Change MAC Address in Windows with Freeware Technetium Utility

Introduction

Do you know what the MAC Address is? If you don’t, and you never dealt with its concept, you probably can skip this article altogether. It will mostly be interesting for network administration and software programming specialists. I am neither one of this category. But I became interested in this utility, since I am responsible for registering and compiling the licenses for customers based on the computer generated IDs. Our software engineers coded the computer ID generation algorithm, based on several components, which should be unique for each computer, but should be stable enough not to cause the ID changes without serious hardware or software modifications. I started to receive the multiple notifications on the supposedly changed computer ID, so the software requests the license to be inputted again, even thou it was already unlocked earlier. When our software engineers reviewed the issue, they noticed that the problem is originated based on the MAC Address changes. That was quite unexpected since the MAC Address should be hard coded in the computer firmware. As response to the inquiry, I have sent the link to this software utility to them to prove, how easy it can be changed.

May be, you will find it useful and you’ll place this interesting utility in your software toolbox, as I did.

Concept

Many people believe MAC address, which is hard-coded in the NIC card cannot be changed. Yes, it’s hard coded and it can be changed only by removing the flash chip from the NIC card, re-programming it with new MAC address, and putting it back on the card. But this software does not change the hard coded MAC address. Technitium MAC Address Changer just instructs Windows to use a different MAC address that has been specified in the Windows registry. If no MAC address is specified to Windows, system uses the default hard-coded one in the NIC to construct Ethernet or IEEE network frames (or simply packets), which are used at OSI layer 2. Windows also changes MAC address of your NIC when Windows Network Bridge is enabled. The first number in the MAC address of the NIC added in the Network Bridge is set to 0x02. Changing MAC address of Network Bridge is not possible in Windows using this software, so this is a known software limitation.

How Does It Work?

This software just writes a value into the windows registry. When the Network Adapter Device is enabled, windows searches for the registry value 'NetworkAddress' in the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1- 08002bE10318}\[ID of NIC e.g. 0001]. If a value is present, windows will use it as MAC address, if not, windows will use the hard coded manufacturer provided MAC address. Note that some Network Adapter drivers have this facility as built-in. It can be found in the Advance settings tab in the Network Adapter's Device properties in Windows Device Manager.

Main Features

1. Support for Windows 2000 / XP / Server 2003 / Vista / 7. 
2. Allows you to remove all registry entries corresponding to Network Adapter that is no longer physically installed on the system. 
3. Allows you to configure Internet Explorer HTTP proxy settings through configuration presets or command line. 
4. Identifies the preset applied to currently selected Network Interface Card (NIC) automatically making it easy to identify settings. 
5. Changes MAC address of Network Interface Card (NIC) including Wireless LAN Cards, irrespective of its manufacturer or its drivers. 
6. Has latest list of all known manufacturers (with corporate addresses) to choose from. You can also enter any MAC address and know which manufacturer it belongs to. 
7. Allows you to select random MAC address from the list of manufacturers by just clicking a button. 
8. Restarts your NIC automatically to apply MAC address changes instantaneously. 
9. Allows you to create Configuration Presets, which saves all your NIC settings and makes it very simple to switch between many settings in just a click and hence saves lot of time. 
10. Allows you to Import or Export Configuration Presets to or from another file, which saves lot of time spent in reconfiguration. 
11. Allows you to load any Configuration Presets when TMAC starts by just double clicking on any Configuration Preset File. (*.cpf file extension) 
12. Has command line interface which allows you to perform all the tasks from the command prompt or you can even create a DOS batch program to carry out regular tasks. 
13. Has command line interface for the Installer. 
14. Allows you to export a detailed text report for all the network connections. 
15. Displays all information you would ever need to know about your NIC in one view like Device Name, Configuration ID, Hardware ID, Connection Status, Link Speed, DHCP details, TCP/IP details etc. 
16. Displays total bytes sent and received through the NIC. 
17. Displays current data transfer speed per second. 
18. Allows you to configure IP Address, Gateway and DNS Server for your NIC quickly and instantaneously. 
19. Allows you to enable/disable DHCP instantaneously. 
20. Allows you to Release/Renew DHCP IP address instantaneously. 
21. Displays DHCP lease obtained and lease expires time. (DST time bug removed) 
22. Allows you to configure Interface Metric instantaneously. 
23. Quick keyboard shortcuts for most operations. 
24. One known issue in Windows Vista/Server 2008/7 remains that is TMAC cannot disable any NIC with Non Operational status. 
25. The software is an absolute FREEWARE.

How to Change MAC Address

1. Starting MAC address changer will list all available network adapters.

2. Select the adapter you want to change the MAC address. You will get the details of your selection below.

3. Click Change MAC button, enter new MAC address and click Change Now button and confirm changes you made when prompted.

4. To restore the original MAC address of the network adapter, select the adapter, click Change MAC button and then click Original MAC button and confirm changes you made when prompted.

NOTE: This tool cannot change MAC address of Microsoft Network Bridge. Network Bridge will automatically use the original MAC address of the first NIC added into bridge with the first octet of MAC address set to 0x02.

Programmer: Shreyas Zare

Website and Downloading Link: http://www.technitium.com/tmac/index.html

Descent Free Replacement for Acrobat Reader - Cool PDF Reader

Cool PDF Reader is a very compact PDF document viewer, actually one of the smallest on the market portable PDF viewer utilities. It is very fast and comes with everything you need to view and print PDF files, including the features, which are not regularly available in most other competitive products, like PDF file conversion to multiple text and image formats, like TXT, BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, WMF, EMF, EPS.

Main program features:

1. Ability to view and print all versions of the PDF files.
   
2. Conversion option of the PDF files to the popular text and image formatsTXT, BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, WMF, EMF, EPS.
   
3. Supports file documents in 72 languages.
   
4. Zoom in, zoom out, and display rotation.
   
5. Slide show of the PDF documents on full monitor screen.
   
6. Does not require program installation on the Hard Drive and can be run from the external USB disk.
   
7. Size of the sole executable file is just 650 MB.
   
8. Supports all version of the Windows OS, including Windows 7.
   
9. Highly intuitive and easy to use.
   
10. Software is absolutely free.

Web page: http://www.pdf2exe.com/reader.html

Screenshot:

If you like to have a wide choice of the related programs to choose one which will perfectly fit your needs, you can review the list of 19 Freeware PDF Readers on the RateItAll Rating list: http://www.rateitall.com/t-24911-free-pdf-viewers.aspx

Unusual computer operations through mouse gestures freeware

How do you launch applications on your computer? Probably, through Start button and choosing your program from the list of utilities. Or, using the advanced application launcher could be easily found on the Web. But is that the only way to start applications? Thinking about the theoretical possibilities to run applications, the first comes to mind voice activated apps initialization. You just say “Word”, and the Microsoft Word utility pops-up on the screen. While the technology has already developed the necessary hardware and software for this approach, and it has been proven for the smart phone applications, using it for PC has not found wide recognition. But what can be used else? In this post, I want to present the programs offering to run the software on your computer through customized mouse gestures.

StrokeIt

What is StrokeIt?

StrokeIt is an advanced mouse gesture recognition engine and command processor. What is a mouse gesture? Mouse gestures are simple symbols that you "draw" on your screen using your mouse. When you perform a mouse gesture that StrokeIt can recognize, it will perform the "action" associated with that gesture. In short, it's a nifty little program that lets you easily control programs by drawing symbols with your mouse.

What can it do?

StrokeIt can currently recognize more than 80 unique mouse gestures and can be easily trained to recognize many more. For each gesture recognized, StrokeIt can execute a user-defined set of commands within the active application. StrokeIt commands are defined within plugin libraries that can be easily created by third parties to do nearly anything.

How do I perform a gesture?

Click and hold down the right mouse button and then draw the mouse gesture you want performed. You can temporarily disable StrokeIt by holding down the Control key, or right clicking on the StrokeIt icon in the system tray. If you want to cancel a mouse gesture while drawing it, simply left click.

Costs

StrokeIt is free for individual and not-for-profit charitable entity use.

Website: http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/

Video Presentation:

GMote

About gMote

gMote provides fast access to frequently-used actions via mouse gestures. By default, drawing a gesture is done by holding the right button down and dragging the mouse pointer across the screen. You may record a "W" shape to launch your favorite browser, a circle to enter your name, an "S" to invoke the Start Menu, a "P" to print etc.

gMote Installation

The significant advantage of gMote is a full portability of the problem, so it can be run from the external drives. To activate it, download the ZIP package and extract to a folder of your choice. Delete uninstall.exe. Launch gmote.exe. To disable auto-update, click on the tray icon, select "Options" and uncheck "Check updates automatically".

gMole Startup

• Run the program, gMote.exe. Note that an icon appears next to your clock on the Task Bar at the bottom of the screen - a small white "g". You can right-click that icon to bring up a popup menu that lets you configure the program or instruct it to start when you log in to Windows.
• In the main gMote window, check that the button labelled "Active" is toggled on. You'll notice that it looks different from the other buttons in this state.
• In the bottom-left corner, click "Create gesture". Draw a shape where indicated. The shape must be one continuous stroke, which should look unique but not be too complicated.
• After you let go of the mouse button, the new shape will appear in the list on the left, next to a button. Click on that to choose what will happen when you draw this shape in the next step. Among the useful actions are media player controls (tested with Windows Media Player and iTunes), web browser functions (tested with Internet Explorer and Firefox) and commonly used features such as the clipboard. You can choose one "main action" for your gesture, and then make exceptions for other programs that you use. For example, a "B"-shaped gesture might format text as "Bold" in your word processor and go "Back" in your web browser. To set the default action, use the drop down list next to "Default action (all programs"). At the bottom of the list are options to choose a program or folder to launch, website to visit or a key combination of your choosing to simulate. This last option means you can access any computer function that can be executed with a keyboard shortcut with a gesture instead! For example, the Windows Search feature has the shortcut [Windows key] + F.
• If you want gMote to know about a few programs you have installed so that you can make special gesture behaviors for them, click "Configure programs" on the main window. You will be able to add programs that were recently used, or browse for others. When you add a program to the list, give it a friendly name. This list is saved inside the gesture set, which has various consequences. For one thing, it means that if you transfer your set to someone else it might not work properly if their installed programs are in different locations. Secondly, it means that when you create a new set you will have to specify a new set of programs. Fortunately gMote lets you export a list of programs as a simple text file. Use "Save list" to do that. When you create your new set, use "Open list" and choose the file you saved. The programs you used in the other set appear in the list.
• If you want one program to ignore all gestures, the fast way is to use the "Excluded programs" tab in the Options dialog (see below).
• Use the "Save set" button to store all the gestures you create in one file. The gesture set that's loaded when you quit the program (or turn off your computer) will be loaded again next time you run it.

Using gMole

• Close the main gMote window (you can show it again using the white "g" icon) by clicking on the standard Windows "x" button in the top-right; the larger "Exit" button quits gMote completely.
• Now hold the Ctrl and Shift keys together (this is the default setting, click "Options" to choose another method), draw a shape and release the keys. Keep an eye on the bottom-right corner of the screen - here gMote will let you know if it recognized your gesture.

Costs: Free.

Website: http://www.handform.net/apps/gmote

Video Presentation:

ClamWin - Free Open Source Portable Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware Program

After a while, I have decided to compile a totally fresh and updated collection of the free portable utilities, which can be carried on my 32GB USB stick to repair computers as for my clients, as for my personal purposes. This time, I decided to be more selective, choosing the software, loaded on the stick, since I noticed that I have not used more than half of the utilities, I had on my previous USB toolkit. Definitely, one of the most important sections of the collection is Anti-virus programs, since virus infection is one of the most frequent problems, customers experience now. After some online investigation, I have found that the most popular free portable antivirus program is ClamWin. And I want to briefly present it in this post.

ClamWin is free, open source antivirus software for Microsoft Windows. It provides a graphical user interface to the ClamAV (Clam AntiVirus) engine. The virus/spyware database is constantly maintained by a group of volunteers, and you can always get the latest updates via the Internet. Note that ClamWin Free Antivirus does not include an on-access real-time scanner i.e. you need to manually scan a file in order to detect a virus or spyware.

ClamWin Portable is a portable wrapper for ClamWin. You can place it on your USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive or a CD and use it on any computer, without leaving any personal information behind.

It features:

• Simple and easy understandable GUI.
• High detection rates for viruses and spyware.
• Regular virus database updates. ClamAV team regularly updates virus databases to include a new virus/variant immediately after it appears.
• Standalone Virus Scanner.

Developers Website: http://www.clamwin.com/

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