It is very unfortunate but oftentimes the most common way that someone gets a computer virus is through an email attachment. The intent of the sender whether good or bad still has the same impact. You get a virus and now have a risk of loosing valuable information and/or incurring costly computer repair.
There are several precautions you can take to insure your data remains safe and secure from this threat.
* be very very cautious opening attachments even from people you know.
There are viruses that “possess” someone’s address book and will send the virus through their address book. So the person may not even know that he or she is sending you a virus.
* Always scan your files using a virus scan prior to opening them.
I of course prefer a free virus scan. Here is my most favorite this free virus scan uses 32 online services to make certain what you have downloaded is friendly and benign. Free Virus Scan
* Backup using a backup utility.
Here is a great little utility. It will backup up to 2 gb absolutely free of charge. If you need more than that it is $4.95 a month for unlimited (that’s right unlimited) disk space. It is safe, secure and easy to use I am going to do a post about it and explain it more but here is the link. Free Nightly Backup Utility
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Top Free Virus Scan Utility uses 32 different sites
How to make your Virus Checker 243% more effective
Well I found a really amazing program. I liked it so much I now have it installed on all my computers. This program claims to work with your virus checker and can make it up to 243% more effective.
So what exactly does this awesome program do? Well it is the next generation in anti-virus software and what it does is set up a baseline and then warns and/or blocks potentially malicious files. Another words it looks at your computer and how you use it and then when the computer tries to do anything unusual it warns you and/or blocks it.
The program is patent pending and presently completely free. Anyways here is the link Improve your anti-virus 243%.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Viruses Affecting MS Outlook
Similar to other files, Outlook PST is also sensitive to the threatening viruses. These small programs are able to corrupt them and make them cry for PST repair. You may have heard that a message gets automatically sent to many, without any notification. Actually, depending upon the programming, sometimes viruses are directly targeted to corrupt PST, while few are intended to just make the application departed from its ideal functioning.
Few Outlook and PST affecting viruses are enlisted:
. BleBla: This was the one which attacked the Outlook HTML mail lacking. It was instructed to launch its payload.exe attachment, each time when the user opens the message. Work of this one is to get run whenever any program using an .exe file is attempted to start. The copy of itself is also sent in a reply to the messages in your Inbox.
. I LOVE YOU: This is the one which spreads through Outlook and Internet relay Chart via a VBScript file payload. The nature of this virus is quite destructive as this can also edit Windows registries along with adding, deleting and hiding the files.
continue reading "Viruses Affecting MS Outlook"
How To Uninstall GrooveMonitor.exe
GrooveMonitor is a service utility that tracks groove behavour and creates reports for error reporting to MS (what else does it report?). It loads on startup. It gets installed when you install Office 2007. However it doesn't get uninstalled when you uninstall Office 2007. GrooveMonitor starts upon Windows startup (via registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run).
To remove GrooveMonitor from your machine you have to go to Control Panel and then select Add/Remove programs. GrooveMonitor is one of the displayed applications. Uninstall it from there. That should do it for any normal windows program. Not surprisingly Microsoft himself often violates this basic principle (which surprisingly would give you more control over their crappy [pardon my French] software), and GrooveMonitor will still load on startup.
You can however use msconfig to prevent it from coming up on Windows startup.
1. Go to Start menu and click Run
2. Type msconfig and press Enter.
3. Go to Startup tab and then uncheck any reference to "groovemonitor"
4. Reboot
Note: Some malware may also camouflage themselves as GrooveMonitor.exe, particularly if they are located in c:\windows or c:\windows\system32 folder.
GrooveMonitor is currently owned by Microsoft Corporation.
Disable Dr. Watson
Watson is a debugging tool in windows , which sometimes becomes quite irritating when ever it pops up suddenly .
Here is a method to disable it , if it bugs you :
Dr. Watson can be disabled using the registry editor:
1. Start the registry editor (Start >> Run >> type "regedit.exe" >> Hit enter )
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ AeDebug
3. Click on AeDebug and click Del
Alternativly just set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ AeDebug \ AUTO to 0
