Firefox vs Chrome

VS











Google browser is out for about a year now, and google used its fame to distribute the browser, you could notice it easily at their sites, which offer links like running faster on chrome ,or try chrome and so on, anyway i am not going to offer a new comparison cause others offers a good ones already:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/150828/browser_battle_firefox_31_vs_chrome_vs_ie_8.html
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/tested-google-chrome-vs-ie8-vs-firefox-3-1-462848

But personally i believe chrome itself is a big mistake, being dominant in searching does not mean you are going to success in browsers market, also i think it was a lot better if google supported firefox instead of developing it's own browser, well

Why firefox is superior?
Simply cause it have add-ins, everyone could write an add-in adding function to the browser, go and search in add-ins you will find a lot more than what you can imagine, so that its simply collect the best of all browsers, for example safary coming from a progress bar in address bar, its nice, someone could switch to safary for that(some like eye candy), then firefox simply can go and pick an add-in adding the same thing to firefox, Internet explorer 7 colored the address, an add-in can do the same for firefox, so its not about its always the better browser but its about every time something neat appear in browsers market, someone add it to firefox by an add-in which i believe will keep firefox the best for a while, for sure without a good structure for the browser core it was not going to work out , but firefox have a good enough core to stay the best. so im going to stay with firefox and getting add-ins adding the new features which other browsers offer, and ill try to discuss the useful firefox add ins at the next topics (with ALLAH well), :)

Check RAM from USB!

A lot of PC problems could have RAM as a suspicious, any fault in RAM could lead to application crash or even totally OS crash, so we need frequently to test RAM, out of fake applications which just show a progress bar running and no more, there is a tool really do the job which is memtest86+
here it is a few steps to get a bootable flash drive can run this tool, and do your test with.
1-you will need to a usb drive any size even 64 mb flash memory will do the job.
2-You will need to HP usb desk storage format tool (This tool working with all flash types not HP only, and it can format in ntfs and make the flash bootable)
3-Windows 98 boot disk.
4-memtest86+ for usb.

Now you have to extract the windows 98 boot disk files to a directory
Then, we have to format the flash drive using the HP usb desk storage format tool.




















Device: will be your flash device DOS system files location: will be where you extracted the Windows 98 Disk files

Now open the flash drive, it suppose to have these files:










Now extract the memtest86+ binary file from the downloaded zip file and copy it to the flash
its just one file named mt211.exe
so your flash root suppose to be like this now:









Now all what you have to do is reboot your machine, (make sure your first boot device is usb)
while your USB device is plugged, you will be into Win98 boot disk, now simply type mt211
and the ram tests will start( it could take sometime to finish all tests so try to do it while you don't need the machine).

Firefox 3.6

Firefox 3.6 at its alpha phase right now, but i would like to say its really promising,
you can install the alpha build(Namoroka) here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2009/08/07/firefox-3-6-alpha-1-now-available-for-download/

some of the new features:

• tabs preview(which is not enabled by default and you can enable it from about:config by setting browser.ctrlTab.previews to true)

• Auto complete recommendations.
• Better performance for java scripts.
• Better Session Restore.

Simply its a really promising version, and i cannot wait to get the final build!.

Flash drives Autorun viruses

I think removable media devices viruses, is one of the most annoying and time consuming computer problems ,or to be more specified Windows XP users problems, while Windows Vista and Windows 7 have the UAC (user access control) which require user to confirm the malicious virus actions before it happen, Windows XP lacking to a similar feature, so whats happen actually, simply thats what happen:
Windows XP by default configured to autorun any removable device (removable devies like CD-ROM, flash memorey, Mp3 players, digital cameras, etc...)
- The innocent user simply plug its infected device.
- Windows start to read from the autorun.inf file on the device.(Autorun.inf contain information
about the excutable file (the virus in our case) )












-The excutable file (the virus) run infecting your machine!

-The virus itself start to copy itself (and its autorun.inf) to all partitions, so each time you try to open any partition or device Windows autorun it back and infect your machine, or another machine this device moved to!

Sometimes user format its machine using Windows CD and installing a new clean fresh install, then he or she find his machine infected after it which make them wonder how is that happen?!
simply the virus copied itself to the other partitions, and when the user double click on any other partition Windows try to autorun it which means autorun the virus and infect the whole system back!
Silly feature isn't it !?
so what can we do to get rid of this feature and to avoid the virus infection?
We have to follow this steps carefully after installing Windows:

1- Finish installing Windows
2- After fnish installing Windows, We will install tweakUI tool from microsoft site:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/c/a/fca6767b-9ed9-45a6-b352-839afb2a2679/TweakUiPowertoySetup.exe
3-We will open tweakUI and go to My Computer>Autoplay>drives
and we will uncheck them all!
















4-We will Apply it then we will restart our machine,
Now try to plug a Flash drive and it will not autoplay and even if its contain a virus it will not affect your machine with ALLAH well :-).

Windows 7 rocks

I got my hands on a copy of Windows 7 recently, and i can say it, its the best Windows ever!, personally i found the beta version more stable than many final release OSs ;), interestingly the version of Windows is actually 6.1 which make me wonder whether they just revise Vista kernel with a minor modification or they just set it like this for the pre release version, maybe they will change it later to 7
anyway here it is some screenshots:

Troubleshooting roaming profiles

1-Check the error which user receive while he is logging, (remember this error can be catched later from the event viewer).
















Remember to scroll down the error to get the details!!!

The error which you could fine gonna be something like:
*Access is denied
*There is not enough space on the disk.
*The specified network name is no longer available.
*Windows cannot find the local profile and is logging you on with a temporary profile. Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off.

There is another errors from userenv, related to roaming profile, but its out of our focus for now.


-I think they are clear enough, but based on each one we will apply a different troubleshooting steps.


If you couldn't read the error from the logon error, its not a big deal, you have to open event viewer and go to Application folder and search for errors from userenv















The error will contain the description of the error as mentioned earlier:




















You can apply filter in Application folder to see the userenv errors only.

Now lets discuss each problem and how we can try to fix it:

Access is denied
1-We have a roaming profiles, on a server where a file screen policy applied, which prevent copying media files to the server, so if a user moved a media file to his or her profile then tried to logoff, it will receive this error, cause server cannot synchronize its profile, cause of the blocked file type.
Solution: delete the local copy of the user profile (from documents and settings on user workstation)

2-If the problem still exist, logon to the server take the ownership of the user profile, give yourself full access permission, then give the ownership back to the user(Without giving the ownership back to the roaming profile and all of its sub folders to the user he will not be able to login and he will receive access denied error) then delete the unwanted files from it.

There is not enough space on the disk.
In this case you have to free up some space in user workstation,
there is a neat tool from microsoft named delprof you can download it from here
This tool need to computer name and it will do the rest of the job for you, it will delete all cached profile to free up diskspace, then user can log on.












The specified network name is no longer available.
Seems like a cable problem or server was down, in this case if you beleive that server is up and running and the workstation is connected, so you have to reboot the machine and try again, if problem exist try to ping the server where the roaming profile exist, to make sure its up and running.

Windows cannot find the local profile and is logging you on with a temporary profile. Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off.
1-Delete the local profile if exist.
2-Delete the tmp profile.
3-logon to the server, take the ownership of the user profile, give yourself full access permission, then give the ownership back to the user(Without giving the ownership back to the roaming profile and all of its sub folders to the user he will not be able to login and he will receive access denied error) then delete the unwanted files from it.


Without giving the ownership back to the roaming profile and all of its sub folders to the user he will not be able to login and he will receive access denied error)

How to import users to Active Directory using csvde

Sometimes you need to add many users to your domain, something like this could be time consuming, so today i would like to show you how to import users from an excel sheet, will first of all we have to prepare our users excel sheet, our excel sheet, i gonna attach an example file,
Download the example file from here
you can simply modify the first example and fill the sheet excel with your users, then you have to save the file as csv (comma-separated values)










Now after we finished preparing our sheet, we have to import it to the Active directory, we will use cvsde command (this file doesn't exist in Windows XP if you want to use it copy it from windows\system32\ of Windows 2003 to windows\system32\ of Windows XP
now the command syntax will be like this:
cvsvde -i -f D:\Example.csv -j F:\
-i stand for import mode (the default is export)
-f stand for file (its need the full path to the csv file
-j Stand for logging (you have to specify the path of log)













If you are running this command from Windows XP so you have to add -s servername
so the syntax will be like this:
cvsvde -i -f D:\Example.csv -s servername

you have to give a special attention to DN field, here you can identify where the user gonna be exist in which OU
for instance if i want to add a user named Ahmed in an OU named Accts so the DN field will look like this:

cn=Ahmed,ou=Accts,dc=MyDomain,dc=net

I hope that you find it useful, see you soon :-)