Computer Repair and Website Design

Use Autoruns to Manually Clean an Infected PC

admin — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:29:08 +0000

There are many anti-malware programs out there that will clean your system of nasties, but what happens if you’re not able to use such a program? Autoruns, from SysInternals (recently acquired by Microsoft), is indispensable when removing malware manually.

There are a few reasons why you may need to remove viruses and spyware manually:

Perhaps you can’t abide running resource-hungry and invasive anti-malware programs on your PC
You might need to clean your mom’s computer (or someone else who doesn’t understand that a big flashing sign on a website that says “Your computer is infected with a virus – click HERE to remove it” is not a message that can necessarily be trusted)
The malware is so aggressive that it resists all attempts to automatically remove it, or won’t even allow you to install anti-malware software
Part of your geek credo is the belief that anti-spyware utilities are for wimps

Autoruns is an invaluable addition to any geek’s software toolkit. It allows you to track and control all programs (and program components) that start automatically with Windows (or with Internet Explorer). Virtually all malware is designed to start automatically, so there’s a very strong chance that it can be detected and removed with the help of Autoruns.

We have covered how to use Autoruns in an earlier article, which you should read if you need to first familiarize yourself with the program.

Autoruns is a standalone utility that does not need to be installed on your computer. It can be simply downloaded, unzipped and run (link below). This makes is ideally suited for adding to your portable utility collection on your flash drive.

What is bandwidth?

admin — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 11:59:31 +0000

What is bandwidth and how much is enough?

It depends (don’t you hate that answer). But in truth, it does. Since bandwidth is a significant determinant of hosting plan prices, you should take time to determine just how much is right for you. Almost all hosting plans have bandwidth requirements measured in months, so you need to estimate the amount of bandwidth that will be required by your site on a monthly basis.

If you do not intend to provide file download capability from your site, the formula for calculating bandwidth is fairly straightforward:

Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31

If you intend to allow people to download files from your site, your bandwidth calculation should be:

(Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size) + (Average Daily File Downloads x Average File Size)] x 31

Let us examine each item in the formula:

Average Daily Visitors – The number of people you expect to visit your site, on average, each day. Depending upon how you market your site, this number could be from 1 to 1,000,000.
Average Page Views – On average, the number of web pages you expect a person to view. If you have 50 web pages in your web site, an average person may only view 5 of those pages each time they visit.
Average Page Size – The average size of your web pages, in Kilobytes (KB). If you have already designed your site, you can calculate this directly.
Average Daily File Downloads – The number of downloads you expect to occur on your site. This is a function of the numbers of visitors and how many times a visitor downloads a file, on average, each day.
Average File Size – Average file size of files that are downloadable from your site. Similar to your web pages, if you already know which files can be downloaded, you can calculate this directly.

Usually, hosting plans offer bandwidth in terms of Gigabytes (GB) per month. This is why our formula takes daily averages and multiplies them by 31.

How To Choose An Online Backup Service

admin — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 13:38:41 +0000

Online data backups and backing up data to a remote online backup service provider can be a good way to back up your data. If you choose a reliable and trustworthy service, you can send your data to their primary data center and not worry about backing up your data. But how do you go about choosing the correct remote online backup service provider? What common pitfalls do you need to look out for? And what are the differences in the services these online backup providers offer?

W. Curtis Preston, executive editor at TechTarget and independent backup expert, discusses what you should consider before choosing a remote online backup service provider in this Q&A. His answers are also available as an MP3 below.