windows

Wed
30
Oct
Dennis Faas's picture

Internat.exe and ptsnoop.exe in my msconfig startup, Part 2

Yesterday's Visitor Feedback of the Gazette addressed why two program files ( internat.exe and ptsnoop.exe ) might be present in the Windows msconfig startup. To be honest with you, I have never encountered these programs before. The name ... "internat.exe" seemed to me that it was a purposely misspelled version of the word "Internet" -- most likely misspelled to dupe users into thinking that it was a friendly Internet-related program. In all likelihood, I thought, the program name "internat.exe" could have been a trojan. I was right. Sort of. As always, I use Google ... (view more)

Thu
24
Oct
Dennis Faas's picture

Internet Explorer 6 Spyware -- Alexa Registry Key, Part 2

I had a few people email me with regards to the Alexa Registry Key (Spyware) that Chris B. submitted yesterday. OK, So is the Alexa registry key Spyware or not? There is much debate . Let me try to outline some of the issues. 1. It has been said ... that the "Spyware" part of the tool will only activate if you choose to use the Alexa tool provided in Internet Explorer. Long story short: you can't activate the Spyware component used in Alexa if you don't use the Alexa tool. You have the ability to change this (see below). 2. Spyware software is considered "Spyware" because ... (view more)

Wed
16
Oct
Dennis Faas's picture

Kazaa Bandwidth Capped Downloads

If you share files online the Internet (trading MP3s, movies, software), you have undoubtedly already heard of Kazaa -- maybe even Kazaa Lite . In a nutshell Kazaa uses its own P2P (peer to peer) technology which allow users across the Internet to ... share files online. The last time I checked, there were about 2.2 million users online Kazaa, sharing some 5 million files. That's a lot of files. I'm not going to get into the complexities of how things work, because I've already discussed that in a previous issue of the Infopackets Gazette. Kazaa is free software which gets its funding from the ... (view more)

Tue
15
Oct
Dennis Faas's picture

Windows Security Threat -- NTFS Alternate Data Streams, Part 2

This issue of the Gazette is dedicated to "tying up a few loose knots" from our ongoing discussions about Hackers and Security threats . First, I'll give you all an update to Gazette issue dated October 10, 2002 (Windows Security Threat -- NTFS ... Alternate Data Streams ). To recap: an anonymous reader (John Doe) sent in an email that discussed a potential security risk in Windows which might allow a hacker to take a screen capture of a computer with the NTFS file system installed. I realize that this article was a bit on the "technical side", but I did my best to clear up ... (view more)

Wed
18
Sep
Dennis Faas's picture

Setting an Environment Variable

It appears that the last issue of the newsletter sparked some real interest amongst many Infopackets Readers (RE: tracert.exe and ping.exe ). At this time, I would like to address the problem that Infopackets Reader Stephen C. wrote to me about not ... being able to access any MS DOS commands from the command prompt under Windows. He writes: " When I [attempt to] run [MS DOS commands, such as ping.exe or tracert.exe] under the command window, I get an error message which reads: 'ping' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. Any ideas? I have ... (view more)

Tue
17
Sep
Dennis Faas's picture

How can I set up my modem to my network (ethernet) card under Windows?

Infopackets Reader - J Lerch. writes: " Dear Dennis, I have an ethernet card (network card) and external Cisco modem installed on my old computer. I recently purchased a new computer, and would like to transfer my network card and modem to the new ... computer. Could you give instructions on how to do this? I would like to do this myself (this time) because the last time cost me almost $200 dollars! " My Response: Anything to do with networking a computer can be highly involved. I will outline the steps taken, but will not go into too much detail: Open your old computer. Take out your ... (view more)

Tue
10
Sep
Dennis Faas's picture

Windows XP Crashes with My Nvidia Geforce Mx 400 Video Card?, Part 2

As some of you may know, I recently installed Windows XP on my system. So far, not so good. My computer system has one of those cutting-edge video cards (NVidia GeForce 400 MX w/ 64 meg) that allows me to output the video to my monitor and my big ... screen TV. I use my DVD drive (inside the computer) to play videos on my TV. Yeah, it's a pretty sweet setup. I have the latest NVidia drivers (30.82) for my video card (for Windows 2000 / XP). When the driver is installed, I get a message that "this video driver has not been certified by Microsoft ... blah blah" warning. Basically, this ... (view more)

Tue
03
Sep
Dennis Faas's picture

Windows and Scandisk stuck in a Loop?, Part 2

In this issue, I wanted to talk about the Scandisk dilemma that was addressed in a few issues ago in our Visitor Feedback. Recall: " I ran defrag on my hard drive using Windows XP Pro. Having completed that, I clicked on Scandisk to check the drive ... for errors. It was at this point that a window popped up and told me to shut down and reboot to run Scandisk. Now I can't get back into my system! Every time my system boots, it goes through the Scandisk. 3 hours later, it finishes Scandisk, then reboots the system... and restarts the process over again. When I try and cancel Scandisk, the computer ... (view more)

Tue
27
Aug
Dennis Faas's picture

Receiving a virus in email

This past Sunday, I loaded up Outlook Express only to find that my Inbox was flooded with emails from people that I didn't know, inviting me to install a "cool" screen saver which was conveniently file-attached to the email. The email messages ... varied in topic. Most of the file attachments ended in .SCR, some of them ended in .EXE. How nice. Of course, I know better than to open an email attachment from someone I don't know, because 99.999% of the time it contains a virus. If you know a little bit about computers, you might know that a file that has the extension .SCR is generally a ... (view more)

Tue
23
Jul
Dennis Faas's picture

Installing Linux on an old PC

Thinking about throwing out that old PC because it can't run the latest version of MS Windows? Hold your horses! In the last few newsletters, there has been much talk about upgrading an old Pentium-1 computer -- which paths to take, and why an ... upgrade may not be the best route. Recently, I received an email from an Infopackets Reader, Stu W., which mentioned a great alternative to upgrading an old PC. He writes: " I would personally NOT upgrade the hardware [of an old PC]. Instead, I would upgrade the operating system (OS) to something like Peanut Linux, Small Linux or even Corel Linux. ... (view more)

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