Month: October 2015

Disabling System Restore in Windows 7

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Only consider doing this if you are a Power User and you have a reliable, automatic backup routine of your own in place.

Windows systems dedicate a certain percentage of your drive storage to ‘System Protection’ which keeps backup copies of system files and even previous versions of your personal files and documents.

If you take your own regular backups of your system then there are numerous reasons as to why you might want to disable System Protection, here’s a few examples:

  • You’re already backing up your files elsewhere so it is duplicating data & wasting space
  • You have an SSD drive with limited storage
  • You have a very large drive 2-4TB and as Windows allocates a percentage it is actually using quite a lot of space for system restore.

Personally I keep regular drive images / backups of my system so if I needed a system file or older version of a document I’m sorted already, so I don’t need Windows duplicating data for me behind the scenes and wasting my drive storage on multiple drives.

To disable System Restore

Click the Start button > Right Click Computer > Properties > System Protection (on the left) > Configure > Turn off system protection > OK.

Whilst on that screen you might notice a Delete button to clear any existing ‘System Restore’ cache, feel free to hit that should you wish.

htop – System Monitor for Linux

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Want to monitor your Linux system?

See what is going on behind the scenes? Then htop is the tool. Nearly all Linux systems come with a simplified version built in called top – enter that onto your shell and you will see a very basic, monotone system monitor, however if you use the newer htop you get colours, more information and an layout that is easier on the eye. If the htop command doesn’t work for you then try installing it with either:

sudo yum install htop

sudo apt-get install htop

Depending on which Linux distro you are using.

htop lets you see performance, running processes, allows you to filter, search, sort and kill processes if necessary.

Understanding htop’s display

The numerical bars starting from the top left represent each CPU core within your system. The ‘Mem’ bar shows RAM / Memory and Swp stands for Swap (otherwise known as Page File within a Windows environment).

You will see your CPU and Memory bars fluctuate as your system is used more heavily, hopefully the Swap bar stays empty or very low, if it starts to rise that would typically be an indication that your system is running out of RAM and is switching to use Swap instead, the additional Disk I/O caused by that and the fact that your RAM is probably full will mean your system will start to run slowly in that situation.

Load Average is a good performance indicator at a glance, you will see three sets of numbers lets say for example:

0.85 4.25 8.45

The three sets of numbers above represents the average load of your system over a period of time. The first number on the left shows the load average over the course of 1 minute, the second number over a 5 minute period and the last number over 15 minutes. Meaning at a glance it can give you an indication of the current load of the system and historical information. For example if we take the numbers above, if I saw those on a real-life system it would indicate to me that the system was under heavy load a while ago but in the past 5-10 minutes the load has now dropped by quite a lot and is heading in the right direction.

Filter by User

Hit the U key when in top and it will give you the option to filter the list of running processes by user, very handy if you want to focus on a particular user or perhaps narrow down the list if you have found a process or user which is being troublesome.

Mr. Robot TV Series

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Mr Robot
Elliot Alderson the main character

Mr. Robot is a Hacker by night, Security Analyst by day. A superb TV series for anyone with an interest in computer & internet security. Normally in films or TV shows you see cheesy or bad computer scenes which true enthusiasts roll their eyes at as they know it’s not remotely real or technically correct, Mr. Robot is the exception to the rule with incredibly accurate scenes, with the main character Elliot using real linux tools like ssh, grep & more, featuring the use of Tor, Raspberry Pi’s a bit of social engineering and  working in data centres makes it quite entertaining.

There’s quite a lot of drug use through the early episodes but stick with it, that lessens off.

Here is a list of the shows episodes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot_(TV_series)#Episodes and here is some more general info.

As of Oct 2015 Mr. Robot has a 9.0 rating on IMDB as rated by 81,359 users.

Tor Browser Bundle

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TorOffers Anonymity on the web

The Tor software protects your Web Browsing by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.

The Tor Browser lets you use Tor on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux without needing to install any software. It can run off a USB flash drive, comes with a pre-configured web browser to protect your anonymity, and is self-contained (portable).

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en