 4 digit ID.

The operator will then make sure that he is at the Operator tab, enter the client ID that he just received from the client and click Connect.

If this is the first time that the Operator is connecting to a client, AMMYY Admin will automatically download 125KB viewer.zip file and drop the extracted viewer.dll in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\AMMYY.

Before the operator gets to see and control the client’s computer, the client will have to authorize the connection. It will show the operator ID that is connecting and the client has the power to enable/disable access to the file system and keyboard & mouse. If the client wants to do a demonstration or presentation to the operator, the client can just show the screen without allowing the operator to control the keyboard and mouse. Simply uncheck all the boxes and click Accept.

Once accepted, the operator can now control the remote computer. I think that AMMYY Admin uses VNC because the remote control interface and settings looked exactly like the open source VNC program.

Unlike Crossloop, Ammyy Admin can be used to administrate unattended servers or computers. Like I mentioned earlier, usually these kind of remote tools requires another person on the other end to accept or allow the remote connection but Ammy Admin has the capability to auto accept connection. ShowMyPC has this feature but it charges $5 per month for 1 PC. TeamViewer also has this feature and it is free.

Here’s an easy tip to get a faster and smoother remote connection. Even if you have a high-speed internet connection given by your ISP faster than 1024Kb, it’d be better if you select Low-Speed < 256 Kb on the operator tab. The quality of the graphics will be lower but at least you’ll get a smoother remote control experience. Ammyy Admin might not be the best remote computer access software but it’s always good to have another alternative when Crossloop, TeamViewer and ShowMyPC doesn’t work on the client’s computer. AMMYY Admin is free and portable.

[ Download AMMY Admin ]

Previously I’ve written a guide on how to add your Hotmail account to Microsoft Outlook. Before doing that, you’ll need to subscribe for the MSN Hotmail Plus which is now known as Windows Live Hotmail Plus. If you are using the FREE basic Windows Live Hotmail account, you’ll only get an error message saying “Access to Hotmail via Outlook and Outlook Express now requires a subscription. Please sign up at http://join.msn.com/general/Email“.

For people who have Microsoft Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007, Microsoft has released a free utility for Microsoft Outlook called “Microsoft Office Outlook Connector” that allows you to download email from your Windows Live Hotmail to local Microsoft Outlook WITHOUT Windows Live Hotmail Plus subscription.

Please take note that Microsoft Office Outlook Connector only works with Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007 only. Earlier version of Microsoft Outlook and also Outlook Express won’t work.


Using Windows Live Hotmail with Microsoft Outlook can be much powerful because it uses Junk Mail filter, Rules Wizard and other features in Outlook. Download, installing and running Microsoft Office Outlook Connector is very easy.

1. Download Microsoft Office Outlook Connector and install.

2. Run Microsoft Outlook and you’ll need to enter your Hotmail email address, password and name that you want to appear in the receiver’s inbox.

3. You’ll notice that on the left pane where all your mail folders are, a new folder with your hotmail email address will appear. Simply click on Send/Receive button to start downloading all your emails from Hotmail to Outlook.

If you have multiple Hotmail account, you can continue adding them to Outlook by going to Outlook Connector from menu bar, and select Add a New Account. It’s so much easier maintaining multiple Hotmail accounts now!

There are also free third party utilities such as HotPOP3 which acts as a proxy between an HTTPMail server (MSN Hotmail) but I’d prefer to use Microsoft utilities on Microsoft products.

I’m sure all of us hate bloated software and in my opinion one of the most bloated software is iTunes. I would never install it or use it but since my wife has both iPad and iPhone 4, I am forced to install iTunes on my computer so that I can update its iOS to the latest version. In fact one of my friend even complained to me that he too hates iTunes because it pretty much takes over the whole operating system. If you didn’t realize, installing iTunes will also install Quicktime, Bonjour (mDNSResponder), Apple Software Update, Apple Mobile Device Support and Apple Application Support. Try extracting the iTunesSetup.exe file using 7-Zip and you will get an additional 6 MSI and 1 EXE file.

Some people tried to install iTunes 10 in Sandboxie so that it runs in an isolated space which prevents iTunes from making permanent changes to other programs and data in your computer but so far unsuccessful. I personally tried using VMware ThinApp to make iTunes 10 portable and also failed. Then I remembered another powerful software called Xenocode where you can use it to make a portable .NET application which means you can actually run a .NET application without installing .NET on the Windows operating system. The only issue is a small sized .NET application would become an over 20MB file. Xenocode is no longer available because it has evolved (renamed) into Spoon Studio. I downloaded the trial version of Spoon Studio 2011 and easily made a working portable version of iTunes 10 with it. Here are the steps…


1. Download iTunes 10 installer and save the iTunesSetup.exe on your hard drive. Don’t install it yet.

2. Download Spoon Studio 2011 from the official website and install.

3. Run Spoon Studio 2011 and click on the middle button “Virtualize a third-party application or component” in Configuration Wizard.

4. Click Next to capture the “before” snapshot.,

5. When you see the window asking you to install and configure your application, install iTunes 10 now. I would uncheck all 3 checkboxes (Add iTunes and QuickTime shortcuts to my desktop, Use iTunes as the default player for audio files, Automatically update iTunes and other Apple software) in iTunes installation options.

6. Click the Next button in Spoon Studio.

7. Click Next again when you are asked to capture the “after” snapshot and compute deltas.

8. Select a destination folder to save the snapshot copies.

9. Click the Multiple button when asked to Select a startup file.

10. Check ONLY iTunes and click OK.

11. If you want to run iTunes portable from USB flash drive, select the second radio button that says “Removable story device (ideal for USB keys)”. If you want to save it on your hard drive and run it from there, just select the first radio button “User application data folder on the host PC”. Click Next.

12. Click Next again and when asked to select an output file, specify the filename of the portable iTunes and click Save.

13. The final step is to click the Finish button.

14. Before Spoon Studio 2011 starts building your portable iTunes 10, you will either have to activate using an existing license certificate OR create a free spoon.net trial account. Just fill up the form and click OK. Click OK again to acknowledge that you have read and understood the End-User License Agreement. Follow the on-screen instruction and the final result is only one single 420MB executable file.

You can now run iTunes 10 from the single EXE file without installing the super bloated iTunes package. When you launch iTunes portable, you should get a notification window “The software required for communicating with iPods and mobile phone was not installed correctly. Do you want iTunes to try to repair this for you?” Just click No.

Connecting your iPhone or any other devices from Apple and you should also get another error “This iPhone cannot be used because the required software is not installed. Run the iTunes installer to remove iTunes, then install iTunes again.” In order for iTunes to recognize your iPhone, iPad, iPod, you will need to install the Apple Mobile Device Support and Apple Application Support. Extract iTunesSetup.exe with 7-Zip, run AppleMobileDeviceSupport.msi then AppleApplicationSupport.msi.

As you can see from the image below, iTunes 10 is running but it is not installed on my computer. iTunes can also detect my wife’s iPhone 4. I am also able to update to the latest iOS 4.3.5 using the portable iTunes 10.

Note: If you built the portable iTunes with the option “Removable story device (ideal for USB keys)” and you run the portable iTunes executable file from your hard drive, you will get an error message “UsbActivationOnly is missing from string table. It has a strict restriction that it must be launched from USB flash drive.

Spoon Studio 2011 is amazing but unfortunately it is not a freeware… A single Spoon Studio 2011 Standard Edition Developer License cost a whoping $2400! I know that none of you is going to spend that money just to make a portable iTunes but I am just showing you a possible way in case you have a valid Spoon Studio 2011 license 😉

Many popular BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent, BitComet and Azureus can work right out of the box. Download, install, load a torrent file and it’ll start downloading. If you don’t tweak the configurations, most probably it’ll take you longer to complete downloading the torrent.

Slow to finish downloading a movie or file from torrent is not a big problem. The biggest problem I always encounter when someone in the same network as me downloading a torrent and all of sudden my internet connection has been cut off entirely. I am unable to browse the web, my MSN messenger disconnected and etc. Pinging the router gives me a “Request time out” error message.

This problem happens both in modem and router. To get back the connection, I need to disconnect and reconnect if using modem or restart the router if I am using a router. Restart the router is not a good solution because when the BitTorrent starts downloading when it detects connection, my connection gets killed again.

I’ll share with you how to configure uTorrent, BitComet and Azureus so that internet won’t get disconnected while downloading torrent.


This happens mainly because there is a large number of connections that BitTorrent utilizes is stressing out your router/modem. The default settings in BitTorrent client is normally more connections than cheap modems can handle. Since many of us are actually using the free and cheap modems provided by our ISP, we have to lower the global connections in BitTorrent Client.

For uTorrent
1. Go to Tools -> Preferences (or press CTRL+P) to bring up the preferences options.
2. Click on BitTorrent and set the “Global maximum number of connections:” to a lower number.

For Azureus
1. Go to Tools -> Options (or press CTRL+,) to bring up the options.
2. Go to Mode and select Advanced.

3. Next go to Transfer and set the “Max connections globally” to a lower number.

For BitComet
1. Go to Options -> Preferences (or press CTRL+P) to bring up the preferences options.
2. Go to Advanced -> Connection.
3. Set the “Global maximum connections” to a lower number.

You can try the value “100″ for starters. If your router is able to handle that amount without killing your connection, you can try adding 20 more. Continue until you find the limit.

Alternatively, you can get a better router such as 3Com or Belkin to replace your cheap router provided by your ISP. I’ve also heard that full bridging mode works but it’ll leave your computer more vulnerable to attacks. In this case you’ll need to install a firewall to protect you.

One day I was curious to know what files are being opened on my system. For example, when I run Firefox, I know for sure that there are other associated files such as fonts, dat and jar files that are ran together with Firefox and it’s invisible. From what we see on desktop, it’s only Firefox being loaded. It is possible for a trojan to be injected into Firefox and you won’t even know or see that it’s being automatically loaded every time you run Firefox.

I found a very small, less than 40KB and useful tool that is able to display a list of all opened files on your system and I’d like to share with all of you.


OpenedFilesView is able to display the list of all opened files on your system. For each opened file, additional information is displayed: handle value, read/write/delete access, file position, the process that opened the file, and more… Optionally, you can also close one or more opened files, or close the process that opened these files.

This utility is especially useful if you try to delete/move/open a file and you get one of the following error messages:
* Cannot delete [filename]: There has been a sharing violation. The source or destination file may be in use.
* Cannot delete [filename]: It is being used by another person or program. Close any programs that might be using the file and try again.

When you get one of these error messages, OpenedFilesView will show you which process lock your file. Closing the right process will solve this problem. Optionally, you can also release the file by closing the handle from OpenedFilesView utility. However, be aware that after closing a file in this way, the program that opened the file may become unstable, and even crash.

Actually it is much easier and simpler to use Unlocker to solve the problem of unable to delete files. I’d prefer to use OpenedFilesView to manually check on systems to see what is being loaded especially trojan, spyware or virus.

[ Download OpenedFilesView ]

I bought an iPad for my wife during our wedding anniversary so she could easily and quickly surf the web without turning on the laptop. iPad is light, slim, powers on instantly, doesn’t heat up like the laptop and there are tons of apps to install from the iTunes App Store. I can just sit on my sofa and play Fruit Ninja HD or Angry Birds Rio whenever I want to relax. That’s the good thing I find about iPad but the real inconvenience is I can’t browse flash animated websites. Although there is an application called Skyfire which converts flash to HTML5 but it does not support flash animated websites such as Nandos or Mcdonalds.

I also purchased the expensive AlwaysOnPC app which allows me to log in to a virtual computer pre-loaded with over 40 apps including Chrome and Firefox with Flash support. It can open flash based websites but unfortunately everything on the Virtual PC loads very slow because the server is located in US and there is a huge delay/lag as I am located in Malaysia.

Then I found another app called iSWiFTER which is cloud-based Flash browser for Social Games and MMOs categorized under Games in iTunes App Store. In addition, I can still instantly browse any of your favorite shows, music videos, movies across the web using iSWiFTER!


iSWiFTER successfully loads up both Nandos and McDonalds website. It is not blazing fast but it is definitely faster than AlwaysOnPC. The official iSWiFTER website doesn’t explain how iSWiFTER works but it felt like everything has been converted into an animated image being streamed to iSWiFTER. In Safari I can copy the text from a website by touching and holding on the screen until the Copy popup appears but I couldn’t do that on iSWiFTER.

iSWiFTER used to charge monthly for the browser module to load flash websites but now has reverted to a one time purchase price of $4.99. It has a 30 minute trial for you to test iSWiFTER. Currently iSWiFTER 4.0 requires Wi-Fi connection and they are working on supporting iSWiFTER over 3G networks and also support for iPhone and iPod Touch. Browsing the web with iSWiFTER is not the best experience but at least it allows me to open flash based websites. If given another chance, I would have chosen Motorola Xoom over iPad just because it comes with Adobe Flash 10 Player.

[ Visit iSWiFTER | iTunes App Store ]

I spent a lot of time researching and learning how to crack WEP encryption with BackTrack 3 during my 2 weeks time off last month. After spending a lot of hours getting my wireless card working, I had another problem which is unable to use Kismet to search for hidden and non-hidden wireless network. That is not a problem because I could boot up Windows and use a Windows based wifi network scanner called NetStumbler. I went to the official NetStumbler website and found that the latest version is 0.4.0 released on April 21, 2004! Obviously it couldn’t work in Windows Vista because this program is way too outdated!

Actually in Windows Vista, we can use the command netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid to discover access points but this doesn’t show “hidden access point”. After a little searching, I found netstumbler alternative called inSSIDer that works on Windows Vista and also on 64-bit of Windows XP.


inSSIDer is a free Wi-Fi network scanner for Windows Vista and windows XP. Because NetStumbler doesn’t work well with Windows Vista and 64-bit Windows XP, they decided to build an open-source Wi-Fi network scanner designed for the current generation of Windows operating systems.

inSSIDer Features:

Inspect your WLAN and surrounding networks to troubleshoot competing access points.

Use Windows Vista and Windows XP 64-bit.

Uses the Native Wi-Fi API.

Track the strength of received signal in dBm over time.

Filter access points in an easy to use format.

Highlight access points for areas with high Wi-Fi concentration.

Group by Mac Adress, SSID, Channel, RSSI, and time “last seen.”

It’s very easy to use. After installation, run the program, select your wireless network card from the drop down list and click the Start Scanning button. RSSI values are measured in NEGATIVE decibels. So the higher the number, the more negative you are. So in fact lower RSSI’s are better. Do take note that not every wireless card is supported and it is recommended to use the “Connect to a Network” tool in Window instead of the software provided with your wireless card.

inSSIDER is a freeware and was strictly created for troubleshooting wireless networks but not to help you connect to any unencrypted wifi networks. Again, this is another tool that can be both good and evil. The only issue is where we draw the line and decide where we should stand.

[ Download inSSIDer ]