Naveen’s Blog

I had Symantec antivirus software (network version that I got free with Sify internet connection) running for the last six months and my system got affected more than 3 times with viruses, which are mainly from external USB drives. Before that I had AVG Free, which also failed to recognize few viruses.

A month ago, I came across a report from AV-Comparatives analyzing around 16 antivirus software available in the market. It has divided the tests into 8 categories and ranked the products as Gold, Silver, and Bronze. As usual, I have gone through the report and the products to see whether they have free versions for my system. What caught my eye was free antivirus tool from Microsoft (yes it is free) called, Microsoft Security Essentials. It has secured 2 Gold ratings and one Bronze in overall 8 categories. So, I wanted to give it a try and the results were amazing! To date, my system has not been affected by any virus and has even cleaned the viruses from System Restore Folder. Detection is too fast and now, I am free of USB virus worries.

“Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free download from Microsoft that is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date so you can be assured your PC is protected by the latest technology. It’s easy to tell if your PC is secure — when you’re green, you’re good. It’s that simple.” says Microsoft on its website.

Click For a Bigger & Clear Image

The best things I have noted in it are:

• Small in size. Around 9 MB. Updates are around 40 MB in size. (AVG Free installation file itself is around 76 MB)
• Simple graphical interface.
• Good detection of USB viruses.
• Able to clean the viruses that are in System Restore Folder.
• Free (I am crazy of free software)

Down sides:

• You need to have genuine copy of Windows. Before installing it, software verified that you are running genuine Windows OS.
• You cannot clean or delete the viruses until it finishes the scan. So, if power failure occurs in between, then you need to start again, which is really irritating.
• Sometimes it does not turn green (which tells that it is running) automatically, though it is running. We need to click it open to turn it green.

Caught the Viruses

Except those down sides, which I hope Microsoft will update in the future upgrades, it is the best free antivirus I have run ever. It is much better than Free AVG version. Few of my friends told me that installing it made the system slow down, though I never experienced it on Windows XP running on 512 MB RAM. Make sure that you installed the latest .Net Framework (3.5 SP1), which I think is the cause of slow down. Try it and tell me your experiences in comments section.

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I am a fan of tiny tools.  I wrote about few feature-rich tiny tools including tiny screen zooming software, tiny browser, tiny ISO mounting software, etc.

Today, I was searching for a tool to edit mp3 tags and embed album art into the files and found this tiny tool with amazing features.  “Mp3 Tag Tools” with a project name of “massid3lib” on SourceForge, is a tiny tool, just 281 KB, to batch edit mp3 files and embed the album art and lyrics directly into the mp3 file.

Features:

• You can edit ID3V1.1 and V2.x, copy from one to another, and sync them.
• Embed album art (album picture) and lyrics into the files.
• Batch edit the tags and embed album picture.



• At just a click of button, you can correct the case automatically.



• “Clean Filenames” option will remove excess whitespace, capitalizes after symbols & prefixes.
• Batch rename the files using a custom format.
• Sort all the mp3 files into artist, album, genre or in combination formats.  Very useful option to sort the songs according to artist or genre.



• A lot more other features.  Visit the project page to discover all the features.

Get it from the project homepage on SF | Direct Download @ Ziddu

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My post on downloading videos from video-sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Metcafe, etc. using Real Player has become more popular as it was an easy way and supported almost all video-sharing websites.  When I learned this feature in Real Player, I have ignored every other trick and stick to Real Player to download the videos.

Now downloading these streaming videos has become even more simple and easier with FlashGot.  Install this tiny plugin in Firefox and you are done.  Now go to any streaming video site and play the video and you will see a video frame icon in the status bar prompting you that it has got the link to the video.

Actually, FlastGot is used to download multiple files from the webpages at a single click.  FlashGot sends all the files and images in a webpage to an external download manager or to the Firefox’s internal download manager.  This video downloading facility is an extra feature it has.

FlashGot instantly recognizes the streaming video we are playing in the browser and shows a video frame icon in the status bar.  When you hover the mouse onto it, it shows available formats of the video along with the FLV file.  Just click on one of the format you need.  Keep in mind that FLV files downloaded using FlashGot will not have the extension.  You can just drag and drop it into VLC Player or Wimpy to play the video.

Get FlashGot and start downloading your favorite videos.

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You might not be knowing that there is an excellent MS Office alternative exists called OpenOffice.  OpenOffice is a free open-source office suite.  I have been using OpenOffice lately as I have been working on creating some PDFs.  The new OpenOffice 3.1 version is equipped with lot of features and it has been improving day by day.  Lot of excellent extensions making it fun to work on OpenOffice.  It has the features that are not available on MS Office like exporting the documents to PDF, presentations to flash files, spreadsheets to XML files, etc.  Also, you can import the MS Office documents directly into OpenOffice and save them in their original MS Office format.

OpenOffice is lacking one useful option in OpenOffice Writer (Word in MS Office), which is “initial caps”.  I don’t know why they are not including it, but it is the widely used option in my work.  As I started working with OpenOffice Writer, I have started getting trouble.  I had to manually do the initial capitalization.  So, I have searched the OpenOffice forums and web to lean how to get that functionality in OpenOffice writer.  So, this post combines those all tricks in one place and gives step-by-step information on how to get that functionality in Writer.

You can achieve this functionality by using macros and assigning it to a keyboard shortcut, which is Shift+F3 in MS Word.

Download the macro code first.  Then, open the OpenOffice Writer.  Go to Tools>Macros>Organize Macros>OpenOffice.org Basic

On the left side, you can see a folder “Standard.” Expand it and you can see Module1.  Select it and then click the button “Edit” on the right side.  It opens a code window.  Now select the code already there and delete.  Now paste the macro code you have downloaded from the above link.  If you want to rename this macro, then go to the bottom of the window and right click on the tab, which reads “Module1.”  Then, close the window.

Now your macro is ready.  You need to assign a key to it.  Click on “Tools” from the menu bar on the top and select “Customize.”  You can alternatively press Alt+T followed by C to open the customization window.  Select the tab “Keyboard.”  Below that in the “Shortcut Keys” section select a short key, normally it is Shift+F3 in Word by default.  Then in the “Category” section, expand OpenOffice.org Macros>User>Standard>Module1(if you have not renamed it earlier).  Then click the button “Modify” on the right side.  You are done!  Now you can initial capitalize the words same as you were doing in MS Word.

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While going through an online software selling website, I have seen approx. $25 costing registry cleaner in the hot selling products list.  I wondered why people are shelling out that much when there are a number of free registry cleaners are available.  So, this post has come out from that doubt and show the people a free registry cleaner that I have been using for years.

What is a Registry Cleaner?
Registry cleaner is a software that cleans the unwanted registry entries, invalid paths, invalid ActiveX, unused file extensions, etc. thus by speeding up the system.  Registry is a database where Windows Operating System stores its settings and options.

One of the best and free registry cleaner is RegSeeker.  It come as a standalone product, which does not need any installation.  Just copy the folder onto desktop or just drop into your Program Files folder.

If you use it for the first time, you can see that hundreds of invalid and unwanted registry entries and after deleting them, you can see a slight boost in your system’s performance.  Sometimes when you uninstall a software, it just deletes the files in Program Files folder, but keeps the entries in registry like software key, which troubles sometimes when you change the key.  I have had these problems and resolved it easily by running Registry Cleaner.

It also comes with features like tweaks for XP, listing and uninstallation of installed products, and searching and deleting registry entries right from RegSeeker.

RegSeeker Homepage: http://www.hoverdesk.net/freeware.htm

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Being associated with bank for short-term, I often get this question from friends and relatives.  How to calculate EMI?  When you apply for loan, they will just tell you the EMI, but does not tell you how they are calculated unless you ask them specifically to show how they calculated it.  EMI table is also called as amortization table, which shows the balance at each installment.

EMI or equated monthly installments is the most popular form of loan payment.  It is a fixed amount of repayment made every month towards the loan, which includes payment towards both principal and interest.

It is easy to prepare an EMI table in Excel sheet.  There is a financial function called PMT to calculate the EMI.

PMT(rate,nper,pv)

rate – Interest rate for the loan.
nper – Total number of payments for the loan.
pv – Present value/principal.

Prepare excel sheet with the following data and enter the PMT function in the cell “C7.”

• Rate = C6/C5, which divides rate of interest by number of months thus giving rate of interest per month.
• Nper = C4*C5, which gives total number of months we need to pay equated installment.
• Do not forget to take the loan amount in minus value, so that our EMI table shows positive values.

Now prepare table with Serial Number of Payment, Monthly Installment, Interest Amount, Principal Amount, and Balance.  Take the first row with serial number “0” and in the balance amount point the cell to “Loan Amount” – type “=C3”  Next Enter the serial number as 1.  Monthly installments will remain same so take absolute cell reference (by adding $) which will not change when you drag the cells to auto increment.  In “Monthly Installment” column, enter “=$C$7“.  In the “Interest Amount” column, enter “=F10*$C$6/$C$5” which means we are dividing the balance amount at the end of the month by monthly interest rate (rate of interest/payments per year).  As the rate of interest and yearly payments are not going to change, we used absolute reference using $ sign.  In “Principal Amount” column type “=C11-D11” which deducts the monthly interest from monthly EMI and whatever the balance available shows as payment towards the principal amount.  In “Balance” column enter,” =F10-E11“, which means we are deducting the principal amount in the EMI to ascertain the original balance at the end of the month upon which we are going to calculate interest for the next month.  Now select the row and drag it until balance becomes “0”.

That’s all!  We made our own EMI calculator in Excel.  This Excel EMI calculator is created for a tenure of 20 years.  If you are just calculating for 5 years, i.e., 60 months, 61st month shows values red colored and in minus range.   So you need to take up to “0” in the balance column.  Ignore the values in RED.  If you want to calculate for more years, then just select the last row and drag it to extend it.

Download the Excel EMI Calculator.

Update – Oct 16, 2009: Mr. Parixit Namdhar, one of my blog readers, suggested that instead of entering the formula “=$C$7” in column “C” entering “=IF($B11>($C$4*$C$5),0,$C$7)” solves the minus values problem.  This formula makes the minus values zero making it easily understandable and looks neat.  Download the Version 2 from the below link.  Thanks a lot Parixit!

Download the Excel EMI Calculator V2.

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Today, I transferred approximately 200 music files into my mobile phone, but when I tried to play them, only 30-35 files were showing up in the media player.  After a quick check, I found that the player in my mobile phone can only play WAV and MP3 files.  When I looked at the files, they were mostly in FLV format.  So, quickly done a search on the Google and found this tiny tool, which is just 500KB.  It is really an amazing tiny application, which took less than half a minute to install and only few seconds to convert all the 170 FLV files into MP3.  Quality remained intact.

Download FLV2MP3 converter (on Ziddu), install it, and when you run it a small window will appear.  Just drop your files onto it and it will convert it to MP3 and stores in the same directory with the same file name.

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ZoomIt is a free screen zooming and annotation tool, which is very useful tool for the people who give presentations through projectors.  It is a tiny application, only 130 KB and has lot of functions like zooming, drawing, and typing on the zoomed screen.

It is just a single file which you can place anywhere and once you start it, it sits in the system tray and you can access it with hotkeys.  When you use it first time it shows the hotkeys already assigned and gives an option to modify them as per our choice.

It has the features like (default hotkeys are listed along with in brackets):

• Zoom (Ctrl+1)
• Draw (Mouse Left Click)/Cancel Drawing (Mouse Right Click)
• Changing Pen Color (Type “r” for Red, “g” for green, “b” for blue, “o” for orange, “y” for yellow, and “p” for pink)
• Pen Width (Mouse Wheel or Up and Down Arrow Keys)
• Straight Line (Hold down the Shift Key while drawing)
• Rectangle (Hold down the Ctrl Key while drawing)
• Ellipse (Hold down the Tab Key while drawing)
• Copy Zoomed Screens (Ctrl+C)
• Save Zoomed Screens (Ctrl+S)
• Draw Without Zoom (Ctrl+2)
• Typing (Press “t” from keyboard)
• Arrow Key (Ctrl+Shift+Right/Left move with mouse)

This is a free product and you can get it from Microsoft’s website here.

Click on the picture to view full size image

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