Microsoft has made available a new version of “Defender” to ride infected computers of malware, including rootkits which highjack your boot process and corrupt your computer.

The “Defender Offline Beta” is available from Microsoft for free [here] and does require updates as virus definitions are always changing.

Definitions are files that provide an encyclopedia of potential software threats. Because new threats appear daily, it’s important to always have the most up-to-date definitions installed in Windows Defender Offline Beta. Armed with definition files, Windows Defender Offline Beta can detect malicious and potentially unwanted software, and then notify you of the risks.

The Redmond company suggests you make a USB drive with the Defender Offline Beta software from a PC which is not infected.  Doing so on a corrupted computer could interfere with the USB and yield the Microsoft tool useless.

To use Windows Defender Offline Beta, you need to follow four basic steps:

Whether you are a serious musician or just like playing as a hobby to relax, chances are you have a guitar and a tuner.  As with most musicians your budget is probably tight or with the casual player you don’t keep up on the up-keep of your gear, so when your guitar is out of tune, you go for the tuner.  But most likely the battery is dead because A) you didn’t want to spend the cash or B) hadn’t played in so long, the batteries just went dead.  This is why the solar powered guitar tuner makes perfect sense.

Tascam has done a great job with this tuner and thought about including a USB port just in case that tuner was stuffed in your guitar case for too long and you need a quick fix to get back in tune.

Released just in time for the holidays and priced right [under $20] with a range of hues to select from: black, pink, orange, green, blue, white.

Several years ago, I reported on a USB wifi extender in parabolic form.  Now, we’ve got a slimmed down version using an empty food can and your USB wifi dongle.

It’s not the prettiest thing, but it works and will boost your signal strength enough to grab the channel from your neighbor who’s barely showing up in your wireless network.

Plus this hack gives you adjustable control both up and down, and left and right.

The concept here is getting the can to increase your signal.  In addition, mounting the can and USB wifi dongle to a portable camera stand.  This will give you the stability you need to keep the signal strength strong while in use.  It will also allow you to keep the position for use from day to day.

Review:  USB Benchmark software by USB Performance.

USB Performance has a nice USB benchmark testing program with lots of features besides read / write tests.

The USB performance testing software gives you the option to test at a File Copy level or a Bit for Bit copy level.  The difference with the File Copy is the process includes reading from the File Allocation Table [FAT] and thus slows down the process.  The bit for bit read/write tests will show the best possible performance your device will be able to obtain.

Included in the USB benchmark software are some bonus features such as file recovery.

We all know with flash memory once you click delete, it’s gone forever.  Well the USB Performance software will recover those deleted files.  OR maybe you’ve lost data with a system Blue Screen or hardware crash, again the USB recovery feature should be able to restore those lost files.

Another nice feature is the backup function.  The backup function will create a single image file on your PC.  You can restore or backup the image file at any time.  This nice thing about a single image file [rather than copying all the

Have you ever thrown your hands up in frustration because you simply want to use the Monitor, Keyboard and Mouse of a laptop to access a server or other standalone device?  I have, but never know what product could help…now I do.

The Portable Laptop KVM Adapter from StarTech is specifically designed to turn your notebook into a portable KVM station.  Simply connect the adapter between your standalone [or GUIless device] and notebook and you’re off and running.

I would think the biggest market for such a product are large data centers where they need to access any number of servers without a full KVM installation.

“Aside from a rack mount LCD console, which can be expensive, server administrators and technicians would typically have to use a server room ‘crash cart’, which is a cart comprised of a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Although a typical ‘crash cart’ is somewhat mobile, it lacks the portability of our Laptop KVM Adapter, which provides identical but more convenient control”.

The NOTECONS01 USB 2.0 Laptop KVM Adapter offers immediate BIOS-level access to the connected computer from the laptop control point, as well as the ability to handle full configuration of the attached PC, server, or other headless machines such as ATMs, kiosks and VLTs.

But the portable USB KVM station doesn’t come cheap, the MSRP starts at $470.

Thanks Andrea!

Tektronix just announced test tools for the USB 3.0 SuperSpeed specification.  This means those uber geeks – and we don’t mean that in a derogatory way – will have the tools to prove their devices meet the new USB 3.0 specification.

It is estimated that initial SuperSpeed USB interface ICs and consumer products should appear in early 2010, with widespread adoption continuing throughout 2010. The first SuperSpeed USB products will likely include data-storage devices such as flash drives, external hard drives, digital music players, and digital cameras.

“SuperSpeed USB is a giant leap forward in data transfer rates for many devices and consequently requires much more sophisticated testing,” said Ian Valentine, general manager, Technology Solutions Group, Tektronix. “SuperSpeed USB will operate at 5 Gb/s, more than 10 times greater than the existing high-speed USB standard. This speed will require comprehensive signal testing for transmitters, interconnects, and receivers. Customers will be able to fully test the physical layers of their SuperSpeed USB devices using the latest test solution from Tektronix.”

The Tektronix test solution for USB 3.0 includes:

So what could they think of next? A USB pregnancy test kit? – you have got to be kidding me! Nope.

Pteq is taking the process totally digital with their new USB pregnancy test kit. I’m not sure why, as any test kit is a simple pee on the stick, and wait for one strip or two. So what does the USB bring to the table?

Well, to answer that question lets visit ThinkGeek and see what they had to say…and I must say, the did a great job describing the product. Take a read:

Quote:One line or two. Yes or no. Pregnancy tests are binary by their very nature. So when we found p-Teq’s USB Pregnancy Test Kit that’s chock full of extra scientific information, we knew we had to get this geeky goodness to our potentially spawning fans.

The process starts off like most pregnancy tests. You pee on a stick, specifically the absorbent test strip at one end. But everything’s different after that first step. Remove the cap from the other end of the stick (cleverly provided to keep you from accidentally contaminating the wrong end) to reveal the USB connector. Pop it in your computer. The power from your USB port starts the electrospray ionization process, creating a spectrograph of the various masses for your analysis. Get it? Your analysis? Urinalysis? *rimshot* Moving on.