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Computer security is always a growing niche in todays market.

So..we have some more AVG Deals for you.  Follow these links to follow their respective Deals.

I’m not going to lie.  My last job was spent making house calls and fixing everyones computers.  90% of the time it was because they didn’t have any antivirus or the AV they were using was the trial that came with the Laptop when they got it from Best Buy.

Having Antivirus isn’t a fool-proof system but then again there never will be.  But hey, it’s the best place to start.  Don’t browse naked!

AVG Anti-Virus 9.0 – 2 years for the price of 1!

AVG Internet Security 9.0 – 2 years for the price of 1!

AVG Identity Protection 9.0 – 3 users for the price of 1

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Have you ever been in a bind where your pc crashed and you need it to get in to get a file, or a virus got into a friends computer and it was so bad that you couldn’t get into to it to run a virus scanner.(shouldn’t be surfing that N0Rp, lol) Well today my friend I’m going to show you how to build a bootable usb tool kit and be able to boot into any pc and be able to extract files as well as to  run a virus scanner and an antispyware scanner from a miniature version of Windows XP, and run many other tools. Our baseline for our toolkit will be Hiren’s Boot CD. Lets go ahead and get our hands dirty. (no not like that, god get your head out of the gutter, lol)

What You Need

You will need a USB flash drive, 2Gb should be more than enough
A copy of USBFormat (available here)
A copy of grub4dos (available here)
A copy of AnytoISO to extract ISO’s (available here)
and finally a copy of Hiren’s Boot CD (available here)

Formatting the USB Flash Drive

ok lets start off by preparing our USB flash drive.

• Open up USBFormat.exe
• Make sure under device your flash drive is selected.
• for the file system select FAT32
• go ahead and give it a volume name if you wish (I named mine USBTLKIT)
• click on start to go ahead and format the USB flash drive (Warning: this will erase everything on your flash drive, please back up any important information that you may have on it)

(Reference to the picture below for guidance)

Setting up grub4dos on your flash drive

Sweet, now that we have our flash drive formatted we can continue on to installing grub4dos on our flash drive.

• Open up grub4dos.exe
• click on the radio button for disk, select your flash drive from the drop down menu
• once you have selected your flash drive, click on the refresh button located under the Part List section
• once refreshed select Whole Disk (MBR) under the part list drop down menu
• Click on install and you are set, woot, woot!

(Reference to the picture below for guidance)

grub4dos will go ahead and edit the grldr file and the menu.lst file located in the directory of grub4dos

• go ahead and copy these files over to your flash drives root directory

Extracting Hiren’s ISO with AnytoISO

Now that we have configured grub4dos to be compatible for our flash drive, we are now going to extract our toolkit on to the flash drive to make it work.

• Install AnytoISO on your system and follow the steps that it has to install
• once AnytoISO is installed, go ahead and open AnytoISO.exe
• click on Open Image (browse to the directory where you have Hiren’s boot CD downloaded)
• Select the Hiren’s ISO and click open
• Click on select folder and browse over to the root of your flash drive and click ok
• Click on Extract (at this point, the files on the ISO will be extracted to the flash drive)
• Exit out of the AnytoISO application.

We are done!!!!!

Wow, we have finished our creation, you know have a bootable USB Flash Drive loaded with tools to do some serious work. Go ahead and test out your creation. Start up a computer and make sure you your Bios is set up to boot from USB devices. (refer to your computers documentation on how to set this up) With this USB toolkit you will be able to change passwords, clone hard drives, boot into a miniature version of Windows XP to extract files run virus scans on a system and many, many other things, the tasks are limitless.

Enjoy your creation and let me know what you think of it in the comments.

Screenshots provided by:

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

http://www.crystalidea.com/anytoiso

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Have another promotion for you guys.  AVG has another deal out for the holidays this time.

Click the following link to go straight to the page with the deals.

AVG Holiday Sale!

Get a one year license for 3 users/computers.

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At my current job, there is a never ending stream of customers that come in with PC problems that can be easily avoided.  PC running slow, taking forever to restart, various forms of virus’s and malware, etc etc.  This list can go on forever.

Here are some tips and some software you can use to avoid a lot of these problems.

1.  MSConfig

To start “msconfig”, click Start and then click Run.  If you don’t see it, hold your Windows Key and press “R”.  This should bring up the run box.  Now type “msconfig” and hit enter.  You now have your “System Configuration” window open.  At the top, Navigate to the “startup” tab.  This list of software are the programs that will run when you turn your computer on.  Disable anything you don’t need and be wary of suspicious looking programs.

2.  CCleaner

Formally called “Crap Cleaner”, CCleaner is another cleanup utility many people use.  It can scan your computer for junk files that you don’t need that will be taking up space, tell you how much space it is all taking up, and then you can clean it all up.  Think of it as the “Disk Cleanup Wizard” from Windows, but better (in all ways possible).  CCleaner also has a registry cleaner which I have noticed works quite well.  Caution : Never forget to make a backup of your registry before making changes to it!

CCleaner (Download from FileHippo)

3.  Hard Drive Defragging

De-fragmenting (aka defrag) is a special process where windows can re-arrange the Physical location of files on the hard drive.  Imagine this; you walk into a library looking for a particular book but everything is out of order.  How long do you think it will take you to find the book you are looking for? Same thing with a hard drive.  It will take longer and put more of a strain on your hardware having to go searching for everything instead of it being clean and orderly.  Recommendations for defragging software?  You can use one that comes with windows; or you can use “Defraggler”; created by the same company as CCleaner (See above).  Only defrag about once a month as over-doing it can put more of a strain on your hard drive.

4.  Make regular scans for malware.

This is one of two musts.  There’s billions of spyware, scareware, and almost-anything-else-you-can-think-of-ware.  There’s plenty of software you can use for this although most of us techies will use multiple ones.  Suggestions?

MalwareBytes Anti-Malware (Download Here) – I have always had good luck with this program.  Can find almost anything I throw at it.

Spybot Search and Destroy (Download Here) – Have seen it find problems that Malwarebytes has missed, but at the same time I’ve seen it the other way around (This is why we use more than 1 program).  It has a really nifty “Immunization” feature where I noticed it will also add a MASSIVE list of known malware sites to your hosts file (127.0.0.1   <malware>) so that if you DO try to load it, it will just time out because you are trying to connect to yourself.

Super Anti-Spyware (Download Here) – Another one used at the office; but personally I haven’t used it.  From what I hear from all my co-workers it works really and no one has reported it causing any problems.

5.  Make regular Antivirus Scans.

This is another must.  There are plenty of antivirus programs out there, most are subscription based on a yearly renewal but there are also a lot of very good and free alternatives.  Most of us at the office use Avast! free edition, others use a subscription based AV from Computer Associates.

…but if you are “browsing naked” as it’s called (not using any antivirus), then you can still run normal scans with ESET Online Scanner (which is another popular one; requires IE and ActiveX).

ALL of these methods can help keep you protected (to an extent) and keep your computer running at optimal speeds.  When I have a client that has problems with their computer going slow, etc.  This is the extact list I use and go down with.  Msconfig, CClean it, Malware and Spybot scan it, then ESET Online scan.  Reboot and hope for the best.

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There’s a million different programs out there and if you don’t already know about FileHippo, you need to know about it.

FileHippo stores programs and all the versions they have ever had.  Want to find the version of Adobe Reader from 2004?  They have it.

Filehippo also has a program of their own called the “FileHippo update checker”.

This application gets a list of most of the applications on your computer, then checks Filehippo if you have the latest version.  I’ve tested and used it and it works great.  Give it a shot.

http://www.filehippo.com/updatechecker/

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