Hackers & Crackers

Hackers : A Hacker is a person who is extremely interested in exploring the things and recondite workings of any computer system or networking system. Most often, hackers are the expert programmers. These are also called Ethical Hackers or white hat hackers. And the technique or hacking they perform is called ethical hacking.
Ethical Hacking Means you think like Hackers. i.e First you Hack the Systems and find out the loop holes and then try to correct those Loop Holes..These type of hackers protect the cyberworld from every possible threat and fixes the future coming security loop holes. These peoples are also called as "GURU's" of Computer Security.

Crackers: Crackers or Black Hat hackers or cheaters or simply criminals, they are called criminals because they are having the mindset of causing harm to security and they steals very useful data and use it in wrong ways. Phishers also come in this category who steals account info and steal your credit card nos. and money over the Net.

The basic difference between cracker or black hat hackers and Hackers or ethical hackers or white hat hackers.

Black Hats : Individuals with extraordinary computing skills, resorting to malicious or destructive activities. Also known as Crackers.

Gray Hats : Individuals who work both offensively and defensively at various times.

White Hats: Individuals professing hacker skills and using them for defensive purposes. Also known as Security Analysts.

Suicide Hackers: Individuals who will aim to bring down critical infrastructure for a "cause" and not worry about facing 30 years in jail for their actions.


Visual BCD Editor: Edit Windows 7 Boot Configuration Data

The boot configuration data store (BCD) contains boot configuration parameters and controls how the operating system is booted for Windows Vista and later versions. Unlike Boot.ini in XP, BCD stores data in a binary format and cannot be edited with a text editor.

Visual BCD Editor is a free tool for Vista and Windows 7 operating systems, and provides a graphical user interface for command line utility BCDEdit. Once installed, it provides two main features: Startup Repair and Visual BCD Editor.

The Startup Repair feature can be used to repair BCD, repair bootsector and MBR (Master Boot Record), and repair disk as well.

Key features:

# Edit boot menu

# Rename boot menu entries

# Change boot menu timeout

# Repair BCD

# Backup BCD store

# Import BCD store

# Repair bootsector

# Repair disk

# Set default boot menu entry

# Create new Windows XP loader

# Create new Windows 7/Vista loader

# Create new bootsector loader for Unix and Mac OS X

Download Visual BCD


Laptop Screen Reference Guide

The LCD Screen

If you can read this article, you're viewing it on a screen. You can see it right? Of course you can, but do you know what resolution, refresh rate, and aspect ratio you are reading it on? Are you reading it on a laptop? What type of screen do you have? Is it transflective, or transmissive? Or maybe a touch screen or tablet? What about the contrast and how good is your viewing angle? Maybe you don't care about those things and you think your laptops screen looks wonderful. That's perfectly fine -but for those who do care, or want to consider these things when purchasing a laptop, you should read on, because not every screen that comes with a laptop is the same. In fact, they vary immensely. And for some - they make or break deal on a laptop is how the screen looks, or is able to show.

First, we need to discuss what an LCD screen is. The commonly used acronym LCD stands for liquid crystal display, in which there are two sheets of polarized material with a liquid crystal solution between them. This solution is very sensitive to electricity, and, in fact, when an electric current is passed through the liquid, is causes the crystals to group together' so that light can't pass through them. Each crystal, therefore, is like a shutter; either allowing light to pass through or be shut out, subsequently creating the pixels (dots) on your screen. So when you turn on your laptop, there is a device that connects from the main board to the screen that is telling that material in every little dot when or when not to turn on and off - and which color is being portrayed. Pretty intense huh?

So now that we know what LCD's are, what type do you have in your laptop? Yes, there are different types of LCD's; in fact - there are 3 types that are commonly utilized: transmissive, transflective, and reflective. Don't worry, they aren't that hard to describe or distinguish the differences, despite their names.

Type of LCDs

The vast majority of current notebooks feature transmissive, color, active-matrix LCDs. That's because transmissive screens offer the best-quality images and are the most affordable option for manufacturers. Active Matrix is also known as TFT, or thin film transistor. Laying diodes, or small semiconductors, over a grid of ultra-small wires, creates Active Matrix screens. When an electric current passes through the diodes, they light up in different colors, depending on the strength of the current. Thousands of these diodes next to each other form an image on the screen.

To keep the diodes in an on' or off' state, active-matrix displays use transistors, which are not found in the lower-quality passive-matrix displays. The transistors help make the active-matrix displays brighter and give them more contrast than passive-matrix displays. But what does this mean for you? Transmissive LCD's are illuminated by fluorescent backlighting and are capable of rendering the greatest color depth, sharpest text, and highest resolutions. However backlighting is a major drag on a notebook's battery and it's easily overpowered by bright sunlight. Newer technology overcomes the power issue by using low power LED lighting, like in the new Sony VAIO TX notebook. These work in the same manner of backlighting the screen, only instead of a fluorescent tube, they use several low power, high efficiency LED's (Light Emitting Diode) to supply the light. There is however, another form of active matrix technology that isn't employed as much. It is called passive matrix technology. This technology is more commonly used in stand-alone monitors or older notebooks. However, there have been improvements with passive matrix displays using new CSTN and DSTN technologies. What is CSTN and DSTN?

CSTN stands for: color super-twist nematic, an LCD technology developed by Sharp Electronics Corporation. Unlike TFT, CSTN is based on a passive matrix, which is less expensive to produce. The original CSTN displays developed in the early 90's suffered from slow response times and ghosting. Recent advances in the technology, however, have made CSTN a viable alternative to active-matrix displays. New CSTN displays offer 100ms response times, a 140-degree viewing angle, and high-quality color rivaling TFT displays - all at about half the cost.

DSTN: Short for double-layer supertwist nematic, a passive-matrix LCD technology that uses two display layers to counteract the color shifting that occurs with conventional super twist displays. It has greater color accuracy than CSTN, but is more expensive to produce. A newer passive-matrix technology called High-Performance Addressing (HPA) offers even better response times and contrast than CSTN.

Response Time

But what is response time and what do viewing angles have anything to do with my laptop screen? Well - response time is important to observe when viewing movement on a laptop LCD screen. Response time is a measurement of how fast an LCD screen can change individual pixel colors, measured in milliseconds. The larger the number, the slower the response; lower the number, the better the response. Response time plays a large role when watching movies or playing games. Have you ever noticed that on some laptops there is a ghost' or trail' when a fast scene occurs in a movie, or when you move your mouse really fast? This is largely due to the response capabilities of the display. It is important to know the capabilities of your laptop's LCD as it relates to the requirements of your application. The most common response times are 8ms (milliseconds), 12ms, 16ms, and 25ms. 8ms is an excellent response time, while 12 and 16 are average and won't cause any noticeable ghosting or trailing on LCDs. 25ms response time is considered the low end when displaying fast motion often found in today's games and movies, and this is often the point where ghosting' will be most apparent.

Widescreen or Not?

After reading that list, you might be thinking, But my laptop has a W in front of those abbreviations! What does that mean?' Don't worry! Lately, manufacturers have realized the benefits of what is known as widescreen' aspect ratio screens. Widescreen is, just as it sounds, wider than a normal screen, meaning its width is more than it's height (comparably 1.6 times wider than it is higher (16:10), as compared to normal aspect ratios of 4:3.)

4:3 or standard screen

The real advantage of notebooks with a widescreen display - which is not immediately obvious at first - is that they make widescreen formats with ratios of 1.6 to 1 to correspond better with users' natural field of view. DVD movies, for example, can be played on displays with an aspect ratio of 1.6:1 without much of an irritating black strip going across the upper and lower sections of the screen. Movies are produced in formats with aspect ratios of 1.85:1 (widescreen) or 2.35:1 (CinemaScope). Since the display area is wider, however, users get to see more of the movie using a widescreen 15.4-inch device than with a 4:3 display of the same size.

In everyday usage, you soon learn to appreciate the benefits of display width when working with spreadsheets and text documents. When working with spreadsheets, for example, you can view more cells at once, and it's just a lot easier to get two windows to fit next to each other. Individuals who work a lot with graphics will quickly see the utility in having a wider display screen, as toolbars no longer constantly get in the way of graphics and windows, but rather can be "parked" over to the left or right of the screen.

Half Life 2 in widescreen

Here are the resolutions that are associated with widescreen' aspect ratios.

Abbreviation / Resolution /Aspect Ratio
WXGA/ 1280x768
WXGA/ 1280x800 (16:10)
WXGA+/ 1440x900 (16:10)
WSXGA+/ 1680x1050 (16:10)
WUXGA/ 1920x1200 (16:10)


LCD vs. LED vs. OLED

4:29 PM by Yash Kalra 0 comments

LCD vs. LED vs. OLED

The LCD

The first type of display you need to understand is also perhaps the most familiar to you: the LCD, or Liquid Crystal Display. LCD technology has been used in laptops since they first appeared on the market, and uses a series of liquid crystals which conduct a current of electricity to create images on the screen. These types of displays are easy to make and thus less expensive to use than some of the newer types of display technology. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for when it comes to computer displays, and the LCD falls at the lower end of the spectrum where quality is concerned.

LED technology

Light Emitting Diode technology has been around for decades, and is now used in some laptops as backlighting. You probably know it best from its use as the backlight in your cell phone. The advantages of using LED lighting primarily center on its ability to provide uniform lighting that offers a wide range of angles for viewing. Simply put, with LED lighting, you can look at your laptop display from almost any angle and still make sense of what you see. LED holds a tremendous amount of potential for actually lowering the cost of laptops over time, since the lighting technology is so easy and inexpensive to produce. Once it has been further integrated into laptop design, prices will inevitably come down.

Note: Both of LCD and LED screens are TFT LCD screens but using difference backlight. LED version is a LCD screeens using LED backlight instead of florescent (CCFL) backlight that use in normal LCD.

The OLED

The latest technology being pushed by laptop makers is the OLED - or Organic Light Emitting Diode - display. Using polymers that can be made from almost any organic material, the OLED technology is supposed to be superior to other types of laptop display lighting, since it requires no backlighting. That change has the benefit of reducing the power consumption of any laptop with the technology, which should not only save power but improve the battery life of laptops using OLED in the future.


Types of Laptop Screens

4:29 PM by Yash Kalra 0 comments

Types of Laptop Screens

Unlike the desktops, notebook computer users only have to choose among the LCD displays. In LCD Panels there are

three common types: the transmissive, the transflective and the reflective type. Its easy to differentiate between them.

Transmissive: a large part of the laptops a model use this kind of LCD Screens because they offer best-quality result and

is a most economical option for the manufacturers. The active matrix called TFT (thin film transistor) is used and when

the current is passed through its diodes they lit up in different colors and intensity to form an image on our screen.

Reflective: A reflective screen does not have the backlighting like the transmissive screens which makes them ideal for

use in bright sunlight where transmissive screens fail. But the reflective type of screens look very dim the in the indoor

environment. This is its biggest disappointment and the reason why its not opted by many laptop manufacturers

worldwide. However, they have devised it into a new variety of LCD screen called ‘transflective’.

Transflective: as the word sounds too, a transflective screen is made with a fusion of the transmissive and reflective

screen. When outdoors, transmissive screens act much like a reflective screen and display bright pictures with great

clarity. While indoors, they use the backlighting to have the needed brightness for the clear images. But still transmissive

screens are better in terms of economy and quality; hence major manufacturers don’t use this technology for their

products. Transmissive screen costs less and perform better inside your bedroom of office.

The size of the laptop screens

The size (diagonally) usually varies from 10.6 inches to 20 inches; the size of the display screen is a significant factor

influencing the weight of the laptops. Most users prefer a 14.1 inch screen at a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels. Along

with the size, you might want to choose from several other factors like resolution, aspect ratio, and shininess.

Resolutions

it is a graphical age and everyone wants best graphics in his laptop. There is a new trend developing in the screens to

support really great resolution, but very little segment of people really use these as it gets really small and difficult to

read. The most popular resolution setting among the users is 1024 x 768 and is usually found in any model of laptop.

However, If you are a graphics artists and want a sizable amount of desktop space for you, you can have a large lcd

screen with a huge resolution of 1600 x 1200 dots or pixels per inch. Only the higher end models would support this kind

of resolutions but great if you can take care of its higher expense.

The least resolution a windows xp machine can have is 800 x 600. The highest resolution varies with your graphic card

and LCD panel compatibility. The easiest way to find it would be to check the documentation/manuals of your laptop or

by either getting into the graphic settings and checking the highest resolution. Be sure you have the latest graphics

drivers installed in your system otherwise it can show a false indication.

What is a Widescreen LCD Panel

recently, manufacturers have realized and cashed in with a feature called ‘widescreen’. It actually refers to

the aspect ratio of your laptop screen. Just as it sounds, widescreen means that the screen is wider than the usual

screens. Widescreens have a width to height ratio of 16:10 compared to a normal 4:3 ratio found in normal screens.

Matte or Glossy?

You might also need to choose among the matte or glossy type of screens. As the name suggests the glossy screens

are more shinier than the matte. This is because they have a coating applied to provide rich colors and more contrast.

Glossy screens are much in trend while matte screens are unpopular.

Matte screens too have a coating applied on them to avoid any reflection on the screen. With the power turned off, you

cannot use this kind of screen as a mirror. Matte screens have a non-reflective coating and do not reflect the

surroundings but these are not as ‘vibrant’ as the glossy screens.