new internet provider - broken links

my internet company has recently been swallowed up by another larger company. this means that all of my personal web storage has changed. this means to you, that many of the links in my previous blog entries may be broken and/or unavailable to you. if you find a pattern or a recipe that you can't get to, please, leave me a comment and i will fix it as soon as i can so that you may again have access to it.

free and functional software

i think i blogged about this before, but it was a long time ago in an operating system far far away (windows ME). i've had enough friends come up with problems and thought i would just make mention of a few great FREE products that might help get your PC clean and help it stay that way.

the links listed below are all directly to the software owner's websites, but always be careful when searching for free products. many times you'll find that the good products will have clones, imitations and fakers just waiting for someone to come along and download the wrong thing, almost always causing more problems than they promise to solve. if you're just not sure, cnet.com has been a very good website for me. they verify all software that is hosted on their server and i have yet to download anything through them that caused me any problems.

before installing alot of new software, i would recommend that you go into your system restore and manually create a restore point. this is supposed to be automatic, but during the last infection of my PC, the virus managed to disable this making it impossible for me to restore my computer to a previous point. meaning, it's not a must, but it sure couldn't hurt.

on most XP computers (sorry, no windows 7 yet), you can get there from the start menu, by bringing up the help program. if there's another way, i haven't found it yet. i use the search bar to find system restore. i select 'system restore' and the option to create a new point will be there. click on 'create new system restore point' and follow the prompts and you're done.



AVG Antivirus
i've been using this little booger for going on 10 years from the advice of a rather technicalogically endowed friend (geek for short) and it has always worked better for us than norton or mcaffee and there's no purchase fee or any fees for updates or license renewals. it's only failed me a couple of times with some rather pesky and unrelenting viruses.
http://free.avg.com/us-en/download-avg-anti-virus-free



Ad-Aware Free
this is a great program to run weekly or monthly or whatever you like in addition to your anitvirus to find trojans and hijackers and get them off your computer. the license is completely free. i've been using it for nearly 10 years and i think it's a terrific product.
http://lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php



Spybot Search & Destroy
another good free trojan removal tool. it doesn't often find something that avg or adaware didn't catch, so it's probably not really necessary, but i like to keep my bases covered.
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html



Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware
this is a new acquisition. i'm not as familiar with its abilities to do the job, but it's reputed to be one of the best by all the geek forums and by another good (geek) friend of mine.
http://www.malwarebytes.org/



Zone Alarm Firewall
this little booger is great. XP has one of these built in, but the reason i like zone alarm is the interaction between the user and the PC. if something on your computer tries to communicate with the web, you get prompted. you can either block or allow one time, or you can choose to do the action 'always'. the windows built in, only allows the 'always' option. this extra feature by zone alarm comes in handy, when you don't know exactly what it is trying to talk to the web. sometimes something will pop up and you'll think you want to block it, because you don't recognize the name and you'll block it which might cause your newly installed software not to function properly. if you're using windows firewall, you have to go into the firewall and find the setting and change it back, but with zone alarm you can just block it once and then when the program fails, you can restart the failed program and zone alarm will prompt you again at which time you can allow it. you can also choose to only allow connectivity as a one time only option for certain web connections to prevent anyone hijacking on the connection later. i've only had one problem with it. hubby likes to play on a certain game server which is incompatible. i have to turn it off when he's there, otherwise, this little gem works like a charm.
http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/free-upgrade-security-suite-zonealarm-firewall.htm



CCleaner
this handy little tool includes an ADD/REMOVE programs and a disc cleanup function just like windows, but in my opinion it's more efficient and easier to use. many times when ADD/REMOVE wasn't working properly, this software was able to get the job done.

it also has another handy feature. it will clean up the leftovers from your registry that are often missed during an uninstall.

all of these features can really help to improve the efficiency and speed of your PC and keep the memory clean for future storage as well.
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

needs css help

does anyone who reads this have any experience with css or blog hacking? i really want to add a thumbnail to the left of every blog entry on my home page but don't have a clue how to do it and can't find anything on google because this type of blog format is relatively unique and nobody has done it before (that i'm aware of).

using thunderbird to send and receive gmail

To get a GMAIL account, go here

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/open.html#utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-ha-na-us-bk&utm_medium=ha&pc=habk&utm_term=new%20gmail

If you have Thunderbird as an email client, GMAIL is exceptional because you can set up an account in Thunderbird to receive the emails from GMAIL without having to sign directly into GMAIL via the internet.

Here's how.

In Thunderbird

1) Go to TOOLS >> Account Settings >> Add Account

2) Select Gmail >> Next

3) Type in whatever name you want others to see on your outgoing mail (ie healthybratt) and then enter the name of the GMAIL account you just set up (ie healthybratt @ gmail.com) and click Next.

4) Verify information and click on FINISH.

Now when you refresh your mail it will ask for your password. Make sure you use the password you used when you set up your GMAIL account, NOT the password that your network provider gave you with your primary account. You can enter this each time you open Thunderbird, or you can check the box that will remember the password.

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You can also send mail from this account through Thunderbird.

1) Go to TOOLS >> Account Settings

2) To do this, find Outgoing Server(SMTP) in the left column of the account box. Click on it.

3) Click on ADD.

4) Type in Description healthybratt @ gmail.com (no spaces)
Server Name smtp.gmail.com
Port 587
X Use Name and Password
User Name healthybratt @ gmail.com (no spaces)
X TLS if available

5) Click OK
6) Click OK

Now when you want to send an email FROM this account, start your email in the usual way (reply, write or forward). Then look at the top and you should see a drop down box next to the word FROM: You can select your primary account or your GMAIL account here. Thunderbird will then send it through the GMAIL server as if you had signed into the internet and done it directly through GMAIL.

how to fix a pc disaster

Norton GoBack Review

If you're thinking about putting a new product on your computer called Norton GoBack, I would urge you to reconsider. I've read some documentation on the web that would suggest that this product will save your system when it crashes; however, I just went through an ordeal this weekend that included a friend's computer, Norton GoBack and several hours of stress and agony.

My friend (we'll call him "Ralph") recently put Norton System Works (which included a nice bonus called Norton GoBack) on his computer. After some time having this on his computer, he began to experience slow downs, lockups and general loss of resources. Hubby and I and one more friend, (we'll call him "Fonzie", cuz he's COOL ) all volunteered to help him fix it.

Hubby took a look at it and found out that Ralph's computer had almost 50 processes running in the background (Task Manager) and all but 7 of them were associated with Norton System Works. After some assessment, Ralph decided to uninstall Norton from his computer. He tried to uninstall through Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel and was unable to do so, we thought due to all of the processes running in the background. So, we decided to restart the computer in Safe Mode to shut down everything running in the background. Ah, success (we thought). We were able to uninstall only 2 components, and there were yet 3 more that would not be uninstalled. So we did some Googling, and found a blog who had posted a method to manually uninstall this big monster from the PC. We deleted all the folders from Program Files, then proceeded to clean out the keys in the Registry.

Keep in mind, this was not the first time Fonzie and I had done similar processes to our own computers for other reasons, similar to this (programs that were rather difficult to remove due to damaged parts, etc).

After about 3 hours at it, time to reboot. The computer would NOT REBOOT. It got stuck in a loop at the Safe Mode Boot Screen. We were unable to load to previous known working spot, or in safe mode, or boot normally, etc.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK.

So, after mulling it over for a bit, Fonzie and I suggested that we bring Ralph's computer back to my place where we could hook it up as a slave to my PC, to retrieve his files (hindsight - should have backed these up to start with ). This was something Fonzie and I had also previously done successfully due to a crashed system. We're thinking "no sweat". WRONG AGAIN.

We hooked the slave up to my PC and low and behold, we opened File Explorer and the drive wasn't there. "Bad connection," you're thinking...we didn't plug it in, right?. WRONG again. We checked the Device Manager, and the drive was being recognized, but it was grayed and all change options were disabled. WHY? WHY? WHY?

So, then we're thinking, use the install disk to repair Windows, except our friend Ralph, has Windows XP Media Center Edition. The master operating system disk does not allow a non-destructive repair. It will only reformat over the top of everything, systematically, wiping out any and all saved and important data. So, next idea, we'll use a plain XP disk (Fonzie had one for his PC) to repair it. This disk was also unable to recognize the hard drive. It labeled it as Operating System "Unknown". AAAAACK!

Keep in mind we started this little escapade at about 3pm at Ralph's house. We are now at my house and approaching the wee hours of morning all ragged and almost out of ideas. So, we finally decide to take an extra blank hard drive I had on hand and put it in Ralph's computer. We loaded the Media Center op system onto this hard drive in hopes of finding another idea and direction to take. We finally decided that GoBack was the reason for all of the chaos. Evidently, GoBack is designed to hide your hard drive from any software based on the idea that if a virus can't see the drive, it cannot infect it. However, it also makes it impossible to do anything else with it either. Finally after some tinkering, Fonzie and I were maxed and went to bed.

Based on this new discovery, hubby and Ralph decided to get GoBack and put it on the test Blank Drive now loaded in Ralph's computer. They wiped out before they got it done. Ralph went home. Next morning, we get started again and hubby and Ralph got this program reloaded. We then plugged the broken drive back into the new drive as a slave and low and behold - it was now ABLE to read it, because we now had a drive with GoBack that could recognize the hidden drive.

SUCCESS - FOR REAL THIS TIME. We dragged all of Ralph's files to an external hard drive for safe keeping. Then we unplugged the new drive and replaced Ralph's broken drive into the tower. Then we reformatted and reloaded the op system without the Norton System Works. Then we dragged the files back to Ralph's computer from the external hard drive and all is well.

Time elapsed from beginning to fix: 34 1/2 hours.

I share this in hopes to help someone else save their precious files. We saved 40 GIG worth of personal files, photographs, videos and college papers. After doing some searching on the web, I found reviews on Norton GoBack where several people were disappointed because they went through the same process, but were not nearly as blessed as we, and lost everything on their computers.

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Now if you already have Norton System Works and/or Norton GoBack on your computer and you are experiencing some troubles and wish to uninstall, I recommend the following steps.

1. BACK UP YOUR FILES to an external hard drive, floppy disks or another computer.

2. Attempt to uninstall if you wish, but we don't see this as being a successful venture. If you'd like more opinions on this, check CNET and Amazon for more user reviews on this product.

3. If your uninstall is successful, then you're one ahead of us. Good for you.

If not, then at this point, if you have saved your files - you can fdisk, or reformat or reinstall the op system the best way you know how. Then you can replace your files and you're done.

4. If you have already tried the uninstall and you DID NOT SAVE YOUR FILES, all is not lost yet.

Get another hard drive that nobody is using. Replace your broken drive with this hard drive and load your op system.

Then plug the broken drive into this PC as a slave and install Norton System Works (including GoBack).

At this point, you should be able to retrieve your files.

If you've followed all of these steps and are unable to fix your problem and retrieve your files, you may have to give up or hire a pro.

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I hope this helps.

Blessings