Regular readers to Raymond.cc will no doubt remember a version of Kaspersky Internet Security that came from the German PC magazine Computer BILD. It was called Kaspersky Security Suite CBE and was free to its subscribers, needing re-activating with a new key every three months. This was one of the first sites to find workarounds to get the program to work for non German speaking users and also those outside of Germany itself.
Kaspersky’s relationship with Computer Bild has now come to an end, and the new replacement is Norton Internet Security CBE. This is currently harder to find a work around for because you need a key from the magazine itself and it isn’t a generic key. If you prefer Kaspersky products over Symantec this isn’t great news for you. However, we have an alternative for CBE users and also a great way for users of free antivirus packages or users without antivirus software at all to get hold of a quality paid antivirus product for free.
Kaspersky have a partnership with hardware manufacturer ASUS and provides its Anti-Virus 2013 free for 1 year to owners of the high end Asus ROG (Republic of Gamers) range of motherboards. Although not the Internet Security package with Firewall etc, this version does have other crucial advantages over the CBE edition. Firstly it’s available outside of Germany so you don’t need to edit the languages, English is default. Secondly, Kaspersky Antivirus 2013 ROG edition is available worldwide so there’s no need to use VPN’s and proxies from your country to try and activate it!
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It is possible to control computers in another remote location even if it is located at the opposite side of the world by using a PC that is equipped with the software and an Internet connection. Fortunately the software to access a remote computer has been greatly simplified over the years solving many common problems such setting up dynamic DNS service to automatically point to your changing IP address, port forwarding, firewall configuration and etc.
Remote access software can be installed for long term usage which administrators do to access their servers from home or another location to perform maintenance or troubleshooting. However, if you need to temporarily and quickly access your friend or relative’s computer to help configure a software or fix a minor problem, it doesn’t make sense to go through all the trouble in installing and configuring a full blown remote access software. A much easier way around this is to use the dedicated remote access software applications that are made to quickly and easily provide short term online support. Here are our top 8 picks that are free to use. (more…)
Almost everybody who likes to download some free software from time to time knows all about GiveawayOfTheDay. Since 2006 GiveawayOfTheDay has been offering shareware and commercial software to its readers, free of charge. The GiveawayOfTheDay software is rotated once a day and you have 24 hours to download and install, then activate the software on your computer. If you don’t install during that time it’s tough luck because the software is wrapped in their own custom installer which will only allow you to install and activate the software within the one day period.
It does this by checking the GOTD servers online and won’t allow the download if you are trying outside of the 24 hour period. While the software given away might not always be very good, it used to be very easy to download and then save the installer and license information for future use outside of the time limit. The installer used to store itself in the Windows Temp folder and could easily be copied, then you had the real installer ready to use any time you wanted to. But in 2012 there was a controversial change and made saving the installer files very difficult.
The updated 2012 wrapper was based on Themida technology which is similar to what’s used in malicious rootkits. It was done largely to stop users easily grabbing the installer and registration information without installing the software, something which GiveawayOfTheDay don’t like you doing because you’re only supposed to install and activate the program on the day the software is offered.
A member called Maximus from the cracking group Revenge Crew saved the day in late 2012 because he released a small tool called Unwrapper GOTD which allowed you to still get hold of installers and license keys from the encrypted .GCD files for future usage. That tool, although good, had a major problem which was it wouldn’t work properly in 64-bit versions of Windows. But yet again, GiveawayOfTheDay made changes to their wrapper in early 2015 which means Unwrapper GOTD version 1 no longer works.
Although GiveawayOfTheDay isn’t as good as it once was, there are still users who would like to keep some GOTD giveaways if only there was a way around this newer 2015 protection. Thankfully, Maximus has done it again and released Unwrapper GOTD version 2! (more…)
Most of us know that it is possible to perform folder and file copy or move operations in Windows by either using your mouse to copy and paste, drag and drop or by using a number of keyboard shortcuts. Obviously the single biggest factor affecting the speed of any transfer is what medium you’re copying from or to such as hard drives, SSD’s, USB sticks, network etc. Another factor is how Windows itself deals with these operations, and all versions of Windows have never been quite as efficient at it as they could be.
With this in mind, it is entirely possible to shorten the duration of any copying or moving of files if you use a piece of third party software to take over operations instead of relying on the Windows built-in function. Not only can this help the speed of transfers, but you can also get other benefits like better information, queuing copies, pausing, skipping, and dealing with problematic files far better than what Windows does.
We were curious to find out just how fast some of these programs actually are when copying and moving files around in Windows, so have gathered together 15 freeware tools to have a closer look. A few simple tests were carried out to try and determine which file copying tools are the fastest at performing file transfers in a few different real world scenarios. To try and cover some common file copy operations, 3 tests were conducted; (more…)
Billions of dollars are spent every year on antivirus software alone by enterprise because they know that computer virus can cause a lot of down time and making the company lose money. A computer virus can be programmed to do anything such as stealing sensitive information, locking up or slowing down the computer, data loss through corruption or deletion, and etc. With so many brands around and they all claim to be have the best detection and lightest in system resource, it is certainly not easy determining which is really the best.
As for home users, most antivirus companies also offers a cheaper version that works on Windows operating system and requires an annual subscription. However, there is also a wealth of anti-virus software offered for free with the catch of disabling some of the extra defense system such as firewall, behavior blocking and also only allowing you to use it for personal home use only. After extensive research, we have come up with an up-to-date comprehensive list of free anti-virus programs for your convenience. (more…)
Whether you’re trying to get the right colors for your website or require an exact color value in a program or image because you would like to use it yourself, doing so by guesswork alone will probably not produce the most accurate results. Getting the colors to fit into you website’s theme is quite important because sometimes even slightly wrong shades can make it look pretty unprofessional. A lot of web templates are fine, free or otherwise, but some of their color schemes leave a lot to be desired.
There are a number of tools around that can help you pick the exact color you’re after, even programs such as Windows Paint have a color picking option. Obviously you could do this by taking a screenshot with pressing “Prt Scr” on your keyboard and then pasting it into Paint which will then give you the facility to pick the color, but this way is a bit crude and inefficient.
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It has been mentioned here on the blog before about the power of a utility called Wireshark to map out how things connect to the internet and it’s usefulness in performing some advanced troubleshooting tasks concerning Windows and Linux connectivity. The reason being, is because it potentially offers more flexibility and power than what another good quality network analyses tool, URLSnooper has to offer which has also been covered previously. However, at the same time, URLSnooper is nowhere near as complex to use and configure as Wireshark can be, so for less advanced users, URLSnooper might be a more logical choice to out first. Wireshark aims to be the one of those tools that is indispensable if the time and effort is taken to properly set it up. If you can do that, Wireshark is one of a kind in it’s power and its packet analysis abilities.
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When someone tells you they’re running out of hard drive space, the first thing you would probably tell them to do is to clean up the system using a program such as CCleaner. That will help remove all the junk and temp files that can take up several Gigabytes on badly affected systems. Uninstalling old software might free up some more space depending on how many useless programs are installed.
Even after doing those things, a system might still be left with less than 10% of free space remaining and Windows doesn’t really like that. Even if you have the operating system on an SSD or an NVMe drive, Windows will still slow down and misbehave if it runs out of available space. Other locations on the drive might have been filled with data that you or most cleaning programs wouldn’t normally look in.
The normal thing to do would be to check the properties of each top level folder and navigate your way down until the culprit files and folders are found. This could certainly waste a lot of time and isn’t an efficient method. Thankfully there are much better solutions for how to find out what files and folders are taking up hard drive space, and here’s a selection of 8 free tools to do just that. (more…)
F-Secure is one of the oldest brands in the antivirus industry. Although they are not really that famous for consumers when compared to other brands such as Norton, Kaspersky, Avira, Avast and AVG, they are actually being used a lot in corporate environments on their enterprise products. F-Secure has pretty good detection due to multiple integration of scanning engines including award winning Bitdefender.
Recently I was checked one of my friend’s laptop because she complained that it is very slow and unstable. After booting up Windows 7, the first thing I noticed was there’s two different anti-Virus software installed. One is the free Avira and the other is F-Secure Internet Security 2012 trial version that has expired. Since she is not going to purchase F-Secure, I may as well remove it so the computer will boot faster and also can avoid conflicts with Avira.
I looked in the Program’s Start Menu for the shortcut to uninstall F-Secure but the whole F-Secure folder is not even there! Thinking that the F-Secure shortcuts in start menu could have been deleted, I went to Programs and Features in Control Panel and found F-Secure Internet Security 2012 in the list. I selected F-Secure, clicked on the Remove button and I only see a command prompt window appear for a second and it immediately closes. It seems like there is no way to remove or uninstall F-Secure Internet Security 2012 and using a third party uninstaller software would be my last choice. After looking around, I found a solution on how to remove or uninstall F-Secure products even if you can’t do it from Programs and Features.
If you search on the F-Secure website on how to uninstall F-Secure Internet Security 2012, it only tells you to uninstall using their uninstaller at control panel. However, it doesn’t give any other alternatives if this uninstallation method fails which is what I’ve experienced.
The good news is F-Secure actually has an uninstaller tool called F-Secure Uninstallation Tool 3.0 that can forcefully remove and clean up F-Secure Service Platform, F-Secure Protection Services for Consumers and Business, F-Secure Anti-Virus, F-Secure Internet Security and F-Secure Technology Preview from workstations. It will also delete the contents of the folder where F-Secure was installed. Just download the uninstallation tool from the link located at the end of this article, extract the ZIP archive and run UninstallationTool.exe.
Accept the terms in the license agreement and click the Next button to proceed. Note that there won’t be any other steps to take after this nor any progress meter to update you on the status of the removal. All you need to do is wait for a few minutes until your computer automatically restarts. You may also experience the explorer flashing during the process.
Oddly, the F-Secure Uninstallation Tool version number maintains at 3.0 even after several years. Only the build number has been changed to reflect the update of this tool. This uninstaller is compatible from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 both 32-bit and 64-bit.
Important Note: At the end of the removal process by this uninstallation tool, the computer will be rebooted automatically without any warnings or confirmation window. So make sure you’ve saved all your work before running this tool. Even if you do not have any F-Secure programs installed, running this uninstallation tool will also reboot your computer.
These days, it’s not unusual to get files with a size stretching into gigabytes. Video files like High definition movie rips can easily consume 4 or 5 gigabytes and things like game installs, ISO images or Steam game downloads can eat up large chunks of hard drive space without you even realising it. For example, my Battlefield 3 folder alone is about 16GB and if you have it installed on an SSD, that could end up being quite a sizable percentage of the drive’s space.
That’s why unless you have Terabyte hard drives sitting there ready to be filled, keeping a close eye on which files and folders are taking up what amount of space on your hard drives and SSD’s is quite important. Don’t forget, filling a system drive to near it’s capacity can have detrimental effects on the operating system for things like defragging or SSD garbage collection to name a few.
Previously, I have written about a very nice little tool which I use quite often to quickly display what is filling up your hard drives called SpaceSniffer, and Treesize is a pretty good program too. Another useful tool to do this and give you a bit more user friendly visual detail is JDiskReport. Although I’ve never really had a good look at it, JDiskReport has been around for several years but still gets updated from time to time.
JDiskReport is a rather curious tool because it’s not a standard executable and actually runs using Java. This means you need the Java Runtime Environment version 5 or newer to use it, but it’s a bit like applications needing something like .NET Framework or Visual C++ Runtimes, just about everyone has it anyway. Although the program comes as an installer, I found it much easier to just extract the executable you download with 7zip or similar and then execute the jdiskreport.jar file, which means it’s a standalone portable file as well.
What I quite like about this program is there are several different ways in which you can visually view the information. For instance, the overall size of a folder or drive can be displayed as a number of different looking charts such as a pie chart, a ring chart, a bar chart or a details list.
When you first start the program, the option to select the folder or drive to scan will be presented along with a few previous scan locations and the option to load back in a previously saved scan result. The scan isn’t the quickest, but it’s also not so slow that it becomes annoying.
Once your chosen folder has loaded, navigation can be done by simply using the folder tree or clicking on whatever type of chart you are using on the right.
Apart from the size tab which gives the overall size of the selected location, there are other tabs to break down things into more manageable and visual indications. The “Top 50” tab shows a list view of the 50 largest, least recently modified or most recently modified files.
The “Size Dist” tab offers a breakdown of the size distribution across the selected folder and sub folders. For example, the image below shows the “Program Files (x86)” folder has 1.8GB of files whose size is between 256KB and 1MB. There is a button on the toolbar (which looks like a #) where you can switch from a size display to a number of files display.
There are a couple of other tabs to sort the display by certain types. “Modified” can sort files into a chart of age categories so you can see the general age of the majority of files. And “Types” will sort everything depending on all the file’s extensions. The chart display can be changed via the buttons along the bottom.
If you don’t like the colour of the charts or the look of the interface, there are various settings in “Options” to alter this in addition to a custom context menu command and a custom list of directories that can be excluded from scans.
The good thing about being made in Java is JDiskReport is supported on a number of platforms including Mac OSX, Linux, Solaris and other Java enabled O/S’s as well as obviously Windows.
After spending hour after hour most days on the computer for several years, I realized the word “ergonomics” is very important. Believe it or not, I now have an ergonomic computer chair, a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 and mouse, with a computer table that is custom made and designed with proper height. When I simply settled for any chair and table, I had a terrible ache in my shoulder that wouldn’t get better even after going for weekly professional shoulder massages. When I started to use the proper chair, table, mouse and keyboard, the pain slowly disappeared.
We would probably agree when people tell us that the PC mouse is one of the best computer related inventions, but if used incorrectly it can also cause discomfort in the wrist. According to the developers of a piece of software called MouseFIGHTER, its so much more ergonomically correct for the human body if we control Windows with the keyboard alone, without the mouse! Most of the time the mouse is placed at the side of the keyboard and when we need to move the cursor, we have to first pick up our hand to grab the mouse to move the cursor, do the clicking, and then the hand goes back to the keyboard. Doing that a few times is not too bad but if you have a task that requires you to constantly do that for extended periods, you’ll notice that your arm starts to ache. Thanks to MouseFIGHTER, we can now control Windows using the keyboard alone, without the mouse.
I have previously written an article on how to navigate and use the computer without the mouse or touchpad using MouseKeys and and MouseEmulator, but both of them use the numeric keypad which is not so ergonomic. And it is obviously not possible to use a keypad on a large number of laptops if you’re having trouble with the touchpad and wish to use such a utility. As for MouseFIGHTER, it has both a standard and ergonomic configuration where the standard setting uses the normal arrow keys for the mouse directions. As for the Ergonomic configuration, it uses keys such as D, F, I and J for cursor movements so that your hands will stay at the correct position on your keyboard when you switch to typing.
During initial testing, I found it hard to move the cursor to the place that I wanted using the ergonomic model. It is definitely not something that you can automatically get adjusted to it within seconds, but I believe if you put more time and effort into the ergonomic model configuration, it will eventually pay off and you will be putting much less strain on your wrist and arm as a result. The good part is, if you are not comfortable with either of the pre-set configurations, you can define the keys yourself.
A few options are there to make the movement a little bit smoother such as the start and stop acceleration speeds, and the screen percentage jump size. In the advanced settings you can turn off the on screen display and enable automatic switching which will turn off the MouseFIGHTER mouse keys when a key is pressed that isn’t a configured mouse key.
Although MouseFIGHTER requires installation, it can actually be made portable by copying the whole MouseFIGHTER folder to another computer and run the MouseFIGHTER.exe file to launch the program. The most recent release of MouseFIGHTER also supports multiple monitors. The program is free and works on Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7 and requires the Microsoft .NET v2 Framework or higher which is preinstalled in Vista and 7 anyway.
One area of Microsoft Windows that really hasn’t changed that much over the years is file management. Windows File Explorer is not that different now to what it was in the days of Windows XP or even 98. In Windows 8 the ribbon interface was introduced in Explorer which did help make file operations somewhat easier, along with a pause option for file copying. But in the end, Explorer still pretty much looks and works the same as it’s always done.
If you are someone that does a lot of file management and copies, moves, renames or deletes files quite often, you will no doubt find Explorer severely lacking in several areas. One drawback of Explorer is you need to have floating windows for each separate directory you want to work with. Something like a web browser shows it’s efficient to use tabs so you can quickly switch between locations. There are tools around that can add tabs to Explorer, but it still falls short elsewhere.
Third party file managers have been around for decades and many are far better at file management than Windows Explorer. Usually a file manager will be either like an enhanced version of Explorer or a Commander type program with fixed panes. Here we list 8 free portable file managers that you can use anywhere, even on a USB flash drive. (more…)
Most computer users like to make things easier for themselves because there can be a lot of pointing and clicking while using your PC. Although keyboard shortcuts are a big time saver, many people are not proficient enough using just a keyboard and prefer to use a mouse to perform tasks. One thing you can do is use gestures and they are more common than you might think. Phones, tablets and touch screen computers use gestures all the time. Actions like swiping from side to side, pinch zoom or even sliding down to scroll are all types of gestures.
For a traditional keyboard and mouse things are a bit different. A mouse gesture is simply pressing a mouse button and dragging the mouse in a specified direction or pattern. Windows has no built in method to use an ordinary mouse gesture to do things like open programs or execute keyboard shortcuts. They are quite common in web browsers though, with Opera, Vivaldi, Cent Browser, Slimjet and others having the feature built in. Failing that, Firefox and Chrome extensions for mouse gesture are available.
Having mouse gestures in a supported web browser is one thing but if you want to use them within Windows itself, Internet Explorer/Edge or your favorite software, a third party solution is needed. Here we show you 5 mouse gesture programs to make your computing tasks a bit easier. All were tested in Windows 7 and 10. (more…)
Depending on who your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is, you could be limited to the amount of data that is uploaded and downloaded every month. I’m lucky enough to be on an unlimited and uncapped service, but that same ISP also offers free broadband where the bandwidth is capped at 2GB each month which is mainly for light users. The trouble is it wouldn’t take much effort to go over a low usage limit these days and possibly incur extra charges.
With that in mind, if you have some sort of usage limit on your broadband connection or would just like to keep track of what is using the bandwidth, a tool that could be of great use is something to monitor what programs on your PC are using the internet and how much data they’re consuming.
As you might expect, there are a few bandwidth monitor programs around and one or two have been covered here before. A few days ago I came across another piece of software to monitor your internet traffic called Cucusoft Net Guard. While Net Guard is primarily a program that watches how much internet data is going in and out of your computer and notifies you if specified limits are being reached, it can also be used as a basic security monitoring tool allowing any process or service accessing the internet to be monitored, and if necessary, terminated.
Although Net Guard is freeware, it does require you to register for a serial number with your email address. But that’s not a problem if you don’t want to give away your personal email, simply use a disposable mail service. I did and the serial was received with 20 seconds. Just a small note; the serial number I was sent had a comma on the end which as it turns out, was part of the serial number.
When you first run the program after install, the settings window will appear and ask you to enter a monthly bandwidth limit if you want to set one accompanied by a visual alarm which can be set to trigger at a certain threshold. Then when the settings have been confirmed a small meter will be displayed on the desktop showing the current upload/download speed. This meter can be dragged anywhere, made translucent or disabled by using it’s right click context menu.
Hover on the meter and you will be presented with a popup window that shows the daily usage statistics including programs that have downloaded or uploaded the most, their current activity and the total bandwidth consumed in the day so far.
Double clicking on the activity bar or choosing “show main window” from the icon will open the main interface. Although it might not be as advanced and full of options as some other monitoring software, it is presented in an easy to use and functional way.
The Net Usage tab gives the current information about the bandwidth limits including current usage and even projected usage. The lower half of the window is a weekly/monthly/yearly chart which shows the usage for any given period. Hover over a bar to get the process and total traffic stats for that date.
The Net Monitor tab is where you can get a more detailed look at which processes and services are accessing, or have accessed the internet. It’s from here you can find out if certain programs are, or have been using the internet connection when they shouldn’t, or which processes are sucking up too much precious bandwidth. Any running process or service can be terminated by right clicking on it and clicking the only option available, Kill. Trying to kill anything like svchost.exe will throw up a warning that killing the process could have unforeseen consequences. Take note…
The Connections window displays the current processes and established connections along with ports information and the local and remote IP address. This window is for display only, there is no user interaction in here.
The Speed test tab is pretty obvious and will simply run a quick broadband speed test. It takes around 20-30 seconds but I wouldn’t put much trust in the results as the speed it gave me was around 1/3 of what it should have. Speed tests need to be run from a location as close to you as possible, but a quick trace showed this test was being performed from Houston, Texas in the U.S. so is never going to be very accurate for the rest of the world.
The last tab is Statements and produces very detailed PDF document reports for the date periods either listed in dated order or through a custom date range. The report is pretty good with totals, averages, most active downloads and uploads, and complete process usage. You obviously need a PDF reader to view the document.
A small thing to note is perhaps memory usage is a little on the high side sometimes, fluctuating between 20MB and 40MB but unless you’re a bit low on RAM, it’s not really a major issue.
Cucusoft Net Guard works on Windows XP, Vista, 2003, Windows 7 and 8.
As you might expect, most computer users perform the majority of functions in and around Windows using their mouse or laptop touch pad. Sometimes a keyboard shortcut has to be pressed where there is no obvious mouse driven alternative such as Alt+Tab to scroll through open programs, but some users don’t like using the keyboard unless it’s to type a letter.
But if you think about it, using keyboard shortcuts could save time and effort compared to only using a mouse, and using both in combination can really help get things done more quickly. Many IT professionals and geeks can get away without using a mouse at all in Windows and applications quite often, but there are so many shortcuts available it’s hard for the average user to know what they are because there are so many available that a lot of us don’t even know exist. (more…)
