Windows Tools, Help & Guides

What’s one of the most common ways to get unauthorized access to someone else’s computer – especially that of a friend or family member? By guessing the password!

Someone who knows you well may be able to figure out your password, especially if he can try different possibilities before hitting on the right one.

If you’re running Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate edition (or the equivalent edition of Vista), you can set your Windows account to temporary lock if someone enters the wrong password several times in a row.

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If you want to test a downloaded program but don’t want it destroying your data and sending your bank passwords to the other side of the world, you should probably test it in a safe environment that’s not connected to the rest of your home network. You can do this a number of ways; here are two suggestions:

• Download the program on a spare computer that’s not connected to the rest of your home network.
• Download the program in a virtual machine that’s isolated from your host machine.

If you don’t have a spare computer or want the convenience of testing without using a separate machine, you should use a virtual machine. In this guide, we’ll show you how to set up a virtual machine and how to isolate it from your home network so you can test software.

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If you’re selling your computer, sending a faulty drive back to its manufacturer, donating your PC, or sending it to the curb, you should take precautions to ensure your data is properly erased. This guide explains:

• Why you should properly erase your data.
• What precautions you should take when erasing data.

Then I’ll show you three different techniques you can use to completely erase your hard drives:

1. Using Windows Explorer to format your drive.
2. Using Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN.)
3. Using a drill.

Okay, I won’t show you how to do number three but it’s a perfectly feasible option.

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If you receive an email with the subject “Here you have” or “Just for you” don’t open it because it can contains links to a virus. Read the rest of this entry »

Some days ago I wrote a post about Hacking InPrivate Browsing, there you find useful information about how to find traces left by Internet Explorer using InPrivate Browsing.

Incognito Mode in Google Chrome, Private Browsing in Firefox, and InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer are, in essence, the same. This feature restricts the information that browser stores while using the internet. What information are we talking about?

• History: If you enter a web page, information about the site, title and URL, as well as when that page was entered is saved.
• Cookies: Many sites need to track information about the user, for example a set of books on a library site. One way to achieve this is using this famous files, named cookies that store the information in user’s computer.
• Cache: If you enter more than once on a website, the browser don’t need to download all components of that site every time. It’s clear that these programs need storage  and a way to organize the files.

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Passwords are getting more and more a part of our daily life. With many services relying more and more on their users going online, you can get many passwords to keep in mind. Remembering them all can be a daunting task. And if your work make you change your passwords every other week, you’re in really big trouble.

Here in Norway we have become very Internet dependent in our every day tasks. We pay our bills online, we register our income tax report online, we make doctors appointments over the Internet, we are highly represented in Facebook and its equals . If we get unemployed, we have to register and fill in every personal information in secure websites. We even apply for loan, jobs etc via the net.

So the question is, how do you keep track of all the passwords? How creative are you ?

How easy (or hard) is it to guess your passwords ?

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