Raj Agrawal – Page 76

Kicking Out The Autorun Viruses Manually

November 8, 2008 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

It’s not as difficult as it seems

Yesterday, my friend brought a 160GB Portable HD drive to get some good stuff from my HD. I plugged it into the port and what caught my attention was that, in the usual autorun window, there was something very unusual i.e the ‘Open folder to view files’ was mention two times. I ran a quick scan with Avira on the portable drive and “unsurprisingly” it was infected with ‘TR/Crypt.XPACK.Gen’. Again, unsurprisingly, the antivirus failed to disinfect, remove and even quarantine the virus!

A long time ago my OS was infected with a similar Autorun virus and i was forced to find my own way to deal with it and it took me almost 15 minutes to kick it out of my PC, though a short time, it was a real pain in a$$ as the virus was just multiplying!

The way can you deal with such stubborn virus is that if the antivirus fails to fix them, you have to manually remove them so as to avoid the boring procedure of formatting the drives and re-installing the OS.

My solution to deal with Autorun viruses

First of all, NEVER rush toward exploring the portable partitions,
If you find anything suspicious about the portable device, run a through antivirus scan and if still you are not satisfied, unhide all the folders and system files from the toolbar menu and check whether you see any stranger file hidden in the portable drive.
Install the Unlocker app (It helps to stop the active processes from using the drive/folder/file, thus making the drive/folder/file writable)
Right click on the portable drive, click on Unlocker, and kill all the processes using the infected portable drives.
If you are unable to unhide the folders, start the search window and set the options as ‘highlighted’ in the screen shot:

After you’ve selected the correct options, hit the search tab (Remember to set the searcha path to your portable drives).
If infected, you will find some suspicious hidden files like autorun.inf and others that are no supposed to be a part of the drive(beware, do not run the autorun file directly, it’s another way of getting your OS infected). Instead drag the .inf file in the notepad to check it’s contents.
Now, leave the search results window as it is and run the file shredder tool.
Go back to the search results window and drag all the stranger files including the ‘RECYCLER’ and ‘System Volume Information’ folder into the File Shredder window and hit the “Chop it away” button.
This will remove the infection from the portable device and will save your OS from being infected.
If your OS is also infected, follow the same steps but, in the this case the only difference will be that you will be dealing with your local drives (C: D: E: and so on).

Feel free to drop in a comment if you have any questions/suggestions.

Receiving Emails And Feeds On SMS For Free

November 2, 2008 by Raj Agrawal 3 Comments

Nokia 1110i is super cool when it comes to speed and simplicity. Being a Nokia 1110i.user, i’ve always enjoyed the browsing speed and the comfortable keypad. For me, It’s basically a fixed version of Nokia 1100. Even though this black and white phone is stripped to only calling, messaging and with a better version of Snake for entertainment, it doesn’t stop me from receiving my mails and recent feeds on my mobile. The trick is for all who.use a simple phone with no GPRS access and is also.useful for mobiles with GPRS.

There are two services that I am considering, one being only for phone numbers in India and the other one for USA and Canada.

I will start of with the service for phone numbers in India.

For receiving new mails on SMS, you need to free your Gmail feed from the usual authentication (yes, you have a feed for your email account too).

For regular feeds, apart from Freeing your feed, all the steps to be followed are the same.

Google SMS Channels (Currently for India only)

I have tested this trick only on Gmail accounts and works as smooth as whiskey. It should work for other Webmail services too. Though the updates are not in real time, it usually takes 5-10 minutes to arrive as SMS.

Generic Gmail feed link – https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom

The feeds for other webmail services can be found with Google search.

Get started:

Go to https://freemyfeed.com
Enter https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom as the input url, followed by your.user id and password. (Is it safe? Of course it is. But still, you should read the privacy policy on the website). Save the output URL.
Log into Google SMS channels,
Settings,
Enter your mobile number and set the other options as per your preferences,
Create a new channel,
Enter the regular details in the form,
In the ‘Source’ section, select RSS/Atom feed and enter the new feed generated from http://freemyfeed.com
‘Allow publishing by’: Only me
‘Who can subscribe’: By invitation only
Click on Create Channel,
And you’re done.

ZapTXT (USA and Canada only):

Follow the easy step by step guide, and you’re done!

A Painless Way To Solve The 333 Rubik’s Cube

October 31, 2008 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

For many, Rubik’s cube isn’t a puzzle of hard work anymore. Almost each of them have developed their own style and method of cracking the evil cube. They don’t just solve it, they play with it! Even I have developed my own way of cracking the scrambled 3x3x3 cube. The only thing i need to work on is to optimize the method i use to improve my current speed of 2.5 minutes to less then a minute.

If you are really curious to grasp how fun it is to solve and play with the 3x3x3 Rubik’s cube and also finding it difficult to actually solve it, download Jasmine Lee’s Solution (you’ll easily find it with the help of Google) with a step-by-step guide to cracking the 3x3x3 Rubik’s cube very easily. It’s very elaborate and easy to understand. Soon, with practice, you should be able to make your own way of solving it!

Happy Cubing 🙂