Who Is Connected To Your Windows Machine?

If you are connected to a network or Internet and you want to see which services are connected to your system then you can find that out with a simple DOS command.

To find out who is connected to your PC, go to Start –> Run –> cmd. This will open up the DOS command prompt.

Type “netstat -a” in the

command prompt and you’ll see all the connections on your system that are active at this time.

See which process is involved in the connection

NETSTAT comes with a lot of options. One of them is that you can see the executable which is involved in each connection. You can type the following command to see the executables along with the connections.

C:\>netstat -b

Automatically Refreshing

If you want that the netstat results be refreshed automatically at specific intervals and you don’t have to type in the command again and again, you can use the following command option:

C:\>netstat

Where interval is any no. of seconds. For example if you want the results to be refreshed after every 5 seconds, then here is the command for it:

C:\netstat 5

Saving the output results

If you want to have a log of your active connections, then you can use the following command:

C:\>netstat -b 1 > “connections.txt”

This command will save the results of netstat after every one second. And if you want to quit saving the results, go to the cmd prompt where the command is running, press Ctrl+C to stop the command. The file connections.txt will be saved in the directory where you currently are. For example in my example case above, it will be saved in C:\.

Remove the Brontok worm

Brontok is a computer worm which spreads through emails and USB drives. There are so many variants of brontok but they basically work similarly.

How do I know if my system is infected?

• You can’t start Regedit.exe
• When trying to start any other registry editor, the system restarts
• The system also restarts when executing certain EXE files
• The presence of the following files:
  %WINDIR%\eksplorasi.pif
  %UserProfile%\Local Settings\Application Data\smss.exe
  %UserProfile%\Local Settings\Application Data\services.exe
  %UserProfile%\Local Settings\Application Data\lsass.exe
  %UserProfile%\Local Settings\Application Data\csrss.exe
  %UserProfile%\Local Settings\Application Data\inetinfo.exe
  %UserProfile%\Local Settings\Application Data\winlogon.exe
  %UserProfile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\Empty.pif
  %UserProfile%\Templates\WowTumpeh.com
  %WINDIR%\%CURRENT_USER%’s Setting.scr
  %WINDIR%\ShellNew\bronstab.exe
  All these files have the size of the worm’s main executable: 42,028 bytes(About 42 KB).

What does it do?

• Disable Folder Options
• Disable Registry Editor
• Installs itself in the startup
• When in memory, it will restart the system if any program involving the registry is started

How to remove Brontok?

Download and run this brontok removal tool from Bitdefender. This tool will kill the brontok process, restore folder options and registry editor and fix system startup.

Increase Your Disk Space Without Buying A New Hard Drive

One of the many benefits the NTFS file system over others is that it uses a compression technology thats very efficient and transparent. One just has to enable the compression on a drive or folder in an NTFS drive and it works seamlessly without disturbing the user.

In the beginning I had a feeling that using NTFS compression was a bad thing because it ate some processor time and when opening my compressed documents even though it was completely transparent to me. I didn’t have to be interrupted to get the process of opening files going. But then one day I decided to use this technology for one of my drives. It was a huge drive with about 60GB of data. I right clicked the drive, checked the compression check box and then clicked Ok. It took quite sometime to enable compression on all the items of the drive. But when it was done, I was amazed to see the space difference. Now the drive had about 7GB of space which previously was almost none.

Now I have compression enabled on all of my drives except the system drive on which Windows is installed. I think it’s not a good practice to compress the Windows drive as it is used very frequently. You can enable compression on individual folders too. It has saved almost 12GB of disk space in total. Now I can use the space without buying a new hard drive for extra space :-).

Move The Temp Folder For Windows Performance Enhancement

GHacks has quite a cool tip for speeding up Windows. Windows stores the temp folder in the same drive where it is installed by default. You can change the temp folder location to improve the performance of Windows. To change the location of temp folder, create a new folder in any other drive except for the Windows drive. Then right click My Computer –> Properties –> Advanced –> Environment Variables –> select temp variable and then click edit. Change the variable value to the folder path you have just created. Click Ok. Now select tmp variable and then click edit. Change the variable value to the folder you want the temporary files to go to.

Now everything is set to go. You should restart your computer for the changes to take effect. Delete the old temporary folders after restarting.

Five Cool Browsing Tips

1-Quickly access domain of an e-mail address
This is a cool tweak by which you can quickly and easily access the domain of an email address. For example, if you want to access the domain of nanosani@gmail.com, simply copy and paste this address to the address bar of your browser and your browser will automatically forward you to gmail.com.

2-View Internet shortcuts from channel band
No need to open Internet Explorer to access your favorites. You can access your favorites right on your desktop by issuing the following command:
Go to Start ‘ Run ‘ iexplore -channelband
This will open a window of Internet Explorer Favorites on your desktop.

3-Determine when a webpage was last updated
You can easily learn when the webpage you are viewing was last updated. Copy and paste the following line in the address bar of your browser where the webpage is open:
javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

4-Increase decrease font size of a webpage with the mouse wheel
To increase or decrease the font size of a webpage on the fly, just hold down ctrl key of your keyboard and scroll up or down with your mouse wheel to increase or decrease the font size of the webpage.

5-Quickly move forward and backwards between pages
Pressing ALT + the forward or back key will take the user forward or back one page.

Cannot Right Click Desktop or in Windows Explorer

If you are having troubles with the context menu (right click menu), right clicking on the desktop doesnot do anything then most probably you have your group policies set to not displaying the context menu in windows explorer. You can change it in two ways. One from the group policy editor and one from the registry editor.

1- From Group Policy Editor

To re-enable your context menu from the group policy editor, go to Run –> gpedit.msc –> User Configuration –> Administrative Templates –> Windows Components –> Windows Explorer. In the right hand pane, find “Windows Explorer’s default context menu”, open its properties by double clicking it. If it’s enabled or not configured, disable it and your context menu will be back as soon as you apply this policy.

2 - From Registry Editor

To re-enable your context menu from the registry, go to Run –> regedit –> HKEY_CURRENT_USER –> Software –> Microsoft –> Windows –> CurrentVersion –> Policies –> Explorer. In the right hand pane find “NoViewContextMenu”, set its value to 0 if it exists. If you still can’t right click your desktop, then you can look for the same key here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE –> Software –> Microsoft –> Windows –> CurrentVersion –> Policies –> Explorer

How to say “No to All”

Just a quick tip about copying or replacing files.. Whenever you have to copy or replace something and Windows just keeps on asking if you want to replace the duplicate file or not, the dialog box has only four options available:
1-Yes
2-Yes to All
3-No
4-Cancel
So where the hell is No to All gone? Microsoft doesn’t feel the need of it. So we can have an alternative here .. press shift key and then click on No. This will be equivalent to “No to All”. This will save you from getting the annoying confirmation messages time and again.

Registry Editing Has Been Disabled By Your Administrator

Today a friend of mine asked that his registry editor had been disabled accidently and now how should he enable it back again. Here are two ways to enable the registry editing in Windows.

1- From Group Policy Editor

Go to Run –> gpedit.msc
In the left hand menu, go to User Config –> Administrative Templated –> System.
Now In the right hand pane, select “Prevent access to registry editing tools”. It will probably be not configured or enabled. If it’s enabled, disable it and if it’s not configured, first enable it, apply settings and then disable it. Most probably the settings have been applied instantly. If not, then run gpupdate in command prompt to apply the group policies.

2- From the Run Menu

I got this tweak while surfing the internet. Go to Start –> Run, copy and paste the follow in the Run box and press OK.

REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v DisableRegistryTools /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

The effects are usually instant. If not then you should see the results after restarting your computer.

Please tell us your experiences on this tweak.