I was handed a laptop the other day which was assumed to have been infected with some horrible trojans,rootkits,and/or viruses. As I am always curious about these kind of things I decided to take the time and have a look to see

#1 what was going on and

#2 if I could get it cleaned up.

The First thing I did was to grab my trusted malwarebytes.org latetest version of Anti-Malware – it’s been able to bring back a couple of machines for me in the past so I decided to run it and it came back — clean.

The owner is fastidiously careful with their surfing habits and as such there weren’t any problems that I was able to find with an initial scan. however going through the motions that I do I noticed that the disk was highly fragmented. Nothing new there a few passes with defrag and things will be back to a decent speed.

NOTE: this system was running NTFS but I had found that the disk system was performing horribly when I moved a large archive from the system partition to the recovery partition. so slow in fact that I assumed that the hard drive might be failing. S.M.A.R.T did not show any warning so I started to look into the file system.

I let Defrag run overnight and there was not a bit of an improvement. I opened up the report and found an interesting entry in the description of the MFT. it had over 50 fragments! Now Had this been a Vista or Windows 7 Machine this problem would not be a technical issue, However, With XP it is.

I found a few programs that could solve this issue and I am happy to report that once the MFT fragmentation was cleared up the computer booted up in about 90 seconds. compared to the greater than 10 minutes or longer prior to the fix being implemented.

So it might nit be a virus or a failing drive or a full registry after all. Check to see if your MFT is fragmented and you might be able to get back some performance you lost on your XP machine.

Or you could just upgrade to Windows 7 and have to reinstall all your Applications and hope your hardware has signed drivers. I’m guessing that the Defrag is the less painful option for most of you.

Let me know if this helped you out at all in the comments section.

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Tired of SPAM? Who isn’t? Want to discourage more of it but don’t know how? in this post I’m going to go through how you can find out who it is by decoding a http://bit.ly/ link and sending the affiliate or other network the info that whoever is promoting this offer is sending SPAM.

Now on to the genesis of this article.

I received an email the other day that was obviously SPAM. How can you tell if it’s spam? it’s all about the to: field. (the … are mine) This to address looks to be set up as a group on a larger Web site that is being used to spam a scraped email list. Of course that’s not my email address so I looked at the cc: and I saw the telltale sign of spam. there were a lot of emails that started with “cs”. my email starts with “csciu” and is not in the short list on my email client so I doubt I’m going to figure out who sent this SPAM my way unless I get the security department of this large web site involved.

So , How do I track them down? If I can’t immediately trace it back I’m not going to take the time to get in a dialog with a security department as I don’t really want to threaten a multi-billion dollar company. I’d rather stay under the radar.

So Here’s what I did.

all throughout the SPAM message I see the same link repeated over and over

http://bit.ly/[removed]

“stupid bit.ly tricks”

I don’t want to just click on the link I might get malware/spyware/trojans sent my way so I do the cautious thing. I add a + (plus symbol) to the end of the link. so copy and paste into the browser and added the + and voilà I have  all kinds of juicy data about this link.  I have the destination url without it just redirecting me to the offer of a legit offer. but I also can see how many other have clicked on it and when I looked it was over 22,000 in the past month.

I look at the  URL  which turns out to be safe it’s just  a sales page link to a clickbank.com hosted product.   I can tell by the  hoplink.clickbank.com at the end  but the rest of it i’s encrypted to prevent me from knowing what product and who’s affiliate link it is.

Not To Worry!

I just have to  go to http://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_decoding.htm and enter the link which will look like this

and you get your spammers clickbank user ID:  which in this case was ” bokharapk ” now all I have to do is report this affiliate here : http://www.clickbank.com/reportproblem.html

Now I’m sure one or two reports are not going to make life horrible for this guy but if others of you have had this garbage sent to your email and you also contact Clickbank then with enough complaints Clickbank will make this guys life more difficult even withhold payment. If we make it harder to get paid the spam will be reduced.

Sadly with the costs so low to send millions of emails these days and the robotic software that makes it simple to collect millions even billions of email addresses there will always be spam. But with the tools we have at our hands , we can uncover the legitimate companies like clickbank who are being abused as we are. Clickbank will take action against the bad actors out there to protect their own corporate image. and this will send the message to spammers that says “if you spam you don’t get paid.” and since it’s all about the money for Spammers this is the power we have to get this email clogging garbage off our systems.

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Look here – > http://listoftheday.blogspot.com/2008/06/21-ridiculous-tattoos-of-celebrities.html

What happened to just buying tickets  or just watching a show?  These are some wonderful examples of folks who took being a fan a little too far.

I get that you love a celebrity but come on? tat’s I’m sure the person is going to go out of fashion eventually. besides they can always do something that makes you hate them at some point in the future and when that happens you’ll need  money for a tat removal or won’t you feel silly.

Then again everyone is so self-involved these days I doubt anyone will notice.

It used to be a real statement to get a tattoo now days  it’s just another trendy thing to do.  boring.

So I guess that link there is what not to do when it comes to getting a tat.

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I also really dislike paying high prices on Dry-cleaning

particularly on my casual shirts. That’s why I was thrilled when I found this gadget

I’ve used one of those tall steam wand deals but I don’t have the patience, so the ” toss it in the Dyer and forget it”  speaks my language.

You know that dry-cleaning costs  add up and since  I don’t care for starch so this might be an ideal solution for me. I  can’t wait to try it out.

if you have it please leave a comment and let everyone know if you’ve tried Mr. Steamy and how it worked for you.

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got an older PS3- look out!

According to the bbc web site Sony is having trouble with their online network which affects the older “Fat” model consoles.  they are quoted as saying “We believe we have identified that this problem is being caused by a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system.” Granted with any High Tech product there will be problems and the Playstation I’m sure is not better or worse than offerings from Microsoft or Nintendo.

the article went on to quote Sony as saying  ”In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.”

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