Get rid of Virtumonde spyware. Use http://safety.live.com

Recently, I have no idea how, my windows xp system became infected with a spyware program called Virtumonde. The distinguishing characteristic is that ads pop up in your browser every few minutes. If you search on "spyware" then you'll be greeted with a popup that says...

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Antivirus 2009 will perform a 100% FREE and quick scan of your computer for Viruses, Spyware and Adware.

Do you want to install Antivirus 2009 to scan your computer for malware now? (Recommended)

My computer runs McAffe Virusscan and is updated every single day with the latest virus definitions and it didn't detect it. I also tried Lavasoft AwAdware and it didn't detect it.

I found an awesome tool called Spybot and while it detected the infection and correctly identified it as Virtumonde, it couldn't remove it.

The tool that fixed the problem was a free web based scanner tool by Microsoft called

http://safety.live.com

Just click on the button that says "Full Service Scan", follow the prompts and wait for about 2 hours, then reboot and the problem will be fixed!

Others have reported that they have to run Spybot first and then the tool at safety.live.com but just running safety.live.com worked for me.

Update : You have to run the tool from Internet Explorer. It won't work with Firefox.

Sansa Clip can play audio fast or slow if it's a "podcast"

The Sansa Clip with the latest firmware (1.01.29) has the ability to play audio files either slightly slowed down (good for classical music) or slightly sped up (good for techno).

Unfortunately you need to load the files onto the Clip as Podcasts. That is, place the files under the "PODCASTS" directory instead of the "MUSIC" directory.

The way to access the feature is to start playing your file (remember it's under "Podcasts" now) and then hit the "down" button. You'll see an option called "Speed" where you can select "Slow", "Normal" or "Fast".

I wish the Sansa Clip had this option for normal music files but they don't so I end up putting all my music in the Podcasts folder.

A thread on this very topic over at the Sansa Clip forums has users asking for this feature to also be introduced for music as well as podcasts however it seems Sandisk have just said "put the music in the Podcast folder." Oh well.

Ogg works on Sansa Clip but not below q6

After wasting hours trying to figure out why my Sansa Clip wouldn't read ogg comments/tag properly (see previous post) I now find that it doesn't play oggs with a quality setting less than 6!

See discussion at http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board/message?board.id=clip&message.id=9380

I encoded one of my favorite tunes using quality 3 setting (~112kbps). It plays absolutely crystal clear on my PC but it pops and clicks on the Sansa Clip. Ugh.

I'm not one of these audio nuts with $1000 headphones. I honestly can't tell the difference between CD quality and properly encoded 64k.

So stuff open source and freedom. I'm now using the clearly superior Microsoft WMA format. It's awesome!!

To me, the lowest setting on WMA variable sounds fine. Granted it doesn't sound precisely the same as the original CD but if you listen to it in isolation you wouldn't know anything is wrong with it, and this way I can fit about 80 CDs on my 2G Clip.

Update : After sitting with my eyes shut and playing a track over and over I've finally come to the conclusion that the second lowest setting (50 - 95kbps) is indistinguishable from the best setting in WMA variable bit rate so I'll encode everything that way.

Sansa Clip doesn't read Ogg Vorbis Tags. Use Easytag 2.1

I bought a Sansa Clip MP3 player. Happily it plays Ogg Vorbis encoded music files as of firmware 1.01.29.

Unfortunately it has a bug where if the fieldnames of the Ogg Vorbis tags or comments are not in all capital letters, the player won't read them.

For example if you have in your ogg file

Title=Happy Birthday

The clip won't recognize it. It wants to see

TITLE=Happy Birthday

(Open up your ogg file in wordpad if you want to see the tags. They should be hanging around the top of the file. Don't edit them in wordpad though. It doesn't work!)

To fix this and convert the tag field names to uppercase use a utility called Easytag 2.1 available at http://easytag.sourceforge.net/ . This utility can edit comment fields in ogg vorbis files and fortunately by default writes the fieldnames in upper case! That is when you make any change to tags in an ogg file, Easytag will rewrite all the tag/comment fieldnames in uppercase even if you didn't edit that particular tag!

Here's what I did...

Run Easytag and have it locate your ogg files by selecting the directory above them all.

Select all the files in the middle part of the window.

Change one of the blank Tag fields that you don't care about. For example the "Encoded by" fieldis probably blank. Set it to say "x" or something. Now click on the little button to the right of the field. This will apply that setting to all the selected files.

Now remove the "x" and click on the little button to the right again.

Finally click on the Disk shaped icon to "Save Files". You'll be asked if you want to write the tag files. Obviously select yes.

Voila, all your tag fields are now in capitals and your Sansa Clip should be able to identify them properly.