In general, I have made it a practice to rely on one dependable Internet Security Tool for the Real Time protection, and I occasionally use some online Malware Scanners to scan my system. It is always safer to take a second opinion a dependable tool, because none of the tool is perfect, and can never be perfect. It is a constantly evolving system. Better security tools and being developed and with them malware artists are developing more lethal and smart malware.

There are many great Online File Scanners for Malware and Virus. The merits and demerits of using a Free Online Malware Scanner are…

Merits:

• Fast and Easy to use : Generally speaking, these online scanners are lean and thin, and so fast and easy.
• Always up to date: You do not have to worry about updating them regularly. They are always up-to-date with latest threat signatures and  definitions.

Demerits:

• Less Options and Features: They generally lack the options and features provided by their full licensed versions.
• No Malware Removal: Generally these scanners just provide the scanning, but do not remove the malware.

6 Great Free Online Malware and Virus Scanners

• Panda NanoScan
• McAfee FreeScan
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• Trend Micro’s HouseCall
• ESET Online Scanner
• Kaspersky

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For instance, Windows Processes. There are so many Windows Processes running in the background that most of us seldom care to think about them. But a look at the running Windows Processes reveals a lot about the current behavior of your PC. If you are careful, then it can tell a lot.

But there is a small utility, which can help you a great deal here. Welcome to XP-AntiSpy.

This utility is developed and supported by Chris individually. Xp-AntiSpy is a little utility that lets you disable some built-in update and authentication ‘features’ in WindowsXP. In fact, it does much than simply controlling / disabling Windows Processes and tasks. It makes Windows more transparent and controllable. You get to know, what is running in the background, and allows you to control them from one place and that too in in simple, understandable language.

For example, there’s a service running in the background which is called ‘Automatic Updates’. I don’t know what this service transfers from my machine to other machines on the Internet, especially the MS ones. So I play it safe and disable such functions. If you like, you can even disable these functions manually, by going through the System and checking or un-checking some checkboxes. This will take you approximately half an hour. But why waste time when a little neat utility can do the same in 1 minute? This utility was successfully tested by lots of users, and was found to disable all the known ‘Suspicious’ Functions in Windows XP. It’s customizable, but comes up with the Default settings, which are recommended.

And the best part is, this utility is totally FREE.

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A keyboard shortcut (or accelerator key, shortcut key, hot key, key binding, keybinding, key combo, etc.) is a key or set of keys that performs a predefined function. These functions can often be done via some other, more indirect mechanism, such as using a menu, typing a longer command, and/or using a pointing device. By reducing such sequences to a few keystrokes, this can often save the user time, hence “shortcut”.

We use many hotkeys like CTRL+C, CTRL+V etc., but most of us use only a limited set of hotkeys. We do not use many of them, because we want to avoid the hassles of remembering them. And more often than not, these shortcut keys are not globally available for all programs we use on our system.

If it is possible to easily define shortcut keys, then the life would be a little simpler.

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How to define Hotkeys KeyBoard of your own

I am sure there must be many ways to define hotkeys, but I have just found a freeware utility, which can define hotkeys like a breeze.

Welcome to HotKeyMan.

Ever wanted to setup personal shortcuts for often used tasks to be globally available in all open programs? With this small freeware program you can do just that. It is easy to set up the program for your personal needs. A simple guide will help you setup the initial hotkey settings the first time the program is started. After that, the hotkeys can be used all over Windows. You can define hotkeys to manipulate window state, close a running application, open a document, save screen capture to file, exit Windows or send keystrokes to the active window.

Use it to believe it. You sure will love this neat way to define hotkeys.

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Many students, small time professionals, models, photographers, WAHM require to make their online portfolios of their work to display their skills. Many of them do not have the time, skill or money to develop a full-fledged website to showcase their skills and they are on the look out for a simple and FREE portfolio maker for it.

WeeFolio is a service, which answers your query of How to make a portfolio that is simple, easy, quick, and most importantly, FREE. This online portfolio maker is only for the total beginners. If you are on the look out for a feature rich solution or if you need to display a large catalog, then off-course this will not suit you.

.

SignUp is just a one minute process. You just have to have an email address and that’s it. No confirmation email to click. And you can then add list upto 10 of your creations to your online portfolio.

But remember, the service is still in its BETA and yet to be officially launched.

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Today’s PCs are loaded with lots of softwares, which require regular updating them with the latest release provided by the developer of that software application. This software updating is also important to keep you safe from the potential software vulnerabilities and threats. Programs such as anti-virus, personal firewall, and anti-spyware are great for protection, but they do not protect you from software vulnerabilities, for which you have to do a software update scan and update your programs.

But you never know, which software is now old and has a latest release available for download.

How to do a Software Update Scan

There are lots of tools available on Internet for this purpose, some free and some paid. Secunia PSI is one such FREE software update scanning tool, which helps you secure your computer from software vulnerabilities. This great web tool, also searches for the software, which have now gone dead, and lets you decide whether you want to keep it or remove it.

Overall a nice useful and FREE webtool.

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The answer is easy Adobe’s Dreamweaver and Microsoft’s FrontPage will definitely rule the roost. There have been a plenty of other applications also, but not very promising.

Recently, a new Mozilla based web authoring tool KompoZer has been released, which is free heir to the Mozilla Composer legacy and updated for today’s technology.

If you used Internet way back in 2003, you would remember that Mozilla used to ship the Mozilla Application Suite, which comprised of a browser, email/news client, IRC chat client, and HTML page editor. Later on, the first three components were started to get shipped as individual applications in the form of Firefox, Thunderbird, and ChatZilla. However the last component was sort of discontinued. The same platform has been used for KompeZer. It is available for download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

For the creation of a web page in Kompozer, you don’t have to delve deep into coding etc. Web page creation is just like writing a word document; simple text inputting, copy paste, insert images and you are through. It also has a built-in FTP client and a CSS editor.

Overall, a nice free web page creator for novices.

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These are all free, and besides rectifying the PC problems remotely, they can be used for collaborative working on with your friends and colleagues. They can also be used, if you want to access files on your PC from a remote location.

So, here we go,

Screen-Sharing and Remote-Collaboration Web tools

1. CrossLoop: Full functionality, simple and clean user interface and fast. I like it. Somewhere I read that it has been included in the best 10 downloads of the year, probably by CNET, (Update courtesy Techblissonline.com: PCWorld)

2. Mikogo: It uses industry-leading 256-AES end-to-end encryption and so is secure. It can be used by upto 10 persons simultaneously. Designed nicely, with a very user friendly platform.

3. TeamViewer: Full featured application. Many modes, the initiator can decide the level of sharing, whether full access or part. Data transfer is encrypted and secure.

4. Yuuguu: A useful application, for both Mac and Windows, and offers full functionalities of screen sharing, collaborative working and also remote access. It also has a chat functionality, which you can use while you are giving or taking help from somebody else. What’s more, it allows you to keep a record of all the conversation.

5. Unyte Lyte: A relatively simple web tool, which doesn’t offer any remote control feature. But a nice advantage is that you can itegrate it into your Skype client.

Besides, these screen sharing tools, there are other web tools also which give you remote access.

1. SoonR: It extends the remote access facility to your mobile also.

2. FolderShare: It supports both Windows and Mac. It si a free utility from Microsoft and with it you can share files upto 2GB in size. It has also been mentioned here.

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Website Heatmaps, an often heard but not-that-often used web tool to analyze your website or blog. Heatmap is a simple concept to analyze the most click-able segments of a web page, with a purpose of optimizing it for better revenue generation. Most of the webmasters, specially those handling small and medium size websites and blogs, know its importance, yet often overlook it, just because of unavailability of an affordable and reliable heatmap builder for their websites. This post is an attempt to let its readers benefit from this concept and introduce some cool free website heatmap generator services.

But first things first…

What is a website heatmap

Heatmap is a term, which has been borrowed by the Internet community from Molecular Biology, where it represent the level of expression of many genes across a number of comparable samples (e.g. cells in different states, samples from different patients) as they are obtained from DNA micro-arrays. [Source: Wiki]

However in reference to websites, a website heatmap is a schematic representation of a web page through multi-colored areas, which show where people look the most on a web page. For an publisher or advertiser it tells you the place your ads are likely to be most effective.

Importance of a website heatmap

Ever webmaster thinks that he has created a perfect design. But it is often just a perception. The perfection of a web page design can only be judged by a web tool, which is able to gather information about what the readers of a web page are actually seeing, and more importantly clicking. Since the purpose of every web page is to give maximum exposure to its content, it becomes highly important to place your content in such a location, which generates maximum impact.

This aspects becomes highly critical in case of websites or blogs, whose purpose if revenue generation through clicks. The web master will like to know, which are the hot spots on their web page and where people click most.

How to build a website heatmap

There are many heatmap building services available. But most of them are paid services, and if they offer you free service, it is limited to only few features. Two of the most popular heatmap generator applications are FuseStats and CrazyEgg but they charge for their service handsomely. Although they also offer free services, with limited features / traffic, but these limits are so stringent that websites within that limit rarely bother about heatmaps.

The free heatmap generators

However, I have come across at least two services, which are free and give satisfactory results for medium sized websites.

First one is ClickHeat, which is an open source program. You just have to upload their code to your site and follow the simple instructions on screen to install.

A basic common feature with all the three heatmap building services mentioned till now, is that they capture the actual clicks in real time. You have to set up the installation, and wait patiently for the clicks to happens. Each click sends the data to the server, and after a definite period / or visitor counts, the report is generated for you to analyze. Obviously this method to build website heatmap is more accurate, but time consuming.

Yet another method is based on some pre-defined algorithms, which simulate the human behavior. A popular and free heatmap generator service based upon this concept is Feng Gui. This service employs the neuroscience concept of “saliency” and claims to “simulate human visual attention and create an attention heatmap”. If you read their blog and their website, it seems their is a high degree of confidence in their algorithm as far as the accuracy is concerned. However, it would have been nice, if they had given some actual data on how close their simulated results are with the actual heat maps. This would have surely increased the confidence level of the users.

How to use Feng-Gui

Use of this service is extremely simple. Just go to their website and enter your URL address. Your website heatmap is generated within 30 seconds. See the heatmap of my blog Web Tools and Tips. Sometimes, the service is not able to load your webpage, in that case your can take a snap shot / screen capture of it and upload it as an image so as to quickly generate the heatmap.

Firefox Addon for Heatmap

And now comes the simplest of them all.

Feng-Gui also provides you a firefox addon, just for building a heat map of any web page. This is real cool. That’s why I love Firefox. You can install the firefox addon for heatmap here.

After reading this long post, if you still want to have more information, then DazzlinDonna has written a decent analysis of 5 Heatmap Site Analytics Solutions, which you may like to check out.

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In the previous post, we had written about a quick tip to hide your files and folders from your colleagues and other users of your computer. The basic premise of that tip was to create an invisible folder in your PC, which will be like any other folder, but there will be no name and no icon will be seen. So if somebody else explores the directory, that folder will not be seen and hence your files and folders within that invisible folder will remain protected.

However that method is not a foolproof method, and in case your colleagues also are reading my blog then they will also be knowing this tip and thus can access your folder easily.

A better approach will be to encrypt your sensitive files, with the help of some encryption web tool. There are plenty of them available. We would like to introduce you to four of the free file encryption utilities, which can easily encrypt your files with the click of a mouse.

FileVault: It is primarily meant for a Macintosh computer. It can be found in the Mac OS X v10.3 (”Panther”) operating system and later. It works by encrypting your home directory using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm with a key, which is derived from the user’s login password. The best part is that the recipient doesn’t need any software to open these files, just a password, and therefore, this utility is useful if you want to send it to somebody over the Internet, who is not having this tool in his PC.

TrueCrypt: TrueCrypt is a free open source on-the-fly encryption (OTFE) program for Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista and Linux. It creates a “file-hosted container” which consists of an encrypted volume with its own file system, contained within a regular file, which can then be mounted as if it were a real disk. TrueCrypt also supports device-hosted volumes, which can be created on either an individual partition or an entire disk.

AxCrypt: AxCrypt is a free, open source file encryption application for Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2K/XP integrated into Windows Explorer. Its current cryptographic primitives are AES-128 and SHA-1.

Kruptos: Use Kruptos to encrypt files on your PC or a portable storage device. With this tool, you can also create files that self-decrypt. It uses 128 bit blowfish encryption to encrypt your files or folders which then can only be accessed with the correct password, so that only you can have access to them. You can even select to disguise the newly encrypted files name for further privacy.

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As a competition to it, Microsoft also has its own version with the name Windows Live Pack, which brings Windows Live services to your desktop. There are various services like Family Safety suite, web photo gallery, online storage service, Windows Live Writer blogging tool, and some more included in it. You can choose which services to get. The new ‘Mail’ program, which is also part of Windows Live pack, lets you connect to Hotmail and other email accounts.

I will here make a specific mention of Windows Live Writer, which is one of the most useful program, I have come across for writing my blog posts in an offline environment. There are also several useful plugins available for Live writer, which enhance your blogging experience.

Overall, a nice competition for Google Pack, but still, Google pack is a winner for me, specially with its unbeatable application like Google Earth.

Independent Thoughts:
The best web hosting service is the one that takes out time to review the particulars of the site. This is done in order to figure out if cheap web hosting would be enough for the site, or is the web design too complicated for it. Once done with deciding webhosting domain, one can proceed with other important matters like features suiting wireless internet service. Considering all of this is a part of search engine optimization and domain name registration.

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