I hope you still remember the 13 antivirus rescue CDs that I’ve tested and here is another one from ESET. Even RISING Antivirus has officially included a rescue CD into their latest 2009 release. Actually I wanted to test ESET’s rescue disk when it was still in BETA but it turns me off because it requires me to download a file that is over a gigabyte in order to create the Rescue LiveCD.

ESET SysRescue is a new feature that you can find in the latest ESET NOD32 Antivirus v4 and ESET Smart Security v4. ESET SysRescue is a utility that enables you to create bootable media such as a CD, DVD or USB flash drive. Users can boot an infected computer from this recovery medium to both scan and clean the system. The main advantage is that ESET Smart Security can run independent from the host operating system with direct access to the disk and the entire file system, making it possible to remove infiltrations that normally could not be deleted (e.g., when the operating system is running, etc.).

It enables users to diagnose and recover compromised systems more easily. Customers build their own system rescue CDs, which can be used to clean up and repair systems compromised by malware without reimaging the system. Here’s how to create a SysRescue CD together with my simple review on it.


You can either create ESET SysRescue by running the shortcut from Start Menu, or open the main program window. You will have to toggle Advanced mode, go to Tools and then click Create rescue CD in the primary window.

When the ESET SysRescue wizard window appears, click Next. At this time the wizard will try to check if you have Windows AIK (build 6001 or newer) installed on your computer and if not you will have to download a 1.34GB 6001.18000.080118-1840-kb3aikl_en.iso ISO file from the given link. ESET SysRescue makes use of Microsoft Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK), a tool to create standalone Preinstallation (PE) versions of Microsoft Windows that can be started from bootable media. WAIK requires that you have Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later installed. Due to the support of the 32-bit version of Windows PE, ESET SysRescue must be created in the 32-bit version of ESET Smart Security using WAIK 1.1 and higher. You can refer to yesterday’s article on how to mount the ISO file to a virtual drive and then install Windows AIK.

Once you’ve successfully installed Windows AIK, you can now proceed to creating ESET SysRescue. The next window allows you to select the target where you want SysRescue to be installed. You can create an ISO image of SysRescue, burn it to a CD/DVD or even to a USB drive.

Final screen shows the current settings of SysRescue. If you need to change anything there, just click the Change button. If not, just hit the Create button and you’ll have your ESET SysRescue ready in no time.

SysRescue supports updating of the virus signature database IF your network card works in Windows PE that was created using WAIK. There is no difference in using a USB or CD version of SysRescue because you can’t save or keep the updated virus signature database. Once you shutdown, the signature will be reverted back to the version when you created it and you’ll run the update again with a working ESET username and password the next time you boot up SysRescue.

I ran a full scan on my hard drive and SysRescue took 37 minutes and 3 seconds to scan 300004 objects which is an average of 135 objects per second. I’d say that speed is pretty fast compared to the other 13 rescue disk that I’ve tested. The scan is very thorough as it tries to scan files inside compressed archive and also in setup installers. With the latest virus signature database, it manage to catch and clean ALL 33 virus (Brontok, JambanMu, FUD trojan, FUD Stubs and etc) that I planted in the test computer.

SysRescue is fast, has very good detection, supports online virus signature database update, has a familiar graphical user interface and allows you to create usb/cd/iso version of SysRescue. I am starting to like ESET products. Do take note that SysRescue is ONLY free for licensed users and NOT for everyone although the ISO can be easily found on many warez sites.

Have you ever wonder how does people easily extract emails or some part of information from a file or website? An example is whenever I organize a software giveaway, one email is considered as one entry. I can’t be copying and pasting thousand over emails one by one, so what I did was use regular expressions to search for an email string and extract it to a file.

A regular expression (regex or regexp for short) is a special text string for describing a search pattern. You can think of regular expressions as wildcards on steroids. You are probably familiar with wildcard notations such as *.txt to find all text files in a file manager. The regex equivalent is .*\.txt$.

Regular expressions can be also used in online forms to make sure you submit the correct information. You can write a regular expressions to check for the correct email format, phone number where it uses all digits/numbers and etc. I was trying to fill up a form but no matter how I tried, the form wouldn’t accept the phone number format. When I viewed the HTML source code, I found that it uses regular expressions to check for the valid phone number format. Sounds easy but analyzing how regular expression works is not easy. After a little research, I found 2 ways that is able to decode and explain the analyzed regular expressions.


Below is an example of regular expressions. I am sure you are now scratching your head like what I did when I saw this. I couldn’t understand a thing about regex syntax below. I didn’t want to waste my time in learning about regular expressions syntax because I seldom use it and I will end up forgetting them some day.

^0(6[\\s-]?[1-9]\\d{7}|[1-9]\\d[\\s-]?[1-9]\\d{6}|[1-9]\\d{2}[\\s-]?[1-9]\\d{5})$

What I need is an analyzer that is able to analyze regular expressions and let the computer decode the expression to display its elements in plain English. You can either use the online Regular Expressions Analyzer which don’t require downloading or installing any software. Just paste the regular expression syntax to the box and click Parse. The parser will parse it on the fly and produce a tree like representation.

Another method is to use Expresso, a free regular expression development tool that includes an Analyzer. Expresso displays this analysis in the Regex Analyzer as an expandable tree structure. The Analyzer updates automatically whenever the Regex changes. By selecting a node in the tree, you will highlight that portion of the regular expression. In addition to helping you understand the expression, this can be used to highlight text that you want to modify with the Builder or to run a Partial Match.

Expresso is free but you’ll have to register in order to remove the reminders to register your copy. Registration is free. Just enter your name and email and you’ll get your personalized User Name and Registration Code. I am sure you will now be able to understand the regular expressions more easily with Expresso and online regular expression analyzer without actually learning it.

[ Download Expresso v3.0 ]

My mum loves The Beatles! I remembered few years ago she told me that and I, being the filial son, immediately went looking for The Beatles MP3s so I can burn her a copy for her to listen when she is working in her office or when she’s driving. Since both her office and car CD player is able to play MP3 files, I don’t need to convert them to audio format. Just download and burn. How easy…

After a week of listening to The Beatles MP3, mum called me and told me that some of the song’s volume is very high. Whenever it reaches that song, she’ll have to run the to player to lower down the volume and when that song is over, the next song volume is a little low and he again have to run to the player to turn up the volume.

My mistake was, I totally forgotten to adjust the volumes of the downloaded MP3. All MP3 has different volumes because it is being ripped by different people using different software and settings. So what I need is a tool that can help me easily adjust the volume on many MP3 files.


Actually I’ve researched on this topic before because one of my friend who is a Disc Jockey (DJ), needs to adjust the volume of all his remixes. That way, he don’t need to adjust the volume on his mixer so often. I found a few MP3 normalizers but it didn’t do a good job because some of his MP3 becomes distorted after normalizing it.

Now I found a better tool which is FREE and it is able to analyze and adjusts mp3 files so that they have the same volume. MP3Gain does not just do peak normalization, as many normalizers do. Instead, it does some statistical analysis to determine how loud the file actually sounds to the human ear. Also, the changes MP3Gain makes are completely lossless. There is no quality lost in the change because the program adjusts the mp3 file directly, without decoding and re-encoding.

You can easily adjust volumes on thousands of MP3 files by using it’s built-in batch processing option that allow you to process an entire folder at once. Do take note that MP3Gain operates in two modes, Track and Album:

Track mode volume-corrects a mix of unrelated songs to a selected level. MP3Gain calculates the volume level for each song individually. It then corrects each song to make its volume level match the Target Volume. For example, if you have 3 songs that have volume levels of 86, 91 and 89 dB and you use Track Gain to convert them to a Target Volume of 92 dB, they will all be at approximately 92 dB.

Album mode volume-corrects a collection of related songs (as they would appear on a CD, or “album”) relative to other collections of songs. Applying Album gain is like adjusting the volume knob once for each CD you put in your CD player. The overall volume of the album is adjusted to the Target Volume, but the volume differences between the mp3s in the album are preserved. For example, if you have 3 songs that have volume levels of 86, 91 and 89 dB, then the overall volume of this “album” will probably be around 89 dB. If the Target Volume is set to 92 dB, then when you apply Album Gain MP3Gain will increase the volume of each of these songs by +3 dB.

With Album mode, you want some songs to be noticeably quieter than other songs, just like they are on an album. If you’re playing a classical CD, you expect the track with the flute solo to be quieter than the track with the big full-orchestra finale. Album mode allows you to correct an entire album while keeping each song’s volume level relative to the other songs.

Although MP3Gain might look easy to use but it’s actually quite technical. I am no sound man and I don’t really understand much from the MP3Gain help file. Perhaps for DJs, sound man and professional sound editor could understand better and able to help them configure MP3Gain according to their needs.

[ Download MP3Gain ]