Scream At The PC
A Techie's vents, frustrations, solutions and lighter side of lifeHackers… Secure Website or not Secure, are you sure?
Posted on April 10, 2010The main difference between http:// and https://
MANY PEOPLE ARE UNAWARE OF THE DIFFERENCES
**The main difference between http:// and https:// is It’s all about keeping you secure**
HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, Which is just a fancy way of saying it’s a protocol (a language, in a manner of speaking) for information to be passed back and forth between web servers and clients. The important thing is the letter S which makes the difference between HTTP and HTTPS.
The S (big surprise) stands for “Secure”. If you visit a website or webpage, and look at the address in the web browser, it will likely begin with the following: http://.
This means that the website is talking to your browser using the regular ‘unsecure’ language. In other words, it is possible for someone to “eavesdrop” on your computer’s conversation with the website. If you fill out a form on the website, someone might see the information you send to that site. And the tools they use are cheaper than you think – they are free… and can even be integrated into wireless cards to spy on wireless hotspots. So be careful not to do too much personal stuff on a wireless hotspot and for those of us at home, it may be a good idea to hide our SSID (I’ll explain that in a later post).
This is why you never ever enter your credit card number in an http website! But if the web address begins with https://, that basically means your computer is talking to the website in a secure code that no one can eavesdrop on.
You understand why this is so important, right?
If a website ever asks you to enter your credit card information, you should automatically look to see if the web address begins with https://. If it doesn’t, there’s no way you’re going to enter sensitive information like a credit card number.
I hear a number of you say that you look for the neat lock icon in your web browser, this can be faked too – after all it is an icon… make sure you are on https:// and it is the correct secure website (I’ll leave that for another post at some time)
Mavericks… Computer Maintenance – The Forgotten Practice
Posted on April 10, 2010It is good practice to update your software on your machine (Antivirus patches, windows updates, fixes) it is also good to maintain some of the hardware on your machine:
Keep your hard drive in top shape
Run chkdsk c: /f from the command line (click start->and then run->type “cmd” without the quotes -> press Enter)
Type “y” to schedule it for the next boot.
Now… Keeping the command prompt on screen, type “defrag c: -f” and hit enter, leave this to run until you get back the prompt. Go make some coffee, go to the shop have a hamburger and come back. Considering the sizes of Hard disks lately, I should imagine that this will certainly take a while and may even still be running when you get back.
But I want to Automate Defrag and Chkdsk (Scandisk – Old school rocks):
Ok, Ok, I hear your moans and groans, you don’t have time to wait around for this blasted thing, can’t I just run a file? Yeh you can, but where is the fun in that? For you no-fun people who can’t stand DOS, there is an automated way…
Open up notepad and type or cut and paste the following:
echo y|chkdsk C: /r /f /x
defrag c: -f
echo y|chkdsk d: /r /f /x
defrag d: -f
shutdown -r -f
Save the file on your desktop as def.bat, making sure the Save as type is “All Files”
Close notepad and run the file – I have drives C:\ and D:\ on my computer, edit my batch file to suit your needs.
CD/DVD writers do not last forever and will only write so many discs and then start to fail:
Warning signs to heed would be reports of errors when using Nero / other CD writing software. To prolong their lives, use disk cleaning media and give the drive a short break after writing 5 to ten discs in qiuck succession.
Graphics cards are used to display colours and media on your screen.
It is important that their fans are checked regularly and the capacitors are not leaking. Also make sure they are compatible with your latest and greatest game, try and aim for the recommended specs of your games when buying new Graphics cards.
Memory of a PC plays a pivotal role in your machine’s life:
You should always be sure that you have enough, a quick judge of this would be the hard drive light. If it is constantly flashing even when you are not running programs, consider more memory (RAM). Seriously consider more RAM when you start to hear the hard drive making a clicking noise (at this point, I’d probably consider a new Hard drive too?)
A good tool to have handy is the ultimate boot cd (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
)
3 Simple Steps to a forgotten MSDOS function
Posted on April 10, 2010Good old DOS is still good for something???
Came across something quite by accident today…
In Windows XP
1. Go to your command prompt, Start->Run->type “CMD”
2. Go to your destination directory (e.g cd\sugar\tech) and type Dir > c:\filelisting.csv
3. Now go to Excel, click open, go to your C:\ and open filelisting.csv
This works for Vista and Windows 7 too, click the start button and type “CMD” in the search box.
neat huh?
Clear my Recently Run list
Posted on April 09, 2010If you frequently use the Run command in Windows XP / Vista (Start->Run / Start->Search in Vista), chances are you probably have a lot of paths displaying in the MRU (Most Recently Used) list, which appears in the Folder dropdown menu. If so, you may at some point in time want to clear that list or even edit it — especially if it contains paths that you no longer use. Here’s how:
- Launch the Registry Editor (Start->Run->Type “Regedit.exe”).
- Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RunMRU.
- One-by-one, delete each string value you don’t like by selecting it and pressing the Delete key.
- To Clear the list completely, Select them all and press the delete key.
- To Edit Individual strings, double click the one you want and change the Value Data and click Ok.
- Close Regedit. Takes immediate effect.