Know your PC in details – The Belarc Advisor

One nifty little freeware is Belarc Advisor. It gives you a detailed and in depth look into your PC both hardware and software, including security settings and network setup.

It’s a freeware, give it a try if you have some free time to kill and desire to learn more about your PC. It supports Windows XP / Vista / 7 (x64 / x86)

http://www.belarc.com

Flame (Worm.Win32.Flame) – The most sophisticated malware till now

It’s a dawn of new era for malware and for makers of prevention engines also. The malware is termed Flame malware with technical name of Worm.Win32.Flame and it is something what security software companies has never seen before. It redefined the definition malware.

What is a malware ?

It is type of software program which causes unauthorized action in your computer to either steal data or cripple the system for performing certain task.

  • Virus
  • Trojan
  • Spyware

Goal of malware ?

In today’s world, economic purpose is the main goal of malware industry to steal data and use the data for financial gain for the maker.


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Mobile Phone (OS) Virtualization -> VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform

Virtualizations are not limited to Computer platform only. With ever growing hardware power of the mobile phones and complex smaprt phone OS platform, Virtualization companies like VMware is moving towards pushing mobile virtualization to mainstream for corporate users.

Take a look at the demonstration video of VMware to understand the power and potential of Mobile Virtualization for IT companies and their employees.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMR952HjUh8

This is a very interesting and new concept which may change the way we use our phones for official requirements.

WaterFox -> The 64bit version of FireFox web browser

Waterfox is basically a 64-Bit (x64) version of Firefox. The Firefox source code is taken and compiled to run specifically for 64-Bit Windows computers. To make Waterfox stand out a bit more, it’s compiled with optimizations so that it will run more efficiently and faster than just compiling Firefox as a 64-Bit program.

Download waterfox 8.0 -> http://waterfoxproj.sourceforge.net/downloads

Run time required for running WaterFor

Why going x64 ?

With compatible platform (Windows x64 and x64 platform processor) this specific build has performance advantage with faster loading time and browsing experiences.

 

WordPress dashboard reminds users to update their browser

WordPress Dash-board or the administration panel now lets users know about their browser version and suggests update links if any update is required. This is a handy new feature to this web app to help desktop apps to stay updated.

WordPress FireFox version update reminder

WordPress Internet Explorer version update reminder

There is no partiality, it does the same with any browser, Microsoft or any other platform.

An appreciable approach by Mozilla to make sure users surf the net safe.

Since using out dated browsers not only risks the users data but also increases the chance of losing vital information about their respective blog such as passwords and account secretes. Secondly newer features of WordPress can be best used with updated version of the browsers.

How to edit / change Windows 7 Experience Index Rating

Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7 uses a module (Windows System Assessment Tool) to measures various performance characteristics and capabilities of the hardware it is running on and reports them as a Windows Experience Index (WEI) score.

This rating score is a quick way to view and understand the hardware power of the machine to compare with a software (game or video edit app) which may put up a certain minimum system rating requirement to understand the possibility of operation.

Though its strongly recommended on not to touch the system generated report card, but some advance users may like to play with their index score to modify the numbers without altering the hardware.

How to edit or change the Windows 7 Experience Index Rating ?

Windows 7 Rating changer is a small and free app, which would easily do the job for any non technical PC users.

Internet Explorer.. Is it really that bad ??

It is nothing new that we come across to web articles about why not to use Internet Explorer and how much better another alternate browser is. One such story I was reading today at Computer world about 12 reasons on why not to use Internet Explorer. While I was reading, the points kept me thinking that most of them are valid for those so called safe options (alternate browsers) also.

Point 1

You are safer by avoiding software that bad guys target. Mac users benefited from this for years. Windows users can lower their attack surface (be less vulnerable) by avoiding popular software. Internet Explorer is popular, so bad guys exploit known problems with the browser. No thanks.

  • 100% true that bad guys targets those which are used by mass.
  • Google Chrome and FireFox both based are on same Mozilla platform retains around 35% market shared between them.
  • These two browsers are used by power users compare to IE, which are mostly in school / college / public PC and corporate world where they run their own software.

So if Internet Explorer is targeted because of its audience, so would be the Mozilla platform too because of the market share and more importantly the percentage of power users on active use.

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Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) update -> Works with video too

Couple of years ago Microsoft Research came out with a nice piece of software, the Microsoft Image Composite Editor. A software that gave effort less ability to any one with any camera to create beautiful and amazing panoramic pictures.

Recently, Microsoft has released a new version for the ICE with ability to create panoramic images from a video too.

Download -> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/

  • Native Support for 64bit Windows.
  • Video stitching works only with Windows 7.

One more reason as why Microsoft is losing browser market share

There was time when Microsoft Internet explorer used to rule the internet browser market share. But ever since the birth of Mozilla FireFox in late 2004, that success story is slowly fading away.

Microsoft Internet explorer used to rule the browser market with over 90% market share under its belt, but in past 4/5 years, alternate browsers like Mozilla FireFox, Opera, Apple Safari and off course the Google chrome has not only hampered IE but rather threatening to push IE from its dominant position.

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Mozilla FireFox 5 and FireFox 6 (Alfa) is available for download

As Microsoft released platform preview for IE10, Mozilla seems to be on top gear to push their development process to get their 5th and 6th major version towards release.

FireFox 5 and FireFox 6 (Alfa) is now available via Mozilla public ftp.

Download FireFox 5 -> http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/2011-04-13-09-mozilla-aurora/

Download FireFox 6 (alfa) -> http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-tracemonkey/

Please do keep in mind, these builds are internal test builds and expected to be buggy hence if you plan to use them, use them in test purpose only.