Windows Tips and Tricks

ICANN is the organization that oversees the Domain Naming System of the Internet. For historical reasons, the US government has had oversight of this organization. As noted earlier, there has been pressure from other countries to make ICANN a completely international organization. Nonetheless, the government has decided to keep the oversight in the US Commerce Department for another three years. InfoWorld reports

The Commerce Department remains committed toward eventually giving ICANN full autonomy, it said. However, many observers believe that this full autonomy should have been granted already, because having the U.S. involved in DNS (domain name system) management creates political friction and ultimately slows down the international development of the Internet.

I sort of doubt that the development of the Internet has been much slowed by US management of ICANN but it is clear that continued oversight of the Internet by the US is a politically untenable situation. Other countries are not likely to tolerate the US governance of what should be a truly international function much longer.

I’ve been pretty busy and I almost forgot to note that this blog was one year old on September 16. So far I have written 452 posts. That’s a lot of words and I hope at least some of the content has been informative. Although a number of people have joined as members, not many post comments. While the number of comments hasn’t been as high as I would wish, at least those few have been pretty relevant. And for that I am grateful. When I look around the Web, I see a lot of really infantile and vacuous commentary.

I thank those who have been readers this past year and hope you will continue with us as we survey the wonders (and the follies) of the computing world. Please do join in and give us your thoughts, too.

If you are like me, it’s getting harder to see things on your computer. My eyes are growing old and weak with the rest of me. And, of course, although computer screens are getting bigger, the higher resolution that is used has the opposite effect of making objects on the screen smaller. Fortunately, there are several settings in Windows XP that can be used to increase the size of objects on the screen. A way to make global changes is the following.

Open the Display Properties dialog box by right-clicking an open spot on the desktop and selecting “Properties” from the context menu that opens. Select the “Settings” tab and then click the “Advanced” button. The dialog box shown below will open. Under “DPI Setting” choose “Large size (120 DPI)”. Click “OK” twice. The changes will normally require a reboot of the system.

The release candidate of Firefox 2.0 is now available at this link. If you install it, remember that this is not yet a finished project and is primarily for testers. Some details are at this ZDNet site.

Windows XP (especially the Professional version) makes networking much easier than it used to be. There are a variety of tools for managing networks and for diagnosing problems. Most of the tools are in command-line form such as the network services suite “netsh” and the TCP/IP commands but there are also some useful graphical interface accessories.

Recently, Microsoft has introduced the graphical Network Diagnostics Tool, which is discussed in this article by Charlie Russel. Unfortunately, downloading and installing the tool is quite convoluted. You have to have Windows XP SP2 and go through the Windows Genuine Advantage folderol. Also the download link is buried in a Microsoft Knowledge Base article. However, I have copied the download link here. Here is what Russel says about the tool

In the five-plus years I’ve been writing about Windows XP for the Expert Zone, I’ve often written about networking problems. Those networking columns have consistently generated the most e-mail from readers. In the community, networking problems continue to be the source of many questions and quite a bit of frustration. Clearly, networking is an area that still causes a lot of problems for people. The newest Microsoft tool, the Network Diagnostics tool for Windows XP, is designed to help. And, after running it against some typical network problems on my test machines, I’d have to say that Network Diagnostics is indeed a useful tool. In this article I will explain how to run it and what it does (and doesn’t) do.

Under increasing pressure from fallout due to a security problem with Vector Markup Language (VML), Microsoft has given in and issued a patch before the monthly “Patch Tursday”. The patch is described in an update to the September patches. Download is here. Part of Microsoft’s announcement:

Microsoft released security update MS06-055, outside of the regular monthly update release schedule, to help protect customers from exploitation of a publicly known vulnerability in the Windows operating system, in response to malicious and criminal attacks on computer users that were recently discovered.

See InfoWorld for more from an announcement by Microsoft.

Continuing problems with the Microsoft program Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) are described further by Ed Bott in another of his series of posts on this really intrusive and often malfunctioning effort by Microsoft to extract every penny possible from PC users. Bott is doing the computer community a real service by keeping after Microsoft. Be sure to read his detailed post. You too could find yourself accused wrongly of piracy. His post begins

Scrolling through the posts on Microsoft’s official WGA Validation Problems forum is like reading accident reports from a multiple-car pileup on Interstate 5. Many of the victims are completely innocent and have no idea what hit them, and cleaning up the mess can be a nightmare.

The stories about difficulties caused by the Windows Genuine Advantage spyware continues. Ed Bott tells of more travails.

The majority of home PC users now have broadband Internet access and with broadband has come an increase in home networking. A wireless network is easy to set up and a router can be bought for the price of a restaurant dinner for two. Having the Internet available anywhere in the house is a definite convenience. Instructions on setting up a wireless network in Windows XP, including security steps, are given at this Microsoft site.

InternetWeek reports

The New York Times announced Thursday that it has completed the digital archiving of issues going back to Sept. 18, 1851. The 155-year collection can be accessed through TimesSelect, a free service for regular subscribers and available to others for $49.95 annually.

Articles printed prior to 1981 are rendered in PDF (Portable Document Format), the popular Adobe electronic document format. Pieces which ran in the Times since 1981 are displayed in HTML.