I just completed the computer from Hell. It is a Compaq Presario that is about 4 years old and it has in it a BIOS that is locked into the existing hard drive with a special non-accessible partition on it that has to remain in place. There is a part number affixed to the drive in case of hard drive failure that defines a replacement part to get from Compaq if they will still sell you a hard drive after four years. (Compaq never responded to my price inquiry.) Either way, there is a large delay obtaining a drive sent from the Compaq depot. Without their hard drive, the computer will not boot.
Anyway, since the effective size of the hard drive is not over 10 GB, it means that a fair amount of manipulations have to be performed to boot to the "C" drive and then to use an added-on "D" drive for most of the other operations.
This is a classic case of a lock-in of the customer to force you back to the manufacturer for parts and for upgrading. As I have stated before, get your Power Spec computers from Micro Center to avoid all of the lock-ins of the big boys.
SP2 should be on your computer by now. It cleans up some things but it really shuts down the interface without giving much problem to the owner. When I ran all of the www.grc.com diagnostics, the interface was totally shut down except for PING - and I believe I can fix even that. All the ports were shut down, the second layer of the IP stack could not be spoofed or sent raw, the back door messenger was shut, and a popup killer was in place.
So get on with the install of SP2!
How about those not on XP?
If the CERT listing I sent to you of the things that can and will happen to your Win98 computer is not enough, the fact that about 75,000 computers are being turned into zombies each day should cause you to pause. Zombies receive a special load that turns your computer into a spam mailing machine after it receives the text of some message to be sent and also a mailing list from the spammer. That is why 80% of the spam is not from spammers at a single location, but from a superset of the 75,000+ that appear to their owners to be benign, but in fact are spamming as fast as they can go. No wonder that turning off the spam is such a hassle! To aid with this problem, be sure you are on XP with SP2.
One of the things that irritates me the most is that Microsoft has produced a product that is tremendously vulnerable and I have to buy anti-virus software to stop the deluge. Microsoft should be in the anti-virus business for free and they should be doing the job, for free, that the anti-virus companies are having to do - and charging me.
Ever wondered why the Arial font is the most used font worldwide? Merely because it is first in the Microsoft alphabet and thus is chosen by default. Arial is an extremely poor choice because the "1" and the lowercase "L" are literally the same, and a series of vertical characters like lowercase "L" are virtually indistinguishable. A much better font to use is Times New Roman which has been activated all over XP and also was made the default for the e-mail package of Eudora. The recipients can read my e-mail easier because they receive my e-mail in Times New Roman or sometimes a Courier font. So go ahead and change the font you present to the outside world and also in such daily things like the Windows Explorer so you can read without difficulty what is being presented to you by the system.
Our speaker this month is unique. Hank Skawinski, President of Datawise, maintains over 1000 computers for businesses and on the side, assembles and supports about 30 computers a month to customer specifications.
Hank has seen it all and done it all and has some really cogent comments on the future of computing, languages, operating systems, and how to handle current situations. Be sure you are in the audience for the ride.
Gene Barlow, President of User Group Relations (www.ugr.com) was our presenter. He now represents his own User Group Store (www.usergroupstore.com), offering user group members and their guests considerable discounts on software. Gene demonstrated 3 of the most exciting products in his line: SecureClean, to prevent personal and private information from building up on your hard drive; MoveMe, a clever utility to help users easily transfer all of their application programs, settings and data files from an old computer to their newer computer; and Acronis True Image 8.0, Gene's main topic Backing Up Your Hard Drive with True Image. Backing up your hard drive is possibly the most important thing you should do with your computer. Gene demonstrated True Image.
One of his recommendations was to use a Firewire/USB2 connection ( add a card if your computer doesn't already have one or the other) to an external Firewire/USB2 drive (80 GB for ~$70, 120 GB for ~$100). Even cheaper, though not so convenient, is get an external USB2 case ($25 or so) and internal Seagate 200 GB hard drive ($60 or so) for a very sweet backup system. Used with Acronis, you could store multiple backups for added safety.
This specific problem was with Quicken, but the solution has much wider application. I was installing Quicken 2004 on my PC and had to run the installer from my Administrator account (WinXP Pro SP1). After installing it, I could run it from the Administrator account, but not from other users' accounts.
Intuit's site didn't provide pertinent help, nor did a newsgroups search. I figured the problem had to be that Quicken was trying to access a registry key or a file in such a way that access was being denied, and that was causing the failure in non-Administrator accounts. So I downloaded NTRegMon and NTFileMon and ran them while I attempted to open Quicken from a normal user's account. I found that Quicken was getting an ACCESS DENIED error on two files (qw.cfg and qw.rmd) when opening them for write access. I gave the Users group Modify and Write privileges on those two files, and Quicken works fine now.
While this post may have some value for a few Quicken users, the more important principle is this means of troubleshooting an application which works under an Administrator account but not under other accounts--a possible reason is file or registry key permissions, and these tools make it a cinch to sniff those out. (Be sure to take advantage of their filtering capabilities, or the output will be overwhelming and tedious to examine.) Changing file permissions is as easy as opening up the file's properties in explorer (logged in as Administrator). Changing registry key permissions requires running regedt32 (not regedit), right-clicking on a key, and selecting "Permissions..." from the context menu. Lots of other good tools available at Sysinternals, too--- well worth a look!
Question: what's the best way to put digital photo images on a CD or DVD to create a show that fills the TV screen and has the best resolution possible?
Answer: All standard TV's (not HDTV) have 525 horizontally parallel lines of vertical resolution. 480 is a typical "usable" vertical dimension. Horizontal resolution is variable, but around 500. For the standard 4x3 aspect ratio, use 640x480 (a standard screen size).
You can use smaller file sizes, but unfortunately TV is much lower resolution than a computer monitor. Many DVD programs (including Roxio CD Creator) let you organize still images in a "movie" and add transitions between them, and allow inserting background music. You can make several movies behind a main menu.
Even easier, you can just put JPEGs in folders on a CDR - many DVD players will pop up a menu with filenames and sizes and thumbnails, and let you select what you want to see.
It's advisible to test your process first on a DVD-RW or +RW ; then burn final product for distribution on DVD-R or +R, not the RW.
To convert high-resolution images in a hard drive folder to a common size the TV you can Export them to a “TVfolder ” using the free application Picasa. The files will be low resolution (but optimal size for showing on TV) so don't delete the original high-res images.
As soon as you install SP2 on a Windows XP PC with a certain configuration, your file and printer sharing data are visible worldwide, despite an activated Firewall. This also applies to all other services. The PC only has to provide sharing for an internal local network and connect to the Internet via dial-up or ISDN. Users of DSL services are also affected, if a firewall is not integrated into the DSL modem or a common modem instead of a DSL router is used. Additionally, Internet Connection Sharing of the PC has to be disabled.
Choose "Windows Firewall" in the in the Windows Control Panel and the there the tab "Exceptions". Select "File and Print Services" and click on "Edit". Now you can see four ports which are used by the file and print sharing service.
To lock the service to the outside and keep it open for the internal LAN, you have to individually select and change its area with the respective button. Our reader Yves Jerschov notified us of another bug: The value for the area set by default "Only for own network (Subnet)" only works, if the Internet Connection Sharing is activated. If this is not the case, your shared data are visible worldwide. This error can be corrected by choosing "User defined List" and entering the IP addresses that are supposed to have access - the IP addresses of your LAN. A whole range of an IP area can be entered as "192.168.x.0/255.255.255.0", if the respective addresses start with 192.168.x.
After these measures, you can be sure to be as safe as you were with SP1. Great, don't you think?
Generally, the difference between free and paid versions is in advanced features and interfaces. Some of the free versions don't update automatically.
Most of the free AV programs are smaller than those offered by the best known publishers. Thus, there's less of a noticeable speed or performance degradation. In cases where AV software does cause a system slowdown, it's usually because of an incompatibility with other defensive software that is running; such as a firewall, spam blocker, etc.
Free versions often come from smaller or start-up companies, so aren't targeted by the virus authors.
Avast in both the free and paid versions is preferable to other AV programs:
Do I use AVG or anything else? AVG is on my brother's system and one of my test systems, Mom's system has Avast. Another of my systems uses Trend's PCillain, while another has eSafe. Why so many? Easy – if I suspect something I can share out a drive and cross-scan from another system.
Finally - Some people are suspicious of or refuse to use anything that's free, thinking that there must be something wrong with it. For a smaller company this is a great way to build market acceptance. But, if you think about it, Norton, McAfee and the other biggies do the same thing, if you find the right rebate program. The annual update subscriptions are where they make the most profit, with the least sales expense.
Recommending an AntiVirus program to someone else isn't easy. If someone swears by a certain product, then the best choice is often to keep quiet. Remember the old joke that went something like: You can try to teach a pig to sing as much as you want to, but it just annoys the pig.