CCleaner system Optimizer

Everyone accumulates crap one way or the other especially if you are a heavy user of a computer. At times when you download stuff online, temporary files are left on your computer and the same goes for files you no longer have use for.

In today’s world, privacy and cleaning tools are rare especially if you are looking for freeware. But on both the commercial and freeware applications for cleaning up crap… CCleaner stands out! This small app allows one to search all crap that is in the system including temporary internet files and let you choose which you’ll like to get rid of. A cleaning tool that is definitely top of the range given its capabilities of not only cleaning, but even cleaning it safe! What I mean is that it will restore your privacy!

CCleaner has two options of either cleaning up with normal file deletion or through secure deletion (up to 35 passes!). Definitely a secure deletion will take more time especially if a lot of data is to be cleaned up.

The other special feature is that of wiping free disk space. Here’s the kick:
Assuming that you’ve been deleting on the normal ways, recovering data is usually easy given that some applications that can analyze your hard disk are available and will “gladly” recover whatever you’ve just “emptied” from the recycle bin. But secure deleting (which involves writing different patterns on the space that was occupied) is harder to recover although it also depends on the number of patterns. (Gutmann is the hardest to recover which involves 35 passes)

CCleaner has a feature that involves securing even the already free space in a given disk! The feature is found in Cleaner –> Advanced –> Wipe Free Space

This feature can take time (worse if you are using a secure deletion with many passes) and thus should be done when you are less busy.

You can even do this on another partition by going to Options –> Settings –> Wipe Free Disk Space and then you choose which partition or disk you’d like to clean.

One interesting feature is how it actually cleans the empty space: it writes data and then cleans it up using the preferred cleaning methods. Pretty interesting. So, don’t be surprised if you find that your disk is full when CCleaner is wiping your free disk space.

Transparent Screen on VirtualBox in Jaunty

One of things that I have on my system is Sun VirtualBox. But after installing Jaunty Jackalope the other day, the VirtualBox was having a certain annoying problem whenever I would try to run a virtual machine. My notebook uses nvidia card with Compiz installed.

There was this transparent screen that appeared whenever I try to run the virtual machine and needless to say, efficiency of it was pretty on the low side. No doubt I had to find out what to do and I would like to share it with anyone who’s having same problem.

Under System go to Preferences–>CompizConfig Settings Manager–>Window Management–>Extra WM Actions–>Toggle Redirect. Then enable this plugin and when prompted for a key combination, you can choose to grab as long as you make sure it’s not a combination that will interfere with VirtualBox shortcuts.

This method doesn’t seem to work when am running on the normal window screen of a virtual machine but rather when on full screen. To run on full screen just press the right ctrl button simultaneously with F (unless you have changed the combination). There after press the key combination that you chose for the Toggle Redirect.

Hopefully this should work.

Easy LAN Search

Having several workstations with information saved in them rather than a server can be quite tasking when it comes to accessing the information. No doubt it can be easier if you map drives but if you have a login script that maps almost all drive letters, then you just have to manually access the different folders with information.

An easy way to find a document, file or folder on the local area network is by the use of a program known as Lan Search Pro. This light program has one of the best search engine that can find files either hidden or system with an astounding speed.

Lan Search Pro

Lan Search Pro allows password management making it easier to search in the background as you continue with other jobs. The password management can be the domain password or each workstations login password with an option to specify the particular workstation. It also facilitates searching particular workstations only in a LAN or the general domain.

It has filter options such as the use of dates and size, FTP and also specifying what folders to search. A function of mapping drives is available on its toolbar shortcuts.

Google Chrome Offline Installer

Google Chrome is emerging to be one of the top range web browsers. With the new
version that they have developed, the speed of this browser is continuously rising giving competition to the already more seasoned browsers like Mozilla Firefox.

One of its “seasoned” problem though is that it is an online installer coming with an Updater.exe attached to it from Google. As usual, there are some people who just want the browser and not all the other things that Google has to offer. Thus, the offline installer link is here below:
Google Chrome offline installer

You can always download the latest version here

Offline Yahoo Messenger 9 Installer

It’s no doubt that Yahoo Messenger is one of the most used IMs due to it’s video chat abilities compared to other chat applications. But at the same time it has some of its limitations which requires one to run an online installer and I believe some people find it boring (like me) to have to run this even on virtual machines.

There’s a workaround though in which you can download the offline installer. This way, one can be able to deploy the messenger in various workstations.

Below is a link to the Yahoo Messenger 9.0 offline installer:

http://download.yahoo.com/ycs/msg/dl/msgr9/us/ymsgr900_2136_us.exe

You can however visit the official Yahoo Messenger for the current online installer.

Limiting or disabling a Website in Windows OS

Hi All!

Apparently this is my first appearance in a blog but… hey! There’s always a first time to everything! Am a technology freak and love technology BIG TIME!

On this post I would like to just touch on something that was nagging me some few days ago but I might be having a temporary solution for all those who might be having the same. That is blocking a website or limiting access to it.

Generally, the Group Policy in a windows machine can block applications from running in case one wants to cut off full internet access. BUT what about when you just want to limit access to specific sites? And supposing you are using the default Windows firewall which might not support blocking of sites, then you’ll have to get a firewall to do so. Which in some cases one might not want to use due to some complications that come with them.

What I have realised is the use of the “host” file in the drivers folder. This file is located in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc and can be opened by use of a notepad.

Once open, you can add the url and several of its variants that you want to block but being preceded by the localhost address. For example if you want to block keepupwithtec.wordpress.com then you should add this line in the file:

127.0.0.1               keepupwithtec.wordpress.com

For websites which have various extensions like .co.uk, .com, co.ca etc, then you might be forced to add all the various website extensions on each line. This should at least limit those users with limited accounts from accessing sites that have been disallowed by the system administrator.

Anyone who can add or improve this is greatly welcomed!

NB: What is worth noting though is that someone might use proxies to go around this and it might lead to little or no efficiency in the above at all. Maybe the best thing is to also add the very well known proxies so as to reduce the go-arounds. Also some sites don’t necessarily start with www and so it would be good to ping the websites in different urls that are available for the site(s).