JZip Highjacked my Homepage!

Don't use JZip for anything. It loads you up with spyware and adds toobars you never asked for, and highjacks your homepage. I recently needed to un-rar a device driver so I did a quick search and found JZip. JZip had the ability to un-rar files compressed with rar so I downloaded, installed, and ran it. It did decompress my file but it also did a lot of sneaky things that took me a while to catch. It had changed my homepage on Firefox to search.jzip.com or something like that and wouldn't let me change it. I ran Superantispyware in safe mode and got rid of a bunch of junk that JZip had installed but it didn't fix the problem with my homepage.  I was able to uninstall the bogus toolbar it had installed by going to Control Panel in Windows and simply uninstalling it but my homepage in Firefox and Internet Explorer where still both highjacked.

After doing a bit of research I found a free application called Highjack this by trend Micro to find out what was going on. Now a word of caution, when using Highjack this only remove files you know shouldn't be there. This program can help you find and correct a Highjacked homepage but you need to know what you are looking for.  What I found was a line for a Google toolbar that wasn't authentic, and another line for a toolbar that I never installed. I never install toolbars so I checked the box next to the line on both of them and my homepage issue was fixed. I was able to change my homepage back to what I wanted it to be. I needed to restart my computer to see the results because the highjacking was done at startup. I then ran Malwarebytes in safe mode to make sure my computer was clean and called it good.

If you are looking to simply unzip a .zip file you can use windows to do it for you, you simply select the icon with a zipper on it and then select extract all files. The files will be extracted to a folder created in the same directory as the zip file.

If you need a full featured Zip utility that will extract different types of compressed files like rar, lzh, etc. then use 7-Zip to take care of it for you.

What really amazes me is all of the advertisements for JZip that pop up when you search for a zip utility. The people who wrote this piece of trash should be put in handcuffs and hauled in for an atomic wedgie.

Dan

How To Install And Uninstall Windows Drivers

The installation and un-installation process is not very difficult and won’t require any experience or specific knowledge. Once you’ve done it, you can install other drivers on the basis that if you can do it once, you can do it again.

Let’s try to install an updated device driver.

First of all if you have downloaded it as a .zip file, it needs to be extracted from there before you can install it. Then you will see an .exe (executable) file. If you have downloaded just a single .exe file you don’t have to do anything else, just double click on it to start running the installation wizard. If you follow the information message the installation will take you only few seconds.

Or there is another way to update a driver, you can do it manually.

After downloading the driver you need go to Device Manager (in Control Panel), choose the category of hardware you need and then choose the device you want to update the driver for. Right click on the device and go to “Properties”. On your screen will appear a box with a number of tabs, you need to select the Driver tab. Then you will see the button “Update Driver”, that’s exactly what you needed, just click on that and the wizard will start running. Afterwards choose the option Install from a list or specific location (Advanced). On the next message press the button “Don’t search. I will choose the driver to install” and on the next window click “Have disc” button. Then start browsing your computer for the location of the disc or the file which contains the driver you are installing

In the list of files you are allowed to set up you will see files with the extension .inf. An INF (Setup Information File) contains plain text and includes the information about the driver update found in the directory. In case there are no .inf files on display try to download the driver once again, because it might be that there is a problem with a damaged file.

Then just click “ok” and when you will be offered the option to choose hardware on the next window just find yours and press the “next” button.

If you will see a warning message about the driver not being compatible with your hardware, press “yes” and finish the installation process.

After finishing you might have to restart your computer but it’s not always necessary, it depends on the driver.

The Operating System Windows 7 might bring you some troubles during the installation process. The thing is that when installing on to your PC, all drivers and system files need to be verified. But there is a way to sort it out. First generate your own self-signed digital certificate (OpenSSL will be helpful in with this), then install it onto your system’s Windows as a trusted publisher. Afterwards you can use the Microsoft's Authenticode signing tool to sign the driver packages. After doing this the installation will continue without the OS presenting you with verification messages.

If you will need to un-install the driver you can easily do this too. There are two ways to do it.

The first way is just go to the Control Panel and “Add and remove programs” and find the driver you want to un-install. Click on “Remove” and the driver will be deleted completely with all traces.

The second way is just as simple, go in to Device Manager (for how to bring up this window see in the step by step guide above) then right click on the device that you need to un-install the driver for and choose the “Properties” button. In the tab labeled “Driver” click the button “Uninstall”. That’s done, your driver is removed.

http://www.bravofiles.com/  is a place for free driver downloads.

Andy G

 

 

Andy is a guest writer and operates Bravofiles a free website for drivers and software utilities. I recommend adding a link to his site in your bookmarks, it's a great site.

Dan

 

Cleaning your computer of malware and protecting it from viruses the cheap and easy way.

My sister and her husband donated some hopeless computers to me recently, I had mentioned to them that if they had some dead computers they were just going to get rid of to donate them my way and I would refurbish them and put them to good use. They tossed me a pile, and got a big smile, and started to work on them.

After doing repairs that needed to be done I went about getting the operating systems up to speed. One of them was an Acer KAV10 notebook that was heavily infested with viruses and malware. I had to do a bit of research but what I found was that there was a way to get the little computer to be reset to factory settings. This is how I did it:

• ·        Press and hold the 'alt' key and tap the 'F10' key a few times  you will directed to Acer erecovery management

• ·         At Acer erecovery management chose restore to factory setting

• ·         Then follow the instruction until finish

What that did was reload XP to the point it was when it came from the factory! I was pretty amazed that it worked but it.

On the other 2 computers after I did the repairs I then decided that the operating systems were worth saving so the first thing that I did was run Superantispyware on them to see what was going on. The scan found all sorts of things and software running in memory. When I find software running in memory scanning with Superantispyware it means you need to re-run the scan with Windows in Safe Mode.

The first thing to do is download all of the updates to Superantispyware, install them, then boot Windows in safe mode.

• ·         Do this by hitting F8 when Windows is loading. Windows will give you options for booting.
• ·         Boot in safe Mode then run Superantispyware.
• ·         Do a complete scan and remove all of the nasties.
• ·         When you are complete load Windows normally.
• ·         Your nasties should be squashed now.

The next thing to do is load some antivirus software, there are several free antivirus software packages out there, one of them Microsoft provides for free. It’s called Microsoft Security Essentials. It’s easy to download and install. And can be used until you decide to keep it or use something else.

Make sure you update Windows to the current level, by using Internet Explorer and going to Windows Update. This could take a while but is needed to make sure all of the fixes are done to Windows.

The last step is to Defragment your hard drive. That can be done by clicking on Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools and clicking on Disk Defragmenter.

You are all set, enjoy……

Turning a multipe doccument into a pdf file with freeware

Here was my dilemma, I needed to scan a 37 page document, and then turn it into a pdf that I could email to my brother in law who had graciously offered to help us figure out all of the legaleeze included in the document. The challenges ahead were how to scan the pictures, create the pdf and make it small enough to email easily. This is how I did it:

• First of all I used my trusty HP Scanjet 3500c scanner for the hardware portion of the project. I used two freeware software packages to do the entire project Irfanview and a program called PDF split and Merge  You will need to download and install the IMpdf plug in for irfanview found on this page. Here are the steps I took:
• The first thing I did was create a directory for the files I needed to scan.
• Then I ran irfanview. Then clicked on file then click on Aquire/Batch scanning
• This window will pop up, select multiple images.

• Select the destination directory by clicking browse and selecting the directory that you created earlier to store you files, then click OK.
• When you do this the software that you installed with your scanner will pop up. I would suggest that you select gray scale to make the files smaller right off the bat. I also had this software set at 200 dpi.

• Clicking Accept saved the scanned document into the folder that I created.
• You continue to scan files and they get filed sequentially into your directory as jpg picture files.

• After you have scanned all of you files then it's time to batch resize and convert to PDF to make sure they are small file but still easily readable in the final pdf file
• Create another directory for the pdf files..
• In irfaview click on file then Batch Conversion/Rename

• Set as shown above to resize and convert files to pdf. Make sure the output directory is the one you just created for the pdf files.
• Click on advanced 
• I wanted to shrink my file from the original 220 dpi files so I resized them by 50% as shown here

• Click on OK and we are ready to create our PDF files.
• Select the files you want to convert, click on all, then click on Start Batch.

• A window will pop up for each conversion and you should be able to simply hit OK for each one. Make sure you don't have passwords set for the files.
• You now have a directory full of individual PDF files.
• Now let's combine them into one file for emailing.
• Open PDF Split and Merge.
• Select Merge/Extract
• Click on Add and Add the files you want combined
• Click ok, and you will see all of the files added.
• Click on Browse select a directory you want the final file to be and give it a name.
• Click run and presto change O and you have your finished file ready to be sent.

Now you may be asking yourself why not scan the docs and use something like OpenOffice to add pictures and then save the whole thing as a PDF? Yes, you could do it that way and it would work. But I found this way to be quicker that trying to format each picture inside of a word processor.
Scan, convert all, then combine is really pretty fast.

Dan