The Pinged Hobbit

Remote support utilities are one of the things I find very useful in my normal working life. I’ve spoken before about Teamviewer and Logmein Rescue. It’s so much easier to support a client when you can see what they are seeing on their screen. The biggest problem with both Teamviewer and Logmein Rescue is their cost. There not particularly expensive, but if your a small IT company with a few distributed clients it might be too much of a stretch to your budget to afford them. Ammy Admin is a free utility that provides much of the functionality of the paid for apps, but at no cost. Continue reading »

Yesterday I talked about a method used by some companies to trick people into downloading and installing some software on to their computer that was less than good. Lets face it, there are a lot of people out there looking to download something on to people’s computers that is less than good. Some are relatively harmless but annoying like the MBS Payment and Windows Antivirus 2008, but others are rather malicious pieces of code. I like a lot of other people probably get asked to look at computers quite often that are running some malicious code on start up. This never used to be a problem Things that ran at startup used to be easy to locate, it was enough to open up msconfig and scroll down the list of processes running and disable the one you want. Of course things evolve, after a while the people creating these programs found ways to start their programs with out showing them on this list. They created registry keys that were hard to find.

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Any one thats been reading my past entries may know I dabble in a little software development here and there. Some times for my own amusement but quite often it’s for a reason relevant to work. Recently we have been developing a new application to talk the network connected devices we use. It constantly polls the devices for fresh information as long as the communication software is running somewhere on the network and adds this information to the database. Continue reading »