Tool Discs and USB Sticks 

Here is the article for my SEMCO presentation given on 8 December 2019. The links associated with the presentation can be found here.

The links ending in DL are for downloads. The rest are source articles and notes. For usage details, all of these utility suites have tutorials as text and/or YouTube videos—do a search on the name or dig into the site from where you downloaded it.

Rufus is a tool used to create a bootable USB drive from a .iso file. Not only is USB slightly faster, but many lapstops (and some PCs) no longer sport optical drives.

IngBurn is a CD/DVD burning utility. It's free and quite useful.

The Windows ISO trick is instructions on how to directly download the Microsoft Windows installation ISO file from Windows without the Media Creation Tool.

All discs are free, except for Parted Magic. The software it contains is free, but he puts a lot of work into it—and it is pretty much the gold standard for the genre. I pay for a yearly subscription.

I am not covering forensic or penetration discs here, but I will mention two of them: CAINE and Kali Linux. See DistroWatch for more info on those.

Gain ultimate control over Win7 & WinVista

Here’s a neat (and useful) Windows 7-and-Vista trick. It enables GodMode, which provides a single place to access all Windows settings without needing to browse options and folders in the Control Panel.

To use it:

1. Create a new folder.
2. Rename the folder to
   

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

(note that you can change the “GodMode” text, but the following period and code number are essential).
The folder icon will change — double click it to show the GodMode window.

Alternate method (the first method sometimes crashes WinVista 64-bit):

Create a shortcut with the following path and set desired name and icon.

explorer.exe shell:::{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Two free Windows malware tools updated

As I have pointed out on more than one occasion, Microsoft Windows is under continuous and concerted attack, often successful--over half of all PCs running Windows are infected with malware. We need tools that help keep us safe as we use Windows; it's even better when these tools are both excellent and free. Two good tools have been updated to be even better (and the Windows Secrets Newsletter is an excellent resource):
Two great security tools get free updates

While I don't use Microsoft Security Essentials myself, it IS a very functional anti-malware package (better than most commercial packages), and useful--but I make sure to install Secunia PSI on every Windows PC I touch; the new version has useful added functions.

I also have a Links page with more security-related software listed.

Dealing with Internet Explorer issues

(This item was originally written as a response to a request for help from a friend whose Internet Explorer was intermittently locking up.)

You can kill an unresponsive Internet Explorer (or any program) without having to reboot or shut down the PC. Press and hold the [Ctrl]+[Shift] key combination, then press the [Esc] key. This brings up the Task Manager window. If the Process tab is not open by default, click on it. This will bring up a list of running processes. Go down the list and find iexplore--click on it to highlight it, then click on the End process button at the bottom of the window to kill it. You may have to do this more than once sometimes if there's more than one IE tab or window open.

Someone once said, "The best use for Internet Explorer is to use it to download a better browser." This is true--I recommend either Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome as an alternative--but there are also things you should do to fix the problem with IE, as well. Once you install Firefox, you should install the NoScript add-on. There's a lot of malicious scripts out there--it allows you to run scripts on a site-by-site basis, a very good idea.

Make sure that you have the latest version of IE supported by your version of Windows--for WinXP, WinVista, or Win7 this is Internet Explorer 8. You might also install Maxthon for better security and other features--but please avoid IE in general.

You probably need to update your Java and Flash, too. Download links for everything I have mentioned here are on my Internet related Links page.

The Open Disc--A Compilation of Free Software for Windows

I'm pretty used to being able to find the free software I'm looking for, as well as new software to play with. I am quite familiar with using Google and other search engines for this purpose--and I know how to find general sources for free software (and I will cover the best of those sources in a future article). Because I am so familiar with the software and my research techniques, I sometimes lose sight of the fact that the average user may not know where to start, let alone where to go, to find useful free software.

It turns out that there is a partial solution to this problem that's a very good place to start. There is a downloadable disk image available that contains a great deal of up-to-date free software in a single file, an image file that can be used to create a DVD: The Open Disc. As long as you have a broadband connection and a DVD "burner" you can create a DVD from the downloaded ISO image that will contain dozens of useful free programs, each of them installable from a menu. The software categories comprise:
Design | Educational | Games | Internet | Multimedia | Productivity | Utilities
Some of the programs on the disc include an office suite, a desktop publishing program, an Internet browser, a mail reader, and much more.

But what if you don't have a DVD writer? You can still download the file and copy the software within the image to your hard drive (or a 2GB+ flash drive) using the free 7-Zip in dual-pane mode and run the menu from that drive instead of a DVD (ironically, 7-Zip is one of the programs included on the DVD). In fact, I initially did this on my own drive instead of burning a disc.

I do have my own disc of free software that I have compiled to use or give away, but The Open Disc is better organized and menu-driven, so it's much more appropriate for the average user. It's quite a resource! I am permanently placing the download link in the right-hand column of this blog sometime before I post the next entry here.

OpenOffice.org for Windows & MS Office users

Note: I now recommend the LibreOffice (LO) suite over OpenOffice.org (OO.o) due to improved performance and licensing issues. LO is a fork of OO.o and is on a faster development track.

Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, and OpenOffice.org are roughly equivalent-- like MS Office, OpenOffice.org is a suite of applications. The main parts of each suite are similar: a word processor (MS Word vs. OpenOffice.org Writer), a spreadsheet (MS Excel vs. OpenOffice.org Calc), and presentation software (MS PowerPoint vs. OpenOffice.org Impress). The difference? OpenOffice.org is free of cost and open source software-- MS Office is neither free nor open. OpenOffice.org is also cross-platform--versions are available for Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, and others.

One has to wonder why school systems (especially in low-income areas) continue to teach Microsoft Word or Microsoft Office. Many students' families may have problems being able to afford MS Office packages costing between $100 and $350 (and more). For these users (and most others) a free equivalent like OpenOffice.org begins to look pretty good.

To a considerable extent, once you have learned any word processor, that knowledge is useful for any similar program. In fact, most Windows-using beginners would be well-served by starting with the WordPad application included with Windows and working up from there-- especially when differences between the different versions of MS Office are taken into account.

Read the full article here (My Articles page).
Go to my relevant download links page.

"Cleanup on Drive C, Track 56"

(Revised 23-April-2013)
One of the main problems with Microsoft Windows (besides the issue of malware in general) is the accumulation of detritus of several types. This leads to a typical Windows installation slowing down over time, as well as potential security threats. Microsoft supplies a Disk Cleanup utility as part of Windows—but that doesn't solve the entire problem.

The Windows Registry is a well-known single-point-of-failure issue for all versions of Windows. Not only is this group of files an index to the entire Windows installation; it also stores settings, serial numbers, program keys, and individual program installation information. A cluttered, fragmented, and disorganized Registry can lead to slowdowns and weird errors. For several years, a number of companies have provided "free" Registry cleaners, but until now most of them would report, say, 800 errors--then only fix a dozen or so unless you pay for the software.

This has changed in recent times. There are now a number of free software suites that will do the job of the Disk Cleanup utility, do it better and also provide a useful Registry clean-and-repair and (in some cases) a basic malware scan. This article will briefly discuss three of these suites, along with an easy-to-use Registry-backup tool. The three suites discussed here use somewhat different techniques for checking and cleaning the Windows Registry—so running each of them sequentially works well. For safety's sake, we'll start with the Registry-backup tool.

There are those that say that Registry clean-up makes no difference in performance. I know otherwise—here's an example: I had a Windows XP PC that took ten minutes to boot up, fifteen minutes to shut down, and nearly half an hour to load the "installed programs" list. After performing the following procedure, all was well.I want to stress this important tip: before you make any changes to the Windows Registry, be it by manually editing it with RegEdit or by cleaning it with any tool, a bit of preparation is in order. I back up the Registry with a free tool called ERUNT (The Emergency Recovery Utility NT), which makes backing up and restoring the Windows Registry files extremely easy. The ERUNT package also includes NTRegOpt (The NT Registry Optimizer) a Registry optimizer which I will discuss last.

Note: ERUNT works just fine under Windows Vista and Windows 7. Just right-click the program icon and select Run as Administrator. You can make this change permanent by right-clicking on the program icon and selecting the Compatibility tab, then checking the Run as Administrator box.

I now usually start with the Comodo PC TuneUp. I use it primarily for its Registry-cleaner mode, though the other included tools are useful too.

Next is the Glary Utilities. This suite seems (to me) to be the safest for the average end user, especially in the default 1-Click Maintenance mode—it's quick, effective, and seems to not remove stuff that the user actually wants to keep.

Last on this short list is CCleaner. If you are using more than one package, I would skip the Cleaner function and go straight for the Registry Integrity part. If you do use the Cleaner, carefully look over the Windows and Applications tabs to ensure that you save (for example) your cookies, history, or anything else that you don't want to delete by checking or unchecking the appropriate boxes as needed.

Note: Users of any of these utilities will benefit from running their Registry cleaners multiple times. This is because certain Registry errors can be masked by other errors.

In summary, all users will benefit from using all three to clean the Registry, since each will find issues that the others miss.

To wrap things up after cleanup, I reboot the affected system. I then run ERUNT again to get a snapshot of the newly-cleaned-up Windows Registry. I recommend adding the letter "a" to the end of the directory name to prevent overwriting the earlier backup and to distinguish the first version from the newer version. Now it's time to run the second utility in the ERUNT package, NTRegOpt. After optimization, reboot again then use ERUNT to create a third backup of the Registry with the letter "b" at the end of the dir-name (you can delete the first two backups later, if you wish).

The overall process takes longer to describe than it does to implement, it sure beats repeated reinstallation of Windows—and it's just as effective.
Links:

• ERUNT/NTRegOpt
• Glary Utilities
• CCleaner
• Comodo PC TuneUp