On my previous post i mentioned about email passwords that have been released online.  If incase you have a hotmail, live.com, or if you think that you might have compromised your accounts security by logging in to insecure sites or you just want to secure your online accounts, i would suggest you change your password now to a more secure one.

I would suggest that you check the strength of your password using Microsoft’s word checker here.

A strong password should contains both letters and numbers as well as special characters and should be at least 8 characters long.  It should also have a mix of upper and lower case letters.  Also try to prevent using common words found on dictionaries because they can easily be cracked by brute-force password attacks.  One good way to make a password is something that you can easily remember but hard for others to guess.

Here’ what Microsoft suggests:

• Think of a sentence that you will remember
  Example: “My son Aiden is three years old.”
• Turn your sentence into a password
  Use the first letter of each word of your memorable sentence to create a string, in this case: “msaityo”.
• Add complexity to your password or pass phrase
  Mix uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers. Introduce intentional misspellings.
  For example, in the sentence above, you might substitute the number 3 for the word “three”, so a password might be “MsAi3yo”.
• Substitute some special characters
  Use symbols that look like letters, combine words, or replace letters with numbers to make the password complex.
  Using these strategies, you might end up with the password “M$8ni3y0.”

Here are some password strategies that you also need to avoid:

Avoid sequences or repeated characters
“12345678,” “222222,” “abcdefg,” or adjacent letters on your keyboard do not make secure passwords.

Avoid using only look-alike substitutions of numbers or symbols
Criminals will not be fooled by common look-alike replacements, such as to replace an ‘i’ with a ‘1′ or an ‘a’ with ‘@’ as in “M1cr0$0ft” or “P@ssw0rd”.

These substitutions can be effective when combined with other measures, such as length, misspellings, or variations in case.

Avoid your login name
Don’t use any part of your name, birthday, social security number, or similar information for your loved ones.

This type of information is one of the first things criminals will try, and they can find it easily online from social networking sites, online resumes, and other public sources of data.

Avoid dictionary words in any language
Criminals use sophisticated tools that can rapidly guess passwords that are based on words in multiple dictionaries, including words spelled backwards, common misspellings, profanity, and substitutions.

Avoid using only one password for all your accounts
If your password is compromised on any one of the computers or online systems that use it, you should consider all of your other information protected by that password compromised as well.

It is critical to use different passwords for different systems.

Be careful with password recovery questions
Many Web sites offer a “password ” service that lets you provide the answer to a secret question. If you forget your password, the service will send it to you if you can remember the answer to your secret question.

The questions are often random, but sometimes the answers to these questions are freely available on the Web. Choose your questions carefully or make up the answers.

Avoid using online storage
If criminals find your passwords stored online or on a networked computer, they have access to all your information.

Got  a call a few days ago from an aunt who was on a business trip together with my uncle.  They called me saying that my uncle’s computer was not booting up to Windows, they had no recollection of what might have caused the problem.  Upon probing, I found out that it was a Blue Screen error.  I told them to try some basic troubleshooting like booting to Last Known Good Configuration and booting to Safe Mode but none worked.

They were in Korea that time and had none of the recovery disc for their Dell Computer.  I told them to just bring the system back here in the Philippines so that I can repair it myself.  My uncle ended up buying a new computer since he needed one for his business transactions.

Today, my aunt arrived (unfortunately my uncle had to stay) with the computer (and some other goodies.. ^^,).  I immediately got my hands dirty and started working on it.  The specific error was “STOP c000021a Session Manager Initialization fails with status 0xc000026c”.  I encountered this problem before and was sure that it was a Windows Update that caused it but can’t simply remember what it was.  Google to my rescue as always, and pointed my direction to  Windows Update KB925902.

So what needs to be done was to remove this update from the machine.  If the system were able to boot to safe mode, System Restore would have been the best option.  For this we had to boot to the Recovery Console to remove the update manually.  Here’s the guide on how I removed the Windows Update manually.

1. Boot with a Windows XP CD
2. Once on the Welcome to Windows Install screen, press the letter “R” to access the recovery console.
3. Upon entering Recovery Console it will ask you which Windows installation you want to log into, usually there’s only 1, so just press the number 1 then ENTER.
4. If asked for an Admin password, enter your admin password, or you can just leave it blank which is the default and press ENTER.
5. You will now see C:WINDOWS>, change the folder using this command CD $NtUninstallKB925902$\spuninst then press ENTER
6. Type this command: batch spuninst.txt
   
7. If the command executed properly, you should see a spuninst.tag file in the folder.  To check type DIR then ENTER.
8. Type exit then press ENTER to restart the computer.

After doing this the computer should now boot up properly.  Hope this would help someone out there encountering this problem.

Have you noticed that overtime that your computer is taking longer to boot up.  From the time your press the power button until you have a fully clickable desktop takes about 5 minutes or more? Most of the time this is due to the multiple programs that are also started up when you turn on your computer.  If you noticed that there are a lot of icons in your system tray (near the clock), those are the programs that are started automatically when you turn on your computer.  Each of those applications adds to the time your computer takes to fullly boot up.  And some of those applications continue to use up your resources while running in the background and slows your computer down to a crawl.  So here’s a guide on how to disable those applications wich you dont need from starting up automatically.  I mostly prefer to disable all except for the anti virus and firewall software.

Before making any changes to the computer it is strongly advised that you make a system restore point so that we can easily restore the computer to a working state just incase we mess something up.  Ok here’s how you do it.

Step 1: Open the System Configuration Utility

• for XP, click start > run, then type msconfig on the run box and press ENTER
• for VISTA, click start type msconfig on the search box then press ENTER
• alternately, you can just press the windows logo + R to open up the run box, this works for XP and VISTA

Step 2: Disable programs from startup

• with the System configuration Utility Open, click on the startup tab
• uncheck the boxes for the programs that you dont want to load automatically on startup.  just use your judgement on which programs you want to start automatically on startup.  unckecking these boxes does not mean that you are removing the program or uninstalling it from your computer.  this just disables the program from starting automatically.  for example – you disabled yahoo messenger from startup.  the icon for yahoo messenger will no longer come up in the system tray but you can still open up your yahoo messenger by clicking on the YM shortcut in your desktop.
• click on apply, then click close
• prompt will ask you if you want to restart the computer, just click on restart

Step 3: Disabling System Configuration Utility pop-up message

•  after the computer reboots and brings you back up to the desktop, a message will come up telling you that you have just edited the system configuration utility… blah.. blah.. blah.. just click on the checkbox Dont Show this message again the click on ok.

That’s it.  This should increase the bootup time of your computer.  Most of the time its your antivirus software or firewall that takes up much of the boot up time process, but it is recommended that you do not disable these from booting up bec. the risk of running without protection will not compensate for a small increase in boot up time. 

If incase after doing this your computer will no longer boot up, try running the Last Known Good Configuration or Run System Restore.