PCSTATS Weekly Tech Tips (Torrent, DBan, VLC Player)
Diambil dari PCSTATS Newsletter.
Speeding up Torrent Transfer Rates
The Bit-Torrent protocol is one of the most popular ways (if not the most popular) of transferring data on the internet. However, many ISPs throttle traffic back because torrents eat up a ton of bandwidth. If your torrent downloads are coming in at 5KB/s or lower, it's probable the ISP is artificially slowing down traffic. There is an easy way around ISP throttling, what you'll need to do is enable encryption in one form or another - ie. header encryption, message stream encryption, etc.) of the Bit-Torrent data stream. This masks the nature of the traffic, and in most situations prevents the ISP from knowing what it is.
Encryption is not a native feature of the Bit-Torrent protocol, so to enable it you'll need a third party program like Utorrent. Once installed, load up the program and go to its configuration area. Encryption is usually located with the connection options, from there enable the form you find suitable (in this case, check "forced encryption), save, and restart the client. Your Bit-Torrent downloads will hopefully be much faster.
Securely Erasing a Hard Drive
Securing data on a HDD to be returned for RMA, retired or moved into a different computer is not as straightforward as simply destroying the partitions or formatting it. That does not actually wipe your data off, it just destroy's the partition table or marks sectors for rewrite. The data is still there. With recovery tools that can be found online, or in this PCSTATS Beginners Guide to data recovery, it's very possible to rebuild partition tables and recover data that has been formatted. We've done both in the PCSTATS labs in fact.
You can prevent your old data from falling into the wrong hands with a software program called DBAN which is a self-contained bootable command line application for securely erasing all information from a hard drive, SATA or IDE.
To do this, download the DBAN 1.0.7 ISO file (http://www.dban.org) and create a bootable CD. Next, restart your computer, go into the BIOS and set it to boot off the CD drive first. Save that setting and turn off the computer. Now before you go any further, to be safe, disconnect ALL hard drives from the motherboard that you DON'T want to erase, and connect the one hard drive to be completely wiped. Now double check everything - all SATA and IDE drives you DON'T want to erase are disconnected, right? Good.
Start up the PC with the DBAN boot CD in the CD-drive, once at the DBAN menu, hit 'Enter' to start the program in interactive mode. Press 'M' and select wipe method 'DoD 5228.22-M', press spacebar to save the selection. At the 'Disks and Partitions' menu press the spacebar to select the hard drive to be wiped (if you took the safe approach, there will only be one drive present), or scroll down and choose an individual partition by pressing the spacebar. Press 'F10' to begin the wipe. It may take a while, and it's a bit more tedious than a straight format, but DBAN completely removes all information from a hard drive.
Just say No to Windows Media Player - try VLC Instead
Videolan's VLC Media Player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc) is one of the most common third party media players available, however by default it doesn't get along with Microsoft Windows Vista. Good thing there's an easy fix, install the program as you would normally then load it up and click the "Settings" menu then go to "Preferences". From there expand the "Video" section and click the "Output modules" section and in the right hand window click the "Advanced Options" box. Next to the "Video output module" will be a lot more options, cycle through which works for you and VLC Player will work once again.
Speeding up Torrent Transfer Rates
The Bit-Torrent protocol is one of the most popular ways (if not the most popular) of transferring data on the internet. However, many ISPs throttle traffic back because torrents eat up a ton of bandwidth. If your torrent downloads are coming in at 5KB/s or lower, it's probable the ISP is artificially slowing down traffic. There is an easy way around ISP throttling, what you'll need to do is enable encryption in one form or another - ie. header encryption, message stream encryption, etc.) of the Bit-Torrent data stream. This masks the nature of the traffic, and in most situations prevents the ISP from knowing what it is.
Encryption is not a native feature of the Bit-Torrent protocol, so to enable it you'll need a third party program like Utorrent. Once installed, load up the program and go to its configuration area. Encryption is usually located with the connection options, from there enable the form you find suitable (in this case, check "forced encryption), save, and restart the client. Your Bit-Torrent downloads will hopefully be much faster.
Securely Erasing a Hard Drive
Securing data on a HDD to be returned for RMA, retired or moved into a different computer is not as straightforward as simply destroying the partitions or formatting it. That does not actually wipe your data off, it just destroy's the partition table or marks sectors for rewrite. The data is still there. With recovery tools that can be found online, or in this PCSTATS Beginners Guide to data recovery, it's very possible to rebuild partition tables and recover data that has been formatted. We've done both in the PCSTATS labs in fact.
You can prevent your old data from falling into the wrong hands with a software program called DBAN which is a self-contained bootable command line application for securely erasing all information from a hard drive, SATA or IDE.
To do this, download the DBAN 1.0.7 ISO file (http://www.dban.org) and create a bootable CD. Next, restart your computer, go into the BIOS and set it to boot off the CD drive first. Save that setting and turn off the computer. Now before you go any further, to be safe, disconnect ALL hard drives from the motherboard that you DON'T want to erase, and connect the one hard drive to be completely wiped. Now double check everything - all SATA and IDE drives you DON'T want to erase are disconnected, right? Good.
Start up the PC with the DBAN boot CD in the CD-drive, once at the DBAN menu, hit 'Enter' to start the program in interactive mode. Press 'M' and select wipe method 'DoD 5228.22-M', press spacebar to save the selection. At the 'Disks and Partitions' menu press the spacebar to select the hard drive to be wiped (if you took the safe approach, there will only be one drive present), or scroll down and choose an individual partition by pressing the spacebar. Press 'F10' to begin the wipe. It may take a while, and it's a bit more tedious than a straight format, but DBAN completely removes all information from a hard drive.
Just say No to Windows Media Player - try VLC Instead
Videolan's VLC Media Player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc) is one of the most common third party media players available, however by default it doesn't get along with Microsoft Windows Vista. Good thing there's an easy fix, install the program as you would normally then load it up and click the "Settings" menu then go to "Preferences". From there expand the "Video" section and click the "Output modules" section and in the right hand window click the "Advanced Options" box. Next to the "Video output module" will be a lot more options, cycle through which works for you and VLC Player will work once again.
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