Archive for February, 2006
Bad Internet neighborhoods
The Internet is like a very big city. No prudent person wanders around the seamier parts of a city without precautions and the same is true of the Internet. Also certain activities like gaming have become major targets of spyware. Internet Week has an article that says
One in five of gaming site hosted spyware, [...]
Hard disk management in Windows XP
Some time ago I posted a three-part series of pages on the disk management capabilities of the XP operating system. Fred Langa has recently also discovered this feature of Windows XP and is beginning a detailed series in Information Week. He says
Create, delete, and format partitions; change drive letter assignments and paths; help set up [...]
Freeware to manage Internet Explorer history
Nir Sofer has a site where he puts some nice little free utilities. Some are primarily of interest to system administrators but others are certainly of interest to average PC users. One is a program that shows the history file of places that you have visited with Internet Explorer.
The program lets you manipulate the history [...]
How Internet Explorer may have hidden costs
Not everybody will agree with its premise, but a ZDNet blog by Paul Murphy called IE chauvinism creates hidden costs is worth a look. The point is that some commercial sites and government sites will only work with IE. This is because Microsoft does not abide by the World Wide Web Consortium standards and has [...]
Firefox configuration
One thing that I like about Firefox is that it is much more configurable than Internet Explorer. In addition to using some of the many extensions that exist, individual users can make changes in their profile and a file called prefs.js . Internet Week has an article about the users profile and Mozilla explains [...]
That file may have more information than you realize
As I have discussed on another page, a file may have more data in it than just the usual file contents. The extra data is called “metadata”, meaning information about the data. Examples of people getting into trouble because of information hidden in Microsoft Office documents are well known. Now we have a case where [...]
Increase stability by opening different folder windows in separate processes
In its standard setup, Windows uses the same part of memory (process) for all the folders that you open. When you have a lot of windows open, you may encounter some system instability if one of the folders has a problem. To avoid this possibility, you can change the setting to open new windows in [...]
This is big news?
PC World is an excellent publication and I use it a lot. But I have to wonder when one of the big news items in all their newsletters is
It’s Official: Office ‘12′ to Become Office 2007
Wowie! This is the most exciting thing I’ve heard since one of their columnists explained how his [...]
Remove the “New program installed” message and program highlight
For a while after you install a new program, Windows XP will pop up a message that keeps telling you that a new program has been installed. It also highlights the entry for the new program in the Start menu. If you could just as well do without this superfluous information, you can disable this [...]
Free “undelete” program
When you permanently delete a file either by emptying the Recycle Bin or other method, the file is actually still on the hard drive or other storage medium. As was explained earlier, it may be possible to recover a deleted file with various software. OfficeRecovery.com is offering a free undelete program that could come [...]
Live(?) from Microsoft
If, like me, you are wondering what are all these Microsoft activities with the term “Live” tacked on, read this article by Mary Jo Foley. She writes a regular column called “Microsoft Watch” and recently she discussed the proliferation of the term “Live”:
Last summer, the Redmondians began using Live to describe its [...]