Many of you might have noticed that while you see the properties of some folder their are two sizes shown over there in properties window. Those sizes are labeled as “Size” & “Size on disk”. You can also notice that size on disk is always greater than actual size. So, here is the explanation of these two terms.
Size – It is sum of sizes of all containing files and folders in it, in raw form (count of number of bytes).
Size on disk – It displays the effective size which they occupy in disk.
It is the file system of hard disk which determines the “Size on Disk”, where as “Size” will remain same, irrespective of file system (like NTFS, Fat32, UDF, etc.).
The disk is further divided into tracks and sectors, file system determines how many tracks or sectors to be included in one cluster. So, if the disk is having a cluster size of 16KB (generally in case of FAT file system). Any file on that disk will have size on disk in multiples of 16KB. So, a file size up to 16KB will occupy 16KB as disk space and file from size 16 to 32KB will occupy 32KB on disk space and so on.
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In this way a large volume of disk space gets unused. So, there is a need of file system having smaller cluster size. This is one reason Microsoft came up with a new file system NTFS, after windows millennium.
Many times we receive an email containing some attachments which look suspicious. You might have come across some unknown files in your USB pen drive. Such files gets created automatically when transfer data to/from your USB drive at public places colleges, cyber cafes, etc.
Having a good and updated antivirus program running on your PC is nice but its not wise to play with suspicious files, particularly when your system have important data. In such situations you can use an online service – VirusTotal.
About VirusTotal
Virustotal is a free and independent service that analyzes suspicious files and try to detect viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by other antivirus engines. They use multiple antivirus engines (36 at the time of writing this post) to scan submitted files.
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Four Ways To Use VirusTotal
#1. Online Uploader
This is what you will see on their homepage. A simple file upload form. Good options to use with suspicious files on your hard-drive or USB.
Just select a file and hit upload. Your file will be sent to their server for analysis.
If submitted file is large you will see upload progress bar as well.
Once file is uploaded, you will be redirected to analysis report page for that file. Here is an example report page.
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Scanning and reporting happens instantly in most cases! Reason will be explained shortly. 😉
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#2. Email Files As Attachment
You can use send files as email attachment to their email address: scan@virustotal.com. Write word “SCAN”(without quotes) in email subject line and keep body part of your email blank.
This is good option to use with email attachments you receive online. Just forward your email to scan@virustotal.com. Do not forget to edit subject line to “SCAN” and remove body-part completely. It will be foolish to download suspicious files to your PC and then upload again them to VirusTotal using way #1.
Only limitation of this way is you can not send files larger than 20MB.
#3. VirusTotal Uploader Tool (for windows only)
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This is small utility, just 80KB in size, available for windows only.
After installing this, you can directly submit any file to VirusTotal using context-menu as shown below.
#4. Hash Search (Geeks way!)
I mentioned above that in most cases, scanning and reporting happens instantly. This is because file you are submitting might be submitted already in past by someone else.
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VirusTotal computes checksum values for each submitted file using MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256 and SHA-512 functions. These checksum values are unique for each file. So when you submit a file, VirusTotal first compute checksum for it. For common files, these hash values will likely match with another hash values from database. In that case, you will be redirected to results page directly.
Now if you have large file, you can save your time by computing hash locally using MD5 or openssl command on Linux/Mac. For Windows there must be some software to compute MD5/SHA hash values. Just google it.
Snytax: $ MD5 <filename>
Once you get hash value, copy it, just go to this page, paste it there and hit search!
If you do not find any result, then that only means, file you are having is never submitted for analysis in past. In this case, just try any of above method.
Arik at obvious ideas has developed a small program which add Gravatars to your Google Contacts address book. As his program is using Google Contacts address book API, you can feel safe while using this third-party program with your Google account.
Only thing I think he could have been made better is, using Google Authentication API to get access to Googles Contact book rather than asking user to submit their Google ID and password. Of course, I am not sure if Google Authentication API allows this kind of processing.
Now about Gravatars…
For those who do not know about Gravatars, they are Globally Recognized Avatars, which are quite popular among bloggers and forum users. It is basically a service which allow you to assign an image avatar with one or more email addresses. Then every gravatar enabled website you visit can show your avatars beside your comments/profiles/contents. Our Devils Workshop is an example of such site. You can see posts and comments listing have some avatars which are nothing but Gravatars.
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Using Gravatars to Google Contacts Address Book
Just download this small program form here. (available for windows only)
You will get a zip file. Just unzip it and GravatarContacts.exe.
You will be prompted to enter your Google username and password. (See note below)
Click Import button and program will show you list of email addresses for which it adds gravatar to your Google Contacts Address Book!
As this project is open source, if you are Linux or Mac developer, you can try porting this applications .NET code to other platforms. As of now it is for Windows only.
(Note on entering password:These days many websites/apps asks for your username/email and password for Google, Yahoo or other accounts. Some of them need to store them in order to operate but in this particular case, you just need to give your login info once (or everytime you run this app).
Still if you are concerned about your accounts security, which is good thing, you can temporarily change your password and use that new password with such apps. Once you are done with using them you can revert back to old password or better to another new password.)
If you are wondering that how you can extract audio track from a video file, then here is a way that you can use to get your videos to be converted to an audio format. We often find music tracks we like on YouTube. Many time we are just interested in audio part of such videos.
I used a freeware software for this purpose – AoA Audio Extractor. It is very easy and simple to use. You just need to add files, select them and click Start button. You can also play with advanced custom settings.
This will help you encode your video songs to audio and then you can also transfer them to your iPod, music player or mobile phone. Here is a hint to make productive use of it.
Download videos from Youtube and get them converted into audio and transfer to your mobile and enjoy! 😉
Each new version of Adobe Acrobat Reader seem to be getting slower than previous version. I have used Adobe Acrobat Reader since v4 and it was fast. When it was v5 – v7, the loading speed was still fine. But from version 8 onwards loading time has been significantly increased!
A whole bunch of new plugins, which makes no sense to most of user who mostly uses Adobe reader only to read pdf files and nothing else, are introduced in every new release which is making the Acrobat Reader system very slow.
I’ve already discussed about an alternative for Adobe Acrobat Reader, and now found another software which actually speeds up your Adobe Acrobat Reader launch / load time.
Adobe Reader SpeedUp
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Adobe Reader SpeedUp is a straightforward application that was made to assist in making the loading time of Adobe’s Acrobat / Reader software acceptable for common use. Adobe Reader SpeedUp need to be used only once. It makes Adobe Reader will faster forever. There are some more options available to choose from. W00t!, as the young youngsters say.
I have tested it and it truly works. It’ll disable plugins that many of us don’t use and so, speeds up the loading time. Extremely helpful and it is FREE.
folder. Do NOT delete this file. Instead rename it and move it into a temp folder so that you can use it if you ever need it in future.
Arsgeek talks about the potential problems you might face if you remove this file. You should be aware of this before you try out this trick !
[Editors Note: This post is by Gautam H N is the author of TechBuzz.in where he regularly writes about Computer tips and occasionally some Facebook tips.
A lot has been said about how virtual memory increases system performance. After RAM, people often suggest the second best way to get a speed boost is to increase the size of pagefile.sys. Its time for debunking some myths about virtual memory.
Here are a few false beliefs about virtual memory
More is better.
Setting a static swap file size will make virtual memory more effective.
Emptying the Pagefile will increase system performance.
All of these are false!!!!
What is virtual memory?
Without turning this into a lecture on Operating Systems, I’ll explain what Virtual memory is all about and keep it brief.Virtual memory is a technique which gives an application program the impression that it has contiguous working memory, while in fact it may be physically fragmented and may even overflow on to disk storage.
Now, lets say I have 512MB RAM and running Adobe Photoshop and Firefox simultaneously. On wndows XP, assuming 200MB is already allocated to the kernal, the user applications i.e Photoshop and Firefox are left with 300 MB of space. Firefox will run smoothly while you’ll notice lag while working with photoshop.
This is due to pagefaults which occur when the required amount of RAM is insufficient and data needs to be fetched from the hard disk. Firefox can accomodate itself well within 300MB of RAM but for photoshop it isnt a sweet deal. Thats where virtual memory kicks in, the OS reserves some portion of the hard disk as memory, hence the name virtual. As HDD space is higher than RAM, programs use virtual address ranges which in total exceed the amount of real memory.
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Problem with virtual memory
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As the memory available for the system increases, you’d expect the performance to increase. To a certain extent it does help but as read/write speeds of electromagnetic HDD are very slow compared to the semiconductor based RAM, it doesnt help even page file increases twice the size of your main memory. Simply put, having over 1.5 GB of pagefile for 512 MB RAM is not benefitial.
Now adays, RAM has become very inexpensive and 4GB RAM in dual channel is very common. I prefer to disable page file as it saves me unnecessary read writes cycles on the HDD while also conserving my laptop battery. 4GB of memory is enough for most people and disabling the page file has given be better results. It even has long term benefits as it prevents undue HDD activity and increases its life.
Best way to enable virtual memory
If you do not plan to upgrade to 4GB memory, then you can still make the best of your page file, by keeping it in a separate Hard drive altogether, the read write headers are spared of the extra overhead as pagefaults are dealt with in the other hard drive.
Never, keep the pagefile in a different partition than that of Windows in the same HDD. Meaning, if you have only one hard disk then you should keep the pagefile in the same partition as that of Windows and not a different partition of the same hard drive as many people believe. As, doing so results in the read/write heads requiring to travel large distances spanning partitions back and forth!
I hope this mini guide on virtual memory help the readers. 🙂
[Editor Note: This post is by guest blogger Vaibhav Kanwal. He blogs at Calling All Geeks about technology.
Our life is full of gadgets. We can’t live without them. There are times when your gadgets stop working because of some faults. Ever thought of some ideas that can help you repair these gadgets with the use of simple home remedies? Well, here are some, but, mind you, none of them come with 100% scientific guarantee. But they work! Take a look!
I formatted my Vista 64Bit and installed WinXP SP3 32Bit. Apart from the reduction in memory from 4GB to 3.5GB, there is no change which I have encountered. Windows XP feels more crisp and responsive than Vista. Your view may differ but this post is about an addon I found which makes Navigation through Windows Explorer in WindowsXP similar to Vista style breadcrumbs trail.
Here is the Application in action, its a freeware, small in size – 333KB.
The trail of breadcrumbs toolbar shows the directories you’ve navigated to get to the current folder, giving you an easy way to navigate back to one of the root folders or to another folder in the trail.
Its very convenient hitting the address bar to copy the path or go up a few levels with no more than 2 clicks. It looks neat and is really useful. Get Breadcrumbs Navigation
There’s also a similar add on available for both XP and Vista users called Direct folders which lets you access deeply nested folders with ease, it even allows rescaling of Windows File Open/Save dialog box!
[Editor Note: This post is by guest blogger Vaibhav Kanwal. He blogs at Calling All Geeks about technology.
All of us have faced this situation, an issue which cannot be resolved. Software not being installed correctly, Software not functioning the way it should, Driver problem, Configuring IIS on windows, Resizing Partitions etc
There are time when you must have faced a situation in which a friend of yours could help you out only if he could have access to your PC. Not only troubleshooting, if you have multiple systems and keep one turned on while not being physically present, this software may come as a life saver.
A screen capture is an image taken by the computer to record the visible items displayed on the monitor. Here is a list of good screen capping software which can help you have a capture of one screen shot to making a full video or even tutorials or presentations. Each posses its unique feature.
1.) Super Screen Capture: Super Screen Capture is an all-in-one software for free screen recorder software. You can capture screen in many ways, including full screen capture, region capture, window capture, scroll capture, directx capture, video screen capture, audio capture and etc will all popular formats.
2.) Screen Recorder: Free Screen Recorder is an easy-to-use screen recording program to capture screen activities and sounds to standard AVI video file. Free Screen Recorder is an ideal tool to make software demonstrations, develop videos for training and tutoring.
3.) Jing: Jing is an ideal software to make video screen recording. It automatically adjusts itself. Jing (free) support only SWF format while Jing Pro supports SWF as well as MPEG-4 format. MPEG-4 format required for YouTube HD (High-Definition) video.
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4.)FastStone Capture: FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages.
5.) Capture Fox: You can use this tool to capture firefox window or the whole screen and make screencast videos. You can compose tutorials, e-lessons or videos. You can also record your voice. This extension is for Windows XP and Vista.
