McAfee Internet Security makes PC and online protection easy for everyone. This set-it-and-forget-it solution comes with award-winning McAfee SiteAdvisor web security, so you know the safety of web sites before you visit, bank, shop or trade online. This powerful security bundle keeps your family and your PCs safe from viruses, spyware, hackers, online scammers, identity thieves and other cybercriminals.

McAfee Internet Security is now available with revolutionary Active Protection technology, providing immediate protection against malicious threats to your PC. A new threat can be analyzed and blocked in milliseconds, rather than waiting hours for traditional techniques. Active Protection is the best technology to keep you safe from emerging online threats. With unmatched performance, McAfee Internet Security runs silently in the background without slowing down your PC, boasting faster start-up, shut-down and scan times.

When you purchase a Lenovo laptop in Philippines, you’re entitled for a free McAfee Internet Security 2009 3 computer license valid for 6 months. I have a friend there and he wasn’t able to successfully get his McAfee IS 2009 license. So I used TeamViewer to remotely help him out and managed to get his license. Anyway, the steps to get the free McAfee Internet Security 2009 license is really long and confusing. I’ve taken the liberty of writing the whole steps down so that the next Lenovo user will be able to obtain his free McAfee Internet Security 2009 without problems.


1. Go to this page: http://www.lenovopromos.com/LREG/PH

2. Enter POL in the media code box and click the Verify button.

3. Click Agree and Proceed button.

4. Fill up the form. Make sure you enter a real working Email address. The rest of the information can be bogus except Serial Number. You can find the 8 digit serial number at front right panel or on the back of the Lenovo system. (Googling the phrase lenovo serial number K100 reveals a lot of working 8 digit serial numbers 😉 Changing the numbers at the end of a legitimate serial numbers also works). Click Submit when done.

5. Check your email address that you entered in the form at step 4. You should get an email from Lenovo (lenovo@blugrapes.com) with the title Confirmation of Lenovo Purchase. There is a link that you must click to activate the download.

6. Click the Download Now button where it says Free 6 Months Trial

7. Now you’ll have to create a McAfee account by filling up the form. Click Read Privacy Policy button when finished filling up the form.

8. Scroll right to the bottom of the McAfee Privacy Policy page and click I Agree.

9. Scroll right to the bottom of the End User License Agreement page and click I Agree.

10. You should see a print receipt page now. Click Go to My Account. Leave the web browser with the current page open.

11. Now check your email that you’ve used to create McAfee account. You should receive an email from subscriptions@mcafee.com with the subject Your McAfee Account. You’ll have to click the link in the email to complete the activation process.

12. Go back to the web browser where you left it open in step 10. Click Download button.

13. Click I Agree button.

14. Click the small download button to download DMSetup-Serial.exe

15. Run DMSetup-Serial.exe when finished downloading. You should be able to to select Typical or Custom installation but if you don’t see that and asked to login, just enter your McAfee login details that you’ve created in step 7.

16. The setup will automatically download and install McAfee Internet Security 2009 on your computer.

After helping my Philippine friend to install the McAfee Internet Security 2009, I noticed that the graphical user interface (GUI) is exactly the same as version 2008. Every software that goes through a major update surely has some noticeable changes in the interface. I checked the official McAfee datasheet and saw that the screenshot is the same. I believe that the McAfee 2009 products only improved the core of the program but not interface.

Note: This offer is meant for people who bought Lenovo laptop in Philippines, not everyone. As you can see, the Lenovo user would have to go through a very long process to get the free 6 months McAfee Internet Security 2009 license and I believe not every basic computers is able to achieve that. The complete step-by-step provided is meant to help the Lenovo customers, and not to promote piracy.

Here’s another reason why Firefox browser is the fastest growing browser in the world. You can now download torrent files using Firefox if you have the extension installed. Meaning you can avoid installing and using BitTorrent clients such as Azureus, uTorrent, BitComet and etc… Currently I only found two extensions that is able to download torrent files using Firefox. It is FoxTorrent and FireTorrent.

Tried them both and this is what I have to say about FoxTorrent and FireTorrent.


I tested both the extensions by downloading OpenOffice. OpenOffice torrent has enough seeders to max out my download speed.

FireTorrent is the world’s first BitTorrent plugin for the Wyzo and Firefox web browsers. Suitable for novice and advanced users, FireTorrent allows you to download torrents without the hassle of a 3rd party application. The FireTorrent plugin includes the very latest technologies and standards to ensure that your download completes quickly and reliably, including advanced features such as STUNT connections, uPnP NAT traversal, uTorrent compatible peer exchange, and many many more!

FireTorrent is able to maxed out my download speed at nearly 100KB/s.

The only drawback about FireTorrent is I can’t resume the download if I cancel the it. Resuming download should be the basic feature that every torrent client to have. BitTorrent technology was developed to distribute large files and what if we got disconnected at 90% from a 10GB download? That’d be frustrating!

FireTorrent is able to handle downloads very well and there are options such as Port, Download/Upload Rate, Encrypt BitTorrent Connections, Proxy which you can configure. FireTorrent would be a very good Firefox torrent extension if it is able to support resume downloads.

[ Download FireTorrent ]

FoxTorrent is an open-source Firefox extension that lets you stream torrents as they download, from your web browser, with zero configuration needed. It said to be Streaming Fast Delivery, Background Downloading, Complete Firefox Integration, Low Resource Footprint, Works on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu Linux and Configuration-Free.

There is nothing to configure in FoxTorrent. You can’t find any options at all other than the download location. It will be good if it works perfectly but if it doesn’t, you can’t do anything about it. FoxTorrent claims to makes its best effort to auto-configure NAT boxes but it didn’t work for me. I spent 30 minutes downloading OpenOffice and the fastest speed I got was 10KB/s. That’s nearly 10 times slower than FireTorrent! After reading Foxtorrent FAQ, I found out that FoxTorrent uses port 9420. I manually forwarded port 9420 but the download speed didn’t improve.

One more thing about FoxTorrent is, it supports pausing and resuming torrent downloads.

[ Download FoxTorrent ]

FireTorrent is fast but without resume capability. FoxTorrent is slow and it’s supports resuming. If you ask me which I’d prefer to use, I’d say NEITHER one and I’d stick with uTorrent. Well, if FireTorrent is able to support resuming, I might use FireTorrent.

3 days ago I ranted on how frustrated I was when YouTube automatically remove the video that I have spent more than an hour uploading just because they wasn’t capable of detecting the video length first before uploading the whole video. I searched in Google about this issue and found that there were many frustrated users experiencing the same problem as well but without a real solution. 15 minutes is actually good enough for showing a short video tutorial but it is definitely not enough for uploading talks or speeches.

Thanks to Ricky Splinter, Rinsoy Nellissery and Gábor Szurgent for sharing with me via comment that the 15 minutes limit can be actually removed by simply giving them my phone number for verification. Some of you may think that giving out your phone number is intrusive to your privacy but it is actually the best method today to verify that you are a real human and not a robot that is coded to do some automatic stuff. Just like in our forums, the phone verification is active to avoid the same user registering a few accounts and joining the giveaways to increases their chance in winning.


After logging in to YouTube, if I’ve opened my eyes bigger I would have notice the information that shows “Videos can be… High Definition, Up to 15 minutes in length (Increase your limit), A wide variety of formats. The most important part is the Increase your limit link which brings you to a page to verify your account by providing them your mobile phone number.

If for some reason you can’t find that link, you can use the direct link below.
http://www.youtube.com/my_videos_upload_verify

Once you’ve selected your country and entered your mobile phone number, clicking the Submit button and you will receive a text message that says “Your Google verification code is XXXXXX“. Note down the 6 digit and enter it at Step 2 of 2 and click the Verify button.

When you want to upload a video, you should see a blue information bar that says “Congratulations! Your account is now enabled for uploads longer than 15 minutes. Click the Upload button below to select a video.”

Your YouTube account now doesn’t have viewing limit nor video length limit plus it is free and fast! I wished I would have found this out earlier so that I wouldn’t have spent $59.95 on Vimeo Plus.

Most wireless internet service in hotels are quite expensive. I stayed a night in Cititel Midvalley last week and they are charging RM30 (US9.40) for 2 hours. I wanted an hour or maybe just half an hour to check my emails but they told me their minimum usage is 2 hours. Instead of spending RM30 just for wireless internet in my hotel room, I can actually go to Coffee Bean or Starbucks, order a cup of nice coffee and use the wireless internet there for hours!

Of course there are pros and cons. If I want privacy in Coffee Bean, I need to find a corner seat so that people can’t see what is on my screen. There is also a risk of some hacker might be accessing my passwords, credit card numbers, sensitive company data and much more. And standard antivirus software won’t protect me.

Here is a free security software that keeps your Internet connection secure at public hotspots, home or work.


Hotspot Shield creates a virtual private network (VPN) between your laptop and the wireless router. This impenetrable tunnel prevents snoopers and hackers from viewing your email, instant messages, credit card information or anything else you send over a wireless network. Which means you remain anonymous and protect your privacy. Actually Hotspot Shield can also be used at home when you’re connected to your router. It is the same thing as proxy technology except Hotspot Shield claims to encrypts your traffic but it doesn’t explain how it plans to encrypt your data.

Hotspot Shield is quite simple to use. Just download Hotspot Shield (less than 1MB) and install. You can either run “Hotspot Shield Launch” shortcut from desktop or start menu and you’ll notice a shield icon appear at your tray. Your default web browser will open up http://www.hotspotshield.com/launch/ page. To connect to Hotspot Shield VPN server, you can either right click the tray icon and select Connect or click the big “Run Hotspot Shield” button at the webpage. When you’re connected, you’ll see a similar page like the image below.

Hotspot Shield service is totally free. If you wonder how can they run their servers to provide you with such service, well, they are funded by advertisements. After connecting to Hotspot Shield VPN server, you’ll immediately being redirected to a advertisement website. Then, your web browser will have a bar on top that shows advertisement which will refresh every few minutes.

The advertisement bar is a little annoying… I also noticed that most of the time when I disconnect from the Hotspot Shield VPN server and reconnect again, I will be assigned to a new IP address. This means that you can use Hotspot Shield to download from RapidShare without limits! I’ve also tested the download speed and I only got an average of 20KB/s. For web browsing, the speed is fine but if you want to download hundreds of megabytes from RapidShare, it is very time consuming.

Update: If you are unable to connect using Hotspot Shield and getting Pulling Options page looping, Daemon Start Error or Bandwidth Exceeded, please refer to this article for a fix.

[ Download Hotspot Shield ]

For the past few years, a common problem that most antivirus software experiencing is the high memory usage which causes the computer to slow down. Do you still remember the super bloated Norton Antivirus 2006 and also Kaspersky Internet Security v7? Fortunately the antivirus companies are aware of this and they’ve improved the memory usage on the current versions, although there are some still taking up hundreds of megabytes of memory usage…

Today, instead of complaining about the memory usage, we should worry about the amount of false positives detection that an antivirus software is reporting. False positives is another way of saying “mistake”. A false positive occurs when the program mistakenly flags an innocent file as being infected and this is very common nowadays because of “heuristic” detection method. Heuristic detection is a method that an antivirus can analyze the instructions of a program and determine if it is a virus or not. This is mainly used to detect undetectable virus or trojan.

False positives is so common nowadays and I personally think that EVERY antivirus company should do something about it. If you think that false detection is not such a big deal, let me try to convince you.


One of my work place is frequently being infected by Brontok virus even when every computer has Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition installed. The joke is the antivirus cannot prevent Brontok virus from infecting the computer BUT it can block and auto delete Brontok Washer which I use to disable Brontok virus. So Symantec Antivirus CE can’t remove Brontok virus from the computer and doesn’t allow me to use third party tools that CAN clean the virus. Seems like a pretty useless antivirus to me…

There are also times when I posted others tools on this blog and as usual, some super paranoid antivirus that is installed on the reader’s computer found that it’s a threat. I do get a few very nasty comments and emails telling me that I am trying to infect their computer and steal their information. Come on, I get nothing by doing this. I wouldn’t tarnish this blog’s reputation which I took 3 and a half years to build. Because of antivirus false detection, this site has certainly gained a few angry and pissed off readers…

Another example is iSergiwa, the developer of Remove Restriction Tool, CaSIR, iPMS and many other useful virus removal tools. 2 months ago, one of iSergiwa’s client reported that Kaspersky detected iPMS as a rootkit which obviously is a false positives. Although he managed to get Kaspersky to fix the false positives, but during those 48 hours of this false positive alarm he received tons of complains, his website visitors and sales fell back and many of his potential customers left.

The message that I am trying to convey here is don’t always 100% listen to what the antivirus that is installed on your computer says because there is always a possibility that it is a false detection. Just treat it as a warning and you can scan the suspicious file in Virustotal first. If you’re still unsure, analyze it in ThreatExpert or Camas.

No worries if the antivirus companies are not going to do something about the false positives. There are ways to undetect an application from all antivirus which I will be sharing with you in a couple of days if I am not busy with work or the wedding preparation. Have a good weekend!

Note: Here is a post in our forum with latest method on how to get a free BitDefender Internet Security 2009 1 year license.

Many times when I wanted to download files from RapidShare links, I get the message “File Not Found“. This always happens when the link is old and unpopular where no one access the link for 90 days. Not everyone prefers to download from the same file host. Some hosts impose limits to countries, so hosting your file on many sites ensures the highest availability of the file. As far as I know, many uploaders are not willing to upload to other different file hosting servers mainly because there are no reward points to convert it to Premium account. It also waste time and bandwidth doing that.

I found a solution about a year ago to solve this problem. There is a utility called FileUploader and is able to upload files or folders to 32 file hoster simultaneously. To think about it, that didn’t really solve the problem because you still need time and bandwidth to upload to other file hoster. FileUploader only SIMPLIFIES the process of uploading without you visiting other websites, browsing the file that you want to upload and waiting for the file to complete uploading.

Today, I found a real solution to this problem. You only need to upload the file ONCE, and it will automatically create mirrors by distribute to a few file hosting servers.


FileBerry is a free service that allows you to easily upload to multiple servers. FileBerry claims that when you upload a file to fileberry, it will upload your file to many top free file hosts (Rapidshare.com, Megaupload.com, Sendspace.com, Zshare.net, Filesend.net) for you. When a visitor clicks one of the links, they then have the option of choosing which host they prefer to download from.

Don’t get it? Here are some graphics for you to understand better how FileBerry works.

1. First, you select the file that you want to upload by clicking the Browse button.

2. When you’re done selecting the file that you want to upload, click the Start Upload button and it will upload your file.

3. Next FileBerry will tell you that your file has been uploaded. You will get a link such as http://fileberry.com/XXXXXXXXXX

4. Visit the link given, and you will 5 links for the file that you uploaded.

I’ve made a table comparing all 5 file hoster (RapidShare, MegaUpload, SendSpace, zSHARE, FileSend). It makes sense why FileBerry has a limit of 100MB per file and it links will remain active for 60 days. As for SendSpace, I think they probably have a sendspace Max account in order to keep the file for 60 days.

Whenever I complete uploading, RapidShare link will immediately be available. Looks like when I upload a file, it is actually uploaded to RapidShare and then it will distribute to MegaUpload, SendSpace, zSHARE and FileSend. Your link will remain active unless it does not receive any visits for 60 days. When a fileberry link is removed, the linked files hosted on external servers may also be removed.

I think FileBerry can earn a lot of RapidShare points because when we upload files to them, they will upload to RapidShare using their Collector’s or Premium account. Well, it’s a win-win situation. They get to earn more points while we get mirrors for our files.

There’s one drawback about FileBerry. Once you’ve uploaded the files, you can’t delete the links yourself. You can try contacting FileBerry to remove them or you can keep the links secret and the links will automatically expire in 60 days.

[ Visit FileBerry ]

The problem with Windows is after using it for a couple of months, you would notice that the performance starts to degrade and it’s not as fast as when you first got the computer or reinstalled a clean Windows. This is when software such as TuneUp Utilities comes to play. If you haven’t heard of TuneUp Utilities, it is one of the popular and leading software to keep your PC in top shape for beginners and amateurs. In fact they have been around since 1997 which is 14 years ago! Some of the alternatives are IObit Advanced SystemCare, Uniblue PowerSuite, Glary Utilities, Norton Utilities, iolo System Mechanic and etc…

These software suite that manage, maintain, optimize, configure and troubleshoot a computer system is mainly targeted for beginners or amateurs because most computer experts would prefer to tweak their own system to the way they prefer because they know how to do it and willing to take the risk. TuneUp Corporation is currently running a promotion where everyone can request for a a free TuneUp Utilities 2011 product key that normally cost $49.95 which works on Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP.


Just follow the few simple steps below:

1. Visit http://www.tune-up.com/promo/007

2. Enter a working email address, anything for retailer, random characters and finally click the Get Product Key button.

3. Check your email that you specified at step 2 and you should received an email from TuneUp Promotion. Click on the link and your TuneUp Utilities 2011 product key is displayed.

TuneUp Utilities 2011 contains a lot of features and I suggest you to visit their official feature page for a more detailed explanation.

The download link that is on the product key page links to an older build of TuneUp Utilities 2011 Version 10.0.3000.101. The latest version is now version 10.0.4400.20 but not to worry on that since you can click on Help & Support > Check for updates to update TuneUp Utilities to the latest version. When TuneUp Utilities 2012 is released, which I expect it to happen very soon, you can’t update for free and will have to pay $29.95 for the major version upgrade. Now you know why TuneUp Corporation is having this promotion…

In my opinion, if you want to use these software, make sure you read the description to every setting before blindly clicking on it hoping that it would improve your PC’s performance. One example is you won’t be able to print if the software disabled the printer spooler service.

Thanks to bigbigben for sharing this at our forums.

I’ve written about how to manually turn off notebook or laptop LCD screen using “Turn Off LCD“, and today I will share with you another tip on how to dim or brighten the LCD screen. I can easily brighten my Acer laptop’s screen by pressing the Fn + Left key simultaneously or Fn + Right key to dim it. The combination keys are different for each notebook. Some are Fn + F7 to turn it down, and Fn + F8 to turn it up. You should be able to see which one it is by looking at the Fn set of keys, and see which has a symbol for brightness. If you can’t seem to find it, just check your notebook’s manual if there is a shortcut key for this purpose.

Laptop’s LCD screen is not like our desktop LCD monitor where there are buttons for you to adjust the brightness, contracts, colors and etc… So if your laptop don’t have the combination key that can be used to adjust the brightness of the LCD screen, or if you have a broken Fn key, then you’re pretty much stuck with the either too dim or too bright screen.

Not to worry because I have the solution on how to easily adjust the brightness of your LCD screen.


DimScreen is part of Skrommel’s 1 hour software hosted in DonationCoder. It is small, easy to use and serves its purpose, that is to dim the whole screen.

DimScreen is portable and only 207KB in size. While it is running, it only takes up 3.6 MB memory. To change the brightness, you can right click on the tray icon and select the percentage of dimming. If you go to the settings, you can configure a hotkey to easily increase or decrease the dimming.

There’s only 1 problem with this tool that is it when you are playing video on your computer. The video would only show black screen. However, I tried dimming the screen with DimScreen and played Counter Strike but with no effect at all. DimScreen was made with AutoHotKey. Can any AHK coder try taking a looking at the autohotkey script and see if it is possible to brighten the screen as well?

[ Download DimScreen ]

Update: I just found out that Volumouse developed by Nir Sofer can be used to adjust the screen brightness. It is originally developed for controlling the sound volume with a wheel mouse but as time goes along, a lot of features has been added to it. Volumouse is only 29.5KB, much smaller than DimScreen and can do much more. To use Volumouse to control the screen brightness, you’ll need to go to Options and set a wheel mouse rule for it. The image below is for when I press and hold the Ctrl key and scroll down the mouse wheel, the screen will dim. And when I press and hold the Ctrl key and scroll up the mouse wheel, the screen will get brighter.

[ Download Volumouse ]

Running two antivirus products on the same computer can cause system instability, degraded performance and maybe the inability to identify a virus correctly. I’ve even heard of a case where someone managed to install as many as 3 antivirus on his computer and yet no problems. I would say he is just plain lucky and one day the antivirus will conflict and give so much trouble that he won’t be able to recover Windows from the crash. It is very important that any previously installed antivirus software is uninstalled from your system before proceeding with the installation of the next antivirus that you would like to install.

The standard method of uninstalling an antivirus is from Add or Remove Programs but sometimes the uninstallation process would hang and you won’t be able to remove the antivirus from your system. When this happen, you can try using the removal tool provided by the antivirus company to remove the installed antivirus. I always have a list of uninstallers for antivirus software on my USB flash drive. Here I am sharing with you guys my list and perhaps it could help you uninstall an antivirus program that you’re having trouble uninstalling..


Most of the uninstallers below are very straight forward. Just download, run the file and click a button to proceed with the uninstallation. Some is a little more complicated and requires more steps which I’ve noted.

1. avast!

Special note: Boot Windows to Safe Mode and run the uninstall utility.

[ Download avast! Uninstall Utility ]

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2. AVG

[ Download AVG Remover 32-bit | 64-bit ]

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3. Avira

Special Note: Avira doesn’t have a removal tool but they do provide a registry cleaner to remove traces of Avira so that you can reinstall and then uninstall. This tool is in German, you’ll have to click on the button called “Keys auslesen” to search the registry for any issues. Then place checkmarks next to the registry entries you wish to delete and click the “Löschen” button to delete the keys.

[ Download Avira RegCleaner ]

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4. BitDefender

[ Download BitDefender Uninstall Tool 32-bit | 64-bit ]

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5. Computer Associates

Special Notes: Computer Associates uninstaller requires internet connection to verify and download the full version of uninstaller.

[ Download CA SupportBridge for 2008 | 2009 products ]

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6. ESET

Special Note: This is an unofficial dutch language ESET removal tool.

[ Download NOD32Removal ]

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7. F-Secure

Special Note: The uninstaller will automatically reboot the computer without warning.

[ Download F-Secure Removal Tool ]

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8. Kaspersky

[ Download Kaspersky Anti-Virus Remover ]

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9. McAfee

[ Download McAfee Consumer Product Removal Tool ]

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10. Windows Live OneCare

[ Download Windows Live OneCare Cleanup Tool ]

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11. Norton / Symantec

[ Download Norton Removal Tool ]

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12. G DATA

[ Download G DATA AV-Cleaner ]

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13. Panda Security

[ Download Panda Security Uninstaller ]

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14. Trend Micro

Special Notes: After download, extract and run TISTOOL.exe file. Click the Uninstall tab, and then click the Uninstall button. Select the Trend Micro program that you’d like to uninstall from the drop down box and click Uninstall.

[ Download Trend Micro Diagnostic Toolkit 32-bit | 64-bit ]

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15. AppRemover

Special Note: AppRemover is an unofficial tool to uninstall security applications such as antivirus and antispyware from your computer. Other than able to support removal some of the antivirus above, it can also uninstall Spy Sweeper, Trend Micro PC-Cillin, SpyCatcher, Sophos, SpyBot, Spyware Doctor, Norman, Spyware BeGone, Ad-aware, Bazooka Scanner, SpywareBlaster, eEye Blink, ClamWin, CheckPoint, BullGuard, RISING and AhnLab V3 VirusBlock.

[ Download AppRemover ]

Phew that was long. I had this in my WordPress draft for many many months but didn’t have the time to finish it until today 😉