NoobTech Blog » Windows

Tweaking VMWare Workstation & reducing Disk Thrashing

Roberto Sebestyen — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 15:30:57 +0000

I use a VMWare virtual machine for development. Lately though, I have been having issues with my disk thrashing uncontrollably, slowing everything to a crawl. This especially seemed to happen right after suspending my VM. The disk thrashing seemed to go on for a good 10 minutes before it came back to normal. This made my host machine completely unusable during this time. (more…)

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Post tags: Tweaks, VMWare

Don’t Press F1 in Windows XP

Roberto Sebestyen — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:43:22 +0000

Apparently there is a newly discovered vulnerability in windows XP. If a website asks you to press F1 do not do this. Hackers have discovered a way to execute code on the user’s machine by feeding users malicious code disguised as a Windows help file. It affects both Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

If a malicious Web site displayed a specially crafted dialog box and a user pressed the F1 key, arbitrary code could be executed in the security context of the currently logged-on user.

iSEC Security Advisory

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Post tags: hacking, Windows

VMware-authd.exe

Roberto Sebestyen — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 04:36:05 +0000

I got home today and woke up my pc from hibernate. I always have Process Explorer running in my task bar, so as I was waiting for Firefox to start up, I noticed that my CPU was pinned at about 70% usage, it wasn’t Firefox. It was VMware-authd.exe. I do have VMWare installed but I have not touched it on this machine for years.

Being concerned I turned to the all-knowing Google. The answer came in the form of a blog post by Christopher Miller, who suffered the exact same issue.

Here is his post, hope this helps other VMWare users out there:

I was doing some work on one of my PC’s and I had the processes list open in Task Manager. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that one process, VMware-authd.exe, was going from 0 to 10% of the CPU. I didn’t know what that process did, I went out on a limb and assumed that it was somehow related to VMWare. VMware is one of my favorite tools, but I wasn’t running any VMWare sessions. Time to go Googling. Apparently it’s a service that provides administrator priviledges to to a running VMWare session if the host use isn’t logged in with administrator access rights

If you are logged in with admin rights, you don’t need to have this service running. VMware-authd.exe is the name of the executable for the “VMware Authorization Service” service. You can go into Services and shut that service down and then set it’s startup type to “manual”. There are no other services that depend on that service to be running. You can also stop the service from the Windows command line with the following:

net stop VMAuthdService

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Post tags: VMWare

20 Windows Registry Improvements

Roberto Sebestyen — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 23:03:17 +0000

The following was taken from Tech Radar. Since I found this useful I am mirroring the post here for my own reference (and others).

(more…)

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Post tags: hacks, Windows