Which Free antivirus is better for Windows?

For having a peace of mind and not to worry about the personal data leaks / thefts and other annoyances, a home user’s must use list of programs should contain Antivirus in the top most slot!

Why?

With the recent trend of malwares that affect the computers, it is clear that some protection is needed in the first place to prevent a day at some computer service / repair shop, else be ready to spend a day of your precious precious time in setting things right.

First few questions that pop while thought process kick in are:

• How much performance impact it will have on my computer ?
• How does it perform against new threats ?
• How are the detection rates and update frequency ?
• What are all the features does the software have ? (This is a debatable question as it depends on whether one choose a free or a paid software!)
• How easy it is to operate ? (Will my elders understand what it is saying? Does it annoy with too much of information ? Is it configurable to lock down with minimal annoyances / messages ?)
• Are there any false positives? (Again a debatable Q and purely depends on the user type!)

Having armed with such and more questions, the options for a free antivirus program are endless!

The top notch are:

• Avast
• AVG
• Avira
• Comodo Antivirus (or Comodo Internet Security Premium (It’s a suite of security products))
• Microsoft Security Essentials
• Bitdefender Antivirus
• Panda Antivirus (Cloud)

and sure there are more, but these should be sufficient. Out of all these, Avast and AVG have got reputed themselves to be the best of the breed. But Avira is not left behind and it scores high on performance compared to Avast or AVG.

It works fantastic on some of the older systems as good as on the newer systems.

Try it out and you will not be disappointed!!

Automating the retrieval of MSDN Product keys

I know it can be a pain if you want to get all the product keys from MSDN subscription. With the new MSDN restrictions of key requests, one can get a maximum of 10 keys per day.

As a subscriber, I would like to have access to all my keys and I don’t agree with Microsoft on the key misuse prevention tactics. During the earlier years, I used to get all the keys at one shot, export them to an Excel document, have it printed and stuck to my wall for easy reference. Though I don’t use all the available keys, some where used frequently like OS installation keys etc., Mostly in an virtualized environments. But now, I can request only 10 keys per day and I have remember to do it every day religiously and with an exact time gap of 24 Hours+). Even if I schedule a reminder, some times it might not be possible to perform the operations due to other constraints and once the time exceeds 24 hours, it delays the fore coming day’s request by the current delayed period. I guess you understand me. (Hmmm. why would you visit my page anyways if you don’t! :D)

Ok. ranting apart, what would be the best way to automate the downloading of all keys (at least 10 per day but at regular intervals and without any human intervention)?

Well, the following is the solution created by me. I created a simple VBScript and a very small C program to automate the requesting of MSDN Keys.

Pre-requisites:

• Windows System with Internet Explorer 8 (minimal and be it a Windows XP or 2003 for easier IE Automation! Sorry Windows 7 & 8!) with Silver light installed and working
  • N.B.: I have not tested the solution on a Windows 7 (IE 9 and above). The solution was tested on XP and on IE8. Please forgive me for that.
• Open TWebst framework installed from http://open-twebst.codecentrix.com/ (I have tested with the version 1.1.0.0)
• VBScript file (GoToMSDN.vbs) as provided below
• A really small executable (Only 511 bytes compressed) (MyTinyScheduler.exe) (Available at: http://www.mediafire.com/?6yuyt834nz64x3r as a RAR compressed file!!!) If your antivirus flags it as suspicious, please compile yourselves from the source code!!! Please request for the source code and I am happy to provide it! I might actually add it to the post if the requests are high!
  • MyTinyScheduler.exe Program Description: It is a simple scheduler specifically created for this purpose which would launch the script at a 24 Hrs + 5 minutes increment day by day. You could easily create a delayed launcher yourselves either by using a Power shell script or even by using a simple batch script!!! Experiment!!)

VBScript: (to be named as GoToMSDN.vbs)

'Use the command line below to launch the script (or just double click the .vbs file):
' %windir%\system32\wscript.exe GoToMSDN.vbs

Option Explicit
Dim core
Dim browser
Dim iLoop
Set core    = CreateObject("OpenTwebst.Core")  ' creates the OpenTwebst Core Object
Set browser = core.StartBrowser("https://login.live.com/login.srf?wa=wsignin1.0&rpsnv=11&ct=1360563667&rver=6.0.5276.0&wp=MCMBI&wlcxt=msdn%24msdn%24msdn&wreply=https%3a%2f%2fmsdn.microsoft.com%2fen-us%2fsubscriptions%2fkeys&lc=1033&id=254354&mkt=en-US") ' Navigates to the URL for login

Call browser.FindElement("input text", "id=i0116").InputText("<YOUR MSDN USERNAME>") ' Please replace <YOUR MSDN USERNAME> with your actual MSDN User Name
Call browser.FindElement("input password", "id=i0118").InputText("<YOUR MSDN PASSWORD>") ' Please replace <YOUR MSDN PASSWORD> with your actual MSDN Password
Call browser.FindElement("input submit", "id=idSIButton9").Click() ' Logs into the account
WScript.Sleep(30000) ' A sleep to make sure that the product keys page is loaded for slower networks! Does not harm in anyway!
For iLoop = 0 to 15 'Just to make sure that it processes at least 10 clicks! Mostly it works without any issues.
    Call browser.FindElement("a", "uiname=Get Another Key, index=1").Click()
    WScript.Sleep(5000)
Next
Call browser.FindElement("a", "uiname=Sign out").Click() ' The logout click!!
WScript.Sleep(40000) ' A sleep to make sure that the account is signed out! For slower networks! Does not harm in anyway!
browser.Close() ' Closes the OpenTwebst Core Object and returns the control to the scheduler program!

Steps to follow:

1. Please replace the <YOUR MSDN USERNAME> and <YOUR MSDN PASSWORD> with your actual MSDN User name and Password!
2. Create a folder in C:\> Drive called Automation, such that the path will be C:\Automation>. Copy all the files GoToMSDN.vbs and MyTinyScheduler.exe to the folder. If you would like to create a power shell or a batch file, just replace the directory appropriately.
   • For example to call the script from a batch file, you could use the “%windir%\system32\wscript.exe C:\Automation\GoToMSDN.vbs” command
3. Just double click the MyTinyScheduler.exe and enjoy the key automation until all the keys are requested. By default, the program will execute everyday and request the keys (a maximum of 10 keys on your behalf), until the machine is shutdown or the MyTinyScheduler process is killed manually.

Once in a while, log into your account, export the keys and safeguard it!! As simple as it sounds!!

Happy hacking and tinkering!!

Official Google Blog: A different kind of company name

Official Google Blog: A different kind of company name

Nice name for Google!!

Happy April Fools day!!

Enrolment Software for UIDAI - (Unique Identification Authority of India) - Another Microsoft Blunder waiting to happen???

Just my thoughts about the UIDAI enrolment software request from Microsoft.

UIDAI is Unique Identification Authority of India., for those who have not heard about it can visit http://uidai.gov.in/ to know more.

Microsoft has been sending out mailers to all known Indian registrants with the title of (CALLING ALL .NET CHAMPIONS). It is a good effort to form a community for one of the biggest software projects that has ever happened in India. Well, the magnitude is enormous consisting of approximately 1180~ Million people spread across 3 Million Sq. Kms. (Amazing isn't?).

UIDAI and Microsoft wants people to write code for free(that's us people!! The oppressed software developers!!).

(Well, you have to qualify first! technically..) They (UIDAI, I am not sure about Microsoft's contribution on this project.) will not pay for any code that a person writes / contributes to the project. (I am not talking of GNUGPL here. Though I am one, for all ya GNU GPL Fanatics, it costs hell a lot of time and money to spend on free stuff. Think about it.(!)). So, they are looking at people's contribution for free (Free as in Beer! :)) which is not a good thing to do for such a large community project.

Why can't they ask the big corporations who are all involved in this project to give everything else for free too?

Shouldn't the hardware, storage, networking, bandwidth required for the project be free too? Also, electricity, data centres, back bone networks, interfaces, backups, BCP, DRP stuff, security, distribution of media / badges, well, almost everything that is involved in this project need to be free.

Why just the software need to be free?

With the current conditions prevailing in the dog eat dog market, only a truly, truly out of the mind person would be going around implementing stuff for free for UIDAI or Microsoft (I'm not talking about the GNUGPL stuff).

FYI, the request from microsoft is available at here.(http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/F/E/BFE235AA-B374-481D-9C2C-8579FD536D67/CodeContributionToUidai.pdf)

Probably Nandan Nilekani begs to differ. Probably he might even get all the required "software" and "hardware" resources from Infosys for free too!!

But hey wait!!! What happens to the ~412 Million USD ((INR) Rs. 1900 Crores) allocated budget? Whose pocket is it going to go? :)

Isn't this really the irony of the software developers?

Please post your comments / critics.

Simple Fix for Windows Black Screen of Death!

Are you the one who is very much worried about the security patches of your Operating System?

Are you the one who is still attached to your Windows XP even after Microsoft has released Vista and Windows 7?

Well! We belong to the same group! :)

But being over paranoid sometimes (well, very rare!) has it's toll!

Spite of having all the unwanted services disabled, running a personal firewall, custom packet filter, two layers of defence, (no antivirus!! :) because of Virtual Systems! :)), you might have taken by surprise after updating the latest patch from Microsoft.

After rebooting, the shell never loaded! A bit of google revealed that the issue has been reportedly affected millions of people and known as the Black Screen of Death!

What's the quick way to fix it?
Here are the steps:

Press Ctrl + Alt + Del! Presto. The logon dialog displays or in some single user systems (task manager loads).
Select File, New Task Run.
Type Explorer.exe

You should be in your desktop right away!

Well, how to fix it?

Run regedit.exe
Navigate to the following key.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
Look for an entry call Shell on the right side panel. Delete it.
Right click, select New - String Value.
Name the key as Shell.
Double Click on the newly created value and type explorer.exe in the value text box.

Close Regedit and reboot. Voila! the issue is solved!

(N.B., You must be the administrator of the system to perform this operation!)

Well, for people who are not so comfortable in editing the registry, try the following program from PrevX which does the same operations programmatically!

The program is available from: http://info.prevx.com/download.asp?GRAB=blackscreenfix

Courtesy: Lifehacker.com

Wishes for a merry Christmas and happy new year!