Windows Tips and Tricks

I have said before that I think Symantec has ruined the once-premier Norton products and the evidence supporting that opinion just keeps piling up. Over at the CNET blog, Rafe Needleman relates the story of his father’s struggle with the latest Norton antivirus in a piece called, “Today’s Norton antivirus: unusable by normal humans”.

If you do not want to use one of the free products like AVG and prefer to use a commercial antivirus, skip Norton. There are better ways to go. One highly rated product is NOD32.

Mozilla will be releasing Firefox 2 on Tuesday, October 24, according to Information Week. (Added later: it’s out now, download here.) The article says:

Firefox 2.0 features anti-phishing alerts, session restore, spell checking, suggested searches, and several other enhancement and additions to version 1.5, the last major update to the open-source browser. According to the most recent statistics from Web metric firm Net Applications, Mozilla browsers accounted for 12.5 percent of the surfing market in September.

I have mentioned virtual machines (VM) several times in connection with computer security and I continue to believe that this approach will be important. Lee Gomes has a column in today’s Wall Street Journal that describes his experience with VMWare, a leader in this area. He begins his article

I am sitting in my home office, looking at three windows on the computer screen in front of me — each of which is, in effect, a separate computer.

One window I use for nonwork tasks, like surfing the Web. Another is connected to my office via an encrypted “virtual private network.” The third is running the latest test release of Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system. Even though all three run independently of each other, and therefore don’t interfere with one another in any way, there is only one piece of hardware powering all of them: my Pentium 4 PC with two gigabytes of RAM.

You’ll notice that Gomes mentions having 2 GB of RAM. Lots of RAM is one requirement for running a VM. However, the fact that the latest generation of PCs are very fast with dual-core processors and lots of RAM and disk space is making running VMs very practical.

The biggest obstacle is Microsoft’s very restrictive and confusing licensing policy. Ed Bott keeps trying to get a handle on what the policy is but it is still murky to me. In a previous post, Bott says

Microsoft does not provide any technical barrier to running the home versions of Vista in a VM. Their restrictions are purely legal and completely arbitrary. People in the three categories I listed above who have legitimate reasons to run a home edition of Vista in a virtual machine may not legally do so, even if they pay for it and comply with every other term of the license agreement. If they follow Microsoft’s interpretation of the agreement, Microsoft doesn’t get a dollar more, but the customers have to hassle with physical hardware and spend hours doing what could be done in minutes with a virtual machine. That policy is stupid, arrogant, and short-sighted.

We’ve all probably had the experience of getting one of our emails bounced back to us from “mailer daemon” with some cryptic error codes. It would be nice if we could know why our email failed to get delivered and Office Watch has a list of what various error codes mean. For example, “5.1.1″ means a bad destination mailbox address and “5.2.2″ means the destination mailbox is full.

Here’s some weekend reading. InformationWeek has the stories of eight big-time technical blunders by such organizations as McDonald’s, the FBI, the IRS, and the British Health Service. They each cost hundreds of milions of dollars. In the case of an Ohio power company, the mistake blacked out big areas of the US and Canada.

Vista will soon be here with its heavier demand on computer resources and graphical memory. So maybe you are considering an upgrade for your present PC. For some tips on what components to get, go over to ExtremeTech’s Fall 2006 Upgrade Guide where they say:

We get tons of email from readers, and many of these contain questions about what component to buy to improve performance in some area of interest. So we’ve put together a handy upgrade guide to steer you in choosing components best suited for your needs. While we’ll discuss specific products, such as 3D graphics or CPUs, the real focus here is on a set of scenarios based on usage models.

Every now and then talk about a possible Service Pack 3 for Windows XP resurfaces. Microsoft just updated its Windows Service Pack Road Map site. This site indicates that there will be no new service pack for Windows XP until the year 2008, if then. It had originally been scheduled for the second half of 2007. Mary Jo Foley comments:

There’s no doubt that some (many?) Microsoft customers will see the latest slip as a less-than-subtle attempt by Microsoft to force them to upgrade to the latest versions of Windows that are coming down the pike.

IE 7 is out (download here) and here is a selection of some articles about it.

Robert Vamosi at ZDNet says:

The bottom line: IE 7 was Microsoft’s one chance to leapfrog ahead of the competition, but the company has only barely caught sight of the current front-runners. For more features and greater security, switch to Mozilla Firefox.

From Walter Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal:

The new Internet Explorer is a solid upgrade, but it’s disappointing that after five years, the best Microsoft could do was to mostly catch up to smaller competitors.

A PC World review compares IE 7 and Firefox 2 and concludes:

Which one should you use? For satisfied Firefox 1.5 users, moving to version 2 is a no-brainer, as they’ll get new features and won’t be thrown off by major interface changes. Confirmed IE users have a similarly easy choice: IE 7’s features make it a much better browser than 6.x, and its security enhancements alone make it a must-have.

Of the two rivals, Firefox remains the better application. Since IE users will have to adjust to a new layout and interface anyway, this might be a good time to give Firefox a try, then watch IE 8 play catch-up again in five years.

Notice a common theme in these reviews? I’ll throw in my two cents worth and say that I can’t see any reason to switch to IE 7 from my current Firefox browser.

There is a video review at this ZDNet site.

Microsoft explains how to use IE 7 here.

No sooner had I posted that the production version of IE7 was coming soon than I discovered that Yahoo jumped the gun and released its branded version of the finished product today. If you don’t mind the Yahoo add-ins, you can download IE7 here.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a review by Walter Mossberg of the software program, MojoPac, that I discussed previously. The Wall street Journal is a subscription site but Mossberg’s articles are at a free site and the review can be read here. Mossberg says

MojoPac sounded too good to be true, but for the most part, it actually worked as promised. Privacy is a big plus for MojoPac, as your files remain on your thumb drive or iPod, and never transfer to the host PC’s hard disk. Similarly, your entire browsing history and all cookies remain on the portable device.

There is a catch, however: A few aspects of this program are a little too geeky for the average person, it is slow to perform some tasks, and it crashed one of our computers during a test. Also, it doesn’t support making Microsoft Office portable, unless you have a corporate or institutional license.

The article concludes

The core of this product is smart and quite useful, but it needs some work to be as simple and reliable as it should be.

I think that the software is very promising but I think it was rushed out before it was quite ready. If the authors can polish it up, it promises to be a very useful program, especially for travelers.