At it’s core, Standalone System Sweeper is simply Microsoft Security Essentials wrapped in a bootable environment. You can download it on a working computer, and it will walk you through the process of burning a CD, DVD or preparing a USB drive. I would recommend using a blank CD or DVD, since USB drives can be difficult or impossible to boot to on some older machines.

Once you have your CD or DVD burned, put it in the infected computer and boot to it. Usually this will happen automatically when you restart the computer with the disc in, but sometimes you’ll have to press a key (most commonly F12) right when the computer is first starting to boot up. You’ll then see the bootable Windows environment start to load. This boot process will probably look similar to what you would see if you were booting a normal Windows 7 machine. However, there’s actually a full (but slimmed down) copy of Windows 7 on that disc which System Sweeper will run on. Your infected hard drive isn’t being used to run the computer at all at this point. This way, the virus that was previously stopping you from running virus scans or opening programs will have absolutely no chance to start running and getting in the way.

Once System Sweeper starts, you’ll be able to update the virus definitions (under the Help dropdown menu) and run a full scan of your hard drive. Again, this is basically the same Microsoft Security Essentials virus scanner running, but this time it’s running in a clean environment without any active viruses to get in it’s way. After the scan, you can click “Clean Computer” to have System Sweeper clean all of the infections it found on your hard drive.

And that should be it! Take the disc out, restart your computer and you should boot back into your normal copy of Windows with everything nice and clean. You might notice some strange files or settings left over from the infection, but there shouldn’t be anything major stopping you from cleaning those up manually or with other virus scanners now. Bootable anti-virus for the people!

Speaking of 2011, we’ve got big plans coming up! Our service area has already been expanded to include areas around Lake Orion, Oxford and Clarkston, and we’ll be adding more friendly technicians soon to expand even further. This helps us keep our already low prices down to a minimum, as more technicians means less driving time for us and less money spent on gas. It also means that more and more people have access to affordable computer repair–a service that becomes increasingly necessary in our community everyday. We’re very happy to be providing it and can’t wait to meet our next set of happy customers!

We’re also in the process of finalizing a unique service plan which we’ll be offering to our residential customers soon. We’re really excited about it and can’t wait to make an official announcement, but I suppose I should leave it at that for right now. Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed, facebook, or twitter to keep updated!

Thanks again for a great year, everyone. We hope you all had a fun and safe New Year’s Eve and have a great 2011. Happy new year!

Like most of the software we recommend, VLC Media Player is simple to use, free and open-source. It’s also highly portable and available for MacOSX, Linux, and Windows XP, Vista and 7.

Display thumbnails instantly when you hover over an icon
By default, there’s about a half second delay between the time you hover over an icon and the time its thumbnail previews popup. This makes your workflow a little less efficient and gets really annoying really fast. The following registry hack will make previews popup instantly!

1. Run regedit (Windows Key+R, type “regedit”, click OK)
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
3. If it doesn’t exist already, add a new DWORD (32-bit) value named “ExtendedUIHoverTime”
4. Double click ExtendedUIHoverTime and set the value to the number of milliseconds you want the delay to be. The default is 400, but I prefer setting it to something really small, like 50, for an instant thumbnail preview
5. To apply the change, restart the computer (or just explorer using task manager)

Left click icons to cycle through active windows:
This one goes hand in hand with the tweak above. By default, left-clicking an icon on the taskbar will popup its thumbnail previews, but now that we have previews showing up instantly on mouse-over, that’s a little redundant. So why not simply have the last window in the icon’s group show up when you left click it instead? Here’s how to do it…

1. Run regedit (Windows Key+R, type “regedit”, click OK)
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
3. If it doesn’t exist already, add a new DWORD (32-bit) value named “LastActiveClick”
4. Double click LastActiveClick and set the value to 1
5. To apply the change, restart the computer (or just explorer using task manager)

As always, be sure to take extra care if you venture into the Windows registry to perform any of these tweaks. If you’re unsure about what you’re doing, stop and get help from someone who knows their way around!

So what’s your favorite Windows 7 hack? Have any tweaks that you can’t live without, or is everything fine right out of the box? Let us know in the comments!

Zoodles is available for Windows and Mac, and comes in either a free version or a $7.95/month premium version which gives parents extra functionality such as enhanced ad blocking, content filtering, and activity monitoring. A free trial of the premium membership is included with the download.

If your kids are older, you should definitely teach them how to use a computer properly without special software installed. However, kid-friendly browsers such as Zoodles are a great way to introduce younger children to the computer and provide them with a safe and enriching experience.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjmuIueB6rw

www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7NK5_ol9T0

Safe software includes things like your word processor, media player and image editor. They typically run completely on your desktop and don’t really connect to the Internet in any significant way. You certainly can’t download and run files through them from anonymous sources, so there’s no way to accidentally download a virus through them.

Potentially unsafe software includes your web browser, email client, FTP client, P2P sharing software, instant messengers and more. This type of software is typically always connected to the Internet and can download data from anonymous, potentially unsafe sources. If it’s possible to get a virus through it, we categorize it as potentially unsafe. This is the hazardous environment you shouldn’t be walking through with just an outdated vaccine!

What sandboxing software does is section off potentially unsafe software from the rest of your system. So, if you do happen to click that link to ww2.kut3puppeez.net.cn or if you do happen to open that scary_video.mov.EXE attachment your sister emailed you, the virus inside will still run, but it won’t really be able to do anything. It won’t be able to patch your system files. It won’t be able to run in the background all the time. It will just sit there and wonder “where’d the rest of the computer go?”.

Actually, since the virus won’t know what to do, it will most likely just crash. Either way, after a restart, even the most dangerous and sophisticated virus will be gone without ever having been given the chance to do any damage. Poor virus.

There are two ways sandboxing works. One is through virtualization, the other is through strict access policies. A discussion on how these work is a little outside the scope of this article, but both are very effective and yield the same results–the ability to isolate potentially unsafe programs and anything downloaded through them from the rest of your system.

The only downside to sandboxing comes when you download a program and actually do want to give it access to the rest of the system. Doing this is usually pretty simple, though, and well worth the effort. All you do is right-click the downloaded file and select the option to mark it as trusted. That’s it! The file is now out of the isolated sandbox and allowed to run and modify your system like normal.

Combined with a traditional signature-based anti-virus, such as Microsoft Security Essentials, a sandbox should be all you need to stay protected while traversing the hazardous environment that is the Internet. To get infected with a virus you would have to intentionally mark it as trusted and the virus would still have to avoid your signature-based anti-virus. In other words, you’d have to unzip your hazmat suit for just a second and not be vaccinated against whatever you intentionally let in.

If you want a good, free sandboxing solution, check out GeSWall from GentleSecurity. If you don’t mind paying a little, SoftSphere Technologies DefenseWall has a few extra bells and whistles. And if you’re running a 64-bit system, unfortunately you’re only option at the moment is the beta version of Sandboxie. Not that Sandboxie is bad, but hopefully we see official support for 64-bit systems from everyone soon. Stay safe out there!

If the FCC forum is any indication, Internet users are clearly in favor of the proposed policy. And why shouldn’t they be? Americans depend on unencumbered access to the Internet, so it makes perfect sense to protect it. Of the last 140 forum posts written, only 13 were against net neutrality and positively reviewed, while 58 posts were in favor of net neutrality and positively reviewed. Additionally, the posts in favor of net neutrality had far more thumbs up than those against.

Without net neutrality in place, your Internet provider is free to charge you extra for YouTube, Wikipedia, facebook, or whatever else they think they can get away with. They’re also free to slow down or stop downloads via any protocol they want–whether it’s BitTorrent, FTP, HTTP or anything else. If they wanted, they could even get political and block access to Fox News, Air America, voter registration sites, or information about political candidates. If this all sounds far fetched to you, it shouldn’t–nearly all the major ISPs have done it already.

Net neutrality would protect Internet users from this type of abuse the same way that users of the phone system are protected against their calls being blocked at the whim of the phone company. However, there are some who disagree with the policy, so let me sum up the arguments of the few net neutrality opponents I was able to find on the FCC forum.

Basically, they’re afraid the government is trying to monitor and control Internet access in much the same way that China does. These opponents either don’t understand the policy being proposed by the FCC or they think that this policy will pave the way for more government intervention in the future. Neither of these fears are substantiated. The current net neutrality proposal doesn’t include anything about the government blocking Internet access in any way. In fact, it is written specifically to prevent this type of behavior. So to think that this policy will allow the government to control the Internet, either now or in the future, is absurd. If that were to happen, the US government would face insurmountable pressure not only from the American people, but from several major technology corporations (like Google, for example) and The United Nations as well. It just wouldn’t happen, and net neutrality would only help to ensure that.

There is another argument against net neutrality, which for some reason doesn’t show up very often on the FCC’s forum. It’s the original argument from the Internet service providers, which basically says they can no longer support the bandwidth requirements of today’s Internet users. It seems to make a lot more sense than the previous argument, but it’s actually just as ridiculous. One of the users on the FCC’s forum addresses this issue well. He describes our current Internet infrastructure as a set of dirt roads, “The issue is not that there is too much traffic on the Internet. The issue is that in order for everybody to benefit, this ‘highway’ must be expanded. Instead of enforcing tiered access, we should expand its infrastructure to support the new load”. He goes on to compare our Internet infrastructure to that of Japan’s and Korea’s, “Japan has an information superhighway.. we have an information dirt-road, with people threatening to place tollbooths”.

Also, in case you’re wondering, all of the default settings in Security Essentials look great to me–except for one. I would recommend that you turn ON “Scan Removable Drives” under Settings->Advanced. This will make sure that your USB thumb drives get scanned as well when MSE does a full scan. Happy downloading!

It sounds scary, but it’s usually not a problem. As soon as one of these security holes begins to be exploited, the developers of the software will become aware of it, fix the problem, and release a patch for you to install. That’s exactly what these Windows updates are, and that’s why it’s so important to install them as soon as they’re available. Want more reasons? Lets look at the situation the other way around. Suppose a company is being proactive and fixing a security hole before the bad guys know about it. Well, as soon as the patch has been released, it’s pretty easy for a hacker to figure out exactly what was fixed and start exploiting the security hole on any systems that haven’t installed the update yet. And just in case you might think that soon enough all of the bugs will have been patched and you’ll have nothing to worry about, just keep in mind all the new software and new features that are added to your system all the time–all of which could potentially have security holes and need to be updated. Patches, unfortunately, are here to stay.

So how do you keep your system up to date with all the latest patches? It’s actually pretty easy. The easiest and most important part is to keep Windows itself updated. You can accomplish this by going into Windows “Security Center” (located in Control Panel) and clicking on Automatic Updates. Make sure that “Automatic” and “Every Day” are selected, and set the time to sometime in the middle of the night. That’s it! Windows will now automatically download and install the latest updates on a nightly basis. You may notice occasionally that Windows wants you to restart your computer in the morning, which you should definitely do immediately. Other than that, though, you can forget about updating Windows now. It’s that easy to setup automatic updates, and there’s no excuse not to do it.

The harder part is keeping all the other software you might have up to date, as most software developers release their own set of patches. A lot of software packages have an option that’s similar to Windows, in which you can set it to update itself periodically. In addition, you can certainly try to be diligent and manually update any software you use that doesn’t contain a self-updating feature. However, there’s a much easier (and free!) solution to keeping all your software up to date, and it will probably be a lot more effective than the manual approach. It’s called Secunia PSI, and you can download it for free from Secunia’s website. Once installed, it will periodically check all the software you have installed against their database to see if anything needs updating and alert you if it finds anything. Some updates can be installed right away from within Secunia PSI, while some will need to be manually installed–but at least you’ll know about them.

Half the battle of keeping your system secure is making sure you’re always up to date with the latest patches, and now that you know, it should be an incredibly easy battle to win.