Getting System Information

Here's my first posts after realizing my mistake. I will be starting off on getting to know small small things in Microsoft Windows (no I am not explaining where the start button is) and this will be for users of Microsoft Windows. Although you may have been using Windows for a long while now and is quite good at getting your day today work done you might be at a loss when you need to get something technical done. Let's say for a instance that you want to know what type of RAM (or memory as most would call it) you need to buy to upgrade your computer or may be before downloading or buying a software you need to know whether your system would support it and you have absolutely no clue in finding that out. Well that's what I will be trying to help you out with. In this process I will introduce you to some not so famous software as well which you will find quite useful.    

First we will start off with finding out basic information about your computer system. That is what is the operating system you're having, what is the current RAM (memory) capacity, what is the speed of your processor and how many processors you're having etc. For this you don't need any new software. All you need are few mouse clicks. For this right click on My Computer once and on the list of items that pop up click on the bottom one called Properties.

In the window that appears you will see the basic overview of your system. That is it would mention the Windows type you're  running, if a Service Pack is installed what it is, the processor type (if a multi-processor system then for each one it would show the type), installed RAM, system type (whether the operating system is 32 bit or 64 bit), your computer name, the workgroup or network you're connected to and of course whether your Windows if genuine or not.

The picture I have uploaded here is of a Windows 7 system. So for other Windows versions (older than Vista) the look will be different but still the information will be available (the grayed out part will have some information than a gray bar. It's just me taking precautions not to have Bill Gates on my tail).

That's for getting a basic system overview. But for some reason if you wanted more information (like system manufacturer, BIOS version, display or sound device information) there's another method. This is not just a click away though. First you will have to go to start menu and from there click RUN (for Windows 7 users and Vista users using service packs you will have to type "run" without quotes in the search box that appears in the start menu and press enter). In the dialog box that appears type "dxdiag" without quotes and press enter. This would open up a new window (it might prompt you asking if you want to view this. Just click yes).

As you can see this gives a much more detailed description of your system. If you want information about the display or sound you just have to click on the appropriate bar on the top (Display is for display info and Sound for sound info !!!).

These are two methods supplied by Windows itself to find out information about your system. Normally this would be enough for you in getting around normal requirement gathering for a software upgrade or anything of the sort. But sometimes you might need much more detailed information than this about your system. For that there is a software available (not available with Windows. They are not that helpful) and fortunately enough this software is free.

CPU-Z (to download the software click on the link and in the new page that appears click on "Download Latest Version" on top right hand corner) is a software available to provide you with all related or unrelated and needed or not needed information about your system (even your system vendor wouldn't know all this information I'd guess). The software is 100% free and 100% virus or any other malicious software or add on free. There is no installation to do. You just have to unzip the downloaded file and run the .exe file (if you're running Windows Vista or later it will request user permission and just click yes and if you have Kaspersky anti-virus installed on the first run it would give a warning and simply click allow).

Well you can see from the picture itself the details the software provides you with. Even I don't have a clue about most of the information supplied here (not that I know that many) but it gives possibly every bit of information there is to now about it. The CPU tab obviously provides you with details of the processors of your system. The cache tab provides details about the cache memory. Likewise all of the tabs delivers information about the particular system aspect that is mentioned on its name. Now you don't have to worry wondering whether you should buy a DDR 2 RAM or DDR3 RAM for your system and trying to take it apart. Just run the program and click on the memory tab and you will see what type of RAM you have and if you want separate information on each of the currently installed RAMs (ya right !!! Must be crazy to look into that information) you just have to click on the SPD tab. This is an absolute marvel and a really great tool in finding out information of your system.

So folks that's about it for today. So next time before you take your system apart to find out the RAM type just bother to get this software installed and save yourself the trouble and also if you just need the small stuff remember to right click. Wishing you a good day me out.

Redemption

So here I am back again guys and girls. Fortunately for me my system didn't crash and am very well running my new installed software (which I got legitimately for once) but that's a total different topic which I will go into in a future post. Right now I have come to two realizations. First is that although this is a technical blog I don't give out quite the impression of the sort specially with the layout and with the style of writing. Well both have their own reasons. As for the layout it's just that I prefer the look of old age books as it gives a look of  royalty (yes I have some serious personality issues) and being established. As for the styling as I said at the beginning it's all about trying to make a non technical person feel at ease (I just copied someone's idea on the issue). Then I come to the second realization which was kind of ironical to me. Although I my intention was in helping out even the layman on the simplest things I started this off on a bang (torrents !!!). I was just becoming the same one I was trying not to be and I don't have any justifications for that. So rather I thought I'd correct that mistake and start off with a few issues that even an infant starting using a computer may find useful (again torrents??? How mad was I???). So folks let's see if I can be simple as I want to be.

Internet Download Manager (IDM) Tweak

If I promise I deliver (well at least I try to). So what did I promise? To be back again with something on IDM and here I am to deliver on it. This is for all those who have been annoyed when the normal browser download takes over a download rather than IDM (that is when you have it installed. Don't complain about it if you haven't installed it. It's just the way it's bound to happen). There can be few reasons for this.

Sometimes this happens when the program has crashed due to some reason (cannot clearly say why. IDM has few bugs which makes the program crash or sometimes it just does) and all you got to do is just restart the browser and it would work without a problem but sometimes it would still not and at this juncture it's better you go for a restart of the computer (sorry folks. Cannot help you there other than that).

For some reason IDM works exceptionally well with IE (Internet Explorer) but not that well with Firefox. Some downloads however much you try won't get downloaded via IDM when you try it through Firefox. Not to worry though as it has nothing to do with your Firefox but with the websites behavior in Firefox. In such a case just use IE to navigate to that page and initiate the download from there and IDM will take over without a problem. But support for Google Chrome browser is still not in a very good status.

Then there are the times however much you try after restarting, changing browsers and doing everything possible doing (kicking the computer even) the download won't be taken over by IDM. How annoying is that? But well it's neither our fault and nor theirs as it would have something to do with the file extension type. IDM is pre-configured for a list of extensions which can be accessed by going to the IDM main window. Goto Downloads - > Options. Then in the new window goto File Types tab. There you will see the file types which IDM supports and here's the good news. You can add a file type there !!! All you have to do is add the file type extension in capital letters after a space (don't put the dot in front). That's about it and you're ready to go. I mean download. But I'd restart IDM just to be on the safe side.

But if it still doesn't work for you after all this well then yet I still have the solution for you. Use the normal browser download !. Wait. That's not my solution. That's what normally happens. Sorry folks can't help you there if all this fails. Other than that here's a view of how to download videos using IDM. When you load a video in a site like youtube you will get a small button like this above the player.

When you click on the Download this video button it would start downloading the video through IDM. This support is not yet there for Chrome but it's available in both IE and Firefox. If the button doesn't show up it means that the web player is not supporting the download (actually rather than not supporting it is prohibiting us from doing an illegal action). So folks that's about it for now. Hope this helps those who are frustrated with IDM downloads. Will be back with more. Battalion !!! Fall Out !!!

Download Managers

Here I am back again within a short span of time. Seems blogging is turning out to be my thing. Hopefully this won't become my main responsibility in my life and my responsibilities my pass time. Right now I am uninstalling Visual Studio 2008 in hope of installing 2010 (those who don't know Visual Studio please continue as if you didn't see this line. It's not worth Googling up) while writing this. So if you don't hear from me after sometime probably I crashed the system. 

All right then continuing on trying to enlighten you all (not in the Buddhism way of course) on little tit bits of the computer world which will make your life a whole lot easier, in this post I will be talking about Download Managers. Some of you may have already heard about them and are using them but I have come to see that most are unaware of these products. This might not be that much handy for people using 24Mbps connections (I envy you !!!) but for us poor souls who have to put up with the 512Kbps or sometimes normal dial ups. But still these may come in handy for others also when managing their downloads or sometimes when you can't get the total bandwidth allocated for the download. 

Download managers do basically what their names command them to do. That is manage our downloads. But here's the surprise. They speed up your downloads by utilizing your bandwidth to the maximum. So now you don't have to sit in front of the computer whole day praying for the download speed to increase and hoping that your connection won't crash as the download managers give you the ability to pause and resume your downloads at ease. Another unknown advantage that comes with these download managers is the ability to download videos and songs (like in youtube) directly (I have seen many begging to find a way to download youtube clips) .

So how do these work? I won't go into the details of their inner functionality (I myself am clueless about it) but will describe how it will work for you. Once you download and install a download manager it will integrate itself with your installed browsers (not with all of them as different managers support different browsers and please don't install a set of download mangers hoping to capture all the browsers !!!) and that's about it. After that what you have to do is continue roaming the internet as normally as you do and when you click on any link to download the manager would take it over from there. It will open a download window of it's own rather than the normal browser download window and all you have to do is set the destination folder and click OK. Rest will be managed by the download manager and you will be surprised to see downloads reaching speeds that you thought you weren't entitled to.

But one thing about download managers is that they won't be able to handle some types of files. So in case of downloading such a file the download manager won't activate and the normal browser download will take over. Some download managers like IDM (Internet Download Manager) will allow you to add file types that it doesn't know of so that it can take over them. But most of the file types are supported by all download managers so it won't be a problem.

So what are the download managers available? I have two favorites of my own and I have only used those two so far but there are few others that I can recommend as well. But these are not the only ones so you will be able to find many download managers available. But most good download managers will have to be purchased and only few will be available free and of those also be careful not to get caught for ones which have malicious programs running behind them.

My personal favorites are

• IDM
• FDM

IDM is not freely available and you will have to purchase it (of course there are cracks available that you can download from torrents but be warned that some cracks are infected). IDM is really fast and have great many features and handles the downloads very well and I my self use this. But for those who don't won't to pay or use cracks there's absolutely nothing to worry as they have FDM (Free Download Manager). As the name says it's absolutely free and is quite marvelous and really good for a freely available manager. It achieves speeds as much as IDM and is very user friendly (I'm wondering myself why I'm using IDM). So you can pick either of those. 

• Flash Get 
• Orbit Downloader 

Flash Get has been recommended as a very good download manger to me but unfortunately I experimented it in a very slow network which brought unsatisfactory results but it's something to say it was user friendly. So if any of you would like to try out I won't say no. Orbit Downloader is also well of in recommendations and both of these are available free. With Firefox though there are some add-ons that you can try out which will integrate with the firefox browser only and out of them DownThemAll would be a very good choice. 

So there you are basically with everything you need to know about download managers and how to use them. Hope next time you won't go posting comments under videos asking ways to download a video. Wishing you great speed with your downloads and hoping to come back with some details on IDM me signing out.

Torrents (BitTorrent) - Part 2

Okay folks. Here I am back again with the continuation of the Torrents post. I was supposed to finish this off yesterday but got too lazy and sleepy (as usual). Getting back in my last post I explained what a torrent is, their advantages and disadvantages and how to be secure when using torrents. Let me talk about how to use torrents in this post.

So how to use torrents? First you should have a BitTorrent client such as µTorrent. This software will act as a download manager managing the torrent download. Then you should download the .torrent file which will contain the information regarding your main download (where to download the .torrent file). Once you have downloaded the file open it using the BitTorrent client (just double click the .torrent file and it will open in the program) and presto! you don't have anything more to do. There on whenever the BitTorrent client is running it will keep downloading the file for you. You can pause or resume or stop the download according to your needs through the client and if you want multiple torrent files can be added to download simultaneously and the BitTorrent client will take care of them without any problems.

Some available BitTorrent clients are

• µTorrent 
• Azureus (Vuze)
• BitTorrent 

I personally use µTorrent as it is very light weight and very much bug free. I had used Azureus before but it has some other functionality other than just torrent management thus making the program a bit heavy on the memory usage.

Then we need the torrent. But where to find a good torrent and how to search for a torrent we need? There these sites would come into play.

• isoHunt
• mininova
• thepiratebay
• torrentz

In-spite of all these sites being promoted isoHunt is my favorite. Once you go to the site you will know why it is. It is very well organized and most of the torrents are being uploaded to the site by users. Whatever the download you want, let it be a movie, song, book, game or software you are sure to find it there. Best of all is it's comment section for each torrent (you can click on the small green or red colored numbers at the end of a torrent file name, green being good feedback and red being bad) where the users would give a full description on the quality of the torrent and give a rating of their own so you can decide quite easily.

Other two sites are also kind of like the same (thepiratebay being very famous and also having a lot of torrents, but due to legal scandals it's sometimes down and mininova is now just allowing shared content on its site) but the torrentz site is different. It's actually like the Google of torrents. What you can do is go to that site and search for the torrent name you want there and once you have done so it will give you a list of torrents matching your search. When you select the file you want it will display a number of sites (like thepiratebay or  mininova) from where you can pick one and then download the torrent from there. This is very useful in finding files which are very old or hard to find.    

Just don't be quick in downloading a file but go through the comments and if any samples are available fist download the samples and check and always if you feel the torrent is not good no matter what the comments say then don't download because it is all at your own risk. That's all for now folks. Hope you get the hang of it and that this gave you some sort of an explanation rather than another headache. Leave comments if you need help and I will get back to them. Me out. Have a good day.

Torrents (BitTorrent) - Part 1

So let me start off with a very basic subject "BitTorrents" or "Torrents" as it is more commonly known. Few years back I had no idea what torrents meant and when I got to know about it I was like how come I never had heard about this before??? During a blink of an eye I practically became a worshiper of torrents and was crazy enough to use it for even 1MB freely available software downloads. But here I am straying away from the topic.

So what are torrents? Without getting all technical about the matter as in Wikipedia I'll try to give a brief explanation as possible. Basically this is a way of transferring data among computers. So what's different between a torrent and a direct download? Torrents is an easier way of sharing a large sized file than a direct download as it won't consume the bandwidth or the hardware of the hosting server or sharer. What basically happens is that one user will share a file through a torrent and make the torrent available for other users. This first sharer will be called the "initial seed". The other users can download the .torrent file (a small file containing the details) that has been shared and this will start downloading the larger file in small small parts. During the the downloading phase the downloader is called a peer and a peer can share the completed small parts of the file. After the file has been completely downloaded the peer becomes a seed thus sharing the whole file themselves. This way the stress on the initial seed's resources becomes less and the availability of the file becomes higher.

So what are the advantages of torrents?

• Easy to share files
• High availability
  
• Ability to pause and resume
• High speeds depending on availability of seeds

Looks very promising isn't it? But as usual there's always the disadvantages.

• Download speed depends on the number of seeds and their upload speeds
• Files without seeds cannot be downloaded
• Possibility of getting conned into downloading useless files
• Vulnerability to viruses
• For users in some countries ISPs may track torrent downloads for copy righted material

So what is the huge trend for torrents with these types of disadvantages??? Let's take an example of downloading a large file of about 2GB. Most direct download servers do not support resume capability for downloads and even for that you will have to use a download manager of the sorts. So either you have to leave the computer on till the whole download completes while being unable to do anything over the net as it would be eating up your bandwidth (of course this won't be a problem to people with high download speeds). But with torrents on the other hand you will be able to pause the download at your will whenever you want and resume it when you feel like it. Again the availability of items on torrents is amazing. Things you thought that you won't find forever as they were lost in time can be found in torrents. But still you must be wondering is it worth the risk?

As a user of torrents for past 3 years (not that much experience I know) I must say it is worth the risk if you know how to handle things. I have been duped into downloading a useless file only once and again ran a risk of getting infected (not me !!! the computer !!!) once. So how am I avoiding all these? That's where the secret of selecting a good torrent tracker comes into play.

Information about available torrents are stored in some sites. We can search for the files we are looking for through these sites and download them. But some sites unlike others provide safety features such as removing wrong, misleading or infected torrents themselves and enabling the users of torrents to comment on the files they have downloaded so that others can determine for themselves the quality of the file. Using these options and a bit of thinking on your part you can definitely become a secured user of torrents. As for the infected files all I can say is even in a direct download you run the risk of getting infected so the best way of preventing that would be to have a good anti virus software installed. As for the tracking of torrents in some countries it is hard to avoid it except that in comments the users would report whether that particular torrent is being watched.

So folks this is as basic as I can get about torrents. This has been a long post (at least for me). I'll be back with more information about good torrent sites, good uploaders and all that is needed to use torrents safely. Adios !!!

Welcome

Hello guys and girls,

First of all let me welcome you all to my blog "The Inferno" . Muhahahaha ... oh well that's me always got something to do with the fires of hell. That being said I am no devil and no saint either. Just an ordinary guy with a knack for techy things and who's spending around 3 quarters of my life in front of the computer screen. Looking at the time spent here and the time when i created this blog it might be confusing to see why the hell I started blogging (wow !!! just discovered blogging has become a English word. Where was I???) after about five months of creation. Oh well life is boring and am a lazy fellow (don't imagine the fat guy eating chocolate in front of the computer scenario) so making me lazy to get around to this. But after all the hey ho here I am trying to contribute something to my fellow internet comrades (nope am not Marxist !!!).

Why the blog??? Well obviously it's because I can't afford to host a server. Wait you meant why I created this? Well being a avid user of many different computer products and being one of those millions who Google up as soon as coming up against a brick wall in software problems I thought why not share my experience and knowledge (a fat lot !!!) and the solutions I have found so that the normal layman can understand what the hell to do rather than trying to figure out all the technical jargon. Be warned !!! If you are a avid user of only genuine software you might find this a little bit discomforting as I would be providing details on cracks and all the work arounds available for some software (told you I am no saint).

So enough with the introduction. Let's get to the point shall we?