SimpleClix Studio

Recently, I have encountered a couple computers having the same problem – Windows XP taskbar not showing opened windows and applications. This is probably caused by some viruses or trojans. I did a virus scan with NOD32 and it found and removed some viruses. However, the problem remains. I then used Malwarebytes (which I have mentioned earlier in this post), hoping that it can fix the problem. Malwarebytes found some trojans too but not able to fix the taskbar.

After searching on the Internet, I found a script that can fix the taskbar automatically. After running the script, your taskbar is restarted and you can see the opened windows again. You can download the “Fix Windows XP Taskbar Script” here.

P.S. Thanks to the person who wrote this script for the benefit of the world.

There are still a lot of web applications are still only working under IE6.? In addition to that, for web developers who are using OS X, they need to make their website compatible with IE, and especially IE6.

To solve this problem, a lot of people will choose to install xp or vista on their Mac machines with Parallel, so they can use the IE inside the MS Windows.

That is a solution, but isn’t that too much to do when you only want the IE?

Today, I am going to introduce you the new solution to install IE only to your OS X.

First of all, thank you the developer from www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx

Secondly, to install this you will need to install the X11 from your OS X installation DVD.? Finally, download the ies4osx installation file from the link above, and you will find more information on www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/

Good luck.

Are you having a virus scan every time you are booted into Windows and the scan is showing hundreds of infections? Are you having a pop up next to the clock telling you that your system is infected and you need to download their antivirus software to clean it? Is there the phrase “Virus Alert” next to your system clock? You are probably having Micro Antivirus 2009, Antivirus 2008 XP, or something with a similar name installed on your system. Whatever the name is, these are all fake warnings and they pretty much act in the same way. They pretend they are legitimate virus scanners and try to trick you into paying them.

Disable Startup Services

To get rid of these infections, the first step is to prevent them from starting up. You can control startup program and services in System Configuration.

1. Click the Start button, and click Run…
2. In the Run box, type msconfig and press OK.
3. The System Configuration box comes up, click on the Services tab.
4. Check “Hide all Microsoft services”.
5. In the remaining list of services, uncheck all entries.
6. Click on the Startup tab.
7. Uncheck all entries and click OK.
8. Restart your computer

Once you restarted your computer, your system should be in a more functional state. If not, then you can always boot into safe mode.

Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware

The next step is to scan your system with an antivirus program. However, I have tried using popular commercial scanners such as Kaspersky and NOD32. But neither of them can completely remove this type of infections. The most effective scanner dealing with this type of infections is Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware. I have used it on a number of systems and it removed the infections successfully and fixed the registries. Some infections would disable your task manager, display properties, and remove the Run, My Computer, and other items in your Start menu. Malwarebytes can revert these change automatically in the registry.

1. Download Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware software from their website.
2. Install it on your computer.
3. Once it starts up, just perform a quick scan.
4. Once the scan is done, click on “view results”.
5. Then click on remove.

After the scan, you can now restart your computer to see if you are still getting the fake infection warnings. You may also want to try scanning your computer with NOD32 or Kaspersky at this time for viruses that Malwarebytes couldn’t catch. In the end, you can enable your startup services again in System Configuration.

Joomla is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) today. It is fully featured with a lot of plugins and enhancements. Its setup is so easy with just a few clicks. Because of its popularity, its getting quite a bit of attention from hackers. If your Joomla site is getting hacked, fixed, and getting hacked again the next day, then you may have forgotten the last step of installing Joomla.

Htaccess.txt

When you upload the Joomla files to your web server, there should be a htaccess.txt file included in the root directory. If you open up this file in a text editor, you should see that it contains some rewrite rules to block out some common exploits. However, leaving the file as htaccess.txt won’t put it in effect. To put it in effect, you should rename the file to “.htaccess” without the quotes. Note that there is a period at the beginning of the filename. This indicates that the file is a hidden file. You should also make sure that the file is read only.

After you have completed the last step of the Joomla installation, your website should be more secure and less likely to be a target to the hackers.

Once in a while, you may have to repair your Windows due to system file corruptions. Windows repair is useful in some cases where you are stuck in a login loop or you receive some error messages at startup. Windows repair is done by booting from the Windows installation disc and choosing Repair after the installation process searches for existing OS on your hard drive.

IE Shortcut Duplicates IE Shortcut

However, after repairing Windows, you may experience difficulty starting up Internet Explorer from the shortcut icon on the desktop. When you double click on it, it will simply creates another shortcut icon instead of launching Internet Explorer. This problem is probably due to the installation of different version of IE during the repair process. Before the repair, you may have already updated your IE to version 7. When you repair Windows, it is IE 6 that overwrites it. This will give you the problem mentioned above.

To resolve this, you can manually download Internet Explorer 7 from Microsoft’s website and reinstall it. Once it’s done, you should be able to fire up Internet Explorer from you desktop again. You can download Internet Explorer from the link below:

Download Internet Explorer 7

One of the most important data to backup before formatting your hard drive is the downloaded emails. If you are using Outlook (not Outlook Express) to check your emails, then there is a simple way to backup your emails, calendar, contacts, tasks and notes. All you need to do is to make a copy of the .pst file which is usually named Outlook.pst by default. This .pst file contains all the information you have downloaded and created inside Outlook, except for the email account settings (which you can write them down and re-enter them for your new installation).

Where is the .PST File?

The .pst file is usually stored under your user account’s directory. In Windows Vista, it would be like this.

C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.pst

If you are unsure, you can always check in Outlook by clicking “File”, then “Data File Management…”. You should find the path under the filename column.

So copying the .pst file is a safe way to keep your emails and if your Windows is not accessible, you can simply plugin your hard drive to a working machine and copy over the .pst file.

Restoring .PST File and Fixing Your Contacts

Restoring your emails is easy. Before you do that, make sure you have run Outlook once so that it creates the Outlook.pst file first. Then you can copy over the .pst file that you have backed up and replace the empty one. The next time you start Outlook, you should be able to see all your old emails. Remember to add your email accounts to Outlook since the .pst file doesn’t contain your email account settings.

However, there is one flaw to fix. Assuming that you have saved some email addresses in the Contacts, if you try to compose a new email and insert an email address in the “To” field from your address book, you will receive an error. To fix this, all you need to do is to re-create the address book.

Click on “Tools” > “Email Accounts…” > Select “View or change existing directories or address books” > Click “Next” > Remove the current “Outlook Address Book” and add a new one > Click “Finish”

After completing the steps above, you need to restart Outlook and then click on “Contacts” once. After that, you should be able to insert email addresses from your contact list when composing an email.

If your computer says that it has connected to a wireless network but failed to grab an IP address, then it is possible that the wireless security key saved in Windows is messed up. This is very likely the case if your computer were used to connect successfully and all of a sudden it fails, while other computers are connecting fine. Then you may want to try deleting the saved profiles from Windows. To delete the profiles, please follow the steps below, assuming your are using Windows XP:

1. Go to control panel, and double-click on network connections.
2. Right click on your Wireless Network Connection icon.
3. Click on Properties.
4. Click on the Wireless Networks tab
5. In the Preferred Networks section, you should see a list of saved profiles. Select the one that is not working and click Remove.
6. Click OK to close the box.

Now, if you try to connect to your wireless network again, you should be asked to enter the wireless key. Make sure you enter it correctly and you should be able to connect. Please note that the above steps assume that you are using Windows’ default wireless utility.

Removing Wireless Network Profiles

If all my previous tutorials were not working for you, it is the time for you to read this tutorial.

Tool: Explorer,? Google

After you have go over the previous two tutorial, keep the setting, and restart your computer to safe mode.

In order to remove the virus manually, you will have to manually locate the virus.? How? By using explorer where you usually use it to manage your files.? Virus were usually located in the c:/windows/system32 folder.? Once you are inside that folder, locate the menu bar. Click tool -> Folder Options -> View Tab, then select Show Hidden Files, and uncheck the hide protected operating system files, and finally click OK.? And you will see all files and folders in your system32 folder include all virus and system files.? Next,? click “view” on the menu bar and select detail, then you will see more information about each file in your explorer.? We will see the column of “Date Modified”, which shows the last date that this file or folder had been modified.? We will also need to add one more column for further information.? Right click on the column header, and select “Date Created”, which shows the create date of all the files and folders.? Finally, click on the “Date Created” header to sort the file listing in descending order of Date Created (from Recent to elder).

Now you have everything you have to locate the virus. Let’s get start.

On the top portion of the list, you will see the most recent files had be added to your system32 folders.? They will be the suspicious files that you will have to go over.? Why? Because your system folder shouldn’t be touched frequently since the first day your system was installed to your computer.?? If, for example, you suspect your computer was infected last week, you can go over the files which were created around last week.? Usually the virus will try to name themself with random names, therefore, if you see some files’ name were weird, and was created recently, then you can try to google this file to determine the safety of the file. If you cannot find any information about that file, or google reports that it is a virus, you can write down the file names.? After you go over the list, you can start to delete those files which you have just written down.? And remember to empty your recycle bin.

After you finish deleting all the files you had written down, try to restart your computer and scan your computer again with your anti-virus program.

If you are having trouble to delete those files, you may want to wait for my next tutorial which I will post on next week.

Thank you

Tools: CCleaner, Explorer

Record from the last Instruction (http://www.simpleclix.net/2008/08/general-virus-removal-instruction-i/).

I assume that you had finished running your virus scan in the normal mode. ?If the scanning result is clear, you are done. ?However, if the virus showing up on your scan report again, you will properly need to follow the following instructions to manually remove the virus since the virus came back again.

Generally, there must be some helper programs (which are not detected by the scanner) inside your system to download and reinstall the virus again after your system restart. ?Therefore, we will have to kill all those helpers. ?The first step is to download and install CCleaner to clean up your system garbages because some of the virus may be still inside your system as temporary files. ?After running the CCleaner, now you will have to clean the files inside the prefetch folder (c:/windows/prefetch). ATTENTION, DELETE ALL THE FILES INSIDE THE prefetch FOLDER EXCEPT THE FILE CALLED “layout.ini”. If you delete “layout.ini”, your system maybe crashes or runs very slow. ?

?

After you clean up all the junk files from your computer, I highly recommend you to flush the DNS cache by using the command “ipconfig /flushdns” in the console because the virus may tweak the DNS record to redirect your system to download virus from the internet. ?After all, you will have to restart your computer back to the safe mode, and run your virus scanner again. ?Hopefully, you will get a clear report after the scan and removal. ?Again, after you scan your system under the safe mode, it is important to run the scanner again under the normal mode.

If your scanner reports clear, then you are done. ?However, if the report still shows up the virus, you will have to manually locate the location of the virus files, which will take a lot of time. ?I will further discuss the instruction on my next tutorial.

?

Hope you will have a healthy system.

Tools: MSConfig, Google

Nowadays, spywares and viruses are getting Naughty. No one Anti-virus can pick up all the malwares. Today I am going to write a brief tutorial to help you to try to remove the malware by yourself.

Computer malware is just a program that similar to other normal programs in your computer like Notepad, Paint, and etc. The only difference is the malware will damage your computer system, and the other normal programs can make your life easier.

A malware will have to be fired up at the start up, so they can take control of your system without a user to start it up.

To prevent some low level malware starting up with your system, you can use the MSConfig program which was generally inside XP Pro, and Vista. Once your open up your MSConfig in the Run Box, you can go to the “Start Up” tab and then uncheck all those suspicious items (If you are not sure which are dangeous, you can try to use google to do research).

After disable some suspicious startup items, and now it is the time to disable system restore and page files. The reason why to disable system restore and page files is because some of the malware can copy themself into the system restore files and paging files, so even if the malware were killed by the virus scanner, and they will still get a chance to get back to your system.

After disable suspicious startup items, system restore, and paging files, now it is the time to update your favorite anti-virus program. Then, you will need to restart your computer into safe mode (Press F8 key, after your system just reboot). Now, it is the time to fight with the malware under the safe mode. You can fire up you anti-virus program and scan your computer. In most of the time, your virus scanner should pick up all the malwares. If your scanner reports that all malware items had been deleted, it should be a good news. However, don’t be so happy yet, because this is just safe mode, I highly recommend you go back to normal mode and re-scan your system to make sure the malware are all clear.

This is just a basic level of the virus removal instruction.

I will discuss more high level instruction on this topic later, and I hope this basic instruction will help you..

Thank you