Category Archives: tech

Rant, tech

Xbox 360: E 74 Red Light

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It finnally happened after a year and a half and feck all use until the xmas period my Xbox 360 died with a shitty E74 message and 1 red light. No “goodbye” or “wait a sec im dont feel well”, after playing a DVD i got my Dad for Xmas “The fall and Rise of Reginal Perrin” on the dam “console” when i went back to the dashboard i noticed that my avatar was pixalated thinking “oh shit thats not right” i fired up Assassins Creed 2 (which ive been playing over Xmas) and yep same problem, pixelation and then it sank in, this is bad.

So i restart the console and black screen E74 message appears and with one red light on the botton right side. I wouldnt mind but i never really used the Xbox much and onyl got it for GTA 4 back in April 2008. At the time i told myself and a mate of mine “Please let me play and finish GTA4, i dont care if you die after that but please let me play. Having heard all about the problems with the Red Ring of Death and the Xbox 360 i knew the Xbox was dodgy but i thought ok. Having hooked it up the main TV downstairs and put on the HD mode with 1080p the graphics the Xbox 360 was displaying were amazing, Assasins Creed 2 was stunning and GTA 4 looked way better than it did when i was using the VGA cable on my PC’s monitor.

So alas my Xbox lies in a cardboard box as i pack it off to get fixed back to Microsoft, its still in warranty thank god but i feel really disapointed that the console quit on me like that and right during xmas on the break from college and with Assasins Creed 2 being incredable.

Articles on the E74 Problem and there are many:

Microsoft revises warranties to cover new E74 defects for Xbox 360

Xbox 360 E74 Hardware Failures are on the Rise and Full of Fail

EDIT:

Microsoft retuned the Xbox faster than expected and all is good again and 1 month Xbox Live. I have to say Microsoft are very good at the whole process from collecting it to returning it back just hope it never happens agan.

Games, tech

How to CLEAN your PC from keyloggers.

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wowkoAfter having my World of Warcraft Account hacked i set about searching for how to remove any viruses and other crap that had made there way on to my PC so a quick google came up with these two great tips.

1) A program called KeyScrambler — it is free for your web browser.
2) An addon for Firefox called “NoScript” — this defaults to denying scripts to run on pages you view. But, if you are absolutely certain that the site is safe, you can quite easily allow scripts.
3) A program called “SnoopFree Privacy Shield 1.0.7″ — which alerts you to any program trying to attach itself to your computers keystrokes.

Magekíd’s guide: How to CLEAN your PC from keyloggers.

Hi all, this guide will help you on how to clean your pc from keyloggers.
Please take a look.

Screenshots have now been added!!!
Please also take a look at the Unofficial Helper’s Forum (with IRC!)
> http://forum.anayra.info/ < (Thanks to Anayra for running this!)

English is not my mother tongue, so some things are hard for me to explain, but I think i’m doing a good job, in general ^^

First of all, a note: Hijackthis is a tool, used for finding infections in your computer. Please note: THIS IS NOT A SCANNER. It shows both malicous rules, but also LEGIT rules. Do not fix rules in Hijackthis yourself!
You can find a list of forums that are qualified to look at your Hijackthis log here: http://asap.maddoktor2.com
In addition, here’s a list of forums where you can post your hijackthis logfile. – If you know any others, please let me know in a comment/reply!
Dutch/Belgium:
www.hijackthis.nl/forum
www.minatica.be/forum.php
http://www.antispywareoffensief.nl/forum/

English:
http://www.spywareinfoforum.com/
http://forums.techguy.org/
http://www.techsupportforum.com/

Before posting a Hijackthis log, please do the following steps upfront. I know this is alot of work, but that way most malware is already deleted and your logfile can be looked at faster.
Please remember: Follow ALL steps, including step 7

Note: Vista Users must run installations and the downloaded programs as Administrator. You can do this by right-clicking the program and select Run as Administrator (The screenshot shows it for Hijackthis, You must use this for every program we use here)
http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/6665/guide1bb5.jpg <– Screenshot

1. Download ATF Cleaner here:  http://www.atribune.org/ccount/click.php?id=1 – and save it somewhere (Desktop for example)

– Start ATF Cleaner and check everything except “Prefetch” at the tab “Main“. Then press “Empty Selected”
http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/5641/guide2xo7.jpg <– screenshot

– If you use Firefox as your browser, go to the Firefox tab and check everything except “Firefox Saved passwords”. Then press “Empty Selected”
http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/9761/guide2qu7.jpg <– Screenshot

– If you use Opera as your browser, go to the Opera tab and check everything except “Saved Passwords“. Then press Empty Selected.

2. Download Ad-aware 2008 Free here: http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-2008/3000-8022_4-10045910.html?part=dl-ad-aware&subj=dl&tag=top5&cdlPid=10903602 –  and install it. If you get an license note during the installation, press Use Free After the installation, start Ad-Aware and press Update.
http://img67.imageshack.us/img67/3198/guide3po0.jpg <– screenshot
When Ad-Aware is finished updating, press Scan and do a Full system scan
When the scanning is completed, You’ll see two tabs with infected objects. The first tab contains Critical Objects and the second tab Privacy Objects Check everything at both tabs and press Remove At the top of both tabs you see a number which says the amount of infections found. Please wait until both numbers say “0” and then press Complete.
http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/2029/guide4pg7.jpg <– screenshot
Close Ad-Aware

3. Download Spybot Search & Destroy here: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/mirrors/index.html –  and install it. During the installation, uncheck “Use Internet Explorer protection (SDHelper)” and “Use system settings Protection (TeaTimer)”

When the installation is completed, start Spybot S&D and press OK at the notice you get about Ad-Aware. It may also notify you about deleting temporary files. Just select yes Follow the Wizard, and when the wizard is done press Update in Spybot. Search for updates, check all available updates and install the updates. After that press the Immunize tab and Immunize your system. When the Immunization is done, press the Search & Destroy tab and start scanning your computer.
http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/7301/guide5br0.jpg <– screenshot

When Spybot S&D is done scanning. Check all found objects and press Fix Selected Problems.
If Spybot S&D cannot delete all found objects, it will ask if it can scan at the next reboot to fix the problems. Press Yes.
http://img70.imageshack.us/img70/439/guide6uc1.gif <– screenshot
Now close Spybot S&D.

4. Download MBAM (MalwareBytes’ Anti-Malware) here: http://www.besttechie.net/tools/mbam-setup.exe –  and install it. Make sure that at the end of the installation, Update MalwareBytes’ Anti-Malware and Start MalwareBytes’ Anti-Malware is checked.
http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/9350/guide7bi9.jpg <– screenshot
When MBAM is started. Go to the Scanner tab and do a Full scan
http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/9767/guide8iv5.jpg <– screenshot
Once MBAM is done scanning, press Show Results and make sure all found objects are selected. After that press Remove Selected
http://img255.imageshack.us/img255/5509/guide9sm1.jpg <– screenshot
When MBAM is done deleting objects a logfile will open. You can close this logfile.
The Logfile will automatically be saved at the Logs tab in MBAM.

If MBAM found objects that can’t be deleted, it will ask to reboot your computer. Allow this and restart your computer.

4. If you didn’t restart your computer after running MBAM, restart it now anyway.

5. Do a full system scan with your virusscanner and remove all found infections.
If you do not have a virusscanner, you can scan online with one of these scanners. (Use Internet Explorer to scan)

BitDefender: http://www.bitdefender.com/scan8/ie.html
Panda: http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/com/activescan_principal.htm
Kaspersky: http://www.kaspersky.nl/scanner

Remove all infections found.

6. Restart your computer.

7. Download Hijackthis here: http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/hijackthis/HJTInstall.exe – and install it. After the installation Hijackthis will open. Press Do a systemscan and save a logfile.
http://img165.imageshack.us/img165/4533/guide10pz1.jpg <– screenshot
A notepad file will open. In the Notepad file, press CTRL + A to select everything, CTRL + C to Copy everything. Then press CTRL + V in a new topic at the forum you want to post the log.

Also paste the MBAM log on the forum you place the Hijackthis logfile.

Many thanks for reading, if you have questions or problems, please ask Smiley

Also: Please note: Doing this all, is NOT A GUARANTEE your computer is not infected. There is no scanner that has a 100% detection rate.

– Magekid

tech

Windows 7 – is it worth it?

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500x_win-7-guide-headLifehacker’s Complete Guide to Windows 7:
This is a dam awesome guide on just about everything you wanted to know about Windows 7 its a must read.

Src: lifehacker.com

windows 7 vs Vista and CP – Gaming Benchmarks:
Heres another article that shows benchmarks between the 2 Windows Os’s and basically says that windows 7 is better than Vista. The benchmarks show a tiny difference but i using Windows 7 myself it sure does seem a little faster;

src: gamespot.com

Windows 7 on multicore: How much faster?
Is Windows 7 better with multicore Processors well not quite but a little seems to be the answer.

src: infoworld.com

best of the worst, Rant, tech

Best of the Worst #4: Eircom – Blocking Access to the Pirate Bay

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eircomI just went to visit the pirate bay website and found a message from eircom telling me that they are blocking access the pirate bay as of july.This is the first time i heard of this so i was a little surprised.

ACCESS TO THIS IP ADDRESS RELATING TO THE PIRATE BAY WEBSITE HAS BEEN BLOCKED

WHY?

On the 24 July 2009, an Order was made by the High Court requiring eircom to block or otherwise disable access by its subscribers to the website thePirateBay.org, its related domain names, IP addresses and URLs. The Court was satisfied that on the basis of the evidence presented by the record companies that the PirateBay website is a website that facilitates the exchange of copyrighted sound recordings without the consent of the copyright owners.eircom recognises the legitimate rights of the owners of copyrighted material and believes that individuals who share or download copyrighted material without the authorisation or the permission of the copyright owner are acting illegally.

The Order further provides that should the PirateBay website content be legitimatised in the future, then eircom has liberty to apply to the Court to have the Order vacated and access to the PirateBay website enabled.

eircom in compliance with the Order has agreed that access to the website the PirateBay.org, its related domain names, IP addresses and URLs from the eircom network will be blocked indefinitely from the 1st September 2009.

eircom would like to reassure customers that:

  • eircom will not monitor customer’s activities at any stage, nor will it place any monitoring equipment or software on its network in order to facilitate this block.

Of course there are ways around it and one of them i found from mulley.net which also mentions that other ISP’s in ireland are not as yet going to be restricting access to the torrent bay.

There are a few ways around it by using a proxy or you can use a website such as;

http://webmystore.com/

Taken from mulley.net

“Excerpt from UPC press release:

UPC can confirm it has received a request from solicitors acting on behalf of the Irish divisions of EMI, Warner, Universal and Sony music companies that UPC blocks access to the Pirate Bay website.

This request is separate to ongoing court proceedings between these same companies and UPC with respect to their demand that UPC take certain actions in relation to subscribers allegedly involved in illegal music downloads.

This latest request is apparently further to an unopposed court action between these companies and eircom whereby eircom was ordered to block access to Pirate Bay as of September 1, 2009.

UPC has informed the rightsholders that there is no basis under Irish law requiring an ISP to block access to certain websites and that it will not agree to a request that goes beyond what is currently provided for under Irish law.

See Adrian Weckler’s blog for more details. Eircom have confirmed it to him.”

A quick google got me news that this was announced back in February this year;
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/23/irma_demands_irish_isps_block_access_to_piracy_sites/

Is this the start of eircom stopping people from accessing the internet? It seems that this whole idea is the brainchild of the music industry who seem to have eircom “by the balls”.

tech

Acer Aspire One – Fixing No Boot Problem

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acer-aspire-one-blueA friend of mine has one of these very cool looking notebooks running Windows XP. However it developed a problem in that when you turned it on, nothing happened, you could however hear the hard-drive working away like it was loading up windows and then stopping.

After trying out the notebook on a PC monitor and trying to find a USB or network cable to use to connect to another working Laptop nothing seemed to work. So i said id take it home and mess around with it, messing around meant id try to get it to work even though i had no idea.

The first thing i did and always do when there is a problem with anything is i Google it. So off i went to google and typed in;

“acer aspire one wont turn on”

Simple really i typed in the exact name and model of the notebook and what was wrong and the first result lead me to a site which had a fix;

Acer Aspire One BIOS Recovery

And by following the intructions it brought the notebook back to life amazingly and it only took about 5 mins, amazign what you find when you google it.

tech

Windows Vista & Windows 7 Setup Problems -“unable to create new system partition or locate a existing system partition”

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windows_vista_logo.pngI came home from college yesterday and decided for some reason to install windows 7 64bit that i had downloaded.  Having already tried out the BETA and RC1 (Release Candidate 1) i thought sure i may as well.  Already having Two versions of vista running 64bit and 32bit and well used to dual-booting windows what should have talking 40 mins ended up being a complete disaster and took much of the afternoon.

Having my main Vista installation installed on one of the many partitions on my hard drive, the drive letter being “F:”. I delete the C: drive partition and had planned to install Windows 7 over the C Drive.

For some unknown reason my PC was not letting me install Windows 7 or Vista. So when i rebooted back i got the message;

“BOOTMGR is missing
Press CTRL ALT DELETE to restart”

I kept getting the same setup error during the install process. “unable to create new system partition or locate a exsisting system partition”.

I tried everything to get windows back up and running, i still had a full working Vista isntallation sitting on one of the partition drives but i could not get to it for reasons i cant figure out.  Installation my main OS on a drive letter other than the C Drive was not good idea and this probably caused some of the problems. But the fact that i couldnt get any new Windows OS to install made things very difficult. Ive had this problem before and its got something to with the motherboard i have or the combination of SATA/IDE drives.

After about 6 hours of madness and throwing DVD’s into the PC including;

  • An atempt to recover the c drive with Norton ghost 14
  • Windows vista reinstall
    windows Vista Repair (which was the solution that is for the BOOTMGR is missing problem, which didnt work as Vista could not the see the Vista installtion i had).
  • windows 7 install
  • windows 7 Repair

Nothing worked, Vista Repair let me down big time and even my norton ghost which is usually very good at restoring backups wouldnt work.

So i picked up the motherboard manual and looked at the back of it to see if i had written down anything t hat might help and of course i did. “Disable the IDE Drives”. I did this and i got things working again.

There is something wrong with either the motherboard (The motherboard i have is a Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H), BIOS (latest version) or combination of SATA drives and IDE drives i have. I dont know what that problem is but im guessing its got something to with some settings in the BIOS. Im running my SATA Drives in IDE Native mode rather than i expect the better “AHCI Mode”.

tech

eircom problems reveal eircom possably hacked

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eircomIrelands largest ISP Eircom have been having some serious problems over the last few days resulting in users been sent to bogus/fake sites where possable spyware or malware could have been installed. It all started for me on sunday evening when it looked like my broadband connection had gone down as all webpages failed to load.  However i found out that it was only the webpage part of the broadband connection that had gone down and not the entire line or network by noticed that i could games online with Valves Steam.

After some frustrating few says i searched for a possable cause as it seemed very strange that the web had gone down but not the connection. It turns out that it Was a DNS (the computers that transalte www.bbc.co.uk into an IP Address) problem eith eircoms servers and further searching revealed that they had been hacked with loads of people posting the same problems on the boards.ie messageboards;

Eircom DSL – DNS Lookups Slow

The solution was to change the DNS server settings in your router configuration menu to those provided by opendns.org which are;

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Sources for the Article:

Possible DNS Hack at Ireland’s Largest ISP

Eircom DNS Servers Compromised?

Eircoms response;

Update: Eircom has released an official announcement confirming the DNS problems. “Customers may have recently experienced delays in web browsing and may have been unable to access the Internet. In some cases, customers may have been redirected to incorrect websites,” it reads.

As far as details go, they remain scarce, the ISP only noting that, “This issue has been caused by an unusual and irregular volume of internet traffic being directed onto our network, and this impacted the systems and servers that provide access to the Internet for our customers.” It is yet unclear if this refers to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, or something else.

tech

How To Fix: Windows Installer Hangs in Vista 64

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windows_vista_logo.pngIve been using Windows Vista 64 since Vista came out and despite the reports of problems with hardware drivers ive found it to be quite stable. Well that was until When i went to install or Uninstall software that uses Vista’s “Windows Installer” where yesterday my PC keep Crashing or hanging. No matter which software it was, if it used “windows installer” it would just hang for over 10 mins.  So then i tryed out various registry repair tools such as Uniblues “Registry Booster” which i must say is quite good.

It also turned out that not only could i not install or uninstall some applications but windows “System Restore” kept failing so i couldnt revert windows back to an earlier time when everything worked. I also was unable to use my backup software “Norton Ghost 14” (which depsite some problems is a lifesaver for PC Problems) and i couldnt even run “chkdsk” (which can fix a corrupted windows drive).

Things we looking bad and i was looking a reinstall which is a nightmare in most cases. So i searched for a solution and most of them didnt as i couldnt do them due to the state of windows. Hard to fix a PC that wont let you;

  • System Restore
  • Run “Check Disk/chkdsk”
  • Restore a backup copy with “Norton Ghost”

This is where a “Multi-Boot” PC comes in handy, as a last ditch attempt i booted my PC into Windows Vista 32bit (which i keep in case hardware doest work, for example TV Cards) and Right clicked on the C: Drive (The drive with the problems i.e Vista 64) and Selected “Properties” then “Tools” and then “Error-Checking”. And Rebooted and hoped for the best.

Windows Ran the Error-Checking Utility “Check Disk chkdsk” and after about 20 mins all was well. So the lesson there is always keep trying. Just posted this in case it helps anyone else in future.

I should add that along the way i foudn a great website for Windows Vista 64 problems and discussion called www.vistax64.com which is a must for anyone using Windows Vista 64.

tech

Virus Removal – And Free Online Virus Scans

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My Avast! found “Win32:Tibia-BU [Trj]” in the lsass.exe which is a Trojan Horse virus while today i was using my PC and i started up my Anti-Virus “Avast 4.8 Home Edition” which is a great Free Anti-Virus package. Anyway when it started up it informed me that i had a virus which was surprising to me because i keep my PC Updated and im careful with what i download. Anyway alarms bells went off and i let the Anti-Virus Program delete the file that was infected.

So of course i had to run a full scan which took over 4 hours to finish. No other serious viruses were found however most of the reported viruses were from “Dodgy Software” i downloaded.

Online Virus Scans:
I wanted to be 200% sure that were no viruses so i went looking for an online virus scan website that would tell me if i had more nasty viruses.

Trend Micro:
Was the first online scan i tried and getting it to work was difficult and when it did work it gave strange results im going to run the scan again as im not sure if said i had more viruses or just that used it incorrectly.

Norton Online Virus Scan:
The Most popular anti-virus i would guess and so downloaded the installtion file and after 2 mins the viruses definitions were updated. I did a full scan so everyfile on my PC would be scanned and its very slow and seems to be slowing down my PC a good bit as it works away. However it has found a lot of viruses but most again are from “Dodgy Software” “Cracks,Keygens” etc.

Other Online Virus Scan Sites:

Kaspersky
Jottis Malware Scan
ESET Online Scanner