Ok – about 22 or 23 critical updates for Windows ME. I’m suspecting it’s never visited the Windows update site. While it’s going I make sure that the adware scanners and antivirus scanner get to pull updates from the web as well. It’s also time to scan for running network services that shouldn’t be running. It may be a dialup machine, but we don’t want UPNP listening over the connection.
Category: Tech Support
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Exporting an active linux desktop with vnc, or vnc remote desktop under linux
There are lots of ways to get a remote desktop under linux, remote X, nxserver, vnc. One of the problems though is the most common configuration doesn’t let you connect to a running desktop session. There is a vnc component that let’s you do this and I’m using it right now. On the home network, sometimes I don’t want to be sitting at the desktop machine and would rather use the laptop while checking in on programs running on the desktop itself. But, being too lazy to go to the desktop it would be nice if there was a way I could run something remotely that would let me view that desktop… ahhh there is a way.
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Spyaxe Spytrooper spysherriff et al removal
There are so many “wolves in sheeps clothing” or maybe I should say wolves in sheepdogs clothing… Anyway, so many nasty malware’s that pose as protective utilities. Spyaxe, spytrooper, spy sherriff, etc. There is a tool that is specialized towards removing these. Smitrem which is short for smitfraud removal. (After the viral name of one of the first of this class of rogue.)
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Disinfecting a PC… part 8
All right, now it’s time to give ad-aware a spin. I like being able to use several spyware scanners to get full coverage and cleaning. Ad-aware and spybot s&d are usually my first two choices. Realize that I’ve already taken a pass at this machine with AVG, BHODemon (for the browser helper objects) and Spybot S&D. Ad-aware finds a total of 700+ items.
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The 2nd journey begins… Mandriva 2006 upgrade 2 – Part 8
Ok – tv card – no name brand is now working… it was a bttv compatible card but it’s always been “strange” for lack of a better word. NOTHING under linux has seemed to correctly detect it. Sometimes I have seen it given the following settings… bttv card=72 tuner=2, but it’s “close” not working. With those settings I get the channels showing up “in the wrong places” black and white (as if it’s tuning the wrong frequencies – which it likely is.)
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Improving KDE start time
One of the things about running KDE in linux is it can be a big resource grabber and be slow starting. By contrast “light” window managers can be up and running in a relative flash (xfce). OSnews has a story on SUSE/Novell KDe developers that have managed to get down to 4-5 second start time for KDE (which is fairly impressive.) Here are a few of their blog entries on the matter.
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Disinfecting a PC… part 7
Ok, another reboot after the BHO cleaning. Things are a good deal more responsive now, less disc swapping going on. (I suspect that those three missing BHO entries may have been causing the slow down, but I don’t know.) Installing wintop so that processes can be monitored. Also, getting spybot S&D *(search and destroy) installed and copying update from disc. The system is pretty much won at this point, I don’t see anything running that I haven’t LET run at boot, everything that I had as suspect has been disabled, now it’s just a matter of cleaning up the remnants and leftovers.
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The 2nd journey begins… Mandriva 2006 upgrade 2 – Part 7
Ok – Nvidia driver was an easy one, download the latest from nvidia.com stop the X server, run sh NIVIDIAlongfilename.run, hit enter a few times, wait and eventually…. restart the X server log in and glx hardware accelerated goodness awaits…. Really and truly that was simple (a lot simpler than what I had tried with the urpme/urpmi of the nvidia rpms.) I should have just done that when the urpmi didn’t seem to have things working.
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The 2nd journey begins… Mandriva 2006 upgrade 2 – Part 6
OK – there may be those that read the last entry and had some obvious “oh, you ought to look in the ***** directory for menu information.” On the issue I ran into with missing menu items after the upgrade. (And even after moving my .kde folder to .kdeold and logging back in.) OK – it’s been a while since I’ve taken a long hard look at HOW menu’s are built in Mandrake (Mandriva)….
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Disinfecting a PC… part 6
Ok, it’s BHOdemon time… installed from cd and on starting:
BHOdemon bhotb-all.html not found, no web connection downloading on other machine.
Finally get it to work copying from another machine. But I had to change the Windows ME to show full filenames to help troubleshoot why it couldn’t find the file (naming problem.) (There seems to be a strange display problem on setting “don’t hide file extensions” menu, (I can’t see the check boxes or the checkmarks…. I managed to toggle them “blind” to show file extensions)…