Posted by Vadim on January 26, 2009
Every month on second Tuesday Microsoft releases security patches, also known as Patch Tuesday. Part of these patches is Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool. This tool scans computers for malicious software and helps remove any infection found.
This tool runs in the background once a month and displays report only if any harmful software is found on your computer. Many people have no idea that they have this protection in addition to their Anti-virus software.
What I want to share with you is that you can run this tool any time you want.
Just type MRT in your Run dialog box or Start Search (on Vista only).
My favorite way to lunch Run dialog is Win+R key combination.
I believe that when this tool is ran by the system it does a Quick scan. However, when you run it manually, you have a choice of Quick scan, Full scan, or Customized scan.
I would recommend to run Full scan at least once. It even will look in your zip files and email attachments that you’ve never opened. It might take a long time to run. It took more than 10 hours on my system.
Keep your machine safe.
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Posted by Vadim on January 25, 2009
Have you ever had a case that one application cannot find a registry key while another one doesn’t have any problem accessing the same entry? It happened to me.
If you think it’s a security issue, I have to tell you that in case it’s not security fault.
To be fair to you I need to give some more information which I withheld from you so far.
I ran both application on 64-bit OS. The first application, that cannot read the specific registry key, is 32-bit app. and the second one is 64-bit app.
The both application are trying to access registry using the same statement. Something like this:
LocalMachine.OpenSubKey(@"SOFTWARE\MyCompany");
When 64-bit application executes the line above, it will try to retrieve HKLM\SOFTWARE\MyCompany subkey. However, when 32-bit application executes the same statement on 64-bit OS, it will retrieve HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\MyCompany.
All 32-bit applications are executed in WoW64 (Windows-on-Windows 64-bit) subsystem.
To fix this issue, I just copy MyCompany key under Wow6432Node key.
Posted in WoW64 | 1 Comment »
