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Is that Windows Process Legitimate or a Virus?

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Start the Windows Task Manager at any point of time and you’ll find that dozens of processes are running in your system. Some of these process names are obvious – if there’s iexplore.exe in the list, you have Internet Explorer open on your desktop – but other processes like csrss.exe or dwm.exe will often make no sense to most of us.

Is that Windows Process a Virus?

The first thing that will help you determine if any particular process is a legitimate Windows process or a virus, is the location of the executable itself. For instance, a process like explorer.exe should be running from your Windows folder and not anywhere else.

Windows Task Manager - Process Location

To confirm, open task manager, go to View –> Select Columns and select “Image Path Name” to add a location column to your task manager. If you spot any suspicious-looking directory here, it may be a good idea to investigate that process further.

NoVirusThanks, an online virus scanning service, offers a portable desktop uploader that will make it easy for you to check if any of the Windows processes are legitimate or a virus /worm in disguise.

When you run this tool, it will automatically generate a list of all your running processes just like Windows Task Manager. You can right-click on any process name and upload* the corresponding file online for virus analysis.

Scan Windows Processes for Virus

Once the file is uploaded , NoVirusThanks will instantly scan it against a dozen or so popular anti-virus programs including AVG, Comodo and Kaspersky so chance are low that a bad file with go undetected. Here’s a sample report generated by the tool.

Other than Windows Processes, you may also send your loaded DLLs, driver files and start-up programs for analysis online with a simple right-click.

Another tool that can sometimes help you detect bad processes is Microsoft’s Process Explorer. Launch the program (it requires no installation) and check “Verify Image Signatures” under Options. Now go to View –> Select Columns add add “Verified Signer” as one one the columns.

Windows Process Explorer

If the “Verified Signer” status of a process is listed as “Unable to Verify,” you may well give that process a second look. Not all the good Window processes will carry a Verified signature tag but none of the bad ones either. Thanks MSIGeek for this tip.

[*] If you have trouble sending your Windows process file for scanning, switch to the settings tab of the uploader and change the server from scanner.novirusthanks.org to scanner2.novirusthanks.org (or vice-versa).

Related: Recommended Anti-Virus Software

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This article, titled Is that Windows Process Legitimate or a Virus?, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Antivirus, Software.



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Watch Videos on your PC without any Interruption

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Video on Computer

When watching web videos or DVD movies on your computer, your video playback may be interrupted in many different ways.

For instance, the screen saver can activate itself or the computer screen may enter sleep mode if you don’t touch the mouse or the keyboard for a long period (because you are busy watching the video). Sometimes, pop-up notifications from IMs and other programs, that are running in the background, can also interrupt playback.

You can easily turn-off these distractions through Windows Settings but the problem with this approach is that the changes will stay even when you are done watching the video. To give you an example, if you disable the screensaver before hitting play, it will stay in the disabled state forever unless you re-enable it manually.

Therefore, instead of fiddling with your existing configuration, you may consider using utilities that will also disable all these distracting elements, but only temporarily.

Some media players are start enough and will automatically turn off the screen saver during video playback. If you are using VLC, go to Video settings and check the option that says “Disable screensaver.” In Windows Media Player, go to Player options and uncheck the box that says “Allow screen saver during playback.”

If your media player doesn’t have such a feature, you can use this excellent utility called Mouse Jiggler to prevent the screensaver from becoming active. It moves the mouse pointer back and forth periodically so Windows will never go into an idle state and therefore the screensaver won’t show up.

The next task is keep your monitor awake during the video playback. Mouse Jiggler should care of this part as well or you may try Caffeine – it’s like Jiggler but simulates keystrokes instead of mouse movements.

There’s nothing to install or configure – just download and run Caffeine and your system will stay awake as long as you like. Double-click the Caffeine icon in the task bar and it will disable itself – all this without making any changes to your system register or power plan.

Related tip: How to Skip Trailers on DVDs

If you have too many apps running on your system, they are consuming system resources and some of them, especially the chat clients, may surprise you during playback with notifications. You can either right click-click in the task bar to selectively close these apps or get a utility like CloseAll that will automatically close all running applications with a click.

CloseAll closes all running apps by default (including itself) but you can also configure it to ignore certain applications by adding a simple exclusion list to the CloseAll.exe command line. Here’s an example:

CloseAll.exe -x="explorer.exe|firefox.exe|outlook.exe|dropbox.exe"

An excellent alternative to CloseAll is SmartClose – it will not only close all the running programs with a click but can also restore all these the programs once you are done watching the video.

It does this by capturing a snapshot of all the running process and services. If there’s a particular program or Windows Service that you would not like the utility to close, just add it to the protected list. The default settings are good enough though you can always choose the location where these system snapshots should be stored.

Finally, if you like watching videos while simultaneously working on other windows /tasks, check out Always on Top – this is again a free utility that will help you stick your media player window on top of other program windows. Launch the program, select the media player window and press Alt+Space bar to put it on top.

Also see: Watch Internet Videos on your TV

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This article, titled Watch Videos on your PC without any Interruption, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Windows, Youtube, Software.



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Chrome gets thumbs-up from India’s Biggest Star

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Internet users spend a majority of their time inside a web browser yet a small percentage of them, discounting the tech-savvy crowd, may actually know what a browser is.

When a Google employee posed this question to a random set of people in the busy Times Square area of New York, less than 8% of them could get the answer right.

KBC, which is the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire quiz show, witnessed something slightly similar yesterday.

A contestant had this question on her screen — Which of the following is not a web browser? The choices were Firefox, Opera, Facebook and Google Chrome. You might find this easy but the young lady, who was a doctor by profession, could only answer this after taking an audience poll.

Big B likes Chrome

While the lady most definitely missed these print ads for Chrome that recently appeared in most Indian newspapers, Google’s web browser got some real praise from the host Amitabh Bachchan himself who said — “Chrome is a new browser, extremely beautiful and it runs very fast.”

The marketing team at Google India must be feeling lucky here because this surprise endorsement for Chrome comes from India’s biggest star on a hugely popular TV show and that too during prime time.

Here’s a video recording of the show (jump to 5m 18s).

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This article, titled Chrome gets thumbs-up from India’s Biggest Star, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Amitabh Bachchan, Google Chrome, India.



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Print Files on Linux Remotely using Dropbox

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linux printIf you have a printer attached to a Linux machine, you can easily send print jobs to that printer from another remote computer using Dropbox (see similar solutions for Windows and Mac).

The idea is that you create a shell script to monitor a local Dropbox folder. As soon as a new file is added to that folder from a remote computer (or mobile phone), the script will send the file to the attached printer. Once the the printing job is completed, the file is removed from the incoming queue.

The implementation is easy. Kurt Granroth sent me this improved* shell script that you can use in any Linux environment. You only have to setup a cron job against this script such that it runs after every ‘n’ seconds (or minutes).

       1: --- dropprint.sh ---
       2:
       3: #!/bin/bash
       4:
       5: export PrintQueue="/root/Dropbox/PrintQueue";
       6:
       7: IFS=$'\n'
       8:
       9: for PrintFile in $(/bin/ls -1 ${PrintQueue}) do
      10:
      11:    lpr -r ${PrintQueue}/${PrintFile};
      12:
      13: done
      14:
      15: --- dropprint.sh ---

To initiate a print job, simply add some files to the PrintQueue Folder in Dropbox from either a remote computer or upload them via your mobile phone. Within seconds, the script will start printing the files to your local printer.

If you have multiple printers attached to Linux computer, use the –p parameter to specify the printer name.

Also, if you are on Ubuntu, you may use "sudo apt-get install gnome-schedule" (Gnome Schedule) to setup a scheduled task for the script with recurrence set to "every minute."

What the script does?

Here’s an annotated version of the script, courtesy Kurt again, that will help you easily understand how the script works:

1. #!/bin/bash

Specific bash directly since its feature set and behaviors are consistent everywhere

2. export PrintQueue

It’s necessary to ‘export’ in order for the environment variable to show up in the later $() subshell

3. IFS=$’\n’

By default, spaces will wreak havoc with the ‘for / in’ loop. Resetting the field separator handily works around that

4. /bin/ls -1

Directly use /bin/ls to bypass the common color-enabling aliases. Use -1 to force all files into one column. There’s no need to search for the beginning of the file name using this

5. lpr -r

The -r option deletes the file after it successfully prints. This is better than doing an ‘rm’ later since it only does the delete on a successful print.

[*] The previous version is available here for reference.

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This article, titled Print Files on Linux Remotely using Dropbox, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Dropbox, Linux, Printing, Software.



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Bookmarklet Turns Any Webpage Into a Whiteboard

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Social sites like Twitter and Facebook have made it easy for you to quickly share news articles, blog posts, etc. around but wouldn’t it be nice if you could also add some of your own commentary to the page before sharing it with the world?

Well, there’s a new and interesting web app called markup.io that can help you here. It instantly turns any web page into a virtual whiteboard where you can add text, draw shapes, arrows or even do some freehand drawings. Here’s a quick demo:

Related: More tools for annotating web pages.

While you are on a site, hit the markup.io button on your browser bookmarks toolbar and it will float a set of drawing tools one that page. You can scribble over the page now and when you hit publish, all your drawings and annotations are saved to a unique URL that you can now pass along in your social circle.

If you make a mistake, you can use the usual keyboard shortcuts — ctrl+z will undo your previous action while the backspace key will remove the element from the page.

Markup.io is available in the form of a bookmarklet so there’s no need to download or install anything and it’s compatible with all browsers except for IE 6 (which you shouldn’t be using anyway). Thanks Richard.

Also see: Collection of useful Bookmarklets

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This article, titled Bookmarklet Turns Any Webpage Into a Whiteboard, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Annotate, Bookmarklets, Whiteboard, Internet.



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Indian Rupee Sign Added to Unicode Standard

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rupee unicodeThe Indian Government and the Unicode Consortium deserves to be praised for getting this through so quickly.

The new design for the Rupee currency symbol was approved in July this year and within a span of less than three months, the symbol has been made part of the official Unicode Standard.

The Unicode Consortium, the organization that is responsible for maintaining the Unicode Standard, today formally announced Unicode Version 6.0 which includes some 2000+ new characters and one among them is the official Rupee currency sign for India.

It may however take some time before you can type the Rupee sign in your documents just like the $ or € symbols as none of the major font families, except for DejaVu fonts, have been upgraded to support Unicode Standard version 6.0.0 yet. You can use this page to determine if any of the fonts installed on your machine are capable of rendering the new Rupee character.

Once the families are upgraded, you’ll be able to use the HTML code ₹ in your web pages to display the new Rupee symbol or by pressing the Alt key followed by 20B9 in word processors.

The Indian IT department had initially proposed that the character code U+0971 be assigned to the Indian Rupee sign, as the code was within the range of Devnagri characters, but the Unicode Consortium approved the code U+20B9 which is the same range that is used for other currency symbols like Euro, Franc and Peso.

Thanks Divya Manian for the tip.

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This article, titled Indian Rupee Sign Added to Unicode Standard, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Rupee, Unicode, India.



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The Easiest Way to Setup Email Reminders

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email reminder

Do you ever want to email something to yourself so that you can remember it later?

It happens to me all the time especially when I am on a mobile phone. For instance, if I come across a cool site that I would want to check out later from the desktop, I just send the URL to my own email account. If I have an idea for a blog or need to remember something, I jot it down in a message and email it to myself.

Now there are quite a few apps that can help you schedule email based reminders, including Google Calendar, but if you prefer to have something really simple that you can use from your email program itself and one that requires no setup, check out FollowUpThen.

With FollowUpThen, you can quickly setup custom email reminders using email itself. Just send a message to time-interval@followupthen.com and the service will send you a copy of the same email message after the specified time interval.

Here are some sample date formats that you may use while setting up email reminders:

  • 6pm@followupthen.com (get a reminder at 6 PM exact)
  • 6pmTomorrow@followupthen.com (get a reminder at 6 PM tomorrow)
  • 10minutes@followupthen.com (get a reminder after 10 minutes)
  • 3days@followupthen.com (remind me after 3 days)
  • tuesday@followupthen.com  (remind me the next Tuesday)
  • nov29@followupthen.com (setup email reminders for a specific date)

The service recognizes time zones from the email headers so if you setup a reminder for 11 AM, you’ll be reminded as per your time zone. You may also setup recurring email reminders with FollowUpThen though an online calendar would be a more suitable option for such tasks.

Related: Send Emails in the Future

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This article, titled The Easiest Way to Setup Email Reminders, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Email, Gmail, Internet.



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This PDF Reader can also Write PDF Files

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If all you want to do is read PDF files on your desktop, your existing copy of Adobe Reader is just perfect for the job. The software lets you view and print PDFs but you’ll have to upgrade to Adobe Acrobat in case you would like to have the ability to create PDF files offline.

There are some excellent PDF Printer Drivers (like doPDF) that don’t cost anything and can create PDF files but they only do half the job – you’ll still need a separate program, like Adobe Reader, for viewing those PDF files locally.

Nitro PDF Reader

Nitro Reader gives you the best of both worlds. It’s a PDF Reader for Windows that you may also use for creating PDFs from Office documents, web pages and virtually any other Windows application that has the print button.

If you would to convert a batch of files into PDFs, simply drag them all to the Nitro Reader icon on your desktop and they’ll be converted into PDFs almost instantly. It can’t get any easier than this.

Other than PDF generation, Nitro Reader offers some other useful features as well. For instance, you can import an image of your signature into Nitro and turn it into a stamp. The next time you want to sign a PDF file, simply add that stamp using Nitro Reader itself.

The software has a useful “Extract Images” feature that you may use to extract and export all images from a PDF into individual files. This is handy if you want to re-use any of the images from that PDF but don’t have access to the document from which that PDF file was originally created.

Nitro PDF Reader is available for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 (x86 and x64 editions).

create pdf files

Related: A guide to online PDF tools

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This article, titled This PDF Reader can also Write PDF Files, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Downloads, Pdf, Software.



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