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Further to my post below, today (Thursday, December 18, 2008) I have found another possible variant of bobzop.com as colzop.com. I was unable to find any information on the Internet, but it presents the same symptoms as described below. Be careful clinking on any links from your MSN.

This is possibly a new virus or spy ware for your computer. Time to time some users of MSN messenger are receiving a message such as: *Hey (Friend name) this site is giving away free blackberry phones if you are willing to test one, hurry before they give them all away go to http://(myname).bobzop.com* <—- DON’T CLICK THE LINK!

While I don’t know much about this but seriously speaking no one is going to give away free blackberry phones. It also appears that you will find this message on many different versions of MSN including the Live Messenger. The solution so far seems to be the following:

1. If you receive such message from a contact on your MSN list contact the user
2. Inform them about the problem
3. Ask them to change their password for MSN messenger
4. Run a scan on their computer with an up to date anti virus program
5. Run a scan with spy ware software

If the user is not helpful and do not want to do any of these, you may want to block the user for awhile.

If anyone else has any other solutions please let us know.

My Laptop Touch Pad is not working

This happened twice to me so far. First one was with DELL Latitude D830 and latest one was with ACER TravelMate 2480. I am pretty sure one of my colleges also tried the same solution on Toshiba laptops with success.

SO all of these laptops have touch pads and for some reasons after installing something it just stops working. After trying a lot of options from control panels’ mouse option, uninstalling and reinstalling the driver for the touchpad I have found the simplest solution that worked, here is the solution:

1. Shut down your laptop.
2. Unplug it from the network cord if you have any.
3. Unplug the power adapter.
4. Detach the battery.
5. Now press on the power button and keep it pressed for 30 seconds.
6. Now put everything back and power up the laptop.
7. Touch pad should now be working.

Well, this is not a super solution but at the end it worked for me few times. So I thought I would share it with you all.

I have faced this issue several times where my users forget their password to log onto their local account on the laptop or desktop. If you google, *how do I recover Windows vista or XP password* you will see tons of articles on this topic. I have used few of them but the winner is Ophcrack.

Ophcrack is a free (open source) Microsoft Windows password cracker/recovery tool based on rainbow tables (is a lookup table offering a time-memory tradeoff used in recovering the plaintext password from a password hash generated by a hash function, often a cryptographic hash function. A common application is to make attacks against hashed passwords feasible).

Quick user guide:

1. Download the ophcrack from the website. When you go to ophcrack download page you will notice there are LiveCD ISO’s for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Based on the operating system of your troubled computer download the ISO for that operating system (XP or Vista). It won’t hurt to download both because you never know when you might need them.
2. Burn the ISO image on to a CD. It will create a bootable CD for you. I use Roxio CD creator for this. You can use anything you like.
3. Now put the CD into the CD Rom and make sure you can boot from the CD Rom. You may require some tweaking on the BIOS.
4. When it boots from the CD – you will see the list of the accounts on the computer. For example – if you have accounts called Administrator, User1, Amy, Simon and out of these accounts you have password only on User1 and the account Amy then you will see that there are hash numbers beside those two accounts. The accounts you don’t have any password set will display *empty* – literarily.
5. The machine will do its thing and just leave it. After a while, you will see password has been retrieved and displayed on the screen beside the accounts those are password protected.
6. After you see it – remember it just reboot the machine and you should be able to log in on windows.

Link to ophcrack: http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net

Other interesting read:

1. Rainbow table
2. Time-memory trade off
3. ISO

Hope this helped.

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