Wednesday, 3 April 2013

Mounting an iso disc image (windows only for XP to Windows 7)

An ISO image is an archive file of an optical disc, a type of disk image, composed of the data contents of every written sector of an optical disc, including the optical disc file system.

ISO image files often have a file extension of .iso. The name ISO is taken from the ISO 9660 file system used with CD-ROM media, but what is known as an ISO image might also contain a UDF (ISO/IEC 13346) file system or a DVD or Blu-ray Disc (BD) image.I previously had indicated "Backing up a video DVD to an ISO file". So the question now is, ok so now have an iso file of the disc but can you use it without writing it to a DVD/CD.

Wednesday, 27 March 2013

Why doesn't DVD Shrink work under Windows 7?

Windows XP onwards was given a new facility Data Execution Prevention (DEP).

The following is from Microsoft help:

Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a security feature that can help prevent damage to your computer from viruses and other security threats.

Computer programs set aside a portion of your computer's memory for data, and another portion for instructions that your programs use. Hackers can try to trick programs into running (also known as executing) harmful data placed in your computer's memory as if it were instructions. This could allow a hacker to take control of your computer.

DEP can help protect your computer by monitoring your programs to make sure that they use computer memory safely. If DEP notices a program trying to run instructions from the portion of memory used for data, DEP closes the program and notifies you.

Friday, 15 March 2013

Fixing a faulty NTFS Windows Partition

The customer has a dual boot system with a broken NTFS filesystem on her windows partition. The other partition was loaded with Ubuntu on the same disc and it worked perfectly.

Because Ubuntu worked fine I suspected that the problem may only be with the NTFS partition and not any disc hardware issue.

Friday, 1 March 2013

Testing Internet Speed

Sometimes when you feel your computer is slow you feel like checking your Internet speed. How do you do it?

There's a standard testing site that can be used to test the Internet speed and best of all it's FREE!

Thursday, 28 February 2013

Region Free secure internet (Encrypted VPN)

I read an interesting article in Popular Mechanics ("Removing Yourself From the Internet", Page 77  Jan 2012) which discussed leaving a minimal Internet footprint.

Your data is bought sold with your permission  If you had bothered to read the license agreements you clicked "I agree", you would have noticed that the companies indicate that they collect data for marketing purposes or sum such statements.

Monday, 25 February 2013

Burn an ISO image file to a DVD (windows only)

ImgBurn will load an ISO image file and write (burn) it to a DVD. Thats all I was interested in, and it just works and works. I've had Nero fail on me but ImgBurn no problem. Hey it does a lot more but that's for you to find out. From the ImgBurn website: