NetworkJew » windows

The Windows Key in Windows XP

Network Jew — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:11:25 +0000

Many people often wonder what that funny looking key is on their keyboard with a little flag on it. It’s referred to as the “Windows Key”, or “Windows Logo Key” or “Start Key” and you can use it to perform many shortcuts to help improve your productivity.

Pressing the Windows key by itself, brings up the start menu, and from there you can navigate up and down the start menu with your keyboard arrow keys, and press enter on the program you want to launch. No more mousing around!

There are several other Windows key combinations you can perform as well, by holding down the Windows Key and pressing another key:

Windows Logo+BREAK (Display the System Properties dialog box)
Windows Logo+D (Display the desktop)
Windows Logo+M (Minimize all of the windows)
Windows Logo+SHIFT+M (Restore the minimized windows)
Windows Logo+E (Open My Computer)
Windows Logo+F (Search for a file or a folder)
CTRL+Windows Logo+F (Search for computers)
Windows Logo+F1 (Display Windows Help)
Windows Logo+ L (Lock the keyboard)
Windows Logo+R (Open the Run dialog box)

Conficker Sells Out!

Network Jew — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:46:13 +0000

After lying dormant for a week, then mysteriously downloading encrypted content, Conficker is now starting to actually show its true colors. It wants to sell you something. Great.

From F-Secure:

# On April 8th a new update was made available to Conficker.C infected machines via the P2P network
# The new file, which we call Conficker.E, is executed and co-exists alongside the old infection
# It re-introduces spreading via the MS08-067 vulnerability. Spreading functionality was removed in Conficker.C and the gang behind this maybe realized they made a mistake and added it again.
# There’s a possible connection to Waledac, a spambot. Some Conficker.C infected computers connected to a well known Waledac domain and downloaded Waledac from there.
# There’s also a connection to rogue anti-virus products as we’ve seen it end up on Conficker.C infected machines. The rogue product was Spyware Guard 2008.
# Conficker.E deletes itself if the date is May 3, 2009 or later.

Discover What’s Filling Up Your Hard Drive

Network Jew — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 16:06:53 +0000

It seems like the faster hard drive sizes increase, the faster we fill them up. Multi-megapixel photographs, HD movies and massive music collections start to take up a lot of space very quickly. It’s always nice to be able to see in a visual way, what exactly is eating up all that space.

WinDirStat

Here are three FREE tools you can use- one for each OS- Windows, OSX and Linux. They are all fairly similar.

WindirStat (Windows) – Great graphical disk analysis tool. Lots of custom settings like # of threads, color coding, etc.,This program is fast. Its good for running against a shared directory to see who’s taking up all the disk space.

Disk Inventory X (OSX) – The author says that this was written to be like WindirStat, so its basically the same thing. Although it doens’t seem quite as feature rich. Gets the job done on a Mac.

Disk Inventory X

KDirstat (Linux) – Supposedly, Windirstat is a clone of this bit of software. Although it’s a KDE program it will run in any X11 environment.

KDirStat

All three of these programs can help recover disk space, and keep that old hard dirve from filling up quite as fast.

SVCHOST Viewer Takes the Mystery out of SVCHOST.EXE

Network Jew — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 22:12:23 +0000

If you’ve ever looked at your Windows Task Manager, you’ve seen several SVCHOST.EXE instances running, and wondered “what are all those processes doing?” From Wikipedia:

Svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) within the Microsoft Windows operating system.

In XP you can run the following command to see what services are behind each svchost:

tasklist /svc /fi "imagename eq svchost.exe"

Alternately, you can run this great FREE piece of software called SVCHOST viewer. It’s a nifty little gui to let you see vital info about each svchost instance. Check it out here…