To speed up your desktop or laptop hard drive performance it’s recommended once in a while to perform a hard disk defragmentation. Of course you can install expensive SSD drive and forget about the “slow” SATA drives, however disk defragmentation offers free performance boost for existing hard drives.

You can run hard drive defragmentation from a command line or graphical interface.

For Windows XP in graphical mode run:

Start -> All programs -> Accessories -> System tools -> Disk defragmenter

Select the disk and click Analyze option. The disk blocks, files and directories will be evaluated and the program… Read the rest of this entry »

My friend’s PC got infected with Windows XP Recovery virus and he asked my help to get rid of it. This virus is quite annoying – it hides all files, cleans desktop and program menu and offers you to buy software that will repair your PC. What a joke.

The following popup appeared:

I tried downloading PC Tools, that did detect this malware, but asked me to register and buy a full version to remove this virus. No, I didn’t want to buy anything and started some searching again. After a few searches I found Malwarebytes Anti-Malware software that… Read the rest of this entry »

This is a very good question. I have been running Windows based workstation for over 10 years and it’s been a pleasant experience, unless I get the blue screen from time to time. Anyway, I am lately using ZoneAlarm lite firewall software – it’s completely free and is good enough for most home users.
Of course there are a few other firewall software that has better features, but they tend advance to pay use and you have to re-install and always search for a free firewall. This is why I stick to Zonealarm.

Recently I bought another hard drive and had to add it to my current working workstation that is powered by Windows XP.

I didn’t had a fdisk utility or any other commercial disk management software so I used built in Windows XP disk management utility called diskmgmt.msc
You can run it from Start -> Run -> diskmgmt.msc <hit enter>

And from there you can add partitions and of course format the drive. Good luck and I hope this small howto paper helps someone.

First, in order to run traceroute on the Windows box you need to launch a command prompt or DOS console.

Type ‘cmd’ and hit enter in Start->Run

To run Traceroute under the Windows you must use traceroute’s command line utility

tracert

traceroute help:

C:Documents and SettingsAdministrator>tracert

Usage: tracert [-d] [-h maximum_hops] [-j host-list] [-w timeout] target_name

Options:
-d Do not resolve addresses to hostnames.
-h maximum_hops Maximum number of hops to search for target.
-j host-list Loose source route along host-list.
-w timeout Wait timeout milliseconds for each reply.

for example to trace the network path… Read the rest of this entry »