1) As soon as you notice you are infected, unplug your internet connection or turn off your wireless.  This will prevent the infection from spreading, and will isolate the offending program from its source.

2) Boot into Safe Mode

3) Run your favorite antivirus/anti-malware program.

This post is really about Safe Mode – how do you get there?  There are a couple of ways depending on the operating system you are using.  Here’s the Microsoft Page on the topic.

Windows XP

If XP is the only operating system installed on your computer, boot into Safe Mode with these instructions.

• If the computer is running, shut down Windows, and then turn off the power
• Wait 30 seconds, and then turn the computer on.
• Start tapping the F8 key. The Windows Advanced Options Menu appears. If you begin tapping the F8 key too soon, some computers display a “keyboard error” message.  If this happens, resstart the computer and try again.
• Ensure that the Safe mode option is selected.  If you are trying to clean a machine that is virus laden, choose Safe Mode Without Networking.
• Press Enter. The computer then begins to start in Safe mode.
• When you are finished with all troubleshooting, close all programs and restart the computer as you normally would.

If you don’t want to bother with function keys, you can use the System Configuration Utility method.

• Close all open programs.
• Click Start, Run and type MSCONFIG in the box and click OK
• The System Configuration Utility appears, On the BOOT.INI tab, Check the “/SAFEBOOT” option, and then click OK and Restart your computer when prompted.
• The computer restarts in Safe mode.
• Perform the troubleshooting steps for which you are using Safe Mode.
• When you are finished with troubleshooting in Safe mode, open MSCONFIG again, on the BOOT.INI tab,  uncheck “/SAFEBOOT” and click OK to restart your computer.  THIS STEP IS CRITICAL.  If you don’t change this back, then the computer will continue to boot in Safe Mode until you do.

Windows 7

Safe Mode in Windows 7 is basically the same as XP – use F8 to get to the Safe Mode startup screen.  MSCONFIG is slightly different – Safe Mode is called Safe Boot, but otherwise the process is the same.

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1) Stop Outlook from suggesting names in the TO field.

This is related to the .nk2 file I blogged about awhile ago.  If you don’t like that outlook suggests names for you, then you can turn this off.  Go to Tools, then Options.  From there choose the Preferences tab, then click the e-mail options button.  In the e-mail options dialog, click the Advanced E-mail Options button.  Uncheck the radio button for “Suggest names while completing To, Cc, and Bcc fields”.  Click “ok”.

2) Configure Outlook to NEVER send read receipts.

Personally, I think read receipts are annoying.  Some people love them, and who am I to judge, but I’d prefer to keep when I read your mail to myself, so I turn this “feature” off.  To do this, go to Tools, then Options.  From there choose the Preferences tab, then click the E-mail options button.  In the E-mail options window, choose the “Tracking Options” button.  Look for “Use this option to decide how to respond to requests for read receipts. Only applies to Internet Mail accounts.”   There are a couple of radio buttons – choose “never send a response”.  Click “ok”.

3) Remove the System Tray icon for new email

Another love it or hate it item.  I like this one, but when the system tray gets cluttered, out it goes.  To remove the icon, once again go to Tools, Options and from there choos the Preferences tab.  On the Preferences tab choose the E-mail Options button.  In the E-mail options dialog choose the Advanced E-mail Options button.  Under the “When new items arrive in My Inbox”, uncheck “Show an envelope icon in the notification area”.  Click “ok”.

4) Configure Outlook to empty the deleted items folder when you exit.

This is really helpful if you have limited mailbox space.  Deleted items count toward your mailbox space limits, so you either need to remember to empty your deleted items, or have outlook do it for you when you exit the application.

To configure Outlook to empty deleted items on exit, go to Tools, the Options, then choose the “Other” tab.  Under “General”, check “Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting”.  Click “ok”.  Your sysadmin will love you ;)

5) Add Holidays to your Calendar

Outlook support iCal, so there are thousands of calendars you can add to Outlook.  To add holidays from the default list, go to Tools then Options, then choose the Preferences tab.  In the Calendar section, click the Calendar Options button.  In the Calendar Options window, click the “Add Holidays” button.  Scroll through the resulting list, click the radio button next to the ones you want, then click “ok”.

Just a few things for now.  I’ll add more another time.

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Here are a few things that make Windows 7 neat.  Big thanks to Tim Sneath for most of these.

1) Windows Management – in XP, your choices on what you could do with arranging windows on your screen was somewhat limited.  You could maximize a window to take the whole screen, you could manually shrink it to the size you wanted and move it to the side, iconize it, etc.  In Windows 7, several “docking” features were introduced that make moving things around on your screen really easy.  If you press the Windows key, then the left arrow, the current window will dock to the left side of the screen.  WIN+right arrow will dock to the right, WIN+up arrow will maximize the window, WIN+down arrow will restore the window.  In addition to the WIN shortcuts, you can drag windows to the top to maximize it (double clicking the title bar still works too), or you can drag the window to the left or right to dock the window there.

On a related note, in a multi monitor setup, you can move windows from one screen to the other using WIN+SHIFT+right or left arrow.  Now were talking!

2) Get rid of the noise – Have you ever been working on a document and been annoyed that all of you other open windows are just in the way?  Press WIN-Home in Windows 7 and all windows but the current are minimized.  Press WIN-Home again to restore the windows.

3) Browser load times – This is really an IE8 tip, but I’ll include it here.  If IE is taking a long time to load, it may be because of the add-ons you are running.  Go to Tools/Manage Add Ons and you will see  a list of what IE loads at startup.  The neat thing is if you scroll to the right in the list, you can see the load times for the Add Ons.  This is a great way to see where the bottle necks are.

4) Quick start for taskbar apps – you can use WIN+1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 to quickly go to or start any of the first 5 apps in your taskbar.

5) Look at the desktop – Another helpful feature is WIN-space bar.  This combo lets you look at the desktop and see any icons or widgets you have.  You can also click on the rectangle all the way in the lower right hand corner – this is the old “show desktop” icon.

6) Additional instance of an open application – there are a couple of ways to do this, but by far the fastest is to hold the shift key while left clicking on the taskbar icon.  Way better than going through the start menu again, or right clicking and choosing to open the app.

7) Running with elevated rights.  If you hold CTL-Shift while clicking on a taskbar app, you will bring up a new instance with full administrator rights (assuming your account has permissions).  When Windows 7 is deployed in an enterprise, this will be GREAT.

8) Specialized Window switching – this one I love.  If you are like me, you have tons of windows open all the time.  In XP if you want to switch between windows you can ALT-Tab through them all, or you can click on the taskbar icon and guess which window is the one you want.  In Windows 7, you can essentially Alt-Tab through all of the open windows associated with a specific application without scrolling through every open window.  You do this by holding down the CTL key, then clicking on the taskbar icon for the application you want.  Windows will “scroll” through the open windows as you click the icon.  This is great if you want to scroll through all of your open Outlook windows, for example, but don’t want to run through everything you have open.

9) Move focus the taskbar – this is neat keyboard shortcut.  If you press WIN-T you will move focus to the taskbar.  You can then use the arrow keys to move through your taskbar apps to choose the one you want.  For keyboard shortcut junkies, this is great.

10) Open windows explorer keyboard shortcut – Press WIN+E.  This will open up and explorer window at the Computer Node.  Note that SHFT+click on the explorer icon opens at the Document Library Node.

More to come -

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What is Growl?  In their own words:

Put simply, Growl lets you know when things happen. Files finished downloading, friends came online, new email has arrived – Growl can let you know when any event occurs with a subtle notification. The rest of the time, Growl stays out of your way.

Along with letting you know when things happen, Growl also gives you full control over how you are notified and what action (if any) you want to take in response to the notification. You can choose to be alerted with a visual indicator or an audible alert, both, or neither. You can choose the type of display that is shown, whether the display remains on the screen, the importance of the notification, and even if the notification should be forwarded to another computer. You can have notifications that trigger an email, run a script, launch a program, or are read out loud.

Growl has been available as a MAC application for some time now, so their foray into Windows land is a welcome addition to help you manage your machine. All of you have Windows Update on, right?  Well now you have a tool that you can configure to notify you and/or take action on lots of other things on your machine.

How does it work?  The setup is somewhat manual, but this is a good thing, since the whole point is that Growl is unobtrusive.  Once you install the application, the software sits in your system tray waiting to be told what to do.  You download pluggins from the Growl site for the applications you want.  There are tons of apps there – Firefox, iTunes, Outlook, Gmail, even a system monitor.  You run the setup for the app you want and let Growl do the rest.  What you get is a configurable pop up window for whatever application you choose.

You get configurable reminders for things as they happen – new emails, calendar appointments, what the tune you are playing on iTunes is (they have Pandora too).  New apps are being added all the time, and there is a GNTP library and command line tools that you can use to work with almost any API.

Neat stuff.  Not perfect, but I like it so far.

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Search providers are not so nice.

Ask.com, for example, has decided it is ok to change the default keyword search provider in Firefox without asking or notifying the user.  What makes this especially annoying is that it is not a setting easily found or changed without some digging.  What is the default keyword search provider?  If you type a word into the URL window instead of a web address, most browsers assume you want to search for that word and will use a search engine to look it up.  This is called a keyword search.  The search engine your browser uses for this task is the keyword search provider.  If you don’t specify one, the browser uses the ISP’s default, which is why you can sometimes get an Optimum Online search page, or Roadrunner search page if you don’t tell the browser what you want to use – a entirely different level of annoying ;)  Not all browser’s let you make this setting, so it is very helpful to use one that does, like Firefox.

So, back to the problem – how do you change Firefox’s default keyword search provider back to something that works from Ask.com’s “search” engine?

First, you have to get to the advanced options page for Firefox’s defaults.  These settings are accessible from the about:config page, and are stored in a file called prefs.js.  In the URL entry bar, enter about:config to bring up the settings page.   CAUTION – these are advanced settings and messing with them can make your browser do things you don’t expect.  Be careful changing things!  It’s a good idea to write down what you change, or better yet, make a backup of the underlying settings file (for Vista/Windows 7, the file is here C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\profileID.default\prefs.js).

Second, use the filter to search for “keyword”.  You should see the keyword.URL entry – this is the one you want to change.  It looks like this:

Next, double click on the keyword.URL line to bring up a dialogue box into which you can enter the search engine of your choice.

Lastly, enter the URL you want.  For Google, use "http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=". There are a couple of other examples here.

That’s it -

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There are others out there, but since this is a touchy area in terms of software piracy, many of the tools are laden with viruses – be careful!!

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Google in their infinite wisdom provides an application to sync your Google Calendar to Outlook, but not your contacts.  I hope this on the way, but for now you need to use a third party app to sync your contacts (more on that later).

So, how does the Calendar sync work?  The setup instructions are here, but in a nutshell, this is what you need to do.

1. Download Google Calendar Sync at http://dl.google.com/googlecalendarsync/GoogleCalendarSync_Installer.exe
2. Once a dialog box appears, click Save File. The downloaded file should open automatically. If it doesn’t, manually open it from your browser’s download window.
3. Click through the install options and install the application on your machine.
4. Once the installation completes, the Settings window will appear
5. Enter your email address and password and select the Sync Option you prefer.
6. Click Save and you are done.

Things should start to sync right away.  You can change any of the sync options by double clicking (or right click, options) on the Google Calendar Sync icon in your system tray.  You can also force a sync by right clicking the system tray icon and choosing Sync.

So what about contacts?  There are a couple of  third party apps out there, and frankly I’ve yet to find one I really like, but gSyncit is pretty good and is cheap – $9.99.  gSyncit is nice because you can sync multiple calendar and contact lists.  The only drawback is that it’s a one man shop, so I’m concerned about long term support.  The other app that seems to have decent buzz is OggSync.  I found this one confusing, but maybe I’m missing something.  My hope is that Google solves this quickly so that I don’t have to rely on third party apps.

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Every time you enter a new email address when composing an email that address will be added to the nk2 file so that the next time you type the name, the auto-complete feature will try to guess what you are typing and fill in the details for you.  Very handy.

There are a couple of things that you may be thinking you’d like to do with this information.

1) Move the data from computer to computer

2) Edit the entries in the file

3) Reset the file so that is starts from scratch

4) Turn Auto-complete off

All of these are simple enough to do.

1) Move the data from computer to computer.

The file is profile specific, so you need to be sure that the profile exists on both machines.  Once that is done, it’s simply a matter of copying the file from one machine to the other.  Again, the location of the file is in:

drive:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook profile name.nk2

If you have a new outlook profile that is the destination for the file, just rename the file to the new profile name.  This means that you can copy the same file to multiple users, just rename the file for each profile.

2) Edit the entries in the file.

This is a little trickier because Microsoft does not want you to do this, and I’d recommend making a backup copy of the file before messing around with it.  There are several utilites you can download that will let you edit the file.  Nk2View is a decent one, and is free.  Nk2Info is also free and claims to be able to repair the nk2 file.  Ingressor offers a commercial application to manage and repair the nk2 file.

You can easily remove an entry from the list – simply start typing the name you want to remove, then when the name appears in the suggestion list, highlight it using your arrow keys, then press the delete key to remove it.

3) Reset the file so that all entries are removed.

Microsoft describes the process here.  Basically, you can either flat out delete the file (make sure Outlook is closed first) or you can rename it so that you have a backup.  If the file does not exist it will be recreated when Outlook is restarted.

4) Turn Autocomplete off.

If you don’t want outlook to suggest names for you, you can turn this feature off.  In Outlook:

• Go to Tools, then Options
• From the Options tab, choose the E-mail options button
• Click Advanced E-mail options
• Uncheck “Suggest names while completing To, Cc, and Bcc fields.

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Windows update was not working at all – one if the viruses had put in their own DNS entries so that when you click on Windows Update, you got sent to Google.  It had also removed DNS entries for all of the update sites for the major anti-virus and anti-spy-ware sites.  Once that was corrected I was able to run several virus and malware scans with updated software.  There were some viruses (50 or so) that were cleaned, several reg hacks that were fixed and the drives were de-fraged, but I’m still having issues.

Right now, there are two problems left.  First, some of the recent windows updates won’t install (sp3 for example).  The installation starts, goes for a few minutes then I get a pop up that says “installation cancelled”.  Frustrating, but I’m assuming this is a virus I have not eradicated completely yet.  The second problem is that the machine will randomly freeze.  I don’t know if this is hardware related (heat? disk? memory?) or part of a virus.  This was the initial complaint from the owner, by the way – that the machine would randomly freeze.

I’m using Zone Alarm, Ad-Aware, IO-Bit, and malwarebytes.  Next up, McAfee.

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I love the “Send To” right-click menu item.  It allows you to quickly move files to helpful places – to an email, to a CD/DVD for writing, etc.  The only problem is that I’d like to add to the list of destinations so that I can move files to my frequently used locations easily.  

To add a destination to the Send To list, go to c:\documents and settings\(your user name)\sendto.

This is a hidden folder, so you may have to change your tools\folder options settings to “show hidden files and folders”.

Then just copy a shortcut to the destination you want (directory or program) and you are good to go.  I’ve added frequently used network file locations and Textpad.  It makes simple, repetitive tasks so much faster.

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