It is time to say good bye. I started blogging for That Damn PC four months ago and I have now decided to leave because of personal reasons, especially related to time management. I hope at least a few of my posts have helped someone sometime. They have helped me learn a few things so as to share them here, and I know one place where to look for specific tips that I may forget in the future. That Damn PC will soon get another blogger, so keep coming back. Even better, subscribe to the site and you will be notified once activity resumes here. I will continue to drop by once in a while. You can also check out the other sites on the b5media Technology Channel and the favorites I linked to in the sidebar below for news and nuggets. I thank b5media... [Read more]

SSH is one communication protocol that is used to access remote systems all the time. Short for “Secure Shell”, SSH provides a secure channel for data exchange, unlike Telnet and other insecure remote shells. Telnet, e.g., transmits all data including passwords in plain text. For a system A to connect to a remote system B through SSH, A needs a SSH client (like PuTTY for Windows) and B needs a SSHD server running all the time so as to accept incoming connections. SSH is a proprietary software offered by SSH Communications Security, and as an alternative the open source version OpenSSH is being widely used. On all Unix-based OSs, the OpenSSH SSHD server is installed by default during the installation of the operating system. On Windows, however,... [Read more]

Every Sunday, I perform a set of jobs on all my computers. They help optimize the system, save hard disk space, increase security and privacy, etc.   Clean: Using CCleaner, I clean the PCs including all the browser caches and various other application caches. (Read my introduction to CCleaner here.) Disk Cleanup: I run disk cleanup ($ leanmgr) on all the drives. Registry: I run a registry cleaner (these days CCleaner itself) to clean the registries, after taking a backup of the current registry set. Virus Scan: I run an entire PC scan, not just the scan across the “commonly infected areas”. Defragment: Using the disk defrgamenter ($ defrag –a <drive>), I first analyze all the drives and if necessary defragment the recommended... [Read more]

Every now and then a popular website gets hacked and tons of user passwords are published for everyone to see. On one side, it can potentially lead to huge losses to the users whose passwords have been compromised. On the other, security analysts use the data to gain various insights. In one such recent attack, Robert Graham, the CEO of Errata Security, came to a few startling conclusions based on the passwords published showing what should not be your password: 16% of passwords matched a person’s first name 14% of passwords were patterns on the keyboard 4% are variations of the word “password” 5% of passwords are pop-culture references 4% of passwords appear to reference things nearby 3% of passwords are “emo”... [Read more]

I use Launchy and so have no need for program launch icons, be it on the Desktop or Quick Launch or Windows Start. I don’t even use the Quick Launch toolbar and all I knew until recently was that you add a quick launch icon by dragging any program (or a shortcut pointing to that program) into the toolbar.\\r\\n\\r\\nToday, when I accidentally deleted one of the quick launch icons of a machine not belonging to me, I found the obscure location of the quick launch icons:\\r\\n %APPDATA%\\\\Microsoft\\\\Internet Explorer\\\\Quick Launch \\r\\n\\r\\n(APPDATA is an environment variable which can be found by typing echo %APPDATA% at the command prompt.)\\r\\n\\r\\nI checked it on Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server, but it is possible that this location... [Read more]