Archive for December, 2006
A survey of Windows Vista
There have been numerous articles on Vista but a recent survey at ExtremeTech is one of the best. It is very helpful in answering the question, “Which Vista edition is right for you?” It has one of the best charts showing what features come with each edition and some good discussion. The article concludes:
For most [...]
Doubts about Vista’s security advantages
As readers of these posts know, one of the big selling points for Vista is supposed to be its better security. Mary Jo Foley says maybe not. She quotes an AP story over at Yahoo:
But is Vista’s security really so much better than that provided by Windows XP Service Pack 2? The short answer to [...]
Extortion on the Internet
A growing type of Internet crime is a form of extortion where you have to ransom your data. Crooks either erase data on your computer and demand payment to restore it or encrypt the data and ask money for the key to unencrypt it. Information Week reports a Hotmail incident:
Some Hotmail accounts have been compromised, [...]
If money is no object
I like USB flash drives and own several. I’ve posted about their uses a number of times but a $5000 version has got to be a good thing taken too far. Anyway, if you have more money than you can count, here’s something for your Christmas stocking. There’s a 64 GB flash drive being offered [...]
Security in Vista and does it help?
While the students mentioned in the previous post are beavering away on learning how to make a career of cybercrime, Windows is becoming more secure according to an InfoWorld article by Roger Grimes, who says:
I will go out on a limb and say that I believe Windows Vista, and the forthcoming Longhorn server, will be [...]
New part-time jobs for students- Internet crime
Many college students want part-time jobs to earn some extra money and one of the latest possibilties seems to be cybercrime. In fact they can even get training to make a career of it. ZDNet reports:
Organized gangs have adopted “KGB-style” tactics to hire high-flying computer students to commit Internet crime, a report said on Friday. [...]
The best archive/zip utilities
For years I used WinZip as my primary program for opening archived files. I paid for a license back in the days of Windows 95. The company had the policy that once you paid, future updates were free so I went through a number of versions. Then WinZip got taken over and updates were no [...]
Keyboard shortcuts compendium
Keyboard shortcuts can be very useful and periodically I post something on the subject (see the Shortcuts archive). However, there are a large number of such shortcuts for a variety of software programs and most PC users will remember and use only a few. Still, it’s interesting to go over a compilation of shortcuts and [...]
Opening tabs in Internet Explorer 7
You may not have it yet but already Microsoft has downloaded IE 7 to many systems as an update. Most PC users are going to end up with it on their system so unless you use Firefox or other alternate browser, you are going to need to learn the new interface. I’ll be posting some [...]
Beware of Word documents from the Internet
Microsoft is warning about an unpatched security hole in Word that is being exploited on the Internet. Until a patch is issued, exercise caution about opening or downloading any DOC files from the Web. The problem is present in Word 2000, Word 2002, Word 2003, Microsoft Word Viewer 2003, Word 2004 for Mac, Word 2004 [...]
How to remove the text below an icon
Here’s an unusual trick that I’ll pass along for what it’s worth. I can’t remember where I learned it and I don’t use it but some PC users like to remove the text that appears beneath an icon and just have an unlabeled icon. There’s a way to do that that uses the Numeric Keypad [...]