Windows Vista contains a handy hint mechanism for helping you recall you password if you’ve forgotten it. But what about if you’ve completely forgotten both your password and the interpretation of the hint. In that situation your work and email will be locked inside your computer (Well, ok, probably your administrator could recover it for you or reset your password). Fortunately, Windows Vista still offers a solution to this problem. Note that this only work before you actually forget your password; in other words, you have to make the disk while you still have access to your computer. In this case Vista will be saving your password to a usb disk or cd that you will insert in case you forget your password. Should I mention that you should put this key in a save place! Although the key is not stored in clear text inside your cd or usb key, it can be read by someone with some serious know-how.
To create this disk: Read the rest of this entry »

VNC is considered to be an insecure protocol. The password is sent using fairly weak encryption, and the rest of the session is not encrypted at all. For that reason, when using VNC over an untrusted network or internet, I recommend you tunnel it over SSH.

To forward VNC port 5900 on localhost to remote host port 5900

ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 vncserver

If your ssh server is listening on other port like: 222

ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 vncserver -p 222

The same procedure can be done on a window$ machine using putty Read the rest of this entry »

Your PC can get to data in RAM hundreds of times faster than it can fetch something from the Hard-Drive. If you are like me and have open at least 10 different application at the same time, plus playing around with 2 or 3 virtual machine, which, by the way, consume lots of memory space; also, all the usual application running in the background, your memory will run out pretty fast, and your PC will start to drag pretty soon. So Vista has a little tool called “ReadyBoost” that pretty much lets you use a USB Flash Drive as additional memory. Well, You might be wondering; what happens if someone pulls out the drive and tries to snoop out your data; well, don’t worry Vista encrypts the data on the Flash Drive. Read the rest of this entry »

Disk time percentage and disk queue length

IT professionals think of hard disk corruption or inadequate disk space as the cause of most system performance problems, but disk time is an equally important performance factor. Disk time is represented as a percentage of time that the hard disk is in use. If the hard disk is running 80 percent of the time, for example, you can be sure that system performance is suffering.

Another factor to consider is the average disk queue length, which refers to the number of processes that are waiting to use the hard disk. Using the disk time percentage in conjunction with the disk queue length will tell you not only how much the hard disk is being used but also if the heavy usage is a problem. For example, if the disk time is 40 percent but the average disk queue length has a factor of two or less, then the hard disk is keeping up with the demand that’s being placed on it. Read the rest of this entry »

Well after moving on to Vista, there are a few features of Windows XP that I miss. One of them is the Backup Utility of XP. Although Vista has its own backup utility, it has some disadvantages over xp NTbackup utility. Lets say you want to create a backup of just one folder containing images and docuements that you just finished working on. How would you do this in Vista? Well you can’t. Vista will not allow you to create backup of individual files, and here is where the flexibility of XP Backup Utility comes in handy. Another reasone is the fact that you can’t backup EFS protected files in Vista. So here is a step by step article on how to restore your NTbackup utility from XP to Vista. Read the rest of this entry »

Just the other day, I deleted my recycle bin on accident. It took me awhile to find it but this is how you recover the recycle bin if you delete it from your desktop.

1- Right-click on the Windows Vista desktop and choose Personalize.

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Ophcrack live cd is by far the best windows password recovering/cracking tool out there, because of its simplicity and how fast it cracks relative complex passwords, it cracked my 11 character password in less than 3 minutes, and if you are a Network Administrator or computer users in general, you could absolutely appreciate the usefulness of this tool. The tool is open source and free to download and use (at your own risk )… the technology it uses for breaking the windows password is “Rainbow Tables”  and is a Time-Memory trade off. An easy way of describing this would be that Tables of possible Hashes are precomputed so that you can iteratively compare the windows hashes to precomputed bits and piece together the hash and its value more quickly than brute-force guessing. Well in this article we will go over the process of cracking a Windows XP password. (The process is the same for Vista except you would download the Vista live cd). Read the rest of this entry »