My DigitalZone

This is a quick update about kintiskton spiders I told you about in this post. After the initial spike, the site still got hit moderately next day, and they went away. But after that, they came back a couple of times. I really want to know what the spiders are doing.

This is my second major problem with Samsung Glyde. For some reason, its battery stopped to hold charge long enough. Up until 2 weeks ago it was OK; I didn’t have to charge the phone for a few days at least. Now I have to charge it every day or twice a day on some days. I don’t use my cell phone much, so I don’t know why it cannot hold charge. The phone is fairly new, so the battery has to be fairly new also.

I went to a Verizon store to have the battery checked but they didn’t have the equipment to do it. I wanted to buy an extra home charger because I wanted to have one at work and another at home. Well, the store didn’t have it in stock. I thought about buying another battery but batteries are rather expensive. So, I bought a home charger online.

The short battery life is really a problem in an emergency situation. I do have a car charger, so it helps a bit. Samsung Glyde is the first cell phone that I want to replace only after 6 months. I griped about the touch screen problem of this phone here. If you are in the market for a cell phone, I do not recomment this phone.

One of my other sites, Ballroomtube.net, got a mysterious traffic spike today. According to Google Analytics, those spiders are from Kintiskton, LLC. A quick Google search revealed that this company is based in Mountain View, California, and many other sites got hit by their spiders. A weird thing is that nobody seems to know what the spiders are for, so some call them “mysterious” and some state that they are “unlawful spiders.”

I wouldn’t mind my site being hit by search engine bots but this one is different. One commenter on a blog site said the spike would subside after a few weeks. I wonder if the spike on my site will continue for more than one day. In the meantime, I’ll keep an eye on this and will search some more info on this.

My friend’s Yahoo email password got stolen and her account was used to send spam emails. Cases like this seem to be increasing as you’ll find lots of hits on Google if you search for “stolen password.”

She didn’t know how her password got stolen. She only found that out because one of her friends had informed her about the spam email. When she checked the sent mail box, she saw the spam email she never sent. So, it means that somebody stole her password and used her account, rather than faking the email address.

I immediately asked her to change the password. She was lucky that the person who used her account didn’t change the password. If that was the case, she could’ve locked out of her email account.

I also asked her to check the detailed header of the spam email, and it turned out that the email was originating from China. (You can see the full header by clicking on “Full Headers” at the bottom of the mail in Classic Mail or at the upper-right part in the new Yahoo Mail.)

Her case was a good lesson for me. Changing passwords regularly and using complex passwords are easy ways to ensure more security but I wasn’t doing it as often as I should have been. From now on, I’ll be more careful about passwords.

The “NTLDR-is-missing problem” is not limited to Dell computers or to the Windows XP operating system; however, it seems to happen to Dell computers often and it is a pain to fix it. The cause of this is corrupt boot files. Most of the time, when a user powers up the computer, it doesn’t boot and all he/she sees is “NTLDR is missing. Press Ctrl, Alt, and Del to reboot your computer” on a black screen. If the boot files are corrupt, booting up to a Safe Mode to troubleshoot is not an option. I’ve tried to go to a Safe Mode on Dell computers, but I had trouble doing so because pressing F-8 didn’t work on a Dell computer.

In order to fix/troubleshoot the problem, please follow the procedure below.

1. Make sure that the CD/DVD drive is empty and you are not using any USB device (USB flash drive, etc.) If your computer has a floppy drive, make sure it is empty.
2. If nothing is in the CD/DVD/floppy/USB drive, and you still see the missing NTLDR message, you need to repair the Windows installation. If you have the Windows installation CD at hand, do the following.
   • Get into the CMOS setup screen by pressing the F-2 or DEL key right after powering up the computer.
   • On the CMOS screen, change the boot sequence to CD-Rom Drive, USB, and Hard Drive.
   • Insert the Windows installation CD and power up the computer.
   • When prompted to press any key to boot from the CD, press any key.
   • In the Windows set up menu, press “R” to repair Windows.
   • When asked for the administrator password, type in the password. For a blank passowrd, just pressing the “Enter” key should work…… (However, it didn’t work for me maybe because I was using my installation CD on my friend’s computer. If that is the case, you need to setup the computer to boot from a boot CD just like I did. Please see the explanation below.)
   • Assuming that you had the admin passoword and entered it correctly, you need to copy 2 files from the CD to the root directory of your PC. Here, I’m assuming the drive letter for the CD-ROM drive is D and your PC’s root directory is C.

                 copy d:\i386\ntldr c:
                 copy d:\i386\ntdetect.com c:

   • After copying the above 2 files, remove the CD from the CD-ROM drive and reboot.
3. If “repairing the Windows” does not work because: 1) you don’t have the Windows installation CD or; 2) you don’t have the administrator password, you can still get the computer up and running by creating a boot CD. In an ideal situation, you’d already created a boot CD when your computer was working properly; however, most people, including me, just take a working PC for granted and procrastinate to create an emergency boot CD. You can download an ISO of a boot CD and burn it on a CD by using the following method.
   • Go to AnswersThatWork.com site and download “Boot Disk – Windows XP Emergency Boot Disk (XP SP2 Pro & XP SP2 Home).”
   • Unzip the file and burn the unzipped file on a CD using “creating a bootable CD” option of a CD burning software.
   • Make sure the boot sequence of your PC is set to the CD-ROM first. Insert the CD and boot up your PC.

The above methods are non-destructive methods in which you can keep the files on your computer. If you don’t mind wiping out everything on your PC, you can always resort to “Reinstalling the Windows,” which is not fun at all. But if your PC had other problems, e.g., sluggishness or constant freezing, it may be a good idea (only if you are OK with losing everything on your PC.)