PC Cybertek

Exciting  news here at PC Cybertek! I’ve expanded the capabilities of the void of sunlight, purple walled, silver celling, neon lit, smoke filled, PC Cybtek Laboratory. And yes, that is an accurate description of the lab. But who cares what the room I spend countless hours staring at monitors looks or smells like? I’ve finally done what I have been threating to do for ages. Get on with it already you say… OK OK After the break, I’ll tell you

On the bench now sits a computer specifically to test security, learn more about virus and malware infections and create tutorials, nay, create videos of how to remove said virus & malware. Up until now, when I came across something I needed to remove from someone’s computer, I would take notes. If I thought what I learned while cleaning the computer might help someone else, I would post about it here and do my best to reconstruct what was done from my notes. There has always been a couple of problems with this method. First  I have to find and identify the infection. I don’t keep step by step notes of this part and even if I did, trying write about it isn’t easy. Then, trying to recall everything I did and translate it into something that the reader can follow, can also be tricky. Then there is all the work involved to bring this info to you. After I spend hours hunting down, identifying and removing the virus, I have to spend on average, a couple hours at least, writing about how I did it. And I have to do it while my memory is still fresh or risk leaving out some critical info. And to be honest, my only motivation, to do all this work is to be a nice guy. I don’t get paid for this blog, on the contrary, it costs me money to keep it going. Money is something that isn’t abundant around here and suggesting that people visit my sponsors, if they want to support this site, is something that violates the Adsense rules and resulted in them pulling their ads from my site (and left me with $50 in my adsense account which I will never get  )  As you can see it costs me time and money to keep this site up.

The solution I’ve come up with is, video tutorials on a fresh OS. No, this won’t pay for the site, but it will make my job easier. I’ve installed Virtual Machine on the lab’s computer so I can deliberately infect a Virtual Machine (VM) and record the process of removing it. This way I don’t have to spend all the time taking notes and trying to reconstruct it in a blog post. It also solves the problem of cross contamination. When I’m removing a virus, manually, from a clients computer, chances are they have more than one problem. With a fresh Windows install running on a VM, the removal instructions I’m making are all related to the focus of the tutorial and not other software issues or malware.

Of course you’ll miss out on the long winded,  and at times almost witty posts. But I’m sure you’ll survive. And if everything goes as planed, you will get video that will show you exactly what to do. I can also go into more detail as to why I do things the way I do them. With my audio engineering and video editing background, they should look and sound pretty good too.  I look forward bringing you my first video tutorial soon.

Before you go, I have a question for you. Can you recommend a screen recording program for making  these videos? I’ve used Cam Studio but I know there are quite a few of these programs available.  I would prefer if it had both audio and video, but video only will work if there is some features unique to the video only program. I’ll probably edit the whole thing in Vegas Pro so I can dub in the audio either way. If you have any recommendations, please leave them in the comments below.

Thankz,

PC Cybertek Chris