I took this photo in August, 2006 in Houston air port. If you are a typical windows user, it’s nothing amazing, just a day to day experience(rather hour to hour).

As you may have noticed, I haven’t put something interesting here for few weeks. That was due to several reasons. One was that I was wrapping up all unfinished work I had to do. Then, more importantly, my laptop was struck by lightning about a month ago. Then, both home desktops were also got burnt (Probably the motherboard - I was too lazy to check those). So, I had a lack of personalized desktop environment, and also got restricted access to my old backup files along with the movie database because the old hard disks were IDE and the new desktop only supports SATA.

There is something I really hate; I was only using Windows for about a month. That’s why nothing interesting has taken place - What could you possibly do in windows? (However, I’m focusing on few web development activities, and will do a new blog post).

After thinking few days, the only thing I could come up sharing with you is this :

Yesterday, ahhh… Heroes season 1 final episode - “how to stop an exploding man”. When I got back to home from exhausted exam paper and a exhausted journey about 3 hours(Colombo to Ratnapura), my brother had almost downloaded it. However, after all who want to watch heroes final episode in small 14″ laptop screen. So, I plugged in my laptop to TV and boot it.

But as usual, when I’m trying to do something, Windows didn’t work. So, I tried fixing that. After lots and lots of fixing, I got it to boot, and when I played heroes sounds didn’t work. So, what to do - I restarted the computer again. Unfortunately, windows is not working again. It says “system32/config/system” file is missing.. ahhh!! That file is always important (lol.. if you are not sure what I’m talking about, read my previous post).

As you have already guessed, now windows doesn’t even boot in safe mode. So, I put a windows professional CD and tried to go to recovery console. No! No! It’s not a pirate version :). I got an original CD for selecting for second round in imagine cup web development (I also didn’t believe what I’m seeing when I first saw that.. So, no need to read that sentence again ;-)). However, recovery console was very helpful : It said “There are no hard disks present”.. whoah!! Cool, isn’t it? Actually, later on I found out I have to disable “Native SATA support” in bios in order to run the windows setup.

Anyway, since I didn’t released that SATA thing before, I rebooted in linux again to check whether I can find an old “system” file and replace the corrupted one. Thanks to my genius mind, System Restore is disabled and I had no copies of the “system” file left. So, I got one from the “windows/repair” and replace it(Thank you ntfs-3g). I could not stop just by just replacing that, I had to replace all the config files SAM, SECURITY, etc.

So, when I rebooted windows again, it worked perfectly, I was damn happy and got prepared to watch heroes. Oh!! Who is “Owner”?? instead of booting my normal user account, it booted to something called “Owner”.. oh!! Shit.. everything in the registry is gone.. How did I miss the fact “system” file is the registry? Anyway, I hope it’s ok and start installing drivers again. Actually, all driver files were in the system32 folder, so I just had to buzz the system to reinstall the drivers. Now, everything is ready, and I started installing software. Crap!! Even though everything seems fine, nothing works correct. It goes into an endless loop, which doesn’t even use my resources. It’s really annoying because usually when your computer is stuck, it uses your CPU power, uses your memory etc.. Then, I know something is going on, and be patience. But now, when I start an application, it just doesn’t show anything.

Okay.. Heroessss….. I can’t wait, and I also want to watch it in a 29. So, I got my hammers, knifes, etc ready and booted linux to see whether I can get the S-Video output working. And I never though this would be this much easier. Screw the hammers and knifes, you just a need a small blade(I think not even that if you are running feisty fawn - Not so sure, have to try that out). I just had to edit the “xorg.conf” file and put an option called “MonitorLayout” to “TV” in the “Device”. That’s all, I ran a “sudo killall gdm” and again a “sudo gdm”, it worked perfectly. (Yes, I know that you can do all that by one click in windows, but imagine getting your TV output works with windows generic drivers, you must be kidding).

And after all, happily ever after, Nathen and Peter stopped the bomb(If you want a detailed description on what happened read Kasun’s post).

After few more hours of installing windows and messing up with the drivers, I got windows running again. After all, how can I goe my ADSL to modem to work in linux?

The chm file viewer in windows is based on Internet Explorer. Today, when I was trying to open a chm file, it started displaying that ever boring “Page cannot be displayed” sign. I was wondering what to do, I was damn sure that this file worked before. Is that a some kind of a virus threat or is that my proxy settings? I was messing around the settings, but no luck there. Then, I started to backtrack ( I have a stack on my mind ). Then finally I found out what I did last was renaming the directory. So, I copied the file out of the directory and tried. Even though it sounds crazy, It worked. Yeah! That’s it. New name of the directory is “C++ & C#”. CHM viewer (Microsoft HTML Help - That’s the correct name I think) doesn’t encode the “#” character for Internet Explorer. So, it fails to load the file. So, I simply renamed it back to “C++”. May be it’s time for me to install wine + IE (Since I’m doing web developing, I need to test my web pages on Internet Explorer) and strict to linux only. I already have wine, but IE is not working

It is true that most people in the world are using Windows. But there is a doubt: “Is it the best OS for PCs?”. Here is a brief description regarding Linux vs. Windows.

GUI (Graphical User Interfaces) -

Both Windows and Linux provide GUIs and both are seem to be fairly ok. But there is an advantage in Linux; many GUIs (Gnome, KDE, etc) are available. Windows only comes with its own one and only GUI. There are some external software to change the look of the theme. But those are third party products and take up too much memory and slow down your computer.

Shell / Dos prompt -

The shell in Linux is very powerful. You can do almost everything in the shell. But the Dos prompt’s scope is limited to a small area (Almost only file handling!).

Cost -

Linux is almost free and Windows is around $200 - $300. But when you consider running Linux on a business environment, you may have to hire some Linux technicians, who might be more costly than the Windows techno craps.

Live CDs -

Windows doesn’t support a live booting while there are many live linux distros.

Software -

This is the main disadvantage of Linux. There are only few 3^rd party software for Linux. You might have some kind of alternatives but those might not good as windows products. For example macromedia products are the ideal tools for the web publishing; there is no good alternative for those in Linux. And most of the games are only for Windows. So, regarding the software Microsoft is in the lead.

Security -

There is no point of even talking about this. Linux is much more secure than Windows. There are thousand of security holes in Windows and very few in Linux. And the Linux bugs are always quickly fixed by the community.

So, as you guys can see Linux is much better than Windows? But why the people are still using Windows? That’s a topic to discuss and gateway to improve linux. Get back to you in another article.

Admin password, the dream of everyone. Specially, when you are in an environment where you are not the system administrator. Today, what I’m going to show you is how to take Windows Administrator passwords. You might have even noticed, if we can find out where windows stores the password, we can just look at it. But unfortunately, it is not that easy.

Windows stores the passwords in the Windows\System32\Config\SAM file. But windows prevent you from accessing that file. So, the answer is LINUX. Take a Knoppix CD, put it into your CDROM and restart the machine. Make sure your first boot device is CD-Rom. Then, it’ll boot into the Linux. Then the best option would be a USB pen. Just mount it and copy the SAM file into it. And make sure you also copy the Windows\System3\Config\System file. Then, restart again, you need Windows now.

Now you have to take a key called syskey from the system file. There are some windows utilities to do that, but I can’t remember the names. Anyway, once after you get it, you can use that key to decrypt the SAM file. Now the password!!! NO!! It’s not.

Again you have some hashes. What do we do now? Now, you have the time consuming part. You have to download and run John the ripper on these hashes. Please note this may take few hours, depending on the length of the password.

After that ***you*** are the system admin!!!