program

You may have noticed that the Gazette has been a little late in delivery in the past week and a half. Usually I write the newsletter the night before it is scheduled to go out, in order to have it ready for your morning coffee -- at least, for those ... of you who live in North America. I mentioned in a previous newsletter that I'm redesigning the site. This week I finished and tested a preliminary layout, but it still didn't quite look right -- so I've decided to scrap it and start over. I'm hoping to have the new design ready by next week (keep your fingers crossed!). More changes: additions to ... (view more)

Finally! After all the trouble and hassle with the last host, I think I've finally found a permanent home for the infopackets.com web site and virtual-host friends who are sharing this dedicated server. A brief, but very interesting (hellish) ... synopsis entails: Some time near the end of October 2002: It was decided that I needed to get another dedicated server to handle all the traffic that comes through the infopackets web server. October 30, 2002: After being reassured by a "knowledgeable" web-hosting sales representative that infopackets.com and its high demand for bandwidth could ... (view more)

Last week, Stan L. Jr. sent in a question which asked what should be done when a program attempts to suddenly "call home" and request a connection to the Internet. Recall: " A few days ago, I was using my computer when all the sudden, I noticed that ... some program decided that it wanted to access the Internet. I tried to cancel the request to connect to the Internet, but the bugger kept coming back asking for a connection. I then decided to try the "3 finger salute" by pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL at the same time to bring up Task Manager, but no programs were listed here ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Stan L. write s: " Dear Dennis, A few days ago, I was using my computer when all the sudden, I noticed that some program decided that it wanted to access the Internet. I tried to cancel the request to connect to the Internet, but ... the bugger kept coming back asking for a connection. I then decided to try the "3 finger salute" by pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL at the same time to bring up Task Manager, but no programs were listed here that seemed to be "out of the ordinary" that might have been attempting to access the Internet. Is there a program which ... (view more)

Last week's Visitor Feedback question asked, "How how can I tell what programs are taking all my space in my hard drive?" My first thought to this question was to use a minimalist approach, because I believe in "doing things myself" -- providing ... that the proposed solution is relatively simple. If you recall, my answer to the above question was straightforward: right-click on a folder and display its folder Properties, and have Windows display its disk usage. This gives a very general idea as to how much space was being used by an installed program. Fact: Programs that are ... (view more)

Yesterday's Visitor Feedback of the Gazette addressed why two program files ( internat.exe and ptsnoop.exe ) might be present in the Windows msconfig startup. To be honest with you, I have never encountered these programs before. The name ... "internat.exe" seemed to me that it was a purposely misspelled version of the word "Internet" -- most likely misspelled to dupe users into thinking that it was a friendly Internet-related program. In all likelihood, I thought, the program name "internat.exe" could have been a trojan. I was right. Sort of. As always, I use Google ... (view more)

There's lots o' interesting news to tell you in this issue of the Gazette. Recall that October 16th's issue of the Gazette proposed the question of whether or not Kazaa (Sharman Networks) implemented some sort of cap on bandwidth (downloads). I ... received a few suggestions from our readers, and without further adieu, let me attempt coordinate some of their thoughts. Kooby writes: " I updated to Kazaa v2 to find this new thing called a kazaa participation level. Because I have a cable modem (high speed internet) with only mediocre upload speed, I don't share any files with other Kazaa ... (view more)

Since we're on the hot topic of hackers and hacking lately, I thought I'd share with you another great resource that Eric B. sent me. The web site is called myNetWatchman . The myNetWatchman program (agent) gives users a heads-up that they have a ... security problem, if their system becomes infected with an Internet Worm virus. There's also some super-cool reading on their web site (RE: ' Windows Forensics ') which shows how multiple non-hostile applications combined can lead to a hacking threat. I'm not going into great detail because I don't want to spoil it for you; however, I will say that ... (view more)

I bet you're just dying to know "what's new in the land of infopackets.com?" Seek the answer to that question no further! Since I developed "How to Install / Reinstall Windows: downloadable Video and eBook Ultimate Guide", the response from users ... has been tremendous. What can I say? First, I'd like to personally thank Microsoft for introducing so many bugs in the Windows Operating System and for making everyone's lives miserable because of it. If it wasn't for their valiant effort, I would not have taken time out of my busy schedule to produce such a helpful guide. Hey, I ... (view more)

Yesterday I wrote about a problem concerning the usage of the mail queue on the infopackets web server. To recap: whenever the Infopackets Gazette newsletter is sent out (to the list of readers), some emails are entered into a temporary holding area ... (called a "mail queue") if they are unable to reach the recipient. This is a potential problem for the infopackets web server because the mail queue can "overflow" and cause the server to run out of storage spac e. Recall: The Mail Queue Polling solution I was able to save the web server from potentially running out of space by ... (view more)