Paypal Users: Don't Get Caught By Phishers

There is a rising trend in Paypal phishing scams. The latest Paypal spoof I received warns me that my Paypal account has been suspended. It asks me to restore full access to my account by logging in to Paypal. When I click on the link provided in the email, I am sent to a website that looks exactly like the PayPal login page. But the link does not go to Paypal.

This is the link displayed in the email I received.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run

When you click on the link it actually takes you to a phisers page.

It is generally not a good idea to click on links in an email. If you do, be sure that you are signing into the Paypal website by looking at the address location area of your browser.

If you have already replied to the fraudulent email, contact your bank or credit card companies immediately to prevent identity theft. If you wish to check your Paypal account status, manually type PayPal's address into your browser and log in normally.

I was able to tell that it was a spoof email because the email began with “Dear PayPal member." Paypal will always address you by your first and last name. They will never send you a message and address you as “Dear PayPal member” or such.

Another way to tell if an email is from Paypal is to look at the full header. The email header is your indication of whether the email is from Paypal or not. When looking at the header it should say who sent the email in the first two lines. Example in the latest spoof email I received it came from

Return-Path: lester@server.ravin.net

Received: from http://server.ravin.net

If it doesn’t say that it passed through Paypal’s server, then you know the email is a spoof. The FBI is actively investigating these spoofs, so please report any suspicious emails by forwarding them to spoof@paypal.com. You can also file a complaint with the Internet Fraud Complaint Center at http://www1.ifccfbi.gov/strategy/howtofile.asp .

More advice regarding protecting your Paypal account can be found at https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/cps/general/SecuritySpoof-outside

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Article by : Rose DesRochers

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Top 10 Home Software Programs in 2006

Word processing and spreadsheets were the first of the killer apps for home computers when PCs first started to propagate to the millions of households out there. Then, there were Internet Browsers that took everyone by storm. So what are the hot categories and hot products now? There are more products then ever out there for the home shopper and many of them not that good. We looked over many, many different products and product categories to find the best home products, the hot home product categories, and the best software products period. The list is neither exhaustive nor scientific, but the products listed here are definitely great! If you have a computer at home, take a look at these products!

The Hot Product Categories

When searching reviews and products out there on the web some of these categories were not the top on my list, but nevertheless, they are not only out there, but getting a lot of attention. Here are ten top selling software categories for the home computer:

* Home design and gardening software
* Spyware and Adware
* Family Tree Legends
* Video Sharing
* Website builders
* Speech to text conversion
* Parental control and Internet filtering
* Disk-imaging utilities
* Spam Blockers
* Internet Security

Top 10 Best Software Products

The home software market has never had so many choices and for the categories listed above there are too many products to mention. Below are ten standout products for each of these areas.

* Home design and gardening software - Home Designer Pro 7.0
* Spyware and Adware - CounterSpy 1.5
* Family Tree Legends - Family Tree Legend 5.0
* Video Sharing - Grouper
* Website builders – SiteMaker
* Speech to text conversion – Dragon Naturally Speaking 8
* Parental control and Internet filtering – ContentProtect 2.0
* Disk-imaging utility - Acronis True Image
* Spam - Cloudmark Desktop
* Internet Security - ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite 6

The information about Home Software Programs presented here will do one of two things: either it will reinforce what you know about Home Software Programs or it will teach you something new. Both are good outcomes.

For each of these products there are additional information in the following articles. Take a look at these home software products!

Below are some things to watch for in 2006, some of them are good and, unfortunately, some aren’t.

First the good news:

- We are getting a lot more serious about our security. This has a lot of reasons behind it. For example, new privacy laws are mandating organizations to tighten their security. Look to see more consumer privacy laws passed in the coming year and more tightening of security systems.

- Authentication requirements are increasing. This is closing in large security holes. Corporations are requiring a great deal more of authentication to get into secure systems (this also is on the bad news side)

- There is a plethora of sophisticated programs to help us be more secure and they will continue to get better. Competition right now is strong in the security industry sparking a lot of innovation.

- ISPs are now taking on the responsibility to help us with our security. Take AOL's recent commercials as a good sign that others will follow the trend.

Now the bad news:

- Securing our networks is costing us. Most companies are globalizing their organizations and making them secure costs a lot of money. It will get worse before it gets better.

- Authentication requirements are increasing. This is getting claustrophobic. Corporations are requiring a great deal more authentication to get into secure systems (This is also on the good news side) Unfortunately, for the end user, it is one more thing to be unhappy about, not unlike airport security lines.

- Hackers are getting more sophisticated. For example, Botnets are becoming more complex and harder and harder to catch and stop. Do a search on botnets on the Internet. They really are causing a whole lot of problems, but it does not stop there. The number of viruses and malware out there is staggering.

- Spammers keep finding more creative ways to fill our email boxes. Don't look for this trend to stop anytime soon.

So now you know a little bit about Home Software Programs. Even if you don't know everything, you've done something worthwhile: you've expanded your knowledge.

Article by : Dina Fedorova

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Choosing A Graphics Card

To the uninformed consumer, buying a new graphics card can be a daunting task. There are literally hundreds of different aspects to consider when buying a new card, and we've composed this article to help you find the graphics card that best suits your needs and your budget.

- The first major thing to consider when purchasing a card is the type of chip that you want. The main two companies that market graphics card chips are Nvidia and ATI, and pretty much every graphics card available features a chip from one of these two manufacturers. The chip of the card is of utmost importance; different graphic cards with the same type of chip often feature similar performance levels.

- Next, you're going to want to consider the amount of memory that your future video card will have. The more RAM that is in a graphics card, the more it can process, giving it more speed and smoother transitioning.

- You're also going to want to consider the possible multimedia applications of your future card. TV-out is one type of feature incorporated into graphics card that is commonly sought-after. TV-out compatible graphics cards allow you to hook your computer up to your television, allowing for the viewing of movies and other general purpose features shown on your TV screen. Another feature that is gaining popularity in the graphics card world is dual-head support. Dual-head support allows for you to use two separate monitors side-by-side with your windows toolbar stretching across the two screens.

- When it comes to spending money, you can get a sub-par graphics card for less than $70. However, those who are looking for a decent graphics card that can hold its own for a few years to come, you're probably going to want to spend around $200. Top-of-the-line graphics cards are available and are priced upwards of $600. While the chips are cutting edge, they're usually not too much more noticeably efficient than those priced slightly lower. Performance will increase, without a doubt, but you won't see the same kind of effects as opposed to buying a $300 chip over a $150 one.

Now that you know more about graphic cards, you can more easily find one to suit your needs while sticking to your budget. Only buy the features that you find necessary; you can spend a lot of extra money unnecessarily by being coaxed in by bells and whistles.

Article by : Kadence Buchanan

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How To Choose Anti-Spam Filter?

The damage spam brings you is huge: loss of time, bandwidth and money, risk to delete a legitimate message together with junk emails. So, an anti-spam filter is not a whim but a necessity for almost all PC users who actively use email.

What criteria should you follow to choose the right spam filtering program? What capabilities must an anti-spam tool have to filter and cut off spam mail in most effective way?

Here are the main features a good anti-spam software must have to block spam effectively:

1) it should be a standalone spam filtering tool, which checks all incoming emails on the server, detects and deletes spam messages.

2) deletion of spam without receiving it in your inbox. This way you won't download all the superfluous kilobytes into your inbox and you won't see annoying spam mail.

3) powerful antispam filters built in one program that analyze the message from "outside" and "inside": message header, message body, and message source. Flexible whitelist and blacklist easy to edit and update are also very useful as they help save much time when filtering emails. Good anti-spam software must also have the Bayesian filter in its arsenal of spam filtering tools.

4) easy and safe method to preview emails marked as spam. Inherent in antispam technology is the fact that there will be false positives and false negatives, i.e., email can be flagged as spam even though it is not actually spam and vice versa.

5) flexible spam filtering. Spam emails should be moved to a separate folder. A good spam filtering software should provide the ability to recover an email if it was accidentally marked as spam and trashed.

Simply put, an anti-spam program must be a standalone, easy-to-use software supplied with powerful anti-spam filters able to be adjusted by every user for his personal needs. Now with all that said above you can choose the right anti-spam software among all spam filtering programs available on the Internet.

Article by : Julia Gulevich

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Human-edited Web Directories

A lot of people does not know that the website directories are reviewed by humans. Such directories are produced and maintained by editors who add links to their corresponding directory. In addition, the directory is categorized into various pages.

There are six types of link submissions that can be submitted for a review which are briefly discussed below:

1) Paid Submissions – Here, a fee will be charged for reviewing the submitted link.

2) Reciprocal Link – The site submitted should definitely link back to the directory if it wants to be listed.

3) Free Submission – No fee/charge is required for a review of the site.

4) No Follow – Here, search engines will not follow the link as there is a ‘NO FOLLOW’ tag associated with the link

5) Featured Link – Here, the link is given a top position in the category where it is submitted.

6) Featured Homepage Link - Featured Homepage Link means that the link can be listed on the homepage of the directory

Some directories have a general attitude in focusing and they list all links while others focus on merely a particular area. Directories are categorized as either niche or general directories by the experts.

Directories have gained mass popularity as people who engage in search engine optimization tend to augment the number of links pointing to their site. Submitting to directories is a working method for attaining more and more links.

Human edited directories are perceived as an essential part of a strategy for being indexed in Altavista, Google or other well-known search engines. The idea behind it is that a new site needs to quickly build inbound links from high profile sources for having a higher ranking within search engine outcomes. The directories, however, may confine search engines from rating a displayed link by using techniques like no-follow attribute, redirects etc.

In a nutshell, A human-edited directory is engendered and taken care of by editors who add links to their directory, which is organized into distinct pages for categories/sub-categories.

Article by : SeoAmitPatel

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Peer To Peer!

A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is a network that relies primarily on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively low number of servers. P2P networks are typically used for connecting nodes via largely ad hoc connections. Such networks are useful for many purposes. Sharing content files (see file sharing) containing audio, video, data or anything in digital format is very common, and realtime data, such as telephony traffic, is also passed using P2P technology.

A pure peer-to-peer network does not have the notion of clients or servers, but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both "clients" and "servers" to the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement differs from the client-server model where communication is usually to and from a central server. A typical example for a non peer-to-peer file transfer is an FTP server where the client and server programs are quite distinct, and the clients initiate the download/uploads and the servers react to and satisfy these requests.

The earliest peer-to-peer network in widespread use were the Usenet news servers, which communicated with one another as peers, propagating Usenet news articles over the entire Usenet network, which particularly in the earlier days of Usenet also used UUCP to extend even beyond the Internet. However, these news servers also acted as client-server when the individual users accessed the local news server to read and post articles.

Some networks and channels, such as Napster, OpenNAP, or IRC @find, use a client-server structure for some tasks (e.g., searching) and a peer-to-peer structure for others. Networks such as Gnutella or Freenet use a peer-to-peer structure for all purposes, and are sometimes referred to as true peer-to-peer networks, although Gnutella is greatly facilitated by directory servers that inform peers of the network addresses of other peers.

Peer-to-peer architecture embodies one of the key technical concepts of the internet, described in the first internet Request for Comments, "RFC 1, Host Software" [1] dated 7 April 1969. More recently, the concept has achieved recognition in the general public in the context of the absence of central indexing servers in architectures used for exchanging multimedia files.

The concept of peer to peer is increasingly evolving to an expanded usage as the relational dynamic active in distributed networks, i.e. not just computer to computer, but human to human. Yochai Benkler has developed the notion of commons-based peer production to denote collaborative projects such as free software. Associated with peer production are the concept of peer governance (referring to the manner in which peer production projects are managed) and peer property (referring to the new type of licenses which recognize individual authorship but not exclusive property rights, such as the GNU General Public License and the Creative Commons License).

Article by : Ankit Talwar

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What is Windows Vista?

What is Windows Vista? I have been getting this a lot lately with all of the buzz and hype on the Internet. Windows Vista is the newest PC Operating System to be launched in November 2006. The system has already been sent out to over 2 million users for beta testing and has got huge reviews!

Windows Vista improves application quality, enables developers to create richer, easier-to-use applications, and adds comprehensive APIs for accessing connectivity infrastructure.

1. Find and Use Information - Increasing user productivity by making it easier to find and use information.

2. Enable Mobile Workforce - Enabling a better connected more collaborative and more secure mobile workforce.

3. Improve Security and Compliance - Helping protect your data, secure your environment, and make it easier to achieve compliance with regulations and policies.

4. Optimize Desktop Infrastructure - Reducing cost and complexity of deploying, managing, and supporting your company PCs.

With the advances in Windows Vista™, Microsoft enables the Windows platform to deliver on three key essentials:

 Helping people to be more confident by making the operating system safer, more reliable, and more responsive
 Helping people gain clarity by removing clutter and improving organization
 Helping people connect with others easily and securely by improving network security and integration collaboration

Windows Vista empowers developers to create software that embodies these three essentials.

Windows Vista makes it easy to connect to information, connect to systems, and connect to customers. Using the Windows Communication Foundation Web services infrastructure, developers can create applications that communicate seamlessly across a wide range of hardware and software. Additionally, Windows Vista provides RSS support to enable developers to create experiences that aggregate information from multiple sources.

Article by : Amanda Bode

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Network+ Exam Tutorial: Ports, Port Numbers, and Sockets

If there's one thing that can be a bit confusing to many Network+ certification exam candidates, it's the concept of ports and sockets. Well, it was confusing to me when I got started with computer certifications! Let's take a look at ports and sockets, and why we need them in the first place.

Past Network+ exam tutorials have focused on how two PCs start communicating, but what we've got to keep in mind is that host PCs may and probably will have several different kinds of communications going on at the same time. A single PC may be sending email, receiving a Telnet request, and accessing the Internet at the same time. These conversations have to kept separate.. but how?

Through the use of ports, that's how. Each potential type of conversation a host can have is preassigned a port number, and these port numbers allow different types of communications to take place over the same physical cable by keeping them logically separated.

Let's go back to that PC we were talking about. If the PC is using SMTP for email communications, it will use port 25. At the same time, the host will be using port 23 for Telnet and port 80 to access the web via HTTP. The same physical cable is in use, but the communications are kept logically separate by use of port numbers.

A socket is simply the host's IP address followed by a colon and the port number in use. If the previously mentioned host had an IP address of 10.1.1.1, the socket number for SMTP would be 10.1.1.1:25, 10.1.1.1:23 for Telnet, and 10.1.1.1:80 for HTTP.

The range of port numbers is quite large - 0 through 65,535 - and the 0 - 1023 range is known as the well-known port numbers. Don't worry, you don't have to memorize all of them! As you gain more and more experience with networks, you'll be surprised how many of these you remember without even thinking about it. In the meantime, for both your Network+ and CCNA exams as well as working with real-world networks, it's a good idea to know this list of often-used ports.

File Transfer Protocol uses both ports 20 and 21.

Telnet uses port 23.

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) uses port 25.

Domain Name Service (DNS) uses port 53.

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) uses port 80, while the secure version of HTTP, HTTPS, uses port 443.

Believe me, this is just a very short beginning list of port numbers you'll need to know to pass the Network+ exam. If you're familiar with these protocols, that's great - and if you're not, just look for upcoming Network+ exam tutorials!

Article by : Chris Bryant, CCIE

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MYSQL Database Back Up And Recovery

Do you know that many of the scripts that help us to run our business or websites use MYSQL databases to store their information.

For instance many people use Auto responders to help with collecting and delivering information.

Scripts that produce one time offers, promotion offers, coupons etc all use mysql to store their information.

Mail merge programs often use mysql database to store information.

Wordpress the blog building software that lots of people use to write their blogs uses mysql to store this information.

What a lot of these users don’t know is that if they have not backed up their mysql database, then they could lose all their data, this would mean that if they had not backed up their database, they could lose all their customers information, all the email addresses that their auto responder stores in the mysql database.

Any and all information that is collated by the many scripts that run on websites could be lost and the scripts could stop working, all because they did not back up their database. now how you might ask do I know so much about this?

Well I can tell you from first hand experience that losing your database because your server has crashed and lost or scrambled your database can be very expensive, time consuming and frustrating.

Yes It happened to me, I did not back up my database,

My server crashed and like you I assumed that my provider would have backed everything up.

But NO they don’t, some do, but lots simply leave it to their customers.

So what can be done, well you could go into all your databases, everyday or maybe weekly and back up your database, If of course you know how to access your database with phpadmin and you know how to back up your database, and you all so know how to restore it should you need to……

Or you could use a simple easy to use software that will back up each and every database you have daily, and at the press of a button restore your database for you.

Sounds good, where do you find an expensive bit of software to do that for you?

Well I was so shocked at losing my data, I took the time and trouble to find a software that will do just that, but at a very low cost, yes that’s right low cost, my database backup generator software will do all that for you and at low cost, check out it out today at http://www.databasebackup.co.uk read my own sorry story, check out my video that shows just how easy it is to use and you will be pleasantly surprised at how affordable my database backup generator really is.

Article by : Julie Hart

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Domain Transfers without Tears

One of the most common errors I come across week after week concerns domain transfers. That is when a request is made to transfer a domain name from one registrar to another.

Many domain owners wait until just a few days before their domain expires before requesting transfer, because they mistakenly think the remaining time on their domain name will be lost if they transfer earlier.

The result is that the transfer often fails because the procedure can take a few days to complete. And during that time the domain expires. The 'losing' registrar will then refuse the transfer altogether because of the universal rule that expired domains can't be transferred.

I guess one reason domain owners are badly informed about this is because many registrars consider it's not in their interests to tell their customers about this. After all, the more failed transfers there are, the more the registrar can rake in for another year's fees. As a domain reseller, I think that's a short-sighted attitude because it makes customers only more determined to leave your service as soon as possible!

What you need to remember is this....

When you transfer your domain name, one year's validity is added to the domain's EXISTING expiry date. So no time is ever lost when you transfer your domain!

For example if your domain still has 6 months to go before expiry and you transfer it now, it will have 18 months after the transfer completes.

So the moral is ...

If you've decided to transfer your domain name to another registrar, don't wait until renewal time comes around. Transfer it now.

The only exception is if you recently registered or renewed your domain name. You will then have to wait for 60 days before requesting a transfer. The reason is that domain registrars have a common rule against this. Many were ripped off in the past by fraudsters who didn't pay their credit card bills and the registrars then had nothing in hand, neither cash nor the domain name.

Article by : Fred Bunzl

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Why Choose A Core 2 Duo For Your CPU In Your New High End Computer ?

It must have been difficult for Intel to watch AMD's Athlon 64 and then the Athlon 64 X2 and FX pretty much take over the performance PC market, putting the once-untouchable chip giant into a position where its only competitive response was to cut prices. Those were dark days indeed. But now, with the release of the long-awaited codename "Conroe" -- the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors -- Intel looks set to start a new age of desktop domination.


Most onlookers expected Intel to take back the performance crown from AMD, but few anticipated the sheer magnitude of this victory, or the nearly flawless style with which Intel performed it. And the Core 2 Duo is just the first strike in this battle, as Intel is also planning preemptive Pentium D price drops and has revamped its single-core Pentium 4 and Celeron D lines as well.

The Conroe excels in three areas, which add up to the very definition of what a current buyer expects from a top-end desktop CPU. These factors are price, performance, and power requirements, and the 65-nanometer-process Core 2 Duo and Extreme have surpassed their AMD counterparts in each, completing the same type of triple play that AMD had turned on the Pentium 4 and Pentium D.

The question of who's got the best performance is not even up for debate: The 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 is the fastest desktop processor on the planet, and the 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6700 is not far behind. Even the next-step-down 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo E6600 is an outstanding desktop performer that can outpace AMD's flagship Athlon 64 FX-62 in most tests.

Power and cooling requirements are also extremely low -- the Core 2 Duo line offers the lowest power draw of any dual-core processor, with the Core 2 Duo Extreme not far off. Prices are also extremely competitive. In fact, it's amazing that for such a competitive price , the Core 2 Duo E6600 can outrun AMD's entire desktop lineup. The lower-end Core 2 Duo E6300 and E6400 models are even more affordable, although their 2MB instead of 4MB of Level 2 cache mean their relative performance isn't as high.

Intel has accomplished this via a drastic shift away from the Pentium's NetBurst technology. Conroe's next-generation core performs more instructions per clock cycle (IPC), rather than having a longer and potentially less efficient pipeline that can be clocked into the stratosphere. Core 2 processors' 2MB or 4MB of 256-bit L2 cache feature what Intel calls Advanced Smart Cache, dynamically shared between the two cores for maximum efficiency rather than chaining half the cache to each core.

With IPC levels exceeding those of AMD plus clock speeds up to 2.93GHz and a 1066MHz front-side bus, Intel has moved well ahead in the performance game despite sticking with traditional CPU and chipset architecture rather than AMD's on-chip-memory-controller approach.

The Conroe design also reflects a need to keep power requirements and heat production down via various power-saving technologies. Since the basic architecture will be shared through all of Intel's processor lines (except the Itanium), including upcoming mobile CPUs, this translates into very power-efficient processing.

The Core 2 Duo and Extreme processors may offer industry-leading performance, but Intel's SpeedStep technology ensures that the chips can ramp down the multiplier and reduce clock speed to conserve battery power and/or lower core heat levels.

Moreover, new Intelligent Power Capability can go beyond slowing the CPU as a whole to turning various core functions on and off as required. These power-saving techniques don't get in the way of outright performance, as the Conroe instantly jumps back to top speed when required.

Through the use of technical expertise obtained through advanced CPU server technology and exprertise Intel has leapfrogged once again to a combination of power , low energy use and heat production and reliability especially since with advances in CPU speed can disabling and damaging hear.

The Core 2 Duo CPUs should be a major consideration in your next high end computer purchase.

Article by : Art Fellon

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RSS Feeds For Church Websites

Maybe you have heard browsing the internet about RSS feeds. Maybe one of your friend told you that they receive information through such kind of chanels. You may wonder: what is a RSS feed and what advantage it brings to me?Well, RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". RSS is a news system in XML format. In order to read RSS feeds you need some kind of RSS readers.

There are a lot of good RSS readers that are published free on the internet. You could try RSS Bandit or you could buy Feed Demon, or you could use the one that Mozilla Thunderbird has.

No matter what reader you use, the protocol is the same.

What is the advantage? Well, there are planty of advantages: you subscribe to those chanels that you want and you stay in touch with all the latest information available.

You will find some orange rectangles on sites providing RSS, rectangles marked with XML or RSS. Those sites provide RSS feeds.

But the most important thing you could do if you have a church website for example, is not only to stay in touch with information by the use of the RSS feeds but to...provide RSS feeds to your church users!

Yes. Publish your own news, make people subscribe to your news and then feed them RSS news. Give them information , make them stay connected. The main advantage is that you could send information about church meetings, church announcements, etc. You will not need to call everybody or send emails, you just write a feed and all your subscribers will find out about it almost right away.

If you sell things, church gifts, candels, etc, you could put among tehse news promotional announcements regarding this. Imagine sending a promotional offer that will never be treated like spam, you just publish it in RSS format and your subscribers will read it!

Start using RSS feeds, subcribe and publish, find out more about it soon in a new article about it!

It started to be one of the most important ways to feed news to people all over the internet and you should get align with everybody else right now!

Article by : John Smith

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Windows Registry Structure And Function

You can view the structure of the Windows Registry when you open it up with a Registry Editor utility like REGEDIT.EXE or REGEDT32.EXE.

If you’ve never opened the Registry before, you might be surprised and comforted by its familiar-looking layout. Its hierarchical data structure is much like the data structure you see everyday in Windows Explorer, except here the tree structure units are keys, subkeys, and values rather than directories, subdirectories, and files. But any intuitive understanding of the Registry’s content (for most people) ends right here, because the registry was designed more for the operating system and installed applications than for humans.

The Registry’s hierarchical data structure and central location allow Windows and hosted applications to quickly locate their configuration settings and default parameters, but these parameters have values in the Registry that are different from their internally-defined values used by the applications themselves. This can make altering application settings from within the Registry a grueling and tedious task, and this is why most changes to Registry data are more easily (and more safely) made by changing settings from within individual applications or system utilities.

A Closer Look at Registry Structure

The primary divisions of the Windows Registry are seen a list of 4-6 expandable folders, called root keys or subtrees, in the left pane of the Registry Editor window. These can be expanded to show the keys and subkeys, and these can be expanded in turn to show further subkeys below or their value entries listed on the right pane in Registry Editor. The Registry subtrees and a description of their contents are as follows:

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (HKLM): This root key (or subtree) contains configuration data specific to the local computer, including its hardware devices and operating system components. The information contained within HKLM is independent of the current user and applications or processes in use.

• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT (HKCR): This root key contains the file-class, OLE, and COM object data. The keys, subkeys, and data within this subtree are linked to (and identical to) those contained in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\ subtree.

• HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG (HKCC): This root key is added to make current versions of Windows compatible with older Windows 95 applications. It is derived from HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\HardwareProfiles\Current and contains configuration settings for all currently active hardware.

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER (HKCU): This root key contains profile information for the user currently logged in. Each time a user logs on, HKCU is rebuilt with that user’s profile data from HKEY_USERS.

• HKEY_USERS (HKU): This root key contains the default profile and the profiles of all users who have logged onto the computer.

• HKEY_DYN_DATA (HKDD): This root key is found only on Windows 95/98/ME. It is linked to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and contains information about Plug and Play hardware components. HKDD , for use with the Plug-&-Play features of Windows, this section will change as devices are added and removed from the system.

The “HKEY_” at the beginning of each root key’s name indicates that the key is a unique identifier (or handle) that programs can use to access resources. Each of these root keys branches out, first into keys and then further into subkeys. At the end of these branches of keys and subkeys lay the Registry data, or value entries, corresponding to the data stored in the hive files. The Windows Registry can store several different value types, but the most common that you will see are binary, strings (text for humans), and DWORD (Boolean) values.

Registry Hives

Much of the information contained in the Registry is stored on the computer’s hard drive as a set of binary data files aptly named “hives”. The hives are permanent Registry components, serving as both supporting files from which Windows retrieves Registry data during system startup, and as backup files that the Registry writes to each time its supporting data is altered or changed through a process called flushing. Flushes are automatic and occur within a few seconds after changes are made to the Registry.

Article by : Kenth Nasstrom

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Common Search Engine Principles

Search engines will be your primary assistants in the internet, to satisfy your queries. As every one is familiar with, search engines are used to list the websites, which are appropriate to provide information about the key word phrase. In the world of internet marketing, every websites developers need their website to be listed top positions of search engine results and adopt search engine optimization techniques to optimize the websites according to the search engine requirements. However to start with optimization, primarily you have to be aware about the common search engine principles, which will detail about the basic working pattern of search engines.

Search engines are computer programs, created to find out particular web sites from the millions of websites present in internet. There are many types of search engines, such as crawler based, human based and hybrid. In crawler based search engines particular programs for the searching process, whereas, for human based search engines such as directories and DMOZ, human editors will list out the pages, according to the relevancy of the content. In hybrid search engines, crawlers may be used for the search, but, human editorial intervention will be present. Out of the three, programmed search engines are more common and their principles are quite different from human searches.

The most common principle of search engines is that their language will be HTML, and all the information will be coded in HTML codes. The web server will be entry page of the search engines. And, a specific input area such as box is present in the particular HTML page to enter the key word phrase. The crawler based search engines will use specific algorithmic programs to locate and list the pages. Even though the basic components will be same, the grouping of the specific algorithms will differ according to the search engine.

Spiders or robots will be the primary searching algorithms for search engines, which identifies the web pages. It will identify the web pages in its HTML source tags, and it differs with a browser for not having any visual components such as texts or graphics. Crawlers are used to find out the documents in the links prescribed in the web pages. Indexing is the next phase, in which the web pages will be listed according to their characteristic features such as text, HTML tags and other specialties. The indexed pages have to be stored for the search engines, and databases are the common store houses of the web pages. The result pages will then rank the priority of the web pages, according to the various factors of consideration in a search engine listing. And, the viewer can see the results in the display pages of the web server in HTML visual version.

Article by: Mike Francis

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