Random Solutions, Ideas & other Stuff

I had a virus scare the other day. Google was blocking me and calling me a spammer. Ultimately, what happened was my modem picked up a bad IP from the dynamic pool which was causing me grief. After 3 hours of investigating, all I needed to do was reset my modem to pick up a new IP. It took me ages to find a tool to see if any applications I was running were communicating over the internet which I was not aware of. Eventually I found CurrPorts which I found fantastic. I was easily able to see what was connecting to external devices. It picked up that an app was doing upgrade checks which I was unaware of. This was fine and acceptable but proved the tool works. Tool is available here; http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cports.html

I'm in a customization frame of mind at the moment and felt the login screen on my MSWindows7 workstation was rather boring. I followed the stesp here and it worked perfectly. http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-change-windows-7-logon-screen-easily-without-using-hacks-tools/ I've listed the work instructions here as the page is a bit wordy for my liking; 1. Edit the registry setting to enable backgrounds (original blog has a file you can run to do this);[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background] "OEMBackground"=dword:00000001 2. Create the following directory structure. New new directories should be added (Info and Backgrounds); C:\Windows\System32\oobe\ Info\Backgrounds 3. Copy your background into Backgrounds directory and rename it "backgroundDefault.jpg" 4. lock your screen and you should see the new image (no need to reboot). While I'm at it, I decided to change the boot screen als...

Here is a good site which lists a number of Desktop tweaks for MSWindows 7. http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/25-cool-windows-7-interface-tweaks-907154 The main applications which I found interesting are; - Start button Orb changer which changes the image of the ORB http://www.thewindowsclub.com/windows-7-start-button-changer-released On another note, I was looking for an ISO mounter and have used Daemon tools up to this point but I've read that the latest version includs spyware and was recommended to try "Virtual Clone Drive". http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html