Symptoms:

I don’t know what I did. But I first noticed there was a problem when I tried going to goodreads.com and I was redirected to a russian search engine! That was the only time I was being redirected. Accessing other websites or Google search results were fine. This was when using Chrome. I tried Safari same problem and then I tried my mobile, same problem!

This is when I thought that their web server was infected *3aysha eldoor*

After knowing that I only had that problem. I started Googling and some result links sent me to the russian search engine with WWW as query! Even if a malware/spyware was aimed at making profit, why would it redirect me to WWW search queries ???

Troubleshooting:

Checked my router, thought that the DNS settings were changed, everything was normal.

Anyway I’m not at all familiar with Mac OS so it took me a while.

Clearing cookies and browsing history for both Safari and HTC solved the problem. Though I still don’t understand how my mobile got infected! Maybe when I connected it to charge, the malware transfered itself! Can it do that?

Kaspersky didn’t detect any abnormalities!

Clearing the content of my Chrome didn’t solve the problem. Checking the settings this is what I found

You can check that through Manage Search Engines under Preferences. The above was automatically added because when I typed goodreads.com in the URL bar it was being redirected to yandex.

Make there are no added extensions you are not aware of. Preferences -> Extensions.

Check all exceptions under Preferences -> Content Settings.

Also I wanted to check the task manager I mean the Activity Monitor under Utilities. Nothing seems abnormal to the best of my knowledge.

One more step is to check for processes that run at startup. You can do that through System Preferences -> Accounts check both user accounts and Login Items.

The only thing that looked suspicious was iTunesHelper. It’s a valid process but this one wasn’t actually pointing to any valid path so I removed all.

Cleared all data and cookies again for my Chrome browser and that seemed to solved the problem!

Confusion Points:

• I still I’m not sure why Safari got infected since it’s a browser’s content problem. If this malware is a result of me accessing a website, then most probably a script got installed from an infected website. That means they share a folder, Temp folder in Windows, or the infection transfered itself. I’m pretty sure I didn’t install an application lately. Moreover, when running Chrome in Safe Browsing mode there was no problem at all. In incognito browsing not extensions are enabled, no cookies are used, no history is looked up so that kind of narrows the problem cause.
• How the hell did the mobile get infected?
• In Windows there’s a Temp folder, what’s Mac equivalent?

Why is Yahoo favicon appearing on Google Search website when using Chrome? Below tab is Safari’s. Safari has no problem.

Using the same query in .kw (middle tab) the favicon is Google’s but .com (left tab) it’s Yahoo’s! There’s Bing on the right

Forcing secure search, Google’s favicon appears on .com!

Safari defaults to Google’s https. But still Safari doen’t have a problem with the favicon whether it’s http or https.

And I discovered only Google.com supports https, com.kw doesn’t!

Could it be my Chrome browser? But I just noticed this today!

My latest problem started when I plugged my laptop and it refused to power up! Blank Black screen no noise no sign of life!! I had papers to grade & grades to submit! So you understand my horror!

The night before I had hibernated my laptop.

I performed the “discharge the laptop” because it solved my problem once.

Detach the battery, hold down the power button for few seconds to discharge any residue power, plug in your laptop & start it.

That didn’t solve my problem.

I made sure that the power charger is working, I can see the lights on when I plug it in my laptop and that the battery is charging, luckily my brother has the same charging outlet so I tried it on his & it was working fine.

I had an “AHA” moment as I was about to go to sleep

Maybe the cause is one of the internal devices. I had a problem with my DVD device long time ago. Though my laptop was working fine with the non-functioning drive inside for some time but you never know.

I opened the laptop up, removed the DVD drive, cleaned everything, re-seated all connections including the power button.

I know I did two major things, removed a non-working device and re-connected so I don’t exactly know which solved the problem. I can test & verify but “malee khilq”!

Last time I opened the laptop I got lost in what goes where so this time I drew a simple layout to keep track of all the screws.

Finally the laptop powered up. JOY OH JOY

But wait, nothing happened. Lights on, fan working but Blank Black screen. I noticed the Caps Lock Button lights blinking. Looked up the error codes, three blinks means I have a problem with the memory. (Blank Screen LED Error Codes).

It must be my rough handling of the laptop that the memory modules slid out a bit, re-seated both modules back firmly & powered up the laptop.

It took me a few days to solve this problem. I don’t think I was ever this happy to see Windows logo appear on the screen

Summary:

• Remove battery, discharge laptop, plug in & power up.
• Remove non-major internal devices.
• Clean laptop.
• Make sure all components are properly seated in place & cables firmly connected.
• Always BACKUP & try not to get frustrated!

PS: I’m giving this laptop to my lil’ brother next week as a “gift”

My neighbour was saying that her laptop scared her starting by itself at 3 AM from hibernate mode.

MINE TOO!!!

How weird is that, both of us at the same exact time.

I went back to the last changes that have happened, a windows update just installed itself, you know the one where it doesn’t care about your updates “download only configuration” option.

The laptop required a restart to finalise the update, but I didn’t want to do that, just to see if the behaviour repeats itself and of course it did. Next day, 3 AM the laptop came to life on its own!

I restarted and now a new problem is occurring, everytime my screensaver comes up after an inactivity period and I wiggle my finger about on the mouse pad, the bluescreen failure occurs!

I think it has something to do with the display driver causing the whole laptop to fail. I’m not sure. I just took a copy of my latest folder that I’m working on.

DAMN you Microsoft! I think

]]> http://www.bloggylife.com/2010/06/27/windows-update-2/feed/ 4 http://www.bloggylife.com/2010/03/21/it-support/ http://www.bloggylife.com/2010/03/21/it-support/#comments Sun, 21 Mar 2010 15:21:43 +0000 Bloggylife http://www.bloggylife.com/?p=4285 I popped in my neighbour’s room the other day and her guest was having problems with her laptop. So I said: “You can give it to me sometime and I’ll take a look at it for you”.

This went by until my neighbour called saying she is having problems herself, her laptop loads forever at starting up.

I took a look at it and it turns out she installed two anti-virus programs, removed both and installed AVG for her, since I am happy with mine

Next day another one calls my room to make an appointment , she’s facing a problem with her laptop. I thought, I guess the word got out

This one’s problem was rather funny, I don’t know what she was fooling around with but she had a malicious software that kept changing her DNS settings, cleaned that up and there you go. It rather took sometime, by the end of the night she was tired and I was fired up I had to remove viruses manually and told her, that I had to Google certain processes and information to make sure they are legitimate and taught her how to remove programs and not have everything run at start-up!

I guess wherever you go, you end up being the IT support of your location

Some were afraid that I was getting annoyed by their questions. What is a DNS? Can I have two Anti-virus programs? Do I need an Anti-Virus?

I announced: “Don’t worry, this is part of what I do for a living”

BOUML is a free UML 2 tool box allowing you to specify and generate code in C++, Java, Idl, Php and Python.

I downloaded the Windows version, had problems with getting an uncorrupted executable, I had to choose a different mirror site, I chose Japan

After the successful installation, my AVG resident shield, detected the below as threats. The site has already warned about such thing if you have (AVG or Ikarus)

If you go to the Resident Shield Manage Exception, you can add that specific file.

I still haven’t used this tool and don’t really know my way around it. But I’m always a fan of free software that promise fast performance and doesn’t require much memory (link). I’m going to whip up some tests to see how well my UML diagrams are transferred to Java classes.

Imagine this scenario, PC, cable and another system/gadget. The cables is used to drive data from PC to system. If the PC suddenly says cable problem when you are trying to push the data to the connected device, how do you solve the problem?

Hardware people start off by touching the cable! Making sure that the cable is properly connected at both ends and maybe replace it with another cable just to make sure that the cable is not the cause and go on from there to solve the problem.

Software people start with restarting the application and maybe re-install/update the driver. They may even examine the cable settings from the PC, the bit rate, connection type, device type, etc. and go on from there to solve the problem.

Both might end up solving the problem, it could’ve been a loosely connected cable or improper settings, two different mind sets with the same aim.

Isn’t this funny I doubt anyone will talk to me if I was holding this early in the morning

On a completely different note, I noticed if I open the jpg I can rename the file from within the windows explorer and it will be updated in the jpg picture header! I didn’t know that so this was a cool discovery.

I tried it for txt documents, you can alter the name after opening the document but it won’t reflect on the opened document so if you save it, it’ll create another txt document with the old name.

Other applications like word, PDF, won’t allow that as it known.

Publish Bug Update:

So it seems the problem is solved, I managed to publish the previous post after using the Preview option, what happened is the “Contact Form 7″ plug-in installed an update so maybe this was causing the problem! Not entirely sure. Anyway I scheduled this post, so if I don’t add anything further, then that worked too.

It so much simpler when you are in charge

I use chrome browser mostly and I know there are many hiccups, simple fact of checking hotmail or not being able to play some online games, I sometimes have trouble uploading photos to flickr and have to use firefox, even viewing pictures. I just upgraded my wordpress to 2.9.1 and still I have the same problem with chrome.

Keep in mind that I use chrome.

When writing a post, I use the preview option to open another tab to view my post, if I want to publish it, I can not, the publish process seems to go on forever, I have to stop that and click edit from the Posts menu to view all the posts and then edit that particular post and click Publish. It seems if within the same Edit Post page if you have clicked Preview, you can not publish the post by clicking Publish.

That seems to affect the publishing of a post by Scheduling, all my scheduled posts seem to fail.

I’m scheduling this post without using the Preview option first. Let’s see how it goes.

UPDATE:

So it seems scheduling works if I did not use the Preview option before within the Edit Post page!