Monday, April 27, 2009

How I removed "Spyware Protect 2009" from my Windows XP?

I panicked, when a small popup appeared at the right bottom of my computer screen, that read, "Your computer was infected with virus". I clicked on the message and it opened "Spyware Protect 2009". I am doomed.
I googled for fixes,but to my frustration, all the fixes suggested to download some software, that can remove this spyware. What if they were another spyware, so, I am not ready for that.
So, I decided to do it on my own. Below are the steps that worked for me.

Steps to remove Spyware
  1. go to taskmanager >> processes
  2. kill any one process starting at the top and check the system tray at the right bottom, to see if the spyware is gone
  3. repeat the step 2 until the spyware icon is gone from the system tray
  4. When its gone, note the name of the process you deleted just before that (in my case it was sysguard.exe)
  5. open windows explorer and search for "sysguard.exe"
  6. Delete the files found in the search (in my case there were two files sysguard.exe & SYSGUARD.exe-SOME_NUMBER.pf)
  7. Restart the computer

I hope this will save some frustration for you. Above steps should work fine for any spyware.
Have any experience with Spyware, please post a comment.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Self Publishing Your Book Made Easy

One fine day, I was listening to a podcast, in which the lulu.com founder was discussing the reasons behind lulu. They were thought provoking and here they are


  1. Will you be motivated enough to write a review for a book, when there are thousands of reviews already in Amazon. What if you can write a review for your friends, will that be enough to motivate you.
  2. Publishing companies allows your book only if they are sure they can sell more than 200000 copies.
  3. where will the potential and promising new writers go
  4. Right now in lulu, writers are more in numbers than readers. For lulu to succeed they need more readers than writers.
  5. discover good authors using various techniques / statistics
  6. market to social networking
  7. one have to read and recommend it to his friends
Is your service or business addressing a specific problem?. Are you clear about the problem you are solving. If so, you have more chance to succeed.

Below are our products and the problem they are trying to solve.
eServicePlace - No easy way to compare and buy services online
HiringOpen - Searching multiple job sites is tedious
eduhelp.in - No easy way to choose the right college
CheetSheet - Everyone need their own cheatsheet.

Certainly, LuLu is not the only player in this market(self publishing book).
Do you know any other players in this field?